Product Powers - Human Skills for Product Thinkers to Thrive in the Age of AI

In this episode, Paddy Dhanda sits down with Mike Rohde, the renowned Godfather of Sketchnoting, at the International Sketchnote Camp in Leiden. They delve into the essence of visual thinking, the rich history of sketchnoting, and ponder its place in a rapidly advancing AI-driven world. Join us for a journey that bridges the gap between ancient cave drawings and the digital age, exploring the timeless human joy of visual expression.

Key Takeaways:

* The unique spirit and community of the International Sketchnote Camp.

* Sketchnoting: More than just doodles, it's a visual language that transcends disciplines.

* The future of sketchnoting in an AI-dominated world: Will the human touch prevail?

Photos from the International Sketchnote Camp 2023

Paddy Dhanda (left) Mike Rohde (centre) Grant Wright (Right)

Sketch by Mike Rohde

👉 Join The Visual Jam community to watch Mike's tutorials on Sketchnoting: Click Here

Mike Rohde

Mike Rohde is the author of two books: The Sketchnote Handbook (2012) and The Sketchnote Workbook (2014). He presents sketchnoting workshops around the world that encourage people to use visual thinking skills to generate, capture and share ideas more effectively.

His popular first book, The Sketchnote Handbook, convinces people around the world to become sketchnoters every day. Translated into German, Russian, Chinese, and Czech, it guides readers in using their natural visual capabilities to create sketchnotes for better understanding, and to have fun taking notes. The video edition of The Sketchnote Handbook includes 70 minutes of documentary-style instructional videos.

Mike’s second book, The Sketchnote Workbook, expands the application of sketchnotes, showing readers how to use them to generate ideas, plan projects, document processes, and capture experiences. The Workbook is packed with challenges and worksheets that help readers accelerate their sketchnoting skills. All versions of The Sketchnote Workbook include 2 hours and 41 minutes of documentary-style instructional videos.

He is the founder of SketchnoteArmy.com a site dedicated to finding and showcasing the work of sketchnoters from around the world.

Mike is the illustrator of bestselling books REWORK, REMOTE, The $100 Startup, and The Little Book of Talent. He has been commissioned to create live sketchnotes for conferences and events, including SXSW Interactive, An Event Apart, Summit Series, World Domination Summit, Storyline Conference, and Chick-fil-A Leadercast.

Mike is a veteran designer who creates usable, compelling design solutions for software and web applications. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with his wife and 3 children.

Website

⚡️ In each episode, Paddy Dhanda deep dives into a new human Superpower and practical advice on how you can apply it immediately.

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Transcription:

[00:01:01] Paddy Dhanda: So, Mike, you're here at the International Sketchnote camp over in Leiden with me, and I just wanted to pick your brains on a few things. Is that okay?

[00:01:09] Mike Rohde: Yeah, that's great.

[00:01:10] Paddy Dhanda: By the way, it's amazing meeting you face to face because I think for the last. Two and a half to three years, everything we've done is virtual. Yeah. So it's so good to, to meet face to face, what brings you across the planet, all the way to Leiden and to this amazing event. Well, I

[00:01:26] Mike Rohde: think I was talking with one of the founders Marianne, Roddy, one of the four who founded this event in Hamburg in 2017.

We were talking a little bit about how she's proud that, you know, it's continued with community support. It's all volunteer organized. And the community supports those volunteers doing it. So that's one aspect. I love the volunteer, I love the community coming together, but I, what we talked about was, there's a spirit here that's unique among other events that I've been to.

It's a little bit deeper than just, oh, we're coming to look at the new medical device and whatever. Right? There's, that's an interesting thing, but you're sort of going for your company or here it's more. Half of it is to see friends as much as it is to learn new things or to be challenged or those things.

So it's, I think it's more of a rich experience that makes it makes a difference.

[00:02:18] Paddy Dhanda: Yeah. And it's my first time, I'm really looking forward to seeing how the next three days go and hearing your talk as well is gonna be amazing. Yeah. But in terms of the event, I mean, it's called the International Sketch Note Camp.

And you are Mr. Sketchnote, the author of the Sketchnote Handbook. And I guess for anyone that doesn't know what Sketch notes are, could you just give us a quick overview? What are they and why did you choose the term sketchnote?

[00:02:45] Mike Rohde: Oh, good question. So I would describe Sketch notes as the visual way to, to express your thinking.

Now, whether that's you're listening to someone speaking and for you, it makes sense to do lettering or drawing shapes, or even drawing people in motion or objects that are coming to you as you're listening to someone present to you. That's sort of where I began with it, but I've discovered that sketchnoting can be applied in lots more ways than that.

Right. I use them to take notes in my bread making. I use them to take notes as I'm planning pizza. I use them for all kinds of things in my work. As a user experience designer, like solving the problem of how this interface will work and where elements should be before I commit to using the computer.

I'm a real firm believer in visualizing first because I feel like a lot of times when you go to a device, you tend to get locked in the what the device allows you to do. And by sketching, And thinking and writing. So I think it's a combination of this drawing and writing together. So it's sort of taking the best of each one and then making them better than the sum of their parts.

So if you're a writer, you know, obviously that's a powerful thing, the verbal, but when you start introducing visuals to support what you're writing, a lot of times you might be able to draw a really simple image that might take paragraphs to describe. And so you're saving time. In that case, but it's really supporting the text.

So in a lot of ways they work in conjunction with each other. And you know, the things that I identify as being part of sketch notes are of course writing, but then lettering, that would be step one, where you're taking the writing and you're emphasizing words, making them bigger, doing them in color, doing them in script or some letter form that's kind of unique.

Then maybe the next level would be containers. So squares and circles and triangles and other shapes, organic shapes to enclose things. And then probably the level above that would be drawing where you're intentionally drawing people or objects or concepts would be probably the highest level where it's you're taking some thing that's in your brain and visualizing it on paper, either as, you know, a concept or a metaphor so that others can understand it or you looking at your notes will be able to recall what it was and make sense out of it.

[00:04:55] Paddy Dhanda: I think for me, Mike, one of the big challenges with sketch notes on a personal level, and maybe it's something that other people might be thinking as well, is the speed at which you're able to capture information.

If you are writing things down and you're having to visualize and draw

[00:05:10] Mike Rohde: things and listening while you're doing it, or thinking, yeah,

[00:05:14] Paddy Dhanda: that's like, you know, three or four things all happening simultaneously, like, how do you do that? Because that. Could be quite overwhelming for someone that A isn't so confident with drawing.

Yeah. But then even having to capture information and listen really attentively can be tough as well. So what's your advice for anyone who has challenges with that?

[00:05:35] Mike Rohde: They wanna do it, but they feel this gap between ability and desire, right? Yeah. I would say it's a learned skill. So that first off is if you're worried that somehow you should be doing this, I think it's a learned skill.

You have to build up that muscle of listening and capturing. And one of the ways that I encourage people who want to get into sketch noting is that they don't know anything about it, but they like this idea. They think maybe they doodle all the time and they wanna redirect that doodling into something impactful or memorable that they can use.

Yeah. Would be, you're probably pretty good at listening and writing. To some degree. So my encouragement to people is to continue writing and then maybe what you can do is, The first step would be to sort of demarcate a little column to the right, or if you're, you know, if you want, you can make it to the left and reserve that for your imagery.

So you continue to write. And then as you think of ideas, like maybe when the speaker is rambling or in a little break where you're, you have a little moment, you can draw a little image in that column and then go back to writing. And then when you have an idea, put it in the draw another image in the column, so you end up with this two column format with writing on the left and images on the right.

Right, related to the text. That would be step one. Then maybe the next step would be when you feel like you've got confidence doing this simple way. Maybe then you challenge yourself with something that's not if your job depends on it, you know, you, maybe you wait till later, but pick something fun or something low stakes where then you could say, okay, on this one, I'm going to do half of the site, I'll write on the half and write a little less and draw a little bit more detailed image of what I'm imagining.

And then maybe on the other, you start with the drawing and then you describe it on the right. So you start to like mix it up a little bit. Right. And you bring the drawing in and make it a bigger part of what you're doing. And then you just keep practicing. And I think a lot of it is just the practice of listening and do and acting.

Is helpful because it's something you don't normally do. You really have to get used to it. And what's really interesting is you get into this practice, you start noticing that a lot of speakers often repeat their statements. Over again, or they go off, they go like, you might have the gist of the idea and they go on and describe in more detail.

Yeah. That you maybe aren't interested in that much detail or you just want little bits. So when you've got the main concept down, you can be relaxing and just adding little annotations to fill out that. Concept, so you'll find out that there's more space. It's almost like the more you pay attention and do this work, the more space starts to expand.

It's like I've heard in sports, like when sport, when athletes, when they first start, they think too much. And it they act slow and they're not fluid. And as they understand the game, they say the game slowed down for me. Right. Where now all of a sudden I'm faster than the game is and I can see this person's going to kick this ball over here, so I'm gonna go to that place where I think they're gonna go.

You make a judgment. Right. So just like this, you're sort of, as you practice it, you start seeing patterns. Yeah. And then you can adapt and build your skills.

[00:08:32] Paddy Dhanda: In the past I've tried to summarize a talk and I've really struggled with certain talks.

And I'm thinking, is it me? Am I not listening? You know, as, as deep as I should. But what I've actually found with Sketch Notes is you're able to really identify if a talk is clear or not. Yeah. And because if you're struggling to find those key points and visualize aspects of the talk it sometimes is a clue that the talk may not be structured so well.

And obviously we don't wanna name names of the speakers that end up in that situation, but I think for me, I find it really valuable to even understand that aspect of it, to be able to analyze what talks are impactful and good, because there's a really clear set of messages.

And in some there are just so many messages that you're over visualizing and you find that it's just information overload. So I think it's a really useful tool to even be able to identify those really useful talks versus those that aren't.

[00:09:31] Mike Rohde: Yeah. And you might even describe that as less discipline.

So the discipline speaker realizes there's a limited amount of messages that a audience can absorb. And they need to be really clear and they need to set out and sort of define them. And then, Ex explain them and then redefine them at the end, sort of, you know, tell them what you're going to say.

Tell them and tell them what you said. Right? Yeah. Because you need to reinforce that. 'cause many people may not be taking notes of any kind. Right. So people who are really disciplined and they know their message, I'll tell you that practicing sketch, noting you spot them right away. Right, exactly.

As you say. And the ones who sort of ramble and are kind of going off on a tangent, it's hard to know where they're going to end up. You notice those right away? It, that brought up, when you talked about whether there was, you know, you're thinking I can't, it's tough. Is there something wrong with me? I will say that there is a case for pre-planning.

So, and the example that I'll give you is my friend Rob Demio is a physicist. He started doing sketchnoting. He challenged himself to do it all over his work. And one of the challenges he found was he had visiting scientists coming to his to his work where he used to work. They're amazing scientists.

Like his, the access to these scientists was amazing, right? So he went there and he decided to do sketch notes. But what he found was he couldn't just show up in the room and start sketchnoting. I mean, he could, but he was always at a disadvantage and always playing catch up and not quite on top of it.

Right. And what he realized was, is that because the scientists are deep in a study of a certain. Thing that when he prepared, like he knew they were coming in a month, he would start reading their papers, right? He might watch previous talks, like really get into the groove for what it is that they're all about, and sort of build a base level of knowledge of their topic before he ever showed up in the room.

And so when he came into the room, because they would, these scientists would often make the assumption, you know, all my, you've read all my papers, you know, all my base arguments. I'm not gonna repeat them here. Right? I'm gonna jump right into the current. State of things. So there's an assumption being made.

Yeah. So what he did, what he realized was for those kind of situations, all that preparation really helps. And you, I would say that professional sketch noters or graphic recorders do the, do that as well. I would do that, like I would research the talk. Or the person, if I can get pre-release, you know, slides as a sketch note or visual thinker.

Yeah. You often can get. Pre-release slides, they might not be final, but you get the general idea of where this person's going. Yeah. Which gives you this, you know, foundational advantage. So when you get in the room, like, okay, I know this is where this person's gonna go, and you have a general idea, so you're not totally surprised Right.

When you go in the room. So that would be the other thing is maybe there's a little bit of pre-work, even if it's 15 minutes of understanding what this person's about, where they came from, what's their space. So that when you get into the thing, you'll have all the context. That will help you make sense of what they're saying.

[00:12:23] Paddy Dhanda: Got it. Got it. And Mike talking about the future to look to the future. If we look to the past, we know that as cave people, we were drawing on walls on caves. We used visuals as a way of passing on stories from generations. But now with the world of AI and technology the way it is, it feels like this could be a skill that gets overlooked.

I mean, what's your opinion? Is there still a place for sketch notes in the future? Or will AI kind of take over and what's your feeling on that?

[00:12:58] Mike Rohde: That's a great question. I don't know that I can imagine the future that clearly, I would hope that there would be limitations on AI's ability to make sense of things and make those jumps that humans make and that it would provide opportunities for those who do visual thinking in the general sense to have a place. Like being in a, like maybe there's an AI at some point that can be in a room, listen to all the discussion, direct that discussion, capture it visually and make sense out of this potential chaos. That becomes an artifact that team later uses to move to the next level.

Or, you know, asking questions like, I think one thing we can do to separate ourselves is move a little bit beyond just being passive. Scribes of just writing down what's being said and trying to be neutral and to maybe enter more into the discussion, ask questions in our sketch notes of, well, if that's true, then what does that mean for this or for that, and sort of become almost like, get into discussion and open the question and encourage people who are reading or looking at our sketch notes to think about things that if this were true, like what does that mean?

And to start being thoughtful. Yeah, because you know, AI in a lot of cases is building on our past work. Right? Whether it's writing or imagery, it's taking, and often it can do a really good facsimile, but basically what it's doing is it's faking based on your prompts, whatever that prompt is. Yeah.

It's taking all its absorbed knowledge and sort of building something that hopefully it looks like the thing you asked for, but a lot of times there's not a whole lot of understanding on why things are so, it's sort of, some cases can be a little bit of a facade. Without depth. Like you've heard about chat, g p t hallucinating.

When you ask it to do too much, it sort of runs out of logic or something. Yeah. And it starts making up like citing things that don't exist and making things up that aren't true and so forth. So I think there's still, at least right now, I mean, who knows in the future that a place for human intervention and human, I think we're interpreters in a lot of ways.

We take this complex ideas and we boil them down and simplify them into a way an image of some kind. Whether it's digital or analog, that makes it either ea easier for us to understand and proceed, or a team of people to understand and proceed with the next step of whatever the thing is that we want to achieve.

[00:15:15] Paddy Dhanda: Yeah, if I think about some of the hobbies that people have, like my mom loves knitting and in a way I'm sat there thinking, Why do you spend hours and hours knitting when Yeah, you could just buy a knitted jumper or a hat or whatever it is that you're making, but there's great joy in that.

Yeah. And I think as humans we do get great joy out of doing certain things, and I think visuals are part of that as well. And I'd hate to think that in the future we stop doing all of those things that make us happy, even though something could do them better. Yeah. And so I think I have that hope that as humans we still hang on to these traditional skills and these human skills that we've been brought up with.

And so, that, that's my hope. Let's see, you know, what happens with that? Yeah. But absolutely. I hear what you're saying the current state of ai. Is a little bit hit or miss. It's almost like a child that wants to keep pleasing you and so when it actually doesn't have the right information, it still wants to please you just

[00:16:18] Mike Rohde: makes a guess.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, something I thought about in discussion with this is I think back to in when I was early in my design career, 'cause I'm trained as a designer was when the desktop publishing tools came into existence and we all worked on computers, on Macs, on a network. What we found though was because of the area where we had our office, the power would, we'd have brownouts and blackouts.

So all the network computers would go down. Right. Well, younger designers than me were totally stuck. They just couldn't do any work. Got it. But I had been trained traditionally, so I just got paper and pen and started working and doing. I just kept working because I had this training. So I think I wonder about if you become dependent on these AI tools.

Yeah. To the point that you can't do this stuff anymore. Like a lot of it is about the process. The process and the thoughts that come as you do the process. If you lose that ability and suddenly, you know, mid journey is down today. Yeah. Which, you know, maybe could happen. Or you're in a place where you can't access it or whatever, like, could you in a pinch do that work?

And so I would be careful to give up. Which comes back to the knitting question, right? Or me, I like baking bread, right? I could go to the store and buy a loaf of bread probably for, you know, a little bit more than it cost me to bake it. But I enjoy the process. I enjoy controlling the elements.

Yeah. And then the output and the being proud of producing something that seems, you know, complex. But if you, once you learn the process, it becomes a skill. And then you can use that, those, that knowledge that applies in other ways that you can't always predict. So, Absolutely.

[00:17:47] Paddy Dhanda: And Mike, I'm conscious of time and you are gonna be up first as the keynote speaker.

Yeah. So, I wanna give you some time back to get prepared and get in the right mindset. Can't wait for your talk, by the way. Can you give us maybe three points that you're gonna be talking about in your keynote speech

[00:18:03] Mike Rohde: today? Well, we're gonna be talking a little bit about a little bit about me.

Like one of the things that the organizers wanted to do was help humanize me because sometimes because I came up with this word, You know, people call me the godfather of sketch notes or whatever, and there can be like a, I dunno may, maybe not dangerous, but like people like put me on a pedestal and I'm just a regular guy, right?

So, who loves Curry? Who loves, I love Curry. Yeah. I can even eat relatively hot curry, although I haven't pushed my limits. Your mom could probably test those limits on me, but Talking a little bit about who I am as a person and some of my experiences and why I'm was led to this place where I am. And so it's gonna be a little bit more informal.

Instead of a traditional keynote, it's gonna be a little bit more of a, who is Mike and humanizing and describing who I am to the audience. So something a little different.

[00:18:52] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, I can't wait. And yeah, it's gonna be fantastic. Thank you so much once again, Mike. It's always a pleasure.

No problem. To talk to you and yeah. I'm so glad we had this opportunity, so thank you.

[00:19:00] Mike Rohde: Yeah, thanks Paddy.

How a seemingly mundane job interview led to a life-changing encounter with discriminatory labour laws. Through her letter to the editor published in a local newspaper, Natasha Tynes discovered the compelling power of their voice in sparking discussions and driving change. Explore how this experience ignited a passion for journalism and shed light on the transformative impact of storytelling and advocacy in society.

👉🏽Tips for Effective Writing

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Natasha Tynes (Journalist & Author)

Natasha Tynes is a Jordanian-American author based in Maryland in the United States. She is a regular contributor to several publications. Her non-fiction work has appeared in the Washington Post, Nature Magazine, Elle, and Esquire, among others.

Her short stories have appeared in Geometry, The Timberline Review, Fjords, and the Markaz Review. Her short story Ustaz has won third place at the prestigious annual F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary. She is the author of the speculative literary novel They Called Me Wyatt.

She hosts the podcast, Read and Write with Natasha, where she chats with authors and publishers and discusses the reading and writing journey. She is currently working on her second novel.

https://www.natashatynes.com/

⚡️ In each episode, Paddy Dhanda deep dives into a new human Superpower and practical advice on how you can apply it immediately.

👉 Sign-up to Newsletter: https://www.superpowers.school/subscribe

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Transcription:

[00:00:59] Paddy Dhanda: Dear friend, thank you for joining us for another episode of the Superpower School podcast. I'm your host, Paddy Dhanda, and on today's episode, I have a very special guest, someone who has some superpowers that I personally would love to acquire.

So I'm gonna be listening with close intent and intention. She is a journalist, an author, a ghost writer, and she's all the way from the us. Welcome to the show, Natasha Tines.

[00:01:29] Natasha Tynes: Hi. Hi Patty. Thank you for having me.

[00:01:32] Paddy Dhanda: You are welcome, Natasha. What superpower would you like to bring to this episode?

[00:01:37] Natasha Tynes: Well, it's if you wanna call it my superpower, and it's my only power, which is writing. I've been journalist, writer, ghost writer for. Let's say over 25 years. So now you know how old I am, but I started when I was three.

No, I'm joking. But yeah. So, yeah, so I've worked as a journalist since I was 19 years old, writing for newspapers in Jordan, in Aman Jordan, where I was born in the Middle East. And then I moved around. As I told you while we were chatting earlier, that I moved to London England, got my master's in international journalism, then moved back to Jordan, worked for the Jordan Times.

 It's. The only English daily newspaper in Jordan. Then I moved to Doha, Qatar, and worked for Al Jazeera for a few years as a reporter. Then I moved to the US with my husband, who is from the US and worked in non-profits training journalists. All over the world. So we used to travel, organize conferences, trainings is great.

Worked for the World Bank for five years in their communications department. And now for the past three years, I established my own L C. So what I do this l s e is I provide content for clients. And so mostly I provide newsletter support. So if there's any brand they want anyone to write the newsletters, I do that.

I do a lot of ghost writing mostly memoir, ghost writing through a company that's called, they contracted me. So, and I love this part of my A job, which is, I talk to people usually in their eighties or seventies and they tell me all their life stories, the happiest moments, their regrets, what would they change?

So for me it's a very rewarding experience. And I also write fiction. I. Published a lot of short stories. And published a novel almost five years ago called, they Called Me Wyatt. It's a murder mystery set between the US and Jordan working on two other books, also fiction. So yeah, I so that's what I do.

So I, I guess that you can call this my superpower since it pays my bills. So let's call it a superpower. And if

[00:03:52] Paddy Dhanda: you're watching the video version of this, there's a stack of books next to you as well. So, a true author and writer just there. There we go. I mean, I was looking at your website and, you've had articles published in the Washington Post Esquire, the Post you mentioned Al Jazeera.

I mean, these are, huge names in the world of journalism. So I'd love to explore more on that in a moment, but yeah. At what point in your life were you inspired to follow this career in writing? Was there a particular event that happened or was there a particular person that inspired you?

Like, tell us a bit more about that.

[00:04:32] Natasha Tynes: Sure. So all of my life I started reading at a very early age. That's what my parents tell me and I've just been reading all my life and it's like a natural progression. If you are a big reader, you would wanna also like write and it is just kind of the next step.

So I've always been interested in writing. I think what got me into journalism it's a story that. I think I was maybe 19 or 18, and I wanted to get a a part-time job. And so my friends told me about this sales job, I think you make sales over the phone and it's for a few hours.

I was like, yeah I wanna do it. I want, I wanna help with paying my parents with paying the bills. I wanna like do my own stuff. So I think I was maybe a freshman in university. So I go, I interview the guy, the person who was in charge. Everything was great. And he said, but we can't hire you.

I was like, why? And he said the morning shift is already filled. We only have the late shift. I was like, oh, it's okay. I prefer the late shift. 'cause I go to school in the morning and he was like, no, we can't do that. I was like, why? Because the late shift ends after I think 7 or 8 PM and according back then it probably changed.

According to the labor law, women are not allowed to work after 7:00 PM. I was like, what? I was like, I don't have a problem. Like if you worried about my parents, nobody has a problem. It's only 8:00 PM I can do. It's like, no, it would be like against the labor laws. So I was furious. So I wrote a letter and I sent it to the Jordan Times as a letter to the editor, and I wrote about my incident, like, and how can we do this?

And it's still this and I, it always got published and got responses and that back then that I realized that, This, that my voice can actually stir debate. It can, start conversation, maybe it can instill change. So that's honestly, I left Jordan 20 years ago and I haven't followed in that issue.

Probably. It's fine now. But that was like over, I said over 25 years ago. And after I started getting those responses to the letter to the editor, I sent, I started sending more letters to the editor and then, Right after that I started I contacted an editor at a different newspaper and it was a weekly newspaper and I started publishing.

I started 'cause I like art and music, I started doing like music reviews and art reviews and and then I continued and then I got master's degree in journalism. And this is how it started? Yeah.

[00:07:07] Paddy Dhanda: Oh wow. That. That's a phenomenal story. I wasn't expecting that actually, Natasha. I was just expecting you'd read a book or you'd

[00:07:14] Natasha Tynes: read an article.

No. It is, yeah. Yeah.

[00:07:16] Paddy Dhanda: That's a really powerful impact that you had there. And as a result of your article, did anything change or was there that sort of support for your argument that led to change.

[00:07:29] Natasha Tynes: The, I mean, there, there were few supportive responses, but you know, the, there.

There wasn't a major change. But at least, I started a debate. Which for me that's good enough, at least for that time. And I said probably the law changed. Now I'll have to look into it. Yeah,

[00:07:48] Paddy Dhanda: So following on from your graduation, you've got your master's, how tough.

Or easy was it for you to land your first job?

[00:08:00] Natasha Tynes: So it was easy for me because I was already publishing articles on the side before I got a full-time job. So while I was in school, I already had my own newspaper column. And the newspaper column was about it was, like funny about life in a man Jordan, and it was in English.

So this kind of humor about living in a city in the Middle East and like, I would joke about driving with no AC and it's really hot and like all that stuff. Or being dragged to weddings and you have to like do like belly dancing and you don't want like all of that life in a man. I was. Like my early twenties, like what did I know back then?

But I thought I knew everything, of course. And so, and it got lots and lots of responses. And so at least in Jordan, I managed to establish a name for myself very quickly, and that led to a number of journalism jobs. And then came, and then I got a full scholarship to go to London to the chief scholarship through the British Council, through the British government.

'cause studying in the UK for, coming from my background, it's we couldn't afford that. So the Chief Next Scholarship provided with us with that opportunity, it was great experience. So coming back to the Middle East with, It already published portfolio, a master's from the UK helped me like land jobs pretty quickly.

Like a job at the Jordan Times, followed by a job at Al Jazeera. And then but it's not like I, I did not suffer. When it comes to that, like in the us not sure if much about the US market. There's a lot of jobs, right? But at the same time, it's a tool employee and in many, which means that it's.

If they lose a, if they had a contract from a client, they lose the contract. They will lay off everyone. So, like I remember my first job was great. I was writing news articles and then they lost their contract. They laid off five people. That's it. I mean, it's, this is kind of the way it is in a capitalist society is like, you keep marching ahead.

And so of course I had my ups and my downs and all of that, but now I'm doing my own thing which is it for me. Like I feel I already paid my dues in the corporate world after 25 years. So now I have, I work with a number of clients and they find me. Either through word of mouth or through social media, or through the website or through platforms like these.

But yeah, it's been good. I have my, as I said, my, my good days and my bad days. Some months I'm really busy with client. Others not so much. So, it's a journey.

[00:10:41] Paddy Dhanda: Just take us back to your days in Jordan because. Yeah, I'm really intrigued about life as a woman growing up in that environment. I have zero knowledge of Jordan. I mean, I've been to yeah, other places in the Middle East, like, the u a e, that places that are, yeah, quite touristy.

But could you put it into a perspective what kind of environment did you grow up in and as a woman, like how was that for you?

[00:11:08] Natasha Tynes: So Jordan is pretty open. I used to go out and with my friends and I went to an older Catholic school growing up which the school was conservative. But But you know, like the society as a whole is conservative, but I'm talking about 20 years ago. So, some might argue no, it's changed now.

It's more open. People say no on the country, it's even, more more religious and is more so. It depends on who you talk to, right? But So like, in terms of like finding jobs or whatever it was okay. It was fine. I was well respected as a journalist. As I said, Jordan is pretty open and, we have like female ministers and all of that.

But I think the biggest issue as a woman growing up in Jordan was for me the freedom to choose a partner. And I think that's one of the biggest issues because it's still a conservative society in terms of. Dating publicly at least back then was frowned upon. So you would have to like date in groups or you won't be able to date until you're engaged or stuff like that.

So that for me was an issue because I wanted to have more freedom in choosing my life partner and not being forced in a situation where I had to because time was running out for me. And like for a woman, we have the biological clock and, I want to be able to have kids if I wait long, like all of these constraints.

And then the society would look at you as like a woman who's passed her prime after a certain age. And so all of these. Mental trauma that can mess with your head as a woman, again, 20 years ago growing up in, in that culture. And for me, sometimes I joke about why, of course there's every, there's no perfect society.

Like I love being in the us but the US has many issues and I love being in Jordan. And the u and Jordan has also many issues. So there's no utopia. But one of the things that I like about. The US or like maybe a country that's more open what Europe or the US is. I always Jo joke about it is like, I can put my AirPods and walk in the street and sing.

Nobody even looks at you, right? Like people are busy with their own lives. I don't think I can do that in Jordan. Women alone, walking, singing. I think I would attract a crowd maybe when I was younger. Now I'm an old lady, nobody looks at me. But you know, like when I was younger, they would do that, right? And it, I wouldn't feel comfortable doing that.

But for me, this kind of simple act of freedom as a woman I think makes a big difference.

[00:13:59] Paddy Dhanda: I can, Kind of relate to that world where you are sometimes torn between two countries. So my mother and father came from India originally to the UK back in the, probably late fifties and sixties.

And I was born here in the uk. So when I'm in India, people say, oh, look he's a foreigner. Yeah. But then in the UK most people will address me as, oh, you are Indian, right? And so, yeah, sometimes I'm like, well, I'm British Indian, but you know, yeah I'm gonna make the best of both worlds.

So yeah, it's sometimes nice to kind of pull the cultural side of India into my life as well as have the liberal side of the uk.

[00:14:40] Natasha Tynes: But see, the difference is I was born and raised there, so I spent 20 years there, so,

[00:14:47] Paddy Dhanda: yeah, absolutely. Most of your childhood is from that land.

[00:14:51] Natasha Tynes: I came out of age in Jordan, pretty much.

[00:14:53] Paddy Dhanda: And Natasha, could you put into perspective the sort of pressures that you have to work within? Because I've never worked within the industry.

Before. Okay. In terms of journalism and I, but I know lots of other industries, we all have different types of pressures and for many of our listeners that are sitting at home, if they reflect on the jobs that they do, you know that they'll have these pressures on them as well. As a journalist, what sort of pressures are you under?

[00:15:22] Natasha Tynes: So it depends if you are a full-time journalist with a newspaper or if you're independent. So I'm independent now, so I like, I don't have lots of pressure because if I don't wanna work for this new, this newspaper, I don't work for it. But the pressure comes from after you publish an article. And you get the feedback and you, there are always people who don't like what you see in anything.

And it, it could be a very, like, I remember it was a very, like a topic about soccer and it was like, ah, I wanna force my kids to play soccer because I like something. It was just like, shall I force them or shall I give them the option? And it was published in the Washington Post, in the parenting section, and it was about my experience with maybe I should like push them and should I force them.

I got so many emails about who do you think you are? You're forcing your kids, you're a bad mom. You like there's always anything you say, somebody gets offended in anything. And I, and it depends if of how you look at it. You can, it can either crush you or you can either move on.

So after years and like early in my career, I remember once. I know this is probably, I know in retrospect in a mis it was a mistake, what I wrote, I was saying, yeah. And this artist is something like running his show for the affordable price of la. And then I. Yeah, the company called like, how dare you say this is affordable?

Who are you to say this is affordable or not affordable? And like they, they felt I tarnished their reputation by alluding to the fact that their tickets were expensive and that the, and using the word affordable and takes away the objectivity of the journalist. Which is, I think they had a point in retrospect.

But They called the editor of the newspaper, the, I think it was like an art studio, and they complained about me to the editor and editor had talked to me. It's only about this one word. So this is what some of the struggles. Is that any, anything you say about any like very, like, it's not politics, it's not like, social, just issues like social justice or any of that, that it's like, Simple topics about a play or soccer and people will get offended somehow, and you have to deal with it.

You have to learn how to have a thick skin. And so my rule is I allow myself to get upset for like two hours. I said, okay, get it out of your system. You have two hours, get upset. And then, okay, let's move on. Let's control our thoughts and I move on. But this is how I. So that, that's, I think my main struggle is the feedback from others.

[00:18:14] Paddy Dhanda: Yeah. Whenever I post on social media, I'm always conscious of the reaction I might get and yeah I generally have had positive sort of comments. I can't really remember any one post that's created any bad feeling. But there's always, the odd one here or there and, yeah.

Yeah. That. That is terrifying because you feel like there are certain things you then don't want to debate out in the open on social media because Yeah. You'd much rather have a conversation, but then Correct. Yeah. If somebody has made a point, then you've gotta respond.

That's my, always my fear about publishing stuff and putting it out there.

During your time as a journalist like how many articles have you ever written? Have you ever counted?

[00:19:00] Natasha Tynes: No. You can count them for me if you want to.

[00:19:05] Paddy Dhanda: I need some AI help on that one. But is it in the hundreds, thousands, do you think? Or?

[00:19:11] Natasha Tynes: I've been writing since I've been 19.

I'm 47, so that's it. 20 articles a year or more.

[00:19:19] Paddy Dhanda: Oh wow. So a lot of articles. And out of all of those articles, is there one or two that are really memorable in that they stand out the most for you? And if so, for what reason do they stick in your mind?

[00:19:36] Natasha Tynes: It would be the one that I wrote the first day of the second Iraq War. 'cause I was stationed on the borders between Jordan and Iraq. My story, my assignment was to write about the people who fled, or the refugees who fled the war and came back and came to Jordan escaping the war.

So we would wait by the border for a bus of refugees. And for me, I felt bad because the minute the bus stopped, all the journalists like attacked the bus, went inside like these poor people. The journalists were all over them trying to get a quote or a story of what happened to them just so that they can have a good story, I guess.

And it was the very first day of the war, so there was a lot of interest in getting the human side of the story. But you know, I tried to be, very understanding and get stories about, so I remember I talked with Sudanese refugees who left Iraq. They were based in Iraq, and they came to Jordan and they were carrying their kids and you know how the war affected them.

And it was And at the same time, we were very scared because there were bombs, right across the border falling. And I remember I was like really high on adrenaline that I, and maybe that's a bit dangerous because I was so focused on the story that. The fear disappeared and I ran on the adrenaline more than the fear of maybe what if a bomb falls across, the other side.

So, but anyway, we were okay. And it was the main it was the main story on the very first day of the Iraq war in Jordan, in the Jordan Times. So, I thought I did. I did a good job. And I remember back then we were like in the middle of nowhere, the desert, and we had to go to like a government office, and I wrote the story by hand and I faxed it to the editor.

That was the only way, I mean, So there was like, I couldn't type it on my phone. There was no iPhones. There was like, there was a cell phone, but it's not like there was wifi or anything like that. So I wrote it by hand and I sent it as a fax and it made it to the front page of the store.

[00:22:06] Paddy Dhanda: Wow. I mean, in a world where we are constantly using apps and gadgets and technology for everything to.

To then be able to just use old fashioned pen and paper?

[00:22:19] Natasha Tynes: Yeah. I mean, I didn't have a choice. I wrote it by hand and I faxed it.

[00:22:22] Paddy Dhanda: Yeah. Wow. And the fact that you faxed it as well, which is again another sort of technology that. Nowadays is rare that people talk about. Yeah.

[00:22:31] Natasha Tynes: Yeah. That's really interesting.

I'm that old. No,

[00:22:36] Paddy Dhanda: I was talking today on LinkedIn. Somebody put on a post and they said, you know what's your preference? Do you prefer to read books digitally or on paper? And I was like, paper all the way for me. I've gotta have it in paper. I just love that. Smell of the paper. The, yeah, the flicking of the pages.

Yeah. Sticking post-it notes on the pages too that I want go back to

[00:22:55] Natasha Tynes: highlighting, like,

[00:22:56] Paddy Dhanda: yeah. So yeah it's paper all the way so that I'm just as old fashioned, don't worry. We're in the, and Natasha, so if somebody out there is looking to ramp up their writing skills and I'm gonna put myself in that group because. I've recently started my newsletter. I'd love to get some advice from you in terms of how to. Get better at writing. Okay. And look to get some tips from you on that. So, could you share some of your wisdom of course, on this topic?

[00:23:25] Natasha Tynes: Well, if you wanna call it that, but Yeah, sure. So first thing is read. I mean, that's the number one rule. If you know you, you'll never be a good writer if you do not read in any topic. So if you wanna write fiction, Read fiction. If you wanna write nonfiction, if you wanna even like newsletters, just like imitate, then innovate.

Look at what others are doing, look at their styles, and then come up with your own style. As well do not try to sound over smart or over complicated. Try to be straight to the point. Read out loud and then get rid of. What I call them empty calories. And these empty calories include words like very, really just that.

And now with ai, some AI tools can help you identify them and just get rid of them. But just keep that in mind that these empty calories, they don't add much to the copy. And if you're talking about newsletters Your number one K p i is of course the open rate, right? So like you wanna have an open rate, 40% or more.

And from my experience, what makes sometimes what makes or breaks an open rate is just the title of your email. And I experimented with that so many times and I realized the one that works is a short. Informative but witty title that would grab the attention. And it should sound human, not robotic.

Like, do not put a title with, like, buy my course or two days left until my course ends, and do not be too salesy in the newsletter. Let's say my newsletter is about writing. Okay. And I wanna talk about as a writer, we tend to procrastinate. So I'll have a title like I finally slayed the procrastination monsters or something like this, right?

Instead of like, tips on how to beat procrastination or take my course on how you beat procrastination. People are not gonna open this, but use words that evoke emotions. Monster slaying, for example, or. People are also like words that has like ne negative connotation. Some people would say, I failed, and people are gonna click, hi, you failed.

Let me see. But if you have the same newsletter and the headline is, I'm blessed. People are not like I'm, they're tired of like, I'm blessed post. They wanna see how you fit. So like if, so people want. Sometimes to see negative emotions because they can relate to them. I'm not saying always to be like this, down or whatever, but.

Try to evoke emotions in the title in a very short, humane, not AI sounding, like let them realize that this was written by a human as well. And that's as well. Now in this age and time, distinguish yourself from AI as well by, by evoking these unique emotions that AI will never be able to do that because they don't feel their machines.

[00:26:29] Paddy Dhanda: That's given me an idea what might be a good. Provocative title for this episode. Do you think? Could you gimme some examples

[00:26:37] Natasha Tynes: For this one something like the journey of a writer. The Middle East to suburbia or something like this.

Something like this.

[00:26:49] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, I like that. That's quite adventurous. It sounds like an adventure.

[00:26:51] Natasha Tynes: Yeah.

[00:26:52] Paddy Dhanda: Yeah. I would be going on an adventure there, and I like that bit at the end. So we are actually giving some contrast

[00:27:00] Natasha Tynes: from here to here and I think that's like from more zones to suburbia or, Right.

There we go. The sleeper cell. The sleeper cell in suburbia. I'm just joking.

[00:27:11] Paddy Dhanda: Oh. But I get the idea that's like, so, so make it intriguing, but like you say, make it human. And the other piece you said there around creates some emotion or emotional connection Correct. With the audience. Yeah. I mean, the other big problem I have is, I'm a bit of a perfectionist and okay, I was trying to launch a blog a few years ago, and every time I went to publish, even my first blog article, I would stop and go, oh, it's not good enough.

I've gotta tweak it. It, I've gotta tweak it. And in the end, I just, I had all these articles, but I never published them. And they were always like, oh, they're just not good enough. Even now when I write the newsletter, I'm like, should I publish it, shouldn't I? Or what? Is there more I could add here?

What's your advice there? If somebody is Yeah. Overthinking things. 'cause I know I am overthinking,

[00:28:03] Natasha Tynes: so I always remind myself that like perfect is the enemy of the good. So you are your actually your own enemy, but trying to be perfect. Sometimes you have to ship your products even if they're not perfect and follow the.

The thinking of startups where they, it's called M V P, minimum viable product, right? So sometimes if, and then you can edit it later on, it's fine. But at least the minute you hit publish, you are done with that, and you can go back to it. But if you keep, like, like if you keep being like, like battling all these invisible enemies of perfection, you're never gonna get there.

So, slay that. Slay the dragon. Publish and remember, perfect is the enemy of the good, and you can always fix it later and just go with the attitude of M V P. Minimal viable product. I'm just gonna ship it. It's good enough. I will perfect it later, but that's the only way you can do it.

Otherwise, what is the other option? Just sitting on it and not publishing it is, are you gonna be okay with, and what is better to not publish or to publish something that might need tweaking later? Like it's mind hacks. It's mind games.

[00:29:21] Paddy Dhanda: Yeah, I get that. Absolutely. And In the past done talks on better storytelling for presentations.

And there are lots of different story arcs. And I know you do quite a bit of work in this space as well Yeah. In terms of storytelling, but for articles, blog articles, is there a structure that you would recommend we follow there? Are there any kind of acronyms that we could use or, any simple structures that you would suggest?

[00:29:49] Natasha Tynes: So the structure that I like to use that I think works well is start with a personal story and which is kind of the hook that will hook you. And then when you end, and then you make the point, and then at the end go back to it. So for example, remember the story I told you about they didn't give me the right shift 'cause I'm a woman.

I can start with that. And then I make my point. Let's say law changed, unload changed, and everything is good. Then we all come by, whatever. And then at the end, I would say I would end like, and maybe the 20 year the 20 year old version of myself would have never thought that this actually, I would have been possible.

I would go back to the same man and I told him, see, I told you so, or something like this, right? So, I'll take, I take the reader into a journey, starting with the personal story and then making my point, the conclusion, the the statements. And then I go back and I close it, the same circle with the same story of the man who told me, no, you cannot work.

So this way the reader is engulfed into this word that you created. I know it's only a blog, but you take them into the journey and just close the journey at the end.

[00:31:08] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, now I'm gonna send you one of my newsletters and Sure. I'd love your feedback because Of course. Yeah. Because I've tried to weave personal stories into it, but I bet there's so much more I could do and so much improvement I could make.

So I don't

[00:31:22] Natasha Tynes: just remember like Ted talks that you listen to or anything. You probably don't remember anything. The only thing you remember is a small story that they mentioned, like, My mom once told me, and that would stick with you and you forget all the tips or whatever. You just remember the story.

And that is the power of stories. We, people connect to them because we are hu we've always told stories around the fire, around what you know. That is, that's what we are as humans. We tell stories. So that's the only thing people are gonna remember. They're gonna forget everything else. Just gonna remember the story

[00:31:57] Paddy Dhanda: and talking of human skills.

We're living in a world of ai. I mean, even when we joined this Zoom call, I said to you, Natasha, who's this third person that's joined? And you said, oh, that's just my AI patty that, yeah. I normally get him to sit in on my meetings. And I was like, whoa. So in a world of AI and the way things are going at the moment, if somebody out there is thinking of becoming a writer or even enhancing their writing, should they bother?

Because surely AI is gonna do a lot of this for us and it's become a lot easier that I can put in a few sentences and just get AI to now create the whole article for me. What's your opinion on that?

[00:32:39] Natasha Tynes: So you can either be scared of AI or you can be excited about ai. Right? For me, I'm the team that is excited about AI because I make AI work for me, AI is literally my assistant.

So AI can help me come up with, let's say, one, a blog post, right? And they can just give you the first draft. And you can never use the first draft because it's very robotic, right? But at least having the first draft. Would cut the fear of the first draft, because sometimes looking at an empty canvas is very daunting, right?

But if you already have a first draft, I immediately you, your mind like beats procrastination and you get to it. So this is what my AI helps me, is gives me it helps me get rid of the fear of the empty canvas, right? So instead of writing, let's say five one blog a day, I can write five blocks a day.

And again, you can never depend on them. To have a whole blog post because it's very robotic. So they can give you some ideas. They can give you, like, he's like he or she or your assistant. Ah, like, don't forget to talk about this side of the argument. Ah, okay. That's a good reminder. And you build around it.

So for me, AI saves me a lot of time productivity. I have my own virtual assistant does the research. Of course I have to follow after them because you can't always trust your virtual assistant. You have sometimes to. Do some follow up and double check. But yeah, I mean, for me it's great and you can never replace a human writer again because humans feel AI do not feel, no matter how text you give them to understand feelings.

They can never understand feelings as a human, they can never describe feelings. As a human, you have to be a human to feel and to express that in your writing. So AI can never compete.

[00:34:30] Paddy Dhanda: And could you recommend any tools that you use just in case if somebody is thinking about utilizing this additional power?

Because I, at the moment just use chat G p t just in its basic form, but I'm sure there's loads of other really good ones. Yeah, it could be using.

[00:34:46] Natasha Tynes: So there's different AI for different things. So for example order that you saw, join the meeting. It's a subscription tool. So sometimes when I interview people for the memoirs, for the people that I go write their memoirs, I use order records, the in the interview for me, and then transcribe the whole text and then divide the text into chapters.

So I have my assistant, they came, they listened to it, they highlighted what's important, and they gave me the first draft. I mean, imagine how much time that in the past you would either transcribe the whole thing, manually, or hire someone to do it. Imagine the hours. That assist. And not only that, but they went through the script and they said, oh, okay.

And they divided the script into chapters and sub chapters. And then you look and you see, ah, okay, I wanna expand on this, I wanna expand on that. So that's one tool, for example. So chat, G P T, you can use it as for, Writing everything from a proposal to a blog post. Or another thing I use is Bard, which is the Google version of Charge G, pt.

And sometimes I put charge g p t on Bard and compare the results. I also use, of course, Grammarly. I have the Grammarly Pro for, to get rid to, to fix your language. Typo sentence structures. There's another tool called Hemingway, where you put your draft and would give you a rating of your draft and try to make it read depending on the grade level that you wanna present it to people.

I also use video editing ai, like, video ai, and that's for me, for my own podcast. It goes through the script and then it picks clips for me. I don't even have to listen to it again. Cuts it for and gives me the templates. All I have to do is to approve it and tweak it. Done. I used to hire a video editor for that.

You can say maybe AI got rid of the the job of the video editor, but no, now it frees some money for me to hire maybe different people, but I'm still hiring. Right. But, AI freed some money to do other stuff. So I use AI to do clips for my podcast, and it's two minutes. I'm done. I have like 10 clips.

Fascinating. And it's very smart. They pick good quotes from the interview. Like they don't pick random stuff.

[00:37:13] Paddy Dhanda: I did actually come across one but I haven't. Managed to use it yet, but somebody reached out and said, Hey, try our tool.

It does this type of thing. Yeah. Very similar to what you said there, but I was like, oh, I dunno. Might be hit or miss, but I might give it a go. So, Natasha, we're running fast out of time. If people would like to get to know more about the work that you do, and they would like to continue their learning journey could you suggest some resources that they could have a look at?

[00:37:39] Natasha Tynes: For me as a writer, Twitter is I know not twi. Twitter is like becoming very controversial and Twitter x whatever. But I still go there. I I have a very good community and so build Finding your people is amazing because you learn from them, you help each other out.

You share resources, all of that. I also go to LinkedIn as well. The same community of writers. I go to LinkedIn and interact with them. If you wanna, like, maybe take a writing course very good one is Rite of Passage by David Perel. He has an I took it as well. It's an amazing immersive, six week immersive experience.

Another resources. There's lots of books on writing like Stephen King on writing. That's, kind of the bible of writing. That's the important book to check out. And then just follow other ri writers like Jane Friedman. She has a very popular newsletter. All about writing and publishing as well.

If you wanna publish books and self-publishing versus finding an agent, we can go down the rabbit hole of that one, but, Jane Friedman and newsletter is a good one. Yeah, I mean, for me it just find your community online and start by writers you admire and follow who you follow and then interact with them and build your own community.

[00:39:01] Paddy Dhanda: Fantastic. And Natasha, how can we get in touch with you and check out your work that you do?

[00:39:05] Natasha Tynes: Sure, yeah. I'm I'm online everywhere and natasha times.com is my website. You can find me on Twitter and Natasha times Instagram, natasha dot times TikTok, all of these places. I have a novel if you're interested in Murder mystery.

It's set between Jordan and the us. It's called, they called Me Wyatt. And yeah, so please feel free to, and you can email me as well. Feel free to reach out anytime. I usually respond quickly and yeah. Would thank you for having me and allowing me to share my thoughts on this platform.

[00:39:40] Paddy Dhanda: Oh no, you're welcome Natasha. And you definitely do respond quick 'cause that's how we got in touch and yeah, you responded to my email. So, I really appreciate that as well and it's been a pleasure. I know you've had a niggly cough and thank you for battling through this episode, even though you weren't a hundred percent feeling right.

But I really appreciate your time today.

Thank you so much.

This episode was recorded in 2019 during lockdown and published on my first podcast titled The Peaky Agilist. The episode has been remastered and re-shared here. Join Paddy as he delves into the extraordinary journey of a nuclear submarine commander who found himself in uncharted leadership territory. Through the lens of his experience, we explore the challenges of relinquishing control and embracing empowerment within a high-stakes environment.

👉🏽 Unexpected Assignment - A seasoned commander takes on the Navy's worst-performing submarine, triggering a reevaluation of leadership.

👉🏽 Empowerment Over Command - Discover how empowering the team over issuing orders leads to surprising outcomes and boosted morale.

👉🏽 Modern Leadership Shift - Learn how the shift from industrial-age hierarchy to adaptable empowerment is reshaping leadership paradigms.

Join us to uncover the transformation from control to empowerment in leadership.

David Marquet (Author of Leadership is Language)

L. David Marquet is a retired United States Navy captain and the bestselling author of Turn the Ship Around and Leadership is Language. He was the commander of the submarine USS Santa Fe. He turned the submarine from the worst in the fleet to the most successful by using a "leader-leader" model of leadership. He became captain of the submarine in 1999 and, since his retirement, the submarine has continued to win awards.

Since then he has worked as a leadership expert and speaks to audiences globally about creating workplaces where people are healthier and happier because they have more control over their work. He taught previously at the Columbia University School of Professional Studies.

⚡️ In each episode, Paddy Dhanda deep dives into a new human Superpower and practical advice on how you can apply it immediately.

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Transcription:

[00:01:01] Paddy Dhanda: Thank you for joining me for another episode of the Superpower School podcast. I'm your host, Paddy Dhanda, and today I have an apology to make. When I first started this podcast, I made a commitment to myself and the listeners that I would publish at least one episode per week. I've consistently been publishing episodes for over 17 months and never missed a single week, but last week I failed on that commitment, so I'm holding my hands up.

It's the summer holidays and family commitments took over. So I'm hoping to make it up to you by bringing you a very special episode.

 Way back in 2019 when I started my very first podcast titled The Peaky Agile List. I attended a book launch in London. It was a launch of the amazing book titled, leadership is Language by One of My Heroes in the Leadership Domain, Mr.

David Marque. Many of you will know David for his bestselling book. Turn the Ship Around. When I met David at the book launch, I plucked up the courage to ask him if you'd join me as a guest on my new podcast, and he politely agreed. What many don't know is that I had no idea how to launch a podcast at the time.

I had no proper microphone or any know-how on the types of apps I needed to actually do the recording. How could I possibly miss out on securing one of the most famous leadership thought leaders as my very first guest? So for this episode, which was recorded around the time of lockdown, I've remastered the audio because I wanted to share that conversation with you since it's so relevant, even post covid, especially in today's world of AI and so much uncertainty.

If you are looking to change your language at work so that you can create more impact with your teams and add to your leadership knowledge, then this episode is definitely for you.

[00:03:13] David Marquet: I was a nuclear submarine commander, which is a job that tends to attract people who like to be in control of things.

And there's a to, to a degree you want that? But my story was I came up through this regime where I was being promoted because I was so good at telling people what to do. And at the last minute, after 12 minutes of preparing to go to one submarine, I was shifted to one of the newest submarines in the fleet, a kind of submarine I'd never been on before.

And it was Alice in Wonderland for me. And oh, by the way, it was the worst performing submarine in the Navy with the worst retention and the worst morale. And the reason I went there on short notice is because the previous captain quit, which is you can get fired, but quitting is very no one ever heard of that.

So they, the Navy says, oh, you got two weeks, you're gonna go over to the Santa Fe. Yeah, it's a different kind of submarine. Yeah, it's the worst submarine. And. You can't fire anyone and the schedule's not gonna change, and they've got the worst morale and retention, go fix it. So I show up, but, and my mindset is, even though you are walking around, you see equipment, you don't know, you don't know how the buttons work, but you still in this mindset of telling people what to do.

It's so deeply ingrained. And the crew, to be honest, was okay with that. They were like, yeah you're the captain. You tell us what to do. And I gave an order re like the first day at sea that couldn't be done. And the officer repeated it, knowing it was a BSS order. It was very simple.

It was basically like shifting into second gear on a car that but you only had one gear. On this motor, and so nothing happened, nothing bad happened, but it just really blew me away that knowing that there was no second gear, the officers still repeated my suggestion and I got the officers together and my instinct was to say, okay, look, you guys need to be empowered.

You guys need to speak up. You guys need to blah, blah, blah. It was all about you guys. I'm fine. It's not about me changing. That's too hard. Right. And eventually it got reflected back to me that really it was my behavior. It wasn't about them. It was about me. So instead of whining that, hey, my team's not taking initiative, so therefore I have to tell 'em what to do, it's.

It's the reason your team's not telling, taking initiative is 'cause you keep telling 'em what to do. So the first step is to stop telling people what to do. And you have to lean back. There's this thing, oh, lean in. I'm gonna lean into you, you're gonna lean into people below you and it's direct.

Direct. And then you report back. And it's this cascading sense of control down the organization. And I think that what the reason we do that is because, Partly it's a biological thing, but also it's an industrial age structure. That's how we aggregated industrial age workers and we could chunk the work into smaller and smaller pieces that required less and less thinking, therefore less and less education.

Therefore, I could pay people less and less. And so now I have a hundred workers each doing one tiny thing making a car, all of them getting paid. As little as possible to maximize the profits, but there's no thinking there. And obviously today and especially what's going on in the world with coronavirus thinking, not just, oh, the people at the top do the thinking and everyone else does what they're told.

That is not, that's the fundamental and industrial aid structure, but it's embedded in so many organizations. Today we don't even realize it. Oh, you can do it different. Yeah. Everyone can think, oh, how does that work? So that's the whole idea. And so what, when I started leaning back, I said, well, you guys just tell me what we should do.

Well, we what you intend to do? If I weren't here, what would you do if I weren't here? And it's just a trick really to get people to talk, to expose their thinking to be thinking and make decisions. But it's really uncomfortable because as for the leader, because you're like, let's see what happens.

And there's this like sense of pause this sense of, well, if I just told 'em what to do, we'd move forward. That gets in the way of developing leaders. So everything about the way I was taught about leadership, I was just asked the opposite question and it almost always, it was right. I, it was more useful, I guess is a better way to say it.

So instead of giving a lecture I call it, so you want culture change? We did culture change. How does it work? Very simple. The traditional approach to cultural change is two steps. I change your thinking and then you'll change your actions. I think this is wrong. I think the right approach is let's change our behaviors in a small way and that will affect our thinking.

So for us it was very simple things like, hey, don't refer to that person over there in the supply department as they refer to them as we. So that's an action change, but the thinking then becomes, oh, it feels like a team. The team boundary spans across. On, on and on. So we just acted our way to new thinking.

And for us, it just always went back to language over and over again. We would be like, why don't we say it differently? Why don't you say it like this? Try saying it like this. And a lot of it had to do with me asking questions in a different way. And that's what this new book. Leadership is language is all about.

[00:08:52] Paddy Dhanda: Thank you for that, David. And if you could just quickly take us back to maybe those first few days of being thrown in this situation, being put in charge of this submarine. That was probably a bit like in, in probably soccer terms, Norwich city football team, the bottom of the league and turning that sort of team into almost the Liverpool of the premiership.

Yeah. Those first few days, I mean, what was the reaction of the crew? How did you deal with their attitudes towards you? Was there any resentment? Maybe describe that as a leader going into that situation.

[00:09:26] David Marquet: I felt off balance. I go onto the submarine. I'd always been rooted in knowing the right answer.

I, in nuclear submarine, it's all about being technically, Competent and correct and knowing the right answer. I can write an equation for the nuclear power plant. I could repeat the set points. I memorized it is knowing the right answer and I get thrown into the situation where I'm walking around and I don't know the right answer.

I don't, I know theoretically what we're trying to do, obviously, but I don't know which button to push on the machine to make it happen. Now, as a captain, you don't normally push the buttons, but you would know which buttons to push. So if the team started falling apart, you say no. Okay. It's in the upper left.

Go down two menu steps. Boom boom. Okay, select this. Boom, okay, there it is. Push. You would know that. And so I felt this weird sense of being off balance. And the first thing that happened was I go into the sonar room and I start asking the sailors about their equipment. Now, in the past, my job was to question, but it was question as in testing, do you know your stuff?

Hey, tell me what this, how's that work? Blah, blah, blah. Because, I would always know, I'd always know how the gear worked. So this time I walk in, I don't really know. So now I'm asking questions from a place of curiosity, but for them, it's still the captain is grilling me with these questions. And finally I say, ah I don't know, I forgot about that.

And as soon as he said that, Everybody looked at me, they were like 10 people. They like their heads like snapped around. And I looked at me because that's when normally you would say the answer. And I was like, oh s**t. 'cause I didn't know the answer. And I had this moment where I had these masks where I was just like, okay, pretend to know.

Well you should find out and then come tell me. And you really need to know. And for some reason, this sense of off balance didn't let me go there. And I just said, well, I don't know either. They were all looking at me like, what? You're the captain you're supposed to know. And I had to say over and over again, I tell audiences that in that moment I could feel my heart beating.

My respiration wa was increased. My body temperature was going up. I was sweating. My palms were feeling itchy. And even though it was only five or 10 seconds, it was the scariest thing I did. We did some stuff that would raise the hair on the back of your neck on that submarine in terms of where we drove it and how what we did.

But none of that really was scary for me because we had a highly trained, competent team. And so the physical thing wasn't really scary. But for me, the emotions of admitting I didn't know that was uber scary and. Then when I said that there was this, then it was just like, there's this pause and then like all this cloud the fog just cleared and the masks dropped away, and everyone else could start saying, well, I don't, yeah, let me find out.

As long as you're pretending to know things, as long as it's unsafe to say you don't know, and it starts from the leader modeling behavior, then no one's gonna say they don't know and no one's gonna learn anything. It's all about learning. So, so that launched us into this sort of learning experimental approach.

Now you gotta make informed guesses and a hypothesis and there's part of work where we're gonna research it, and then we're going to make sure to, as much as possible, we're doing the right thing. But there's also part of work where we don't really know, like, we're gonna launch a new product, how's it gonna go?

Well, I can make sure that the product. Is protecting people's privacy. And I can make sure that it's safe from hackers to as much degree as I can, but whether it sells in the market at the price that we think it should is something we don't know. So there's this sort of hypothesis, do it and then let's reflect.

And that's how we approached everything that we did. We did all kinds of fun things. We did crazy stuff like you read in the manual. If you shut off the oxygen gen into the, to the submarine, you have 135 people and you can do calculations. What's the actual average amount of oxygen one person uses per hour and how much is in the submarine?

And you can draw a line and say, okay, at this point everyone's gonna fall unconscious because we don't have enough oxygen. And then now there's precursors before that you get headaches. So we would actually, but rather than rely on the theory, we would just do it. We would just turn off the oxygen and say, Hey, we're gonna run an experiment.

We're turning off the oxygen. If someone's feeling really Ill let us know. We'll turn it back on. And then we just take data for two hours and we'd see like, how did it feel physiologically. When the oxygen got down normally it's around 20%, but then it gets down to 19%, 18%, you start getting headaches.

But like, that's just one example. But we would do all these things. We'd actually do it, and we take that and we'd try it. And this piggy there, there are navy training programs which tap into this idea. We really live this stuff. And so as a result, this crew learned it. The crew became the, one of the most knowledgeable crews I think there was and it was the highest performing crew.

We got the highest score in history in the Navy and the next 12 months, every sailor signed up to stay in. We went from three sailors outta 33 to 33 outta 33.

[00:15:09] Paddy Dhanda: Your first book turn the Ship Around. It's mentioned in literally every agile course out there. Why do you think the book resonated so well with the Agile community?

What elements of your style of leadership that you were evangelizing, kind of resonated with that community most?

[00:15:25] David Marquet: Well, I love Agile. I think there's some things that are just fundamentally. Right and brilliant about it. Now, we didn't know anything about Agile when we were doing this, but there's some fundamental tenets of how we operated, which I think are parallels.

Number one, it's all about getting people to think. It's not, you can't just sit in your room with your arms crossed in a yogi position and just think all day long you actually have to do something. So you have to think about it, then do it, and then reflect and then hypothesize and do it, and then reflect and then hypothesize.

And so this was the rhythm of work. And of course that sounds very, that's sprint planning, sprint, retrospection cycle. It's and the reason we do it is 'cause we wanna activate people's thinking. We say push the authority to information, not push information to authority. The industrial age command and control approach is the people at the periphery of the organization, i e the person looking into the eyeballs of the salesman, the person standing in front of the pump that's vibrating a little bit, unusually the person who's in the code.

They have the most information about. What's going on, but they don't have the authority to make decisions. So the approach is take aggregate the information, fill out a form, goes up the chain, yes, no, launch the product on time. Nope. Do more testing, and it comes back down. And so what we tried to do over and over again was, let's let the person who's closest to the information make.

As many decisions about it as possible, which we again, push the authority to the information, not the other way around. Information authority is separated in hierarchy. I don't think we can get away from that, but it's what do you do about it? That what, that was different. Right. And I think that resonated.

Plus, it's a true story. It's not. Made up. My experience now with Agile groups is they can smell BSS in a nanosecond look, we ran a nuclear submarine this way, so you can probably launch your. Facebook imitation software like this, and

[00:17:32] Paddy Dhanda: it'll probably Okay. It's a pretty, pretty critical piece of work. Yes, absolutely.

Yeah.

[00:17:36] David Marquet: Yeah. So anyway, and it was fun. So I love and I really appreciate what the Agile community does, not just to, for inviting me to go join them and different places to talk, but for making the world a better place for people to go

[00:17:48] Paddy Dhanda: to work. No, absolutely. Teams that really have that right.

Culture and the right environment around them going into Agile, even though it can be quite scary, having that autonomy and being empowered to make those decisions. I think it just boosts morale sky high versus perhaps the more traditional way of working. Going to the new book.

So leadership is language. I love the cover, by the way. The little speech bubble in the Thinking Bubble, and. The sort of the industrial age versus the modern thinking age. Could you explain the concept in the book about red work versus blue work?

[00:18:20] David Marquet: Yeah, so it, it goes back to this rhythm of work, which is we're physically engaged in the world, which is, I call red work.

It's it red work is the work. We're building code, we're assembling cars. We are. Meeting with clients, we're checking someone in at a hotel. We're flying an airplane, we're operating on a patient. It's, it is the work. And then Blue work is thinking about the work. And so there are a couple things.

Number one is, In a lot of empowerment. Well, my experience wasn't, as I started talking about empowering people, is we tended to, I thought inappropriately denigrate the work itself and underappreciate the actual work. We were like, oh, we gonna network. We're gonna meet with people. I'm gonna, you know, connect A to B to C to D.

Yeah. But someone's actually has to still write the code. Right. And so I wanted to elevate the appreciation of the work. And number two is, I, it's too simplistic in my mind to say, well, we used to have these industrial age organizations and it was all about these assembly lines. And now we're just gonna stop and everyone put your pencil down and we're just gonna think That to me was also not right.

And for me it's always the interaction between. Engaging in the world, the physical task, and then thinking about it. And I've been on, I've been over biased on both sides. Sometimes I'm just doing stuff. And I realize sometimes it's it's just for a day. It might be, I did something for a couple years.

I had a job for a couple years. Well, like, what am I doing? I don't. Because there's not enough blue, there's not enough thinking about it. But o other times I've been over biased on the blue side where I'm just, I'm thinking and like, well, what am I gonna do? And it seems really big and overwhelming. Like I don't know where to start.

And in this case, what you need to do is do something small and chunk it very small and just do something, make a hypothesis to say, well, this isn't perfect, but it's. Better than just, I'm not gonna know. If I just keep thinking about it, I'm, I need to actually do it and then see what happened. Writing a book is like that.

You can think and think. I like when you start writing a book, you don't know what it's gonna be. You think you know, but you don't. And it's only by starting to write and say, oh, okay, now I see, oh, this doesn't make, oh, this connects to that. Oh, okay. But it's the action of writing, which will take you there.

So, That's the idea. This should sound super obvious to agile groups because it's exactly like I said with the sprint. What I think what I perceive is to be the sprint process. Now, agile guys will say, oh, well that's not really true. We have a daily standup where there's a tiny bit of thinking in there.

And when I'm doing the code, it's not like I'm not thinking. I still have to make decisions about how to structure the software. And I'm saying, yeah, I'm not saying there's no thinking while you're doing this other red work, but it's recursive. So there's this big thinking. We might take a day to do a retrospective, but then we take an hour to do a morning meeting or 15 minutes, and then we might take 30 seconds.

But the key is, the way we use our brains during these two different processes is different. When you're in the work, it's focused the more focused you can be. That's why when every time I go see these coders, they'll have the headphones on because they're trying to focus, they're trying to exclude distractions.

But when we say, well, what do we learn? What, how can we get new ideas? What other ways could we approach this problem? Now you want broad perspective. So it's a head down focus versus a head up broad perspective. And those are two different ways of using your brain. And it's about variability.

I want, I'm starting the nuclear power plant. I'm in the procedure. I want to go A, B, C, D, I don't want variability. I don't want A, B, D, C, I don't. You don't want that. That means boom bad. So we, when we're making parts on an assembly line, when I am writing code, I don't want. I can't just write random code. It has to be in accord with the language.

So I reduce variability. But when I thinking about it, so before and after, should we start the reactor? Right? When, which team are we going to use? Then I want thinking so. I have to, and if I don't, if I'm not clear about this is embrace variability work and this is reduced variability work, then what happens is that work, it all feels the same.

I'm just broad and I'm focused, but I'm not really uber focused and I'm not really broad. I feel like I am, but I'm not, versus teams that say, Now we're laser focused. Now we're super broad scanning the horizon,

[00:23:20] Paddy Dhanda: which I'm guessing is the core part of the book, the six plays that you've introduced, and that's all about switching between those different modes of working.

Is that, would that be correct?

[00:23:30] David Marquet: Yeah, so my, my, my experience of life was I kept asking questions and I said, why did I ask it that way? That wasn't very helpful. Someone comes up to me and says, Hey, I'd like to delay the software launch the product launch next week. I'm like, what? Why? No. Look, we've talked about this, and so in other words, I'm reacting, I'm responding.

I'm projecting what I think. Versus and I no. Lemme try again. I started by saying, well, why do you wanna do that? But that even that's a little provocative. I was trying to reprogram my brain to just be very neutral. Oh. And be neutral in terms of tone and curious in terms of intent. You gotta start with just, Hey, what do you seeing, what do you see that's seeing as description is safe?

You mentioned before it feels scary and I, and I. And I think that's right, because now I'm taking responsibility for the future, which is unknown. I can be wrong. And so we start with what do you see? Describe the situation what's going on? I. What do you recommend? What do you intend to do? If I weren't here and you had to make this call, what would you do?

So you're basically weaning people of their dependents. I'm coming to talk to you, and what you're doing is you, the mindset is you're building a decision making factory, not you are the decision maker

[00:24:46] Paddy Dhanda: before coming across your work. This perception that. The more that a leader speaks, the better the leader they are.

And something that I've I that really stood out in your book was where you talked about the share of voice and the team language coefficient. And you got a bit mathematical on me on that one. Yeah. And my strong point, so could you just break that sort of concept down a little bit for us, and then just explain what you meant by that.

[00:25:12] David Marquet: Well, you know, I'm a engineer, so I had to have some math in the book, but you don't need, you don't need any math. Everyone intuitively senses this. You go to a meeting and I just ask afterwards, take a card, write down the percentage of words that each person said. The sense is that the higher you are, the more words you're entitled to.

And we know this is scientifically true. We are looking, we looked at transcripts, and one of the stories that runs throughout the book is the transcript of this ship. So it's, they have black boxes like airplanes, but airplane, black box transcripts are not that long. This is 25 hours. The ship sank in a hurricane.

And everyone died, but we have 25 hours of their conversations as they were dealing with decisions about how to avoid the hurricane. And so we analyzed this language in a bunch of different ways, but one of 'em was just a very simply counting the words and every time the captain was on the bridge, so there was the captain and officer, and then a crew member.

So it was three person, team. Every single time the captain said the most number of words and more than half of the words.

Yeah. Then we say, well, the problem is people aren't speaking up. That's not the problem. The problem is you're just talking too much. And what you wanna do in a meeting is we call it leveling the share of voice. So if there's three people you don't want 50%, 40%, 10%, you want 40, 30. 30 or so. Something that's closer to flat.

And there's some work by. A guy named Mal professor Malone at m i t, where he studied this, and it turns out that the more even that share of voice is, the more, the better the team's decisions are because, and it makes sense because you have more information. We call it the wisdom of the crowd versus the wisdom of the loud, which is are just the people.

And by the way, if you're the leader, you already know what you think, so you don't need to say it. Saying what you think results in reducing variability, because as soon as you and some people like deliberately do this, I need to get everyone on board. I wanna build consensus. What is that? It sounds like reduced variability.

That's appropriate for doing work that's appropriate for assembly line work. For thinking you want the opposite. We approach innovation like it's an assembly line and we're confused why it doesn't work. It's 'cause we're applying the wrong playbook. We're applying a reduced variability language and a reduced variability playbook.

I. It doesn't work.

[00:27:52] Paddy Dhanda: And so just going over to the six plays that you have in the book, what was the idea behind having a playbook in the first place?

[00:27:59] David Marquet: I identified I call 'em the six plays from the industrial age. And they all have to do with they stem from two original sins. One is the sense of a bang clock and the second original sin is the fact that we've divided the organization into leaders, followers, management.

Workers, salary people, hourly people, white collar, blue collar. I mean, this dichotomous language is the problem. And so what that means is, oh, we're the thinking group and you're the doing group. We do blue work, you do red work. So for example, the last play in the industrial age is, I call it conform. Play your hierarchical role.

Don't go walking into the boss's office unannounced, conform to your role. You're a doer. Do what you're told. Be a team player. And what I think we need to replace that with is connect. Well, it's interesting. We know that emotions are actually needed in order for you to make decisions. You need your emotions.

And there I talk about a case where. A man had a brain tumor where the surgery was successful. He was just as intelligent as he was before, but he, it affected part of the emotional processing part of parts of his brain, and he just couldn't make decisions. I. And so there, we know healthy emotions are necessary for healthy decisions.

And in the industrial age, I didn't care about your emotional health because I didn't ask you to make decisions. I didn't, I wasn't going to you and saying, well, how should we change the assembly line? Should we even be making cars? Maybe we should be making electric cars. I didn't ask you that. So, Be connecting to you as a human being actually got in the way of me beating you on the head and just coursing you into doing what I needed you to do.

[00:29:50] Paddy Dhanda: Fantastic. And out of the six plays, is there one that really stands out for you, aside from the connect play in terms of helping some of the leaders out there in this current situation? I can imagine. There's panic all around the world right now. We have leaders of big corporates, even team managers trying to deal with lots of uncertainty.

Team members feeling really vulnerable. What would you recommend in, in terms of the plays?

[00:30:17] David Marquet: Most important one, I would say would be the sense of improvement, right? Be because we're in such an unknown time, the leadership of the company can get together and say, okay, here's what we're gonna do. Keyword do, and then they're gonna tell everyone, and it's going to be, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't.

Some people will like it, some people won't. And it's a sense of proving, okay, we're gonna do something. Therefore, that's gonna invoke a mindset of I gotta prove it and do it, versus a sense of improving and learning. So rather than saying that, I say, Hey, we don't know. We don't know any more than you guys like, first of all, admit, say, I don't know, right?

Yep. Right. We don't know how long it's gonna last. We may be locked down six months from now. I hope not. Maybe I don't think so, but we don't know. We may be lifted in a week. I don't know. Coronavirus may research next winter, twice as bad as this. Today, we don't know. This may be something we do like e every year for the next five years.

We may have a period of one month every winter where everyone just, we shift it and we just work from home. We don't know. So here's, let's do this. Let's run into some the, we're gonna couch these things as experiments. Okay, let's try this. Let's see what we can do. Now, a lot of our clients. Some people can work from home, but some people can't.

Oil refineries, nuclear power plants food processing plant. So, but again, it's an experiment. So say, Hey, look, we don't know. Let's try this for the next four weeks. And then reflect. I want everyone's opinion how to go, how can we make it better? And then go, then, okay, let's tweak it, make it a little bit better, and then try it again.

So I think it's this approach of experimentation. It also makes it more like, Hey, it's a little more fun. Hey, here's what we're gonna learn. What can we learn from this? And then maybe there's some stuff we can learn from this about resilience and being independent and working from home that we can then apply.

I mean, there's some good stuff. The canals in Venice, Italy are clean. The skies in Shanghai are clear. There are some good stuff now. It's bad for the airlines and so can we keep some of these good things. And learn from them.

Learning has become a superpower in the modern world we live in. But learning at a deep level is something that is extremely challenging. In this episode we explore the topic of Intentional Mastery and why it matters.

Key topics covered in this episode:

👉🏽 What does Mastery mean, and why does it matter?

👉🏽 Can you fast-track Mastery? Are there shortcuts?

👉🏽 What are the common strategic mistakes?

William Buist

William Buist enables business owners to become the masters of their markets, operate more effectively, and stand out from all their competitors. With a strategic focus on building better business daily, his clients are at the heart of their work, making better decisions and empowered to excel.

William thrives at supporting his clients as they develop a better, resonant understanding of their strategic intentions to create a company that is more aligned with their purpose. He knows that by asking the right questions, effective decisions will result. Those judgments will be based on a deeper, more complete understanding because of an unbiased analysis of the appropriate elements.

William prides himself on his well-honed skill, posing questions that unlock blocks and barriers. William is a speaker, business mentor and author of “Intentional Mastery: Step Beyond Your Expertise and Build Better Business”. He is a keen photographer, walker and skier.

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Transcription:

[00:01:03] Paddy Dhanda: Dear friend, thank you for joining me for another episode of the Superpower School podcast. I'm your host, Paddy Dander, and on today's show I have a fellow Britt. He is an author, a business mentor, a speaker and he's called William Bust. Did I get that right? Will

[00:01:22] William Buist: you, did you did Patty?

Yes. Thank you very much and delight to be with you today for our conversation. Looking forward to it. Oh,

[00:01:29] Paddy Dhanda: so am I, and I don't wanna spoil the topic that we're gonna go into just yet, but I'm really intrigued because you and I, we've literally only spoke for about five minutes beforehand and just some of your background really got me curious.

And I think it's gonna be, Extremely useful for the audience of this podcast. So I'm really excited about that. But before we go into that, first of all, where are you sitting right now?

[00:01:57] William Buist: I'm in an office that we are very fortunate to have. It's a small office in the garden of the house I live in, and that house is about 15 miles south of Oxford in between Oxford and Newbury, right in the middle of England.

About as far from the sea as you can get.

[00:02:11] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, wow. I wouldn't be complaining if I was sat in that environment because it looks amazing. And William, in terms of your background, could you share like your area of expertise in terms of how you've been helping people and also how you'd ended up in this

[00:02:27] William Buist: area?

Yeah, of course. I started my career. I left university and I guess like quite a few people, I left university without really having a clear idea of where I was gonna take a career. Some people are very fortunate. They fall into the thing they love and they know from day one what they're going to do.

And I wasn't one of those and I ended up in the insurance industry. So I had a career in insurance. I was an underwriter. The underwriters are the people who work out how much to charge for something that hasn't happened yet. It's an easy way to describe it. And I was in the industry for about 21 years, and towards the end of it I was working a lot with project teams and leading project teams.

So there's a lot of kind of, The leadership stuff that we maybe will come on and talk about happening there. And I got really interested in looking at how people in work develop the knowledge of what they do and the skills that they have and how they use experience. And in 2004, I set up my own business and started working with small business owners to bring some of that thinking, to help them develop strategies and to think about how they wanted to.

As I call it, build better business. And I carried on being curious about that way people learn. And that led me to think about what I call these days, intentional mastery. And I'll split that into the two halves. So first of all, the mastery bit, that's about how people go from knowing very little about a topic.

If you are wanting to learn to code a computer you've got to understand the computer languages and you may know none of them. First of all you look for knowledge and you learn about the different types of languages and what they do. You then go on, as a novice, you start writing code, but that's likely not to work very well to begin with 'cause you haven't got that much experience or skill at it.

So those novices, as I call them, Searching for skill development and when they've got that, they become practitioners, people who can do what they do really well. But again, to use computer language as an example, there may be code really well in one language, but they can't yet transfer that insight, that knowledge into a different language.

In my day I learned a little bit of coding and it thing called cobalt, which you may remember long time. Nowadays there's a whole host of different languages and I don't know pretty much any of them, which is fabulous. But then from that practitioner level, people go on, they build experience and they become an expert, and they become that person that we know they really know their topic well.

I think there's another stage and that. Last stage is the step towards mastery, and that's that when somebody arrives in the room who really knows a subject inside out, a great depth, can answer any question, is never phased. They've got experience across a wide range of stuff, and importantly, I think they have insights into.

Not just that topic, but how to share it with others, how to see the benefits of it. They can talk with equal comfort to somebody who knows absolutely nothing about their topic, as well as somebody who is already an expert and they just stand out in their market. So that's the mastery bit. I think the other thing and the reason why the book that I wrote is called Intentional Mastery is because I don't think you can make that shift from practitioner to expert to master unless you are completely deliberate about it.

You make a conscious effort. To become the best person in the world, perhaps at the thing that you do. And I've seen business people good practitioners run great businesses successfully, but they're just a kind of run of the mill business. They're another insert name of business here, another accountant, another computer agency, another marketing agency.

But there's a few who say, no, that's not enough. I need to stand out. I need to be really at the top of their game. And they take those intentional steps. And then you get the businesses that really thrive in their niche, and they might be quite small. They're just serving a very particular niche area.

Or they might be successful in the sense of growing and employing lots of people and becoming internationally known. So that building better business, part of what I talk about is really the better bit is down to the business owner and what is better for them. There is no universal definition of what's better for everybody.

I don't think.

[00:07:14] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, that gives me some really good insight then into your kind of specialist subject. And in your experience, I'm sure you've worked with many different people, are we in a state where people are successfully getting to this level of a mastery? Or are you finding that actually it's only a handful of people that are achieving

[00:07:37] William Buist: this?

I think there's some places where you can see mastery very clearly and very obviously. The simplest example of that is in sport because we see premiership, footballers on the television. If we watch Match of the Day or we're just in the middle of summer in 2023 and England just drew the cricket and there was some fabulous cricket played as well in the Ashe series.

 These are people who really are at the top of their game and what I would call the masters of what they do. They're very easy to spot. I think they're much harder to spot in business particularly if you've got some masters who are within a big business. That itself perhaps isn't yet masterful, but the people within it are.

I think there are diminishing numbers. There's an army of practitioners. Most of the people who are working are practitioners at what they do. A few will go on and become experts, but a reasonably high proportion it's that intentionality piece I think that gets in the way of people thinking, I can really thrive here, really put down a marker as being the only person who does what I do this way.

And I think that's an important part of it. It becomes part of who we are as individuals as much as it is what we do as an individual. You see it too. The other areas where I think it's a little bit more obvious in healthcare, if you have the need for some serious healthcare, and I hope none of your listeners do, but if they do, they go to a specialist, you seek out the expert or the master of that area.

And you see it in the law too. You hear these big cases with difficult challenges being talked at through the courts and there'll be. A few people whose names keep coming back as the lawyers that are representing those people. And that's because they are the masters of that bit of the law.

But what you won't find is somebody who's good at copyright law taking on a V A T tribunal case, because it's not their, it's not their area of mastery. Their area was contract law. So that's where they stick.

[00:09:46] Paddy Dhanda: Yeah, the phrase that comes to mind is the one about jack of all trades, master of none is sometimes used.

And when I coach and train people in my day-to-day job, which is helping tech teams build products and services, something that we often talk about is T-shaped skills. And talking about this kind of having a breadth of skills. But long, that's the top of the T. And then having a deep understanding of maybe one or two things, in your opinion, to really attain this level of mastery.

Should we be focused on just one thing or could someone who's passionate about multiple things be your mastery in all of

[00:10:27] William Buist: those? It is a really interesting question and I like the T-shaped model. It's that kind of mile wide and an inch deep, or an inch wide and a mile deep and which are you going to choose?

There is definitely a place for generalists, people who know a wide range of things and can Do them practically. It's why I call them practitioners, you know, can do all of those things practically reasonably well. And that's great. I think you can certainly be master of more than one thing.

As a hobby, I've been a photographer for most of my life. I find bits of what I do as a photographer. I'm no master at it. Getting reasonably competent with a camera and when producing some lovely images from time to time. But what I find is that I'm getting insight from framing a picture that I'm then thinking about working with one of my clients.

I'll think about what picture is their business painting? What are people seeing? From that business, how are they framing it? How much exposure have they got? Those are all photographic words that translate well into the business arena as well. So I think you can be master of a few things, but you can't be master of everything.

It is that jack of all trades, master of none. And it's converse, it is master of a few related things, maybe drawing insights from each of those to support the others. But it's very unlikely you could be a master builder and a master at the violin and a master at football. We don't see sports people being masters of multiple sports. They focus on one. So I think it's a mile deep, but just an inch wide. Got it. I love that. I've never

[00:12:17] Paddy Dhanda: heard it that being put in that way before. So that's that's something I'm gonna take away. So thank you for that. And how much of it is natural talent?

We always hear about people that we know who are really good at something and we go, yeah, but they're just a natural at that. That's something they're just born with. So in some ways we convinced ourselves that we could never be that good because we weren't born with that talent.

How much of it is hard work. And actual lifelong learning.

[00:12:50] William Buist: It's a fascinating area, isn't it? I'm five foot seven and a bit, I'm quite short really. Probably would never have succeeded as a basketball player however much I wanted to.

I'm just not tall enough. And so there's a constraint there, a physical constraint that I can't get past. I've run marathons, but never at the sort of speed that the marathon runners that win world records do. Could I have run them faster if I'd put more time and effort in?

Yeah, of course I could, without question. As a young man, could I have got to those world record times? I suppose I'll never know really, but I somehow doubt it. I just think I'm not built that way. So I think there are some things where we look at them and go, yeah, I can never really be the very best at that.

But then of course there's the other side of that coin and that is, I think when we're born, we don't innately have a set of talents so that almost everything work related, at least business related. We learn as we go, as we grow up and as we choose, as we make choices at school about which subjects to study and at university, if we go to university, and so on.

So we've got all that choice making along the way that leads us down. To a path that says, actually I want, I'm going to really focus on being an underwriter as it was in my case. And then what happens is you learn that you get the knowledge, you learn and get the skills and get those honed through experience and trial and error and making mistakes and that will certainly get, anybody, I think, can get to a practitioner of pretty much anything, that practitioner level.

Get your expert by putting more time and effort in and narrowing down the width of the field you're studying to, so that you can go deeper with what's left. Can you get to master? If there are no constraints, no physical constraints certainly when we think about knowledge type work and the sort of thing that I'm doing, mentoring people, the sort of work that you are doing, I don't think there's anything.

It's there to constrain us apart from our own belief and our own ability. And that again, comes back to intentionality, doesn't it? If we don't believe we can get that step up and get better, we probably won't try because we don't believe we can get there. And because we don't try, guess what we don't. I think it is very much a mindset thing and if you want to be a better business person tomorrow will then set out to do that. Start asking the questions that enable you to improve. What is it you need to know? What else do you need to develop a skill with? What more experience do you need? How are you gonna get that? Who do you know who can work with you and lift your game and mentor you to be that next best person?

[00:15:50] Paddy Dhanda: I have a lot of respect, William, for authors of books because I appreciate how much time and effort it takes to write a book. There's thousands of words you've gotta get together and often it can be a lifelong piece of work where people bring together all their experiences. When you are writing the book, I'm sure you did lots of research.

Is there any scientific research or interesting studies that you came across that you could share to back up some of the concepts in the book?

[00:16:22] William Buist: You remember I was saying I was really curious about the way that people learn, particularly in business and the way they develop that knowledge and skill and experience and how they got insights.

And I spent quite a bit of time looking at the psychology of that. So I was thinking about really about how adults learn and. One of the things I studied there was a psychological study around four different ways that adults learn. And there's the first of which is around what they call pedagogy learning.

That's like learning like a child which was all is the stage where you go from explorer to novice when you are needing to get. That extra information, the extra facts. The second stage they talked about was I can't remember the name, they gave it off the top of my head, but this is about the skills development and it's all about practical, using your hands, seeing things work and that kinesthetic learning Yeah.

Kind of kinesthetic learning. Yeah, exactly. And then, We go on to the third type of learning that adults do, which is all about experiential learning and learning from, again, from doing and seeing what works, what doesn't, what goes wrong. And that experiential learning takes you, I think, from practitioner to expert.

The interesting thing with the psychology study was that they looked at those three ways of learning and were saying, these are all filling in gaps. They're filling in something that's missing. So something that that you haven't got, but you need. And the last stage was not about filling in a gap.

It was about drawing insight from other aspects of life. Things that you come across, seeing connections that other people don't make. And that for me is the bit that sits between expert and master. So you can keep building the knowledge, keep honing the skill, keep getting more experience. That will get you to expert, but it won't get you to master.

It's that last bit about seeing the insights that take you the last bit of that. And it was Ken Ack and. William Bergquist, I think that were the psychologists that did that study. And it felt really like a really good fit with the model that I'm that I've developed. And so I think there's a lot of overlap there between the two bits.

[00:18:53] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, fantastic. And so that gets me curious about the model that you've developed. Could you share some insights on that? Is that a framework that people can pick up and start to put into action themselves? I.

[00:19:07] William Buist: I think it is. It really boils down that, first of all, what are you really struggling?

That you don't know enough? You haven't got enough facts to really understand the topic. That's when you are an explorer, right at the beginning of the model. So it's five stages. Explore to novice to practitioner that is about that building skills and learning how to do it. So the first stage, if you like, is learning what it is.

Second stage is learning how to do it. That takes you to practitioner, practitioner to expert, is about experience and about learning all of the different contexts in which what you are doing can work and building the knowledge of around. Again, this is about depth. It's about narrowing down the width of what you are working with, but going much deeper with what's left.

And then the last bit is say from expert to master about thinking about where else you can draw inspiration from. Where are the insights? What have you not thought about in connection with your work? And that's the bit that really stands you out, I think, because it allows you to tell stories, allow you to share that. Deep knowledge with an audience that hasn't yet been through that journey and have it land well. I remember reading and had the good fortune to meet and chat to Clive Woodward as part of what was doing with the book. Clive who I was the England coach that won the Rugby World Cup.

It's getting to be quite a long time ago now, but nevertheless, still remember it. He talks in his book winning and talks that I've seen him give about. The idea of two types of people, he called them rocks and sponges so that the rocks were people who thought they knew best already and wouldn't take new information, couldn't absorb new ways of doing things, and he fairly quickly.

Dropped them from the squad and the sponges who were hungry for new knowledge and new skill and new insight who would absorb it and try things out and wanted data. And he was one of the first people to bring really detailed data about the positions on the field, how much, how many yards they'd run in the match, how hard they were working as a team and using technology to help.

Give them that information, be able to analyze it after the game and look at why did we lose a point here? Why did we lose a try? What happened? Where were we mispositioned And so helping to improve it. And that's that intentional piece at work again. And being really determined to find out how you get better and what data you need to do that, what knowledge, what skill, what experience, and what insight.

[00:21:49] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, thank you. I love that analogy as well. The rock or sponge analogy, which I can think of a few people that I know that would fit into each of those categories. So it's quite interesting. Your mind starts visualizing this stuff. It's, and I know there's some people who really try hard at something.

I've done it myself. I've thought, right. I'm gonna learn this thing. I'm gonna try and get really good at it. I. Read on the topic. I try to practice the skill, but then I find that I'm not making as much progress that I hoped. So are there any pitfalls that we should look out for when we're on this journey towards mastery that you would suggest we avoid?

[00:22:35] William Buist: Yeah, and I think that's really common that you start something, you do the reading about it. I'm. Learning. I'm going to Italy in the spring. Well, I thought, I don't really speak much Italian, so I better start learning at least some basic Italian, and I've hit that war way.

I don't feel like I'm getting any better. And it's difficult, isn't it, this, you've got to motivate yourself to drive through that. And I think the reason that happens is because you realize. How big that topic is. You know, speaking a language. I've spoken English all my life and I know, effectively I know maybe, certainly a large number of the words that are in the Oxford English dictionary.

There's plenty I don't know as well, but I know enough to get by. I don't know anything like enough of the words in Italian to get by. So I've got to do a lot of knowledge gathering. And that feels like a bit like wadding through treacle, but they'll, I know there will come a point when suddenly things start to become much easier because they become familiar.

 And at that point I can move on again. So the first bit of advice really is if you are waiting through Treacle, I think it was Churchill who said, if you're going through, hell keep going. 'cause you want to get out the other side of it. So you know, if you are waiting through cheek, you'll keep waiting because if you just stop, you're just left in the treacle, every time you go back to it, you're still in the treacle and it doesn't feel like things have got better.

So keep going. Keep at it, but also recognize where you are on the journey. I'm in this knowledge gathering phase, so what I shouldn't try to do right now is to jump ahead and try to be an expert. Italian because that's too big a jump. I need to keep gathering the knowledge so that I can then work on the skill of speaking effectively and conversationally.

And I haven't got enough of the knowledge yet to do that, so I've got to just keep learning the vocab. Musicians talk about this a lot. They talk about, that great practice isn't about playing pieces, it's about doing scales. I. That's about building the skill of playing the instrument in a way that you really know and understand it.

Then you can work on the pieces and get the piece to sound really good because you are, where Csharp is or dfl or whatever on the Keys, if it's a piano. And so again, that wadding through that early stuff takes a bit of time, but it's worth it.

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[00:26:37] Paddy Dhanda: That's great advice. And actually the skill I was thinking of was also languages for myself because I enrolled onto a Spanish speaking class a few years ago with a good friend of mine, and my assumption was, if I do this with a friend, then we can push each other along.

The problem was, I think both was. Got to hell and then we both run back the other way. Where if one of us had stayed, I think they might have pulled the other one along, but

[00:27:04] William Buist: We both decided we couldn't really continue it. I mean, it's a really important point too for people and maybe in people who are listening to us today who are leading teams of people that.

If you're looking at your team and thinking, how do I best support them? If you were a Spanish teacher for you and your friend, recognizing that you were in that stage where you needed more vocabulary and you needed more understanding about how the verbs work, perhaps when you are thinking about past and future tenses and all those things where we get muzzled up easily.

If they recognize that's where you are, then they can focus on making that an enjoyable part of the journey for you. But if they think you've got further and start expecting you to hold a conversation with them in Spanish and you can't do it, that just frustrates you. Now we take that into business and we think about a business challenge.

If you are leading a team and you've got somebody who just doesn't have the knowledge to do the job, your job as leader is to share the knowledge, not. Failing to deliver the of the model helps. Leaders to do that too. To just think about all your people and where are they on that journey towards mastery in the skills that you need them to have so that the team works effectively.

I've seen when leaders do that and start really focusing how they support their team members, the whole team suddenly comes to life and gets excited again. It's fab.

[00:28:36] Paddy Dhanda: Talking about fab. So in your experience as you've worked with teams and individuals, is there one that really sticks out for you where you were able to help them attain that level of mastery?

And could you share some of the insights

[00:28:52] William Buist: there? Yeah, of course. There's one that really does stand out. It was a great deal of fun. We had a lot of fun working together as well and I think that's important. The third section of my book is called Mastering Joy.

It's all about making sure that what we're doing is fun along the way. I was working with a family owned training business and the family members Who were running the business were for various reasons needing to step away, not really related to the business at all, but they'd wanted to pass the business on and yet still hang onto some of the values that they'd created.

 Obviously their customers and their clients and their modus operandi, they wanted to make sure we're well and truly protected. 'cause it meant a lot to the family. They just couldn't be in the business long term. They'd appointed a new management team to take over the role of running the business day-to-day.

Four people, some of whom had been in the business for a while. Some who were new to the business with very different skills. There was some finance skills, sales, operational skills, and so on amongst the four people. And I got involved because they were. Really a little bit unsure about how to take it forward and achieve all of these various different aspects that they all wanted to hold onto.

They're keeping the values of the business. And I'll maybe explain why that was important in a minute. And so we worked together over the course of five or six months. We met once a month as a group of four, and I worked with each of them individually as well. And. I think the most important aspect of that was helping them to recognize each other's mastery, each other's talents, because whilst there was the finance guy, finance director of the business, everybody makes an assumption.

They know what that means in terms of that person's skill and. Actually he was a great negotiator. He was quite good at sales as well. And that when needs be, he was a really good project manager too. Had a lot of project skills and those weren't necessarily recognized within the job title, within the name.

And by working with them closely they could see all the talents that they had and then draw on them and act synergistically together. So when there was a project, It didn't automatically mean that the project management aspects went to the operational team in the business because sometimes the finance guy was the best guy to do that.

And the lady who was looking after operations, really extraordinary talent around making sure that all the moving pieces in developing a training course, in delivering it in multiple countries with multiple trainers to a client, Amazing vision to see all those moving pieces and keep 'em in the right place.

 When there were moving pieces elsewhere in the business, they weren't turning to and saying, help us out to make sure we keep our eye on all of these too, until we'd done the work. And then they really stopped thinking about what their job title was and what that meant they should do.

And started thinking about what's the best way to get this particular task delivered? And they really were acting as if they were one person rather than as if there were four people trying to negotiate the best way through it. 'cause they instinctively knew where the right place for this particular piece was.

And that was brilliant to watch. The whole transition, the business was ultimately sold to a another company who have absolutely maintained the values. And the important bit in that was they do a lot of work with a trust fund that they build to help. Predominantly young people in other parts of the world where training and education is difficult.

So they build, for example, they've built floating classrooms in Bangladesh and they've worked in some of the more rundown areas of places like Johannesburg and South Africa where there are, there's a kind of gang culture and kids find it difficult to get the education they need. They're busy doing that outta the back of the business and the work they do training in corporate world and changing lives forever in those places, which, is really important stuff enabled by having the training company that develops the profits to be able to support doing that work makes a difference.

To the rest of the world forever. Fabulous stuff. Oh wow.

[00:33:25] Paddy Dhanda: That's an amazing story. Probably I can understand now why it sticks out so much, just 'cause of the amazing work that they're doing on top of the amazing sort of charity work that they're doing there.

That's phenomenal. And I guess, William, from your side if a client were to come to you and. Say, Hey, we're struggling. We'd like to, build our learning, our skillset in this particular capability. How would you engage with them? Is there a way in which you would kick off that engagement?

And is there anything there that you can share with us?

[00:33:58] William Buist: Yeah, of course. And it's really important actually I think, to make sure early on in any relationship around supporting building better business, that we first of all get a really clear view of where that business is today and what it aspires to.

 We make sure that's all kept in alignment. I have an audit that's on, it's available on the website. It's free to complete. So anybody who's listening who wants to do that would be very welcome. That looks at five strategic areas of running a business. Through the lens of mastery and so I can help to guide people on where they are on that journey right now and where they should focus to get the best result in the short and the long term.

So it's a 20 questions. It's a fairly quick to complete but it doesn't produce automated AI generated report at the end of it. I spend a bit of time looking at the answers and some of the other metadata that I get from the back end of the website, like how long you took to fill in some of the questions, which is quite insightful at times.

And I'll also look at things like LinkedIn profiles, so I get a bit of a flavor for the business as well. There's a report that will go back to people who fill it in and if that's of interest, if they think it's hitting the right notes for where they see the issues too, then we should have a conversation.

And I'd normally start an engagement with that audit followed by. Probably a day spent just talking through those aspirations for the business and where they are now and listening to the answers and playing back some of what I hear and bringing my experience to bear on what that means. I'm hearing, let's say for example, sales are a problem and I'm hearing that you are working 15 hours a day to try to solve that problem and keep everything running.

And I look at those two things and start thinking, well, where is the issue? What is it that there's something wrong in the business that's in that situation? So what is it that's wrong? How can we break that cycle of running to stand still and not getting the result you want?

'cause somewhere there'll be a tweak and it probably is only a tweak that can make a difference. So we look for that allows 'em to get a bit more time in the business to be able to do some other things, and then we can use that time to keep building and making the business better as time goes by.

[00:36:26] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, thank you for that. And we'll share that link in the show notes as well to do that audit. So that's fantastic. Now. I can't finish this episode without mentioning those two dreaded letters. Ai and getting your opinion on a couple of things there, William. Some would argue that in the world we live in right now, we've got such powerful tools that our disposal that.

Yeah, we probably don't need to waste our energy on learning loads of stuff anymore because we can take this shortcut by asking AI to give us the answers for things. What's your opinion on that? Should people be investing as much time as they did in the past in learning and attaining mastery or can they take some shortcuts along the way by using these powerful

[00:37:15] William Buist: tools?

 It answer your question, I don't think that people should spend as much time as they used to learning. I think they should spend more. Actually things like AI allows us to spend more time focusing on learning in those areas where it gives us. A big and a better benefit and a bigger step towards mastery and less time learning the things that can be done by machine.

You know? So it is a very interesting area, AI still despite it, having appeared as a big, bright star in the last certainly no more than a year ago. A year ago, we weren't really talking about it at all, and now it's everywhere. That's partly I think because the technology has reached a point where it can be opened to the world, to everybody.

Computers have got to the level of power to deliver it. The technology, the software behind it has got to the level where it can do it fast enough and so on. So there's a kind of crossed the line where we could, everybody could have access to it. Like a lot of new tools everybody's treating it a little bit like they've got their first hammer and they're hitting everything with it, so they're hitting nails, which is great, but they're also hitting screws and not necessarily using the tool in the best way possible.

 I use ai, I think it's a useful tool in its rightful place, which is for me is mostly around sometimes just helping me to hone an email, maybe to rewrite something I've written and make the tone a bit friendlier or even to make the tone a bit more assertive and a bit more direct.

'cause I have been known to use. 15 words where five will do, so AI's really good at that stuff, I think and can help me really get punchier with what I want to say. What I don't use it for though is I'm not using it to write a complete blog and then posting that unaltered or I could go onto air and say, write a blog about mastery.

It would come back with 600 words. Wouldn't be. Vaguely related to what I'm thinking, I suspect. So you've gotta be careful about how you use them. Use tools in the right way. And as I say, I think that then frees us. 'cause if we use a tool that shortens the time that we were spending before to maybe draft that email or write bits of a proposal, we can do that a little bit quicker.

 That frees up some time. That's fabulous. What are we gonna use the time for? Why not use it to get better? What you do to get more relevant to your target market, to stand out from that target market by not being another company that does all their landing pages written by ai, but put some heart and soul into what you do that says, this is William, be speaking, not chat g p t or what, whichever AI you're using and free up the time to be.

The masterful person that you could be by using the tools really effectively. Oh,

[00:40:22] Paddy Dhanda: great answer. I love that. Spend more time on learning than you did in the past, because we should have that time if we're doing things so much more productively with ai. Where we've saved, let's invest that saving into ourselves.

So that, that's a great way of looking at things. We are running. Towards the end of this episode. But before we leave, William, I'd love to hear any recommendations you have for people who are thinking of continuing their journey towards mastery. Any resources that you would recommend, and could you tell us a little bit more about your book and how people can get hold of that as well?

[00:41:00] William Buist: Yeah, of course. I think there's a couple of things that I think really have made a massive difference for me on my journey. And the first of those was really understanding, spending some time to understand What listening really means. We often talk about, oh, well, people need to listen.

And what does that really mean? And I came across the work of a lady called Nancy Klein. And she's written a series of books I think she's on, she's written three that are around the topic of listening. In fact, the first one was called Time to Think.

The second book was called More Time To Think. And the third book is called The Promise That Changes Everything, which is a great title for book, isn't it? The promise that changes everything fundamentally is, I promise I won't interrupt, and giving people the space to really. Talk and allow their thinking to be develop and to being a really good listener.

And I think the thinking behind all of that has really helped me to become a better leader, a better business mentor. All of those things that, that go with listening. So that's a book I'd recommend, not my book. Somebody else's book that I'd recommend. I would of course also obviously recommend my book.

It's called Intentional Mastery and Step Beyond Your Expertise to Build Better Business. It's in three sections, which I've alluded to. The first is about mastery itself. A bit of an explanation of what that is. You've got a flavor for that from this podcast. The middle section is about the really powerful business strategies that those who are Masters of their game are employing every day to make their business work really well.

And the last part is about mastering joy, which I also mentioned earlier is about making sure that you are focused for yourself on being. You are most joyful. You are most talented. You are most effective at what you do and being the best person you can be, as well as being the best business person you can be.

So that's my book that's available, as they say at all. Good bookshops, although many of them might have to order it in, it comes in the next day. It's on Amazon as well. If you'd like a signed copy, then order it from my website and I will pop a signed copy in the post to you. And that's of [email protected], so

[00:43:22] Paddy Dhanda: fantastic.

And again, we'll share that link as well for people in the show notes. William, my final question. So if you were looking back at a younger self, at a younger William who had.

[00:43:39] William Buist: I really looked

[00:43:40] Paddy Dhanda: forward and thought, what am I gonna do with my life? What one big piece of advice would you give yourself having gone through all the experiences you have now?

[00:43:52] William Buist: Yeah, so I think there's a couple of things. I tell one of these stories in the book actually, which is about my relationship with my parents, both of whom unfortunately no longer with us, but various things that I learned from them, and some of which I learned after they had gone which is curious gift that my parents left for me, that I discover things after they've gone that I really should have picked up on while they were still alive.

The biggest single thing I would've said is never ever be afraid to ask for help. It's not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength. I spent too many years battling through with things I was struggling with because I didn't want to stick my hand up and say, I need a bit of help here.

And I think that's the thing that. Actually, my parents were busy trying to tell me and I didn't understand until they'd gone. So yeah, stick your hand up and ask for help if you need it, because your friends, your colleagues, the people around you, they don't want you to fail. They don't want you to do badly.

They want to help you. And actually denying them the opportunity when you need the help is a bit daft, isn't it? So yeah, stick your hand up, ask for help. Don't don't be worried about what other people think or think. You might not be doing a great job. They'll think you're doing the brave thing and the right thing and asking for the help in the first place.

Oh,

[00:45:12] Paddy Dhanda: thank you for sharing that. That's great advice. I often talk about wisdom of crowds and how to collectively we have such diverse skills, backgrounds, knowledge, and Yeah, the more people we can tap into in terms of their knowledge the more interesting things are, rather than us just trying to battle through on our own.

Really thank you for for sharing that. William, it's been a pleasure. I feel like I've become a lot wiser than I had before this conversation. So, that's credit to you and I appreciate you sharing those insights. Yeah, so thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:45:47] William Buist: A pleasure and I really enjoyed the conversation too, Paddy, so thank you very much.

[00:45:52] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, you're welcome.

Conflict is a natural part of life. It's inevitable that we will encounter disagreements and clashes with others from time to time. But what if there was a way to transform conflict into something positive? Something that could actually strengthen our connections with others? It may sound like a superpower, but it's actually something that many people overlook. We often believe that conflict can only have one winner, leading us to miss out on the potential for growth and understanding. In this episode, we will explore how we can navigate conflict and turn it into an opportunity for connection.

Kristine Scott

In 2008, Kristine took an AmeriCorps job running a meal program for unhoused young people. Almost 50 youth arrived on Kristine’s first night. What happened next was terrifying. Her purse went missing, there were fights and screaming guests. Kristine vowed to never return. But then something unexpected happened. A 17-year-old guest instantly turned the chaos into quiet, polite behavior with a single phrase. This began Kristine’s journey moving from conflict avoidant to conflict embracing. She has since trained thousands of people how to respond not react, lean in and not lash out.

To learn more about Kristine’s mission to create “conflict resolutionaries” wherever she goes, see https://www.seattleconflictresolution.com

Kristine’s book recommendation (Live Kind, Be Happy)

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Transcription:

[00:01:01] Paddy Dhanda: Dear friend, thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of the Superpower School podcast. I'm your host, Paddy Dhanda, and on today's episode we have a topic that impacts every single one of us in some way or other. And so I have a chief trainer with Seattle Conflict Resolution.

Christine Scott has joined me today who's an expert in conflict resolution. Hey, Christine. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Paddy. Christine, you are from the city where Starbucks started. Would you like to tell us a bit more about this wonderful city of yours in case anyone hasn't been there?

[00:01:41] Kristine Scott: We like to tell everybody that super rainy and that you don't wanna come here.

That way all of the folks that are moving here, we can offset the bad traffic a little bit. But it's beautiful. I've got mountains on one side, the Puget Sound and the ocean on the other orcas and bears and just beautiful, natural stuff. It's great for those of us who like to hike and go

[00:02:02] Paddy Dhanda: snowshoeing.

Oh, and are you a Starbucks drinker?

[00:02:06] Kristine Scott: I actually, I'm pretty scary on coffee, so I am not.

[00:02:10] Paddy Dhanda: Oh my God. Oh wow. So they haven't worked their magic with you, so that's disappointing. 'cause I was gonna ask you like, what is the quality of Starbucks there versus anywhere else?

It's a bit like Guinness, people say if you have a Guinness in Ireland, it tastes totally different to anywhere else in the world. Because that's where it comes from.

[00:02:28] Kristine Scott: Well, that, that's a challenge I might wanna take up. Yeah. The Guinness Challenge, not the coffee challenge.

Oh, okay.

[00:02:36] Paddy Dhanda: I'm not sure which one I'm more excited about, but yeah, I think both of those would be good for different times of the day maybe. Christine, which superpower would you like to bring to this particular episode?

[00:02:45] Kristine Scott: Well, I would love to talk about conflict resolution.

The superpower to turn conflict into connection is something that a lot of people miss out on because we have bought this narrative that conflict has only one winner. And so we miss a lot of opportunities to actually turn all of the big feelings and the raw emotion and the honesty that comes with that into connection with others.

So there's basically three superpowers that I have identified as a part of good conflict resolution. I would love to talk people through how that works.

[00:03:24] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, now you got me intrigued. I can't wait for this conversation. But before we dive in, Christine. I wanna know how you got into this, because a question I often ask my guests is, when you were growing up around that age of seven or eight, I'm sure this was not your dream job.

And no. What led you down this path? Because I think it's always really interesting to hear people's stories and their backgrounds. Many people end up in something because of circumstance or they've had to deal with certain adversity themselves, so I'd love to know your story.

[00:03:57] Kristine Scott: Yeah. I had a lot of adversity.

 I grew up in a violent home, and so I was one of those victims of that conflict as one winner. Perspective, right? There was always one winner and I was always the person who had the biggest violence, the biggest feelings in the room, shall we say. When I got into social services, I sucked at conflict.

 I would respond way too aggressively or way too passively as a part of my upbringing. That's all I knew, right? That was what my biology taught me to do. You either take control of everybody or you're a doormat, and our biology perpetuates that. I kept on screwing up and getting curious how are other people handling this?

Because at the time I was working with young people who lived on the streets. Conflict was a constant for them. Their lives were always under threat, and I started watching how they handled it, and they were doing much better at it than I was, and they had much bigger threats to their very existence than I did.

And so they became my greatest teachers. I have a funny story. One night I was pulled over for speeding and the cop was taking forever to come back and tell me if I got this ticket. And I thought it's been 20 minutes, clearly I've got the ticket, right? And they walk back to the car and they say, you must be the un luckiest person I've ever met.

And I'm like, yeah, because you're giving me a speeding ticket, right? And he says, no, because. You have witnessed a stabbing, a shooting, two arsons, an overdose, blah, blah, blah, and he just lists all the stuff that has happened during my social services career that I was the one that called 911 and I had no idea that they kept track of those records.

And I just said, oh no, that's from my job. Essentially because I've been exposed to so much conflict and I've had to make this journey from being really terrible at it to getting better at it and had so much practice, I finally realized, well, I need to teach other people this. 'cause it's been a big source of liberation for me to get out of that.

Oh, some only one winner idea, right?

[00:06:18] Paddy Dhanda: Oh wow. So during those days of when you were doing this for a living, like what different types of conflict that you have to deal with. It sounds like there's some pretty traumatic stuff in there, but could you give us a range of examples just so we know what we're talking about when it comes to conflict?

[00:06:36] Kristine Scott: Everything from physical violence to mild manipulation and intimidation. Because when you're on the streets, your credibility is basically determining if you're gonna live or die. If you have no street credibility, then the other people from the streets will mess with you, or they won't protect you from all of the folks that are out to go after this.

The young people who live outside. How you show up in the face of conflict is really important. And I watched them navigate these very important social relationships. It was the full range for sure.

[00:07:12] Paddy Dhanda: Yeah. I'm just thinking about myself, like when it comes to conflict, I'm not very confrontational.

I'm the type of person that would rather just walk away from the conversation if it starts to get too heated. And I'd rather just let the other person feel like they've won sometimes. 'cause I'm just like, Do I really want to prove my point? Sometimes you have a disagreement over something and I may even know like I'm a hundred percent right here, but do I really want to expend all this energy just to prove a point to this one individual? And so I tend to then find any opportunity to walk away from that. But are some people. Just naturally better at this than others, or do you find we're all pretty similar?

[00:08:00] Kristine Scott: I think it's a developed skill. It's kinda like public speaking. It feels really awkward at first because you have a lot of big feelings that come up and that's normal, that's natural, and you just feel like You're a conflict robot. Like, okay, I'm supposed to not say anything that's gonna provoke them, but I don't know, like what to do with my body and I clearly, I feel some tension and I've got all this cortisol and adrenaline telling my body that it needs to go into fight, flight, freeze.

Basically Most of my working with people is training them how to not be escalated themselves. How to get back into that parasympathetic nervous system and you're talking in your earlier podcast about that curiosity and that human connection and those soft skills. All of those are exactly what we need to be doing with conflict, right?

We need to come from that parasympathetic, what I call the green zone. Where we can be curious about this other person, all of their barbs and insults. We don't take them personally. We've got like the Wonder Woman bracelets, we're just gonna defend against those and not let it in because we know it's ultimately not about us.

We just have this other person who's on their own journey and for whatever reason they're having a rough time and that I'm not responsible for their rough time. When we have that flexibility to really take care of our own self, right? Then we can be curious about them, so that starts with self-compassion and it also starts with what I call clarity of purpose.

What is my role and what is my goal in this conversation? And once I have that role and that goal, Then I've got like Superman's, x-ray vision. 'cause I can just look into what's going on for this other person and know that I'm solid, I'm stable. Like even if they radically disagree with me, my role and my goal isn't to get them to agree with me.

'cause that's, I can't force that. Right.

[00:10:03] Paddy Dhanda: Yeah. And I was gonna say like with certain skills you. Know when you need to apply them upfront. Like it's almost pre-planned. So I'm thinking about public speaking. We have a scheduled presentation. And so we can almost get ourselves in the zone for that, and we have time to prepare.

But conflict resolution is very different to that because you just don't know what's gonna happen next and when you're gonna have to evoke this superpower. So I think for that reason it becomes even more difficult because. You just might not be in the right state of mind to have that conversation.

At that point.

[00:10:42] Kristine Scott: Yeah, and that's when I encourage people, please set the terms around your engagement so when something comes out of the blue at you, just to say, wow, Patty, that is a great question. I wanna give this my undivided attention. I can't do that right now. Can I circle back to you in 15 minutes?

So now I'm gonna go to the restroom, and for the next 15 minutes I'm gonna like, okay, what's coming up? What do I need? Right? Get back to that green zone. What's my role? What's my goal? And if this relationship's important to me, I'm gonna have that difficult conversation and I'm gonna focus on why I wanna maintain the relationship, even though Patty just said something that got all my dash lights blinking, right?

[00:11:29] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, that's a great tip actually, because the majority of the time, I don't even think to take that break. You are so engaged in that experience that you sometimes don't even think about or you don't think rationally. You don't think that, well, if I continue this conversation, it's gonna end badly because I can already see this other person's really worked up.

They're really emotional. Or actually this is. Starting to create this emotion inside of me. And often the best way is just for both of you to take a break and then come back. And then see if you're still feeling the same, because otherwise Yep. If we're hot headed, I can imagine it's gonna be trouble.

 Christian, you mentioned you have three superpowers when it comes to conflict resolution. So would you like to tell us a bit more about those?

[00:12:17] Kristine Scott: Sure. I mentioned the Wonder Woman bracelets, right? Being impervious to those insults or those sudden demands of our resources.

 For me, that's just really curiosity. Like, can I be curious about what's going on with this other person? If I can be curious. That means I've already done my own work around being able to see past their bad behavior, using that X-ray vision to focus in on what's my goal, what's my role, right?

So need those two superpowers to work together. Because when I have my x-ray vision going, I'm seeing the person and ignoring the patterns or ignoring the behaviors that I find so irks in. I get to be really curious, like something's got them worked up. It very likely has nothing to do with me.

But for whatever reason, they are really amped up. And if I'm honest about it, the last time I was amped up, I wasn't really nice. Think about ways you can empathize with this particularly bad behavior that they're doing, because we all do it to each other. And one of the things that used to happen when I was running a shelter, Is most of my staff were actually college student volunteers, so they're the same age as the people we're serving, and invariably in the first two months, they would get what I call hazed, right?

The shelter youth would just do something in their direction to see what they were made out of. And they would've come to me like, oh, so and so did such and such, they don't like me, da. I'd say, oh, here's another way to look at that. What if they don't know if they can trust you yet, and they just kinda wanna see they're just testing your metal.

They trust you enough to be curious about you, and now they're just seeing what you're made out of. And every time a relationship is ready to see what you're made out of, it's going to include these unrealistic demands, these bad behaviors, because that's like the relationship asking for like how much.

How much can we get past the super superficial office nicety? And if you're gonna lean into that relationship, and if you can think of times that other people have leaned in for you, then it makes it easier for you to get past the behavior again and look at the person.

[00:14:48] Paddy Dhanda: That could be really daunting for someone who's quite young, like you mentioned, you've got. Staff who are of a similar age to the the recipients of the service that you're offering there. And I can just imagine at that kind of young age that could be quite challenging for anyone, regardless of age.

What are some of the techniques and tips that you could give to someone who is maybe in that situation? I know before you and I started this conversation, you posed me a question and I've been pondering over that question as well. It'd be great for us to maybe put this into practice so people who are listening can see it in action.

[00:17:04] Kristine Scott: Yeah. I encourage people before you have the difficult conversation, before you schedule it or set it up, that you do your own work. You get really clear about what is it that I wanna have happen here? And I remind folks that they are all going to have the same. Kind of engineering that we've all been engineered over thousands of years of evolution.

That kindness is our operating system and we've lost track of that. 'cause the last 200 years it's been very much about scarcity and competition and extraction and all of that kind of stuff. Basically we have many more thousands of years of kindness. They've done a lot of research around how this works for humans.

 Once you understand that idea that we're all wired for kindness unless you're a sociopath. Like we all want it, we all want human connection. So if that's the given, what's in the way of me having connection with this other person? Oftentimes it's bad company culture hierarchy.

My own fears about if I'm , a good leader, or if I'm a good employee, all of this stuff. And once I get digging into that, I can start looking at, oh, okay, so actually my goal and my role here is. For me to do well in this job, I need to have a really good relationship with this coworker.

 We have a lot of overlap and that I can come from that place and so I have a worksheet that I walk people through the difficult conversation worksheet, right? Just go through that and once you've gotten that done, Then you can lean in and say, so Patty I've got this area that I really need your feedback on.

Can we schedule a time just to sit down without any distractions or interruptions? And I recommend you find a place that's neither person's desk, right? Find a place that's pretty neutral and that you've actually scheduled more time than you need because this is you demonstrating to them. My relationship with you is important.

And it might be something that you are giving feedback or receiving feedback around a topic that's a little conflicted. Like for example, say that every time you and I are in the same staff meeting Patty, that you've been cutting me off or taking credit for my ideas, right? So what I'm gonna do is actually a little tactical.

I'm gonna say, you know, Patty, I've noticed that. When I start to talk in staff meetings that my ideas never quite come out all the way that I just somehow get sidelined or sidetracked somehow. And I noticed that you are much more successful in getting your ideas across to the finish line. I'm wondering if you could give me some coaching or some thoughts on that, or maybe you could just start witnessing what you're noticing in staff meetings and give me some feedback.

That's so much better than saying, well, you are such a jerk, and you've been stepping all over my ideas in the staff meetings, right? Just give them the benefit of the doubt. Assume that they don't know that this is what they're doing and say, I'm just noticing this thing and I'm wondering if I could count on you.

Generally they'll be, oh, yeah, I would love to help, and da dah. And then later they might realize oh I'm a part of the problem. And Christine pointed out a very real thing that's happening. And they don't even have to admit that to you. But because you've opened up the possibility so kindly without trying to destroy their ego, without trying to make them wrong, you've given them this great opening.

To be aware of the problem.

[00:20:47] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, that's a great example. And I think kindness is also a superpower that I found can work wonders that also killed them with kindness. Is one that pops to mind, but in this situation, I see how your flipping that on its head a little bit to say, well, I still want an outcome here that's gonna help me, but I want you to navigate through that at your own pace. And so you are really giving them the ownership of getting to that outcome in a way, which is quite a smart little tactic there, Christine. I like that one. I might have to use that one with my kids.

[00:21:28] Kristine Scott: Yes.

[00:21:29] Paddy Dhanda: Yeah. So like with my son, he's always on the iPad. He's always watching YouTube. And he just zones out. So I'm calling him like 20 times and he won't respond at all. And then eventually he gets into trouble and I'm like, how could I have dealt with that better? Because now he's angry 'cause he's defensive about it and yep. I probably not helped the situation so. Maybe I could reverse it on him in some way. For sure.

[00:21:55] Kristine Scott: Yeah. My son has a similar problem and I just told him, you know what? If I can't get ahold of you on your cell phone, then I'm gonna stop paying for your cell phone, because clearly it's not working.

And for him, The desire to keep the cell phone has actually increased his capacity to actually use it as simple as that sounds, it's been working.

[00:22:20] Paddy Dhanda: So, Christine, is there like a checklist of some sort that you would say? Depending upon the type of conflict you are having, then you should try these strategies. Like how do you work out what the right strategy is? I'm guessing there's other strategies out there as well that you suggest, so could you share some of that? Because, I could imagine there's loads of different types of conflict. There could be marital conflict, there could be obviously the parent child conflict. But at work with your boss, all sort of neighbors,

[00:22:52] Kristine Scott: It's everywhere.

Folks came out of lockdown without people skills. I don't know what happened. Our people skills just evaporated while we were locked in our own homes. There's conflict everywhere and There's kind of the macro level stuff that we've been talking about, like, know your goal, know your role, make sure you're in that parasympathetic nervous system when you're having these demands on your attention or these difficult conversations.

But within that there's some very specific things you can do to stay in or return to your parasympathetic nervous system. Like once that gets hacked, you're worthless for about 20 minutes. So don't, if you feel that heightened stress. Kind of response going on that feeling like, oh, everybody's out to get me and I have to resolve this right now, and da.

Like, when you feel that urgency, those are the flashing lights. Do not proceed. The scene is not safe. You're just gonna make it worse, right? I really encourage people go take a break, change your environment if possible, move your body. Because your body, once it gets flooded with adrenaline and cortisol, it believes it needs to like, physically vanquish its foes or run like hell.

So, go move yourself. And once you've calmed down, give yourself some space to reflect on what's really happening here. Again, what's my role? What's my goal? What are my opportunities to be curious about this person? And if you don't have the resources to think well about this other human, you're not gonna resolve the conflict.

You're just gonna make it worse. There's this space between how we are really ourselves and who we project to the world. There's a gap between those two things. When somebody gets under your skin, it's because there's a difference there between who you really are and what you want the world to know about you.

Right. And when we're feeling insecure, boy, it's so easy for people to hook into that gap. Yeah.

[00:24:57] Paddy Dhanda: I was thinking about even on social media, there was a while back where somebody commented on a post I made, and at the time it was like, oh my God, I've gotta respond, I've gotta respond. And then luckily I took a deep breath and didn't respond, and it just gave me some time to think about what I was gonna say.

But it was something silly, it was just the fact that this person had really disagreed with things. I can actually remember the situation, so I had posted a snippet of one of my episodes on LinkedIn and the guest, he was a professor of creativity and he had literally been studying creativity his whole life.

And so Wow. He's a pretty experienced expert in this area. And I just remember, like someone had commented on his. Message in this clip. And they had really badmouthed him gone, you know, I can't stand it when people start talking this way. He was talking about malevolent creativity and how creativity can be used for bad.

And he gave some examples. Oh yeah. And this person just really didn't like his angle to say, oh, how dare you make creativity into this bad thing and you're just making up stuff now, and blah, blah. And it was really rude and I felt compelled to jump in. Because I felt a responsibility for this guest.

'cause I'd been on my show and I put this poster out there, but I took a step back and it's quite interesting, the conversation between the two of them then. So the guest and the poster of the comment, it started off really hotheaded and then you just follow the comments down and towards the end they almost ended up in a situation where they both Said, we'll agree to disagree kind of thing, but there was no like, animosity,

[00:26:46] Kristine Scott: there's no resolution.

Yeah. But at least the tension

[00:26:48] Paddy Dhanda: reduced. Yeah, absolutely. But I can see, like the first few comments were really almost like battling against each other and then the whole situation just calmed down. But even a silly example like that, you get into these, circumstances without even wanting them there. They just happened to you, as I mentioned earlier.

[00:27:08] Kristine Scott: I'm proud of you that you didn't just insert yourself and that you just let them be the adults figuring it out

[00:27:14] Paddy Dhanda: on their own.

Probably given me too much credit here, Christine. I think the truth is I was trying to think of something really smart to say and I just couldn't think of anything. So I just I pondered and by that time it was too late. 'cause I had already finished the conflict.

[00:27:26] Kristine Scott: The third superpower related to conflict that I wanted to mention is you've probably seen Wolverine and Superman. They have this healing power, right? They can receive this mortal wound and just heal it up, right? And conflict shows you, wherever you're not healed, whatever wounds that you received as a child or as an employee or as a partner, whatever.

That haven't been healed. Beliefs about yourself, that aren't true. Beliefs about others that are somehow limiting or grandizing. All of those things will come up in how conflict shows up, how it feels in your body, how it feels in your brain. Like all of those big emotions will be a little barometer that says, oh, something's out of whack here.

 I really encourage people do some journaling. I also have a boundaries worksheet that I can share with your listeners that basically next time your toes get stepped on, kind of guides you through four questions to write out like what happened there da and you get better at stating boundaries.

About how you wish to operate in the world. That's not about other people. It's just about you being true to your own self. Once you can get good at that you'll find yourself a lot less reactive because you bring your safety with you wherever you go.

[00:28:51] Paddy Dhanda: That'd be great. I'd love to make that available to the listeners. So we'll include a link in the show notes for that. Okay. Yeah. 'cause in, you mentioned near the beginning that there's lots of research in this space. Could you share some of that for us? Because I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to research, and I love to hear.

[00:29:09] Kristine Scott: This is my latest favorite new book is live Kind, be Happy. I'll give you a link for this one as well. Because, Having that basic understanding that others wish to connect and wish to be kind to each other, but we fail to do that out of our confusion or out of these ideas of, well, organizations have hierarchy and hierarchy looks like this. We have some screwy stuff, but underneath it all is our desire to connect, is our desire to be valued, to be seen. And if we lean into that, we'll often find that it works. For example, when I was running the shelter, every time I noticed somebody was mean, mugging me, or it didn't seem very favorable in my direction.

 I was the executive director, so I had very little risk here, but I would just go up to them and say, Hey, I noticed you're not as outgoing and warm in my direction as you normally are. Like, is there something I need to know, something I need to change or do differently?

Nine times out of 10, it had nothing to do with me. They were just having a bad day. Whatever was going on for them. Normally what we do is we internalize that. We say, oh, well, Patty's not happy about something I did. I don't know what's up his, but blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? We start, we create the story, and then the story becomes a wall between us and so again, if you assume they really wanna connect, they just don't know how, and it makes it a lot easier to lean in without that curiosity.

And if you show yourself compassion first, like, no, I'm good. I'm fine. I have resources, I'm ready. I've got the green zone onboard, ready to have this conversation, ready to be curious about them. Then I can show them compassion as well. And I can really think about what's a win-win? Because conflicts never resolved until both people feel good about it.

So like your text exchange with the people. On LinkedIn. Clearly when those folks went away from that conversation, it doesn't feel resolved to either of 'em. There was no point at which either one of them felt seen or heard. They just notice the difference, right? And I really encourage people go for the resolution.

That increases your understanding and your trust with this other person. And if you know that whatever happened between you is not gonna happen again. Then that conflict is resolved until then it's just kicked down the road.

[00:31:42] Paddy Dhanda: Yeah, because that's sweeping it under the carpet and then just hoping.

It never happens again. But then you'll probably find that there's a similar trigger and then it happens all over again. I can absolutely see the logic of that. And Christine, so you must have had lots of conflict resolution conversations over your career. Is there one that really stands out for you as being one that you are most proud of, or at least.

It could have been the most difficult and then you've somehow resolved it. Could you share something that, I

[00:32:15] Kristine Scott: think the one that was the most revolutionary for me was where I was the bad actor and somebody called me out. I had people who were supervised by somebody I supervised who called me on my CREP and went two levels up to do so.

I spent the first probably 15, 20 minutes of our meeting just defending and doing the white lady superiority, executive director, positionality. I could do that if I want to, and da. And it in my right to hire whoever I want to, and I don't have to have people on my hiring panel and dah.

Right? Like I was not hearing it. What they did that was so beautiful is they kept leaning in to my humanity. They kept leaning in for connection and kindness and basically saying, we know you're capable of better than this. We've seen how much you want to do and how much you want to introduce anti-oppression into this organization.

And your actions on this hiring panel are out of sync with that bigger desire. And we felt obligated to let you know that we see that.

I just lost it. I started to cry because after I had wasted all of this time defending and positioning myself. I realized that what they wanted and what they were calling forth was the deeper connection and not something on my job description. It worked. 40 minutes later, I am like changing my perspective on this hiring panel, and I had deepened my connection with these two staff members.

It was a really gutsy move on their part. Really gutsy move. And I'm forever grateful and I actually ran into one of them recently at a protest and I just said, I need you to know how much of a catalyst the courage of that moment was for me.

[00:34:24] Paddy Dhanda: Oh wow. That's actually an example where it's completely changed your thinking and your mindset and had a, an ongoing impact, which is not temporary, but like you say, you are to this day grateful for that conversation. That's a really lovely story, so thank you for sharing that. Yeah.

Wow. Christine, we're. Fast approaching time, and I wish we had more of it, but unfortunately, I'm sure you've got other things booked and I'm probably booked on other stuff as well, so if you could let us know how can people get in touch with you and if people want to know more and they want to talk to you more, what's the best way to do that?

[00:35:05] Kristine Scott: Yeah. I would encourage them to find me on my website, which is seattle conflict resolution.com, and just add yourself to my mailing list so I can send you more resources and materials. I also have a new online training that's soon to be on my website where people can actually pay. To go through an interactive training, learn what their conflict styles are, and overcome some of the barriers inherent with your particular conflict style.

[00:35:35] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, that's great. We'll share that link in the show notes as well. Last thought, Christine from. What you are seeing in the world? Are we winning this conflict battle or are we losing it? Because every morning I wake up and I watch the news and I just hear about more and more conflict in the world.

So there's a part of me that thinks the world's getting more and more violent and things aren't going the right direction. But what are you seeing on the ground when you go out and talk to people?

[00:36:06] Kristine Scott: Maybe it's the optimist in me, but I think it's getting better. I think everybody going through this shared trauma of this pandemic has made people more curious about what authentic connection looks like, and I'm seeing folks form Zoom meetups and things that are about connection and about creating more inter reliance.

And people are starting to understand that isolation is bad and that idea echo chambers are bad. People are getting past that and it doesn't mean we all know how to do that next step. But one of my favorite stories is you look at how Meetup formed, I don't know if you're familiar with the website

[00:36:53] Paddy Dhanda: Meetup, but I am.

But I'd love to know the story 'cause I don't,

[00:36:57] Kristine Scott: that was after nine 11. After New York was so traumatized by the huge tragedy of the loss of those lives, everyone noticed oh, we're all treating each other so gently and so kindly. I wonder if we can make an app that continues that mojo. And so I think we're at the, a similar point as a globe, right?

Just like we all had this tragedy. How can we continue this sense of, wow, we've come out of the dark, out of our caves and we wanna be in touch with each other, but all we have are these really bifurcated little pockets of social media. That's not working for us.

[00:37:38] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, what a wonderful way to finish this episode.

 I'm absolutely familiar with Meetup because I've benefited from the app myself. A good friend of mine and I, we set up a community during lockdown, and it was for exactly that reason that we were missing that connection with people. And almost two years later we have almost two and a half thousand members.

So it's just grown exponentially and amazing how the app has helped us to create that community. So, yeah, absolutely. Empathize with everything you've just said there. Christine, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to get to know you and I've certainly walked away with some tips that I'll be trying out especially on my kids.

So, thank you for that.

[00:38:19] Kristine Scott: Your son is not gonna thank me.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure to talk to you as well.

With the rise of remote work, online learning, and virtual gatherings, staying connected has never been more important. However, as a facilitator, it’s difficult to create virtual experiences that are as good as face-to-face events. Asking 100+ people a question but only being able to acknowledge a handful of responses can leave your audience feeling disengaged.

In this episode, I speak to Lux Narayan the co-founder of StreamAlive. His platform is a facilitator’s best-kept secret. It uses an innovative way to boost engagement in virtual events. Lux also shares his entrepreneurial journey and some interesting stories of how he wrote his book as well as how he ended up working for one of the most famous Bollywood actors on the planet!

Lux Narayan

Lux Narayan believes that “So, what do you do?” is a tough question to answer and should certainly not be answered with the current title on your LinkedIn profile. In 2021, he published “Name, Place, Animal, Thing”, an Amazon bestseller- to help people answer this dreaded question. He enjoys mining the intersections of various spheres of life and work, speaking of which… He is the CEO and a co-founder at StreamAlive, a category-defining, fun and engaging web application that helps livestreams and live events on Zoom, YouTube Live, in-person, and everything in between literally come alive. With the ability to plan, track, increase, and analyze engagement simply through the live chat, StreamAlive’s goal is to help presenters and creators move their audiences from bored-away to blown-away. Prior to founding StreamAlive, and prior to a creative and personal break, Lux was a co-founder and the CEO at Unmetric right up to their acquisition by Cision, the world’s largest “earned media platform” that’s now a part of Platinum Equity, a $20bn+ private equity group. He is a perpetual learner of “stuff’ — from origami and molecular gastronomy to stand-up and improv comedy. He enjoys reading obituaries and has given a talk on the TED main stage – on lessons from 2000 obituaries. This talk has been viewed over 2 million times and translated into every majorly spoken language.

👉🏽 Website: Click

👉🏽 StreamAlive: Click

🔥 Our Sponsors: How do you know where to invest your efforts when helping your Agile teams? You could simply ask them, but what if you need a more scalable and robust approach? One platform that I personally use and recommend is Comparative Agility. It has the world's largest Agile maturity index with over 4m data points from over 14,000 organisations. You can try it out completely FREE at the following link, and be sure to let me know your thoughts:

👉🏽 https://bit.ly/3Zi5OXw

⚡️ In each episode, Paddy Dhanda deep dives into a new human Superpower and practical advice on how you can apply it immediately.

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Transcription:

[00:01:00] Paddy Dhanda: Dear friend, Thank you so much for listening to the Superpower School podcast. I'm your host, Patty Dander, and on today's episode, I have someone who I feel is becoming a really good friend of mine and it's amazing the power of social media, and connection in general. And I think that's gonna be a theme of this episode.

I have lux n Ryan, who is the co-founder of Stream Alive, he's an entrepreneur stream Alive, is an audience engagement platform to then be able to run live sessions really effectively. It's a product that I've been using and I just wanna make it clear this episode is not sponsored by Stream alive in any way whatsoever.

But I think the insights that Lux has are gonna be really relevant to every one of us who are listening to this episode today. So Lux, welcome to the show.

[00:01:52] Lux Narayan: Hey, thank you so much, Patty, for having me. And by the way, the feeling is entirely mutual on fast becoming friends and yes, I think it's a testament to the kind of connectivity that, that social and other things channel, but exactly my feelings, my friend.

Thank you for having

[00:02:06] Paddy Dhanda: me here. Oh, you're welcome. Lux, what is the superpower you're gonna bring to this particular episode?

[00:02:13] Lux Narayan: I, I think you kind of beat me to it.

You talked about connectivity and connecting, humans to humans has been something that's important for me in many ways. And the superpower I'd like to bring today is the ability to enable connectivity at scale. Which is when you have more than a certain number of people how do you connect them without still losing that human to human connection?

So connectivity at scale, if I were to summarize that in three words and

[00:02:39] Paddy Dhanda: what an amazing superpower that is. We're talking at the moment how the world is becoming more and more lonely. People are getting more and more depressed because we are losing that human connection. And to have a superpower that enables the opposite of that, I think can only be a good thing for humanity.

Can't wait to talk more about that, but before we do, I know you have a interesting background and story because I'm guessing when you were growing up around that age of seven or eight, your number one career choice was not to do what you do today. Tell me a little bit about that journey and how did you end up to where you are today?

[00:03:17] Lux Narayan: For anyone who's familiar with Indian parenting around the time I was growing up you probably know that what you're gonna do in life is largely dictated by the social infrastructure around you and parents and folks. You kind of almost presented two choices at that point, at least where I grew up, it is like, do you wanna be an engineer or do you want to be a doctor?

 Which is not to say those are the only two themes. In fact, I, I did a talk afterwards about how that's pretty constricting in terms of how we should be looking at the world, but I grew up in a very tech surrounded household, so to speak, where science and all of that was very important.

Grew up also gravitating towards the sciences. I don't know if that is a function of the environment or the fact that I naturally liked physics and math. So went down that path. Did my engineering, I'm a mechanical engineer by qualification from this place in India called the Indian Institute of Technology, I t Madras.

But I think the most important thing I did was learn to play football or soccer as we call it here in the states and fall in love with it. actually that's b because A is really meeting my co-founders in my previous company and this company I met them in college.

 We were part of the same dom, same hostel, same wing. That's how we know each other. Then when I did my MBA at a place called Im Calcutta, where I think the most constructive thing I did, was meet my wife who's also part of the founding team here at Stream Alive. So college worked out very well in terms of benefits that had nothing to do with the core educational part of it in terms of who I live with, who I work with.

All of that was desired decades ago when I went to college. Fast forward to what we do right now, it's kind of totally removed from what we learned. That's a funny thing, right? All of it makes sense from a rear view mirror now when you look back and say, yeah, sure. That led to this.

And then from there you went to this point. In my case, I had a career in entertainment for a while where I worked for this. Famous Indian actor that everyone in India knows, and a lot of people across the world know as well called Amita Chen. He was my first boss.

[00:05:11] Paddy Dhanda: Hang on, I didn't know this story at all. The Amita Chen, the legend from Bollywood, who I think he's like everybody's idol. When it comes to Bollywood, it's the Chen

[00:05:23] Lux Narayan: you're talking about here, the Chen and for context in terms of people who follow him, thanks to the population we have in India, perhaps.

I mean, take Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and a couple of others like that combine that together. And my first employment letter was signed by Mr. Chen. Wow.

Crazy story on that. When I did my MBA at, IM Calcutta, the norm at that time was for everyone to apply for a job, but I maybe had this bug on being an entrepreneur then. And me and a couple of like-minded or equally foolish friends, depending on how you think about it, wanted to start this event marketing company. We even have a competition within the college to name it, and people that the winner named it Rope Trick.

So we had this company called Rope Trick, which was supposed to be an event marketing, an event management company. Shortest lived company in the history of companies lasted for all of one month because the first thing we did was pitch for business to the earth while Amitha Chen Corporation Limited.

And instead of giving us business, they offered us jobs with salaries and a package that was way beyond what we would've gotten with our GPAs had we applied for a job out of college and plus working with the legendary Mr. Chen. So all of us killed our entrepreneurial aspirations within 30 days and ended up joining the

[00:06:39] Paddy Dhanda: company.

Yeah. And what, what sort of drove them to offer you that job? There must have been something very compelling about what you guys either were offering or doing.

[00:06:47] Lux Narayan: They were they were looking to corporatize the film industry. So the thesis was that there was a lot of disorganization in the industry.

They wanted to bring a certain corporate way of thinking organization. And I guess at that point, it logically made sense to have MBAs joining. And they just started the company. So I was employee number 12, I think, in the company. They just started and they had an internally articulated this plan of hey, we should be reaching out to some of the B schools and looking at folks who might wanna join a company like this.

And here are three jokers who land up and say, can you give us business? And yes, they're all from a reasonably good B School, and they seem already aligned towards what you wanna do. They wanna do events, which is a big part of what A B C L was focused on. So they said, okay, all right, this is a sign.

Let's get these guys on board. So they made his offers. I think that's how it worked at that point. Just right place, right time.

[00:07:38] Paddy Dhanda: Wow. And do you have any examples of where you actually got to meet the great man himself and could you share any

[00:07:46] Lux Narayan: Funny thing I'm originally from South India where we understand Hindi, but not too well.

And therefore, although everyone in India knows of Mr. Chen, I, I wasn't a huge fan of Chen as much as I was of Rajni Khan and some of the heroes from the south. I became an Amitha Chen fan when I worked for the company. The man is amazing. He was a masterclass, not an acting and thing, just in presence.

I'll tell you a couple of stories in that the first thing was when he actually gave me my appointment letter. I. That's the time we actually meet him for the first time. And he's sitting looking as regal as he does behind this beautiful big, I dunno if it's oak or mahogany table with a lot of important looking things out there.

And he has a presence as larger than life, right? He kind of fills the room. And I, I distinctly recall there's a bookshelf behind him. I sit in front and he gets up and I do as well at that point. And then he shakes my hand and says, hi, I'm Chen am without Chen. Like, we didn't know, right?

But it is courtesy to not be presumptuous about the fact that everyone knows who you are. And that first introduction was a masterclass in humility. I mean, he didn't have done that. He knows, we know who he is, that the company has his badge on the door the moment we walk in, but it's a gentlemanly thing to introduce himself and then talk about it.

And then we used to have meetings in his house and things and he would treat us as guests when we come in there. Every evening at about five 30 in the evening outside his house in Bombay, there is this thing where without exaggeration, close to about 250 people gather outside just to get a one minute peek at the man.

The gates opened. He has Z class security, and he just waves at the audience and just says hi to them and waves. And there are people who are traveled far and wide from across the country, from villages, just to catch that one glimpse and say, I breathe the same air as Mr. Baston did. And we were with him in a meeting once when that happened and he just, we were about to leave and he said, sorry, but if you don't mind, you'll have to hang around a little bit longer.

I'll have to delay you guys by 20 minutes. And it was for this, right? So we were standing behind him and we saw this and there are a lot of people who command the kind of audiences. Not maybe the size that he does, but he wears that responsibility with the great sense of humility, which was a masterclass.

I became a huge Amitha Han fan in the one year that I worked in the company.

[00:10:03] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, wow. I was just googling to see how many movies he's made because he's been around a long time. He's about 80 years old now and it's actually over 200 films. So he's had a whole kind of plethora of movies, my most memorable isle which was almost inspired by some of the spaghetti western movies, you know.

Oh yeah. Back in the day clin Eastwood and some of those folks. So they went on to star in, but he just absolutely blew me away in that movie. I think that's where I just became a massive fan of his. And then beyond that, there's just too many to name. Do you have a favorite or two?

[00:10:41] Lux Narayan: Interestingly, I love his songs and his voice and what he brings to, there's a lot of renditions of his father's work.

His father was a poet, his father wrote this beautiful little parable story about these friends. Their names are I recall, right, e b and yes, I remember the song. Now you remember the song. That's a poem or a song written by Haron Chen and Aha Chen sang it with this deep baritone voice with music said by Bali Sagu.

So that to me is a beautiful piece of art because it transcends generations. It's father and son, and it transcends even more generations because Bali Sagus was, at that point, was far younger than Mr. Chen. Totally different genre of music, but he was open to all of that. So it catches a lot of things added over, across generations, working across boundaries in geographies, across genres, and still making beautiful art together.

So lots of movies and surely is a personal favorite as well. But I'm a big fan of his music as well. Yeah.

[00:11:43] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, no, that's a really interesting side that you've mentioned there. And talking about talents. So going back to your story, it sounds like your entrepreneurial journey started and stopped very quickly.

So then how did you lift yourself back up to go into that world again? What happened?

[00:12:02] Lux Narayan: So about a year of working with the Amitha Virgin Corporation Limited it was growing great. It was a great place to be, but exactly what you said, I said, oh, I have killed those entrepreneurial ambitions a little too soon.

And I had some ideas from having a ringside view of the entertainment industry on interesting things that could be done, like direct marketing within the entertainment industry and things. So I actually left to start something on my own, which was a firm that really at that point did anything that we could do to make money, which was sometimes direct marketing, sometimes something else, sometimes events.

And interestingly, we also went back to A B C L and helped them sell their Indian movies in various territories like South Korea and Spain and other places where we discovered there was an appetite. And people wanted the dubbed or subtitled versions of Indian movies because India has the largest movie production facility you just mentioned.

Mr. Chen acted in 200 movies. There are more than 10,000 movies that have been made in India. So there's a huge repertoire of content that was ready to be sold to different territory. So I used to do a bit of that for A B C L and other producers. So worked in the entertainment industry as an entrepreneur for a couple of years.

And then when we had our first kid, this was way back in, in the late nineties in Bombi. Then we had our first kid. And I just felt it was irresponsible of me to live from month to month without certainty on where the next paycheck is coming because, You suddenly have a windfall one month, and then you have nothing happening for three months.

That's fine when it's you and your girlfriend, now wife. But when you have a kid on the way and stuff, you just think you need to be a little more responsible. And that prompted me towards taking up what one might call a regular job for various reasons. Desired to go to Dubai because my folks were there at that point.

Went on a break there and ended up getting a couple of good job offers, including one with an advertising agency called Lintas which has changed his name about five times since. But Lintas was a pretty big name in the advertising world. So worked with Linta at that point and worked in media planning, buying advertising for about seven years which is a whole bunch of different stories rolled into one at that time as well, because that's the time the.com boom and bust and all that happened.

So I ended up working in advertising for about seven years. And then that same sense of, oh, now I wanted to do something on my own kind of setback. As you can see, that's a bit of a recurring theme. There's this sense of dissatisfaction that kind of comes back. Was approached by a very dear friend from college who had been a successful serial tech entrepreneur for some time, and he was starting something new in India, in Chennai at that point in the data backup space.

And he convinced me that data backups are the best thing on the planet and that I needed to get into a tech entrepreneurship kind of a thing. So we relocated from Dubai to India around 2005 to join up with his friend to start a company called Wabo Technologies in the data backup space. And that really was set kind of, cast the d so to speak, for what I've been doing ever since, for the last 18 years, which is being a serial entrepreneur in the technology space with doing different SaaS and products Since then.

That's kind of where it started and had some kind of discernible pattern, so to speak.

[00:15:18] Paddy Dhanda: Yeah. My origins are Indian as well, like my parents that come from Punjab, they came over in the late fifties, sixties. And I do go back to India every now and again, but I really don't have my finger on the pulse in terms of what's trending out there.

And would you say, in today's world and in today's generation in India, that people are aspiring to become entrepreneurs? It as being the number one thing that they want to do because it feels very entrepreneurial in terms of hearing about all these new tech companies that are coming out.

I saw a post the other day on social media and they were listing out. All of the Indian CEOs, right? For all the major tech companies. And there's like loads of them, and I'm like, wow, I had no idea there were so many we obviously know Hai from the Google sort of organization, but then there's a whole bunch of others out there as well.

What is this new generation wanting to be when they grow up? And I guess from your side, having been on that journey, what would you recommend and advise those people?

[00:16:27] Lux Narayan: I think you're absolutely right. There has been a very discernible change in perceptions, options and what is considered a career option, so to speak.

Which also translates into things downstream and upstream, right? It's translated into a lot more flexibility when kids wanna do something different in school or college and the kinda streams. They want to pursue. We talked about a little while back where, when I was growing up at least in the society I grew up, you were expected to be a doctor or an engineer more often than not.

And now that canvas, it was always broad, but it's more broadly acceptable at this point, right? And some of it has come from success stories like the ones you described, because people are gonna look up to Pache or Satya Nadella or the CEO of ibm Han of Adobe and a whole bunch of other names and say, oh wow, those people started here.

 A lot of them are also first generation in Indian immigrants into the states or wherever they live, right? So there is a story there of was born and grew up in India, which is also a lot more relatable for people. I've personally seen the change in the last 15 to 18 years because when we were hiring at my first company at Bamboo, I still remember.

I've had to go and pitch to the parents of potential folks who are joining us because India, as you probably know, is very strong arranged. Marriages are a big thing in India, and they were websites like shadi.com where kids will put up their profiles. And the parents, believe it or not, were worried that when a kid puts up their profile saying they work for a company called Mbu, nobody's gonna want to marry them because that's a no-name company and therefore a startup is like a several steps down when you want to get married and settle down in life.

That is the number one problem we had to contend with for hiring, if you can believe that. Fast forward to now. It's certainly if you say you work in a startup or co-founded a startup or joined a startup early, that's got exactly the opposite perception. Something change at a very societal level.

And I think the prime removal for that is the fact that you have success stories around. It's also the fact that with software as a service, and I mean what we buy, we were one of the first at that point to do it, but there were a few companies in India around the early two thousands who were building products in India for the world.

The logic was that everyone's connected. If you build a great product, it shouldn't matter which part of the world someone wants to use it. And that's true about anyways, web-based product at this point, right? So what's obvious now wasn't at that point. And then of course, other tailwinds came in as well like funding and all the investors started looking into India and set up an office over there.

And there was more and more capital coming in there. A whole bunch of policy changes. And the net effect of all of that was I think it started a lot more grassroots, which is that people saw entrepreneurship as a viable option. And in the last few years you're seeing ramifications of that as well.

For example, in the last few years, it's not been. Total shock and dismay when a kid says they wanna be a content creator, for example. Being a YouTuber is something a kid is allowed to articulate as a potential career option, although the d is stacked against them from a probabilistic perspective, it is entering the mainstream conversation where people talk about it and they're comfortable talking about it.

So I think a lot of things have happened and they've stemmed from success stories because there are, you can point a finger at, look at these people who did amazingly well. They may still be the outliers, but at least there are examples for people to look up to. There are startups that were started by founders from very humble beginnings, and there is relatability from that perspective.

And I think it's continuing to happen. You're gonna see a lot more of that.

[00:20:07] Paddy Dhanda: Yeah. No, I completely relate to that. My son, who's 11 now, when he was about nine, he went at a, I wanna become an influencer, and I was just, Looking at him thinking what on earth? Because for Kid at nine to be telling me that's what they want to do.

And I had no idea what a real influence does. I was completely outta my depth, but now I understand it, and in some ways I'm thinking actually I, not a bad career choice with everything going on with the power of AI and the world changing so much, maybe being an influencer isn't such a bad career choice after all.

But, hey, we'll see. So Lex, I heard you speak on another podcast and you mentioned during the pandemic you wrote a book. Could you tell us a bit about that? Because I think for me, there's lots of different dimensions to you, right? You've got your entrepreneurial spirit, but then there's, there are these other talents that you've got as well.

And just talk to me a little bit about the book. What was that about?

[00:21:13] Lux Narayan: Thank you. Yeah. You could describe that as an extended midlife crisis or multiple talents that you pick,

[00:21:17] Paddy Dhanda: but yeah, definitely talents. Come on, let's be, I take it. Thank you.

[00:21:23] Lux Narayan: I like to keep busy. I like to do different things, and I like to, I have counterweights to what you do at work because entrepreneurship can take a lot out of you in a good way.

But it's good to constantly keep that perspective that it's not all, everything there is to life. There are other things that they need to define you and that you need to make time for, right? From family and friends and hobbies and everything. The book, however, came from the combination of a Brightspace and a dark space, so to speak.

What happened was just to fill in the gap after Bambu, which I did for some years, I co-founded a company called UN Metric in the social media benchmarking space. And that company's journey is one I describe as from a bedroom in Chennai in India to a boardroom in Copenhagen because in the end of 2019, we were acquired by a Danish company, which was acquired by an American public company called Cision in the PR space, which was then acquired by a private equity group.

So long story short, we moved in one month in October, 2019 from being an independent company of about 75 people to having a corporate great-grandparent within the span of one month. And I thought, okay, this is gonna be utter chaos, but then sometimes life gives you lessons. We had a personal chaotic incident with our older son who was on a semester abroad who had a crazy medical emergency with this rare autoimmune disease called Gullen Barre syndrome when he was in Germany.

And long story short, it ended up with us spending the next four months in hospitals and him having to be airlifted from Berlin to the states. And then he gets discharged from a hospital in Jan 2020, and the whole world goes into lockdown a month and a half after, but we are still going to hospital for the next six months.

Reason I bring this up is just to give you a sense of the kind of mental space I was in at that point because there's a lot of stuff happening and when your child is hurting and stuff, that obviously takes a lot out of any parent. And I'm sure you can relate to that.

 Because of all that, I also left the company that I founded that I'd gotten acquired, just needed to spend the time at home with our son and with myself. And I'm glad I did that at that point because gave myself the space from a mental perspective just to have that freedom of thinking and doing what you need to.

But then I also found that I had more time than I had in a very long time. So, there was the ideas behind the book you mentioned had been in my head for many years. You can't see it if you're not, if you're listening to the podcast, but it's called name, place, animal Thing. And I look forward to giving you a copy when you beat in person, Patty.

[00:23:46] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, I'd be honored. I'm already really excited about the cover. Cause I just love the very simplistic visuals for anyone that can't see it. It just got some very strong colors and yeah, just grab my attention immediately.

[00:23:59] Lux Narayan: Thank you for saying that because when we did the cover fun fact I had feedback from people thinking, saying, I think it's a child.

It's a children's book. Rather than a book for adults. And at that point, I had to make a decision saying either double down on it or say No, we gotta redesign the cover so it looks a little more adultish. And I decided to double down on it. It's a cover done by someone in Berlin, interestingly, a visual designer in Berlin.

And the brief to him was to make it look like a children's book, because the idea was it needs to appeal to that child that we've silenced a long time ago and give a voice to the child. So I said, if people are saying it's colorful and looks like a children's book, maybe we've done our job.

What I'd done through on Metric was I had these ideas which had shaped into a talk that I did in a couple of times. And then someone told me, sometimes you need a little nudge. So there's this gentleman who was on our advisory board at this. He died during Covid around that time.

God bless his soul. But at that point he mentioned to me that these are powerful ideas. Maybe you want to bring it out on the form of a longer piece of work, perhaps a book or something. And sometimes that little nudge that someone gives you is all you need to say, okay, maybe there is something here.

And this gentleman Anami that's what he did for me at that point. I travel a fair bit on work because the previous company on Metric had people here in the States and people in India. And I used to fly to and fro at least about four to five times a year. So a lot of long flights where I would jot down these ideas and use those times to, so I had the skeleton of a whole bunch of points to give you a.

Too long didn't read version of the book. It's the title is name, place, animal Thing. And the book is like, if you've read Jonathan Livingston Siegel or Mon Who Sold His Ferrari, or Who Moved My Cheese, it's like a fable or a parable with lessons in between. So it's non-fiction in the guise of fiction.

And the whole idea is in reverse. It starts with thing where it says make more things. It can be physical things like stuff like art and things. It can be virtual things like a podcast that people listen to on, like the Superpower podcast and learn things and do better things. So make more things.

And a framework for how you think about making things. Animals get in touch with your inner animal, which is your body, your brain, your breathing, and all of those things. Place was very apt during covid, which was, you don't need to travel far and wide. Maybe you need to travel near and narrow because most of us have stuff in our backyard that we've never seen.

We probably need to look at those rather than have to travel far and wide. And name is actually to go on a total tangent, you had a podcast issue, some, I think it was Leslie, someone who talked about how to describe yourself in 50 words, right? Yep. Name is basically the fact that when people ask you, so what do you do?

All of us tend to respond with what it says in the top line of our LinkedIn profile, but there's so much more to us as you and I had discovered with each other in our conversations, and I'm sure it's true of. Everybody who's listening to this podcast or not, but we should give vent to those names as well beyond just what we do for a living.

So get, embrace those selves of you that go beyond what you do for a living is a part of name. That's the gist of the book. Became my pet project, became my solo pro project for towards the end of 2020. And funnily enough, what I do now when Stream Alive never saw it coming, but was born from that journey.

 I never thought it would happen, but the idea for what we do now, everything was born from the three months of working

[00:27:16] Paddy Dhanda: on the book. Oh, perfect. I was just thinking there for a moment. I had a recent guest and a good friend of mine, Carrie Nichols. She was also talking about this job title that we use as an introduction and she said for many years she worked in banking and she's always given a job title, but now she's finally set up her own business and she thought, Hey, for the first time ever, I can create my own job title and call myself anything.

And I love hers because it's a chief mischief maker and I just thought that's the best. And she said she's got way more LinkedIn followers as a result of having that job title because people are so curious to know what on earth is that all about? Whereas if she just said, I'm the VP of X, Y, Z, that's just like everybody's got a similar job title.

So there's nothing that engages you with that. But really interesting. So moving on to streamer Live, I have to say for those of the listeners that have never heard of Streamer Live or never used it, I think just a personal endorsement from myself, it's been one of the most valuable tools that we've added to our arsenal from a collaboration and events perspective.

And I'm not just saying that cause I've got looks in front of me, but I came across your so application. Very soon after it was launched, it was on one of the kind of marketplace websites, which is App Sumo. And we were lucky enough to get a lifetime deal on it back then. I'm gonna get you to explain what it does in a moment.

And I say we, because some of my listeners will know. I co-host a monthly meetup called the Visual Jam with my good friend Grant Wright. And we have a whole bunch of creatives who join that every month. And we were really looking to see how we could boost our collaboration the experience for people that were coming to those events.

And when I came across your platform, it was just a no-brainer. I was like, this is exactly what we need. And hence we made that step. And it's been phenomenal. So look, tell us what is Stream alive and how can it help people? Tha

[00:29:21] Lux Narayan: thank you first of all, Patty, for the endorsement. It means a lot, especially coming from you because visualizations are a big part of the platform as we'll.

Explain in a minute and when I stumbled upon your community when you saw you using it, and then actually couple of us on our team attended a couple of your sessions and workshops and they're amazingly inspiring. so thank you for what you do from that perspective too.

And if Stream Alive helped in some small way in making those better in terms of connecting people together. We are super flattered and super happy. Thank you. I mentioned Stream Alive was born so there are two stories actually. One goes back to 1979 about my grandfather, and we'll bring that in later because I was actually thinking about this and it has some influence on what we do in Stream Alive.

But first, let me pick up where we left off, which was, we talked about the book. I didn't know the first thing when I wrote the book and stuff in the end of 2020. I didn't know the first thing about writing a book, editing a book, and marketing a book. Let's keep aside the fact that you might read the book and say he still doesn't know the first thing about writing a book.

But let's keep that aside for a second. I signed up for a bunch of classes and these were understandably online classes at this point. But even now with the world returning back to sort of normalcy and being in person, it's still online classes because it's difficult to get a distributed bunch of people who want to write a book in the next quarter at this point in time, to be in the same physical location.

They're probably much better off meeting up online. So I signed up and paid for six different classes across these different subjects, writing, editing and marketing books, right? Class sizes ranged from 11 students to 1,200 students for the how to Get Amazon to Love and Bless your book class, which is delivered on YouTube life.

The other classes were typically more often than not, run on Zoom, mostly Zoom meetings. If you had less than 50 people in the room, zoom webinars, if you had more than a hundred, there were two or three sessions that actually were run on Facebook Live. So in effect, I got to attend classes on YouTube, live on Facebook, live on Zoom meetings, and Zoom webinars.

And I think one other platform that I can't remember at this point, but a whole bunch of live platforms, right? I actually counted, I attended 56 live sessions in a 90 day period. So two things happened. One was I learned a bit about writing, editing, and marketing a book, which I took forward into writing and publishing.

Name Please Animal Thing. But the second I saw Patterns, time and again, I saw that the first session more often than not, would always open with the presenter saying, Hey, where's everybody joining from? And there are 300 people in the room. Of which about 140 people actually respond to that because people enthusiastically type.

I'm in this place, I'm in Birmingham, hi from Basking Ridge, and so on and so forth. The presenter, eyeballs, four of those responses and says, we got Patty from Birmingham. We got Lux from Basking Ridge, we got Joe from Chicago we got John from Chennai, and I knows the remaining 136 people who so painstakingly put their answer.

But that, if you think about it, is something that all of us are used to have seen and have come to accept because, hey, what else can you do? If the presenter read off every single thing, he would sound like a geography teacher who's reading off the names of the places in the world. But it's pretty rude if you think about it.

I mean, if I were to ask you a question and you gave an answer and then I absolutely ignored your answer, you wouldn't be too thrilled about it unless you are one of 200 people, in which case you're okay with it because you're like, Hey, what else can you do? He's gotta pick and choose, right?

Rewinding back to my grandfather. My grandfather was the first public speaking teacher in Chennai in India in 1979. He started the school called the Effective Public Speaking Institute, and he had a rule which he used to implement and teach, which anyone who's spoken in public and use to some in some form or fashion, he would say, every five minutes, ask your audience a question and ask them to answer either the first time, ask them to answer by raising their right hand.

The next time, ask them to stand up and answer. The third time, ask them to answer by raising their left hand. And the fourth time, start them off standing up and ask them to sit down if they're saying a yes, right? So he was employing physicality to get a binary response of yes or no, and then he would read the room and say, yeah, two thirds of the group thinks this way, or There are this many left hands and this many right hands.

But essentially giving a collective visualization to the audience just based on physicality of movement. And essentially you can't acknowledge every single person in a class of 40 people, but at least you can acknowledge them as a group, right? So to some extent, I think that was in the back of my head when we saw this over here, or the person would ask a question like tell us how you're feeling today, or what is the number one reason you joined this course?

And people would get their answer and then they would pick or choose one or two people and answer their questions and ask them a little bit more and stuff like that, right? Or they would ask them a question, ask them to scan a QR code, go to a different website altogether, do a whole bunch of browser gymnastics just to answer what they had for breakfast two hours ago.

So it was very obvious that one to many communication was badly broken. And if you think about it, Patty, I mean it's actually 38 years, if you can believe it, since PowerPoint was invented 1985, and here we are. Still having conversations where presenters are talking and delivering monologues.

Our thinking was, isn't it high time? We had a dialogue where the presenter could listen to the audience. So that's kinda what we do. We solve for that. And the way we do that is in an online session, let's say take Zoom as people put things in the chat stream, alive intelligently understands that.

So in the first example of, let's say the presenter is asking people, where are you joining us from? As they type their answers stream alive, ingest that plots it out on a map that is accessible to the presenter. So all the presenters doing is showing their browser screen, which has a map, which within about one 10th of a second of a person saying Hi from Birmingham, puts a little blue dot on Birmingham so that Patty is marked on the world.

And something powerful happens when you tell people, I see you, I hear you, I acknowledge you. It just helps people connect a lot better and it's certainly in our opinion, a lot better than the default of ignoring people. I can go on and on, but I'm gonna pause here and hopefully that explains why and how we build what

[00:35:34] Paddy Dhanda: we do.

No, and that's exactly the problem. I've used other apps, not bad mouthing them in any way cause they're really useful, but like you got mentee, you got Slido. These are other apps that we sometimes as presenters will ask our audience to scan that QR code or go to a URL and answer some questions.

It can be a poll, it can be some form of brainstorm. And it means that if I'm sat at home and I'm nice and comfortable and I've joined this virtual session, now you're asking me to pull out another device because I may only have one screen. And I'm having to now log onto my phone, open it up and go take this extra step.

When I was expecting to do everything in this one tool, and I think you've hit the nail on the head, like the friction. When we remove friction from any kind of experience, it just makes things so much easier. I'll give you a quick example of that. I had a website, my own website that was hosted on a particular platform, and I was thinking like, I would really love to build up my newsletter following and my newsletter list.

And up until now I've used this one platform, but it's not very well designed to capture people's email addresses. It puts a little popup on the screen every now and again, but it just felt like it was just a distraction for people. Well, now I've moved over Tock. And for anyone that doesn't knowck, it's a way of publishing newsletters, but it's designed very much for that purpose to be able to capture people's email addresses in a ethical way.

 It takes out all the friction. There's no nasty popups. It's literally you go to the site and it's there as a input box and it just makes things so much easier. So when we design to remove friction, I think it makes things so much easier. But stream alive, how does it do it?

Because it's quite clever the way you manage to make this a seamless experience. Could you tell us a bit about that?

[00:37:41] Lux Narayan: Certainly. And just to react to what you just said big fan of stack here as well. I love the fact that you use CK for a lot of things beyond what it was originally designed. So yes, you have your newsletter on ck but if you also host your entire podcast on CK as well.

 So you publish all the podcasts on CK and Sub is relatively new to the podcast games. So you're using it for all your publishing, if I gather right? Exactly.

[00:38:07] Paddy Dhanda: And I've only just recently moved over there, so I talk about the newsletter. I haven't actually published one yet, but I've written some content that I'm hoping to be sharing with the listeners.

So please do look out for that. And I just wanted it to be simple, even as a creator, like to take the friction out, even for myself and the fact that this platform has newsletters, kind of a blog capability plus the ability to host a podcast, it felt like the right thing to do.

So that's why I've moved over. It

[00:38:37] Lux Narayan: makes so much sense. And it's about friction. They eliminated the friction for you. They eliminate the friction for the people who are following you. Because now I know that whether I want to listen to your podcasts or read those blogs that you're soon gonna be publishing and those articles that you're soon gonna be hitting, it's all gonna be on the same place.

And then that makes it easier for me. So I think friction is super, super important in you're designing products as you mentioned. That was a singular driving force for us as a product. So all those other products you mentioned they're all amazing products and they were some of the earliest products.

So Slido, minty and others were some of the earliest products in the audience engagement space. And they literally created that space and they're pretty amazing. What happened was they were designed for the physical world for in-person meetings. Because when you're sitting in an auditorium, yes, of course you scan your QR code, you do that at Stream Alive as well for an in-person meeting.

When the pandemic happened, suddenly everyone went online and they used the tools that we had for a physical world, for the virtual world because we didn't have any other tools. That's how it happened. So our central guiding principle became, don't ask people in a meeting to go to another product.

They're already in a product, which is Microsoft Teams or Zoom or Twitch or YouTube or WebEx or whatever, and they're already overwhelmed and confused and distracted and things and stuff. So don't send them off to a browser because they're gonna look at what Kim Kardashian is doing and never come back to your meeting, right?

So keep them here and make it easy for people. The central thesis became a very simple one. If you think about it. Don't ask people to go to the product, bring the product to the people. Which required a fair amount of engineering, heavy lifting in terms of our ability to integrate with every platform.

Because here's a fantastic thing, right? Every online meeting and streaming platform, whether you're a live streamer or a slide streamer, which is what I like to describe, people who present on Zoom and other platforms, every platform, Google Meet, zoom, Twitch, YouTube Live, LinkedIn Live, Facebook Live, WebEx, what's common to all of them?

They have chat. So I think it was if we can build a platform that integrates with the chat in each of these places, and that became a bit of an uphill task because each one is engineered differently. In the case of Zoom, we had to join as a bot in the case of something else. You joined with an API call, but it's different for each platform.

But if we solved for that, how amazing would it be? Because people don't have to change a thing, they just type in the chat like they already are. Like you have a poll and you have four things and people type. Yeah, I like one or two or three or four. And the poll is reading off that. How are you feeling today?

Happy, sad. Amazing. Awesome. And is reading those words and populating a word cloud typing where you're joining from. Hi, from this place I live in this place. It's looking for locations plots you on a map. If you think about it, my grandfather's thing had a binary thing, but now with the internet you have so much more color in the chat and therefore shouldn't you have a lot more color in how you visually represent what people are saying?

 The beating heart of stream alive is these visual interactions that are powered in real time by what people are saying in the chat. And it's based off the platform chat. Or if you're on an in-person event and I have to tell you this, Patty, I think you'll love it. When I go for an in-person event, let's say I go for an event over here that is talking about how to use TikTok to generate B2B leads.

And the keynote speaker there is Gary Chu. I go out there and I listen to the session. I'm not here to listen to Gary because if I wanted to listen to Gary talk about TikTok, I can probably find that on a YouTube video. I'm here to network with the other people who have a similar bent of mind, but here I am sitting in this conference room with a hundred other people on.

I can't have a conversation with them because I would end up disturbing the flow of the presenter because I get shushed by a whole bunch of people. But if Gary was on Zoom, I could do that because you could have a parallel chat. So we all talk about getting inspired by the real world and taking it into the virtual world.

We saw a case for the reverse where what we do for a in-person meeting is actually create a chat on your phone. So you click on a URL and you go into a chat where you can talk about anything under the sun, except when the presenter is asking a question like, where are you joining from? Your chat interface changes to request you to answer that question in the chat.

So we just launched a hybrid version now. So just imagine you have 200 people sitting in person and you have 500 people who join the session from Zoom. The Zoom folks are typing in the Zoom chat. The guys in the room are participating on a mobile chat, and everybody is the same. Nobody's a second class citizen.

Every single voice is heard and that's really a core proposition. Move audiences from 95% ignored to 95% engaged, which is what you do by simply acknowledging people. What we built is a platform that plugs into chat as a vehicle across platforms and the real world and hybrid to give every single person's voice and opportunity to be heard as a visualization that pops up on screen so that nobody's ignored.

On that

[00:43:32] Paddy Dhanda: point, I've actually just formulated an article that I'm gonna be writing for the newsletter and it's the exact same point because I talk about. When we go on holiday, at what point do we actually feel like we're on holiday? That is actually happening, right? Is it the moment that we book the ticket or is it the moment that we pack our suitcase?

Or is it the moment that we leave the house? Or is it the moment that we check in our luggage? I think for me it's that moment that now I've given my luggage to you, it's on the airplane. It feels like this is actually gonna happen now. Right? There's no going back unless I mess up, unless something happens between me checking my luggage in and getting to the gate, I'm pretty much guaranteed now to go on that holiday.

And I think when we think about meetings, whether they're face-to-face or virtual, when people come to those meetings and if they're not engaged in those first few seconds, unless they've had that check-in, I think people don't feel like they're part of that meeting. I've been the same, I've joined these sessions and if I'm just there as an observer in the background, whereas some of the people are being engaged, I kind of switch off and like you say, get distracted.

Maybe Kim Kardashian, or in my case, I'm trying to think which singer I would be distracted by, but I'm not gonna say it cause my wife might listen to this episode anyway, but I think that check-in is really important. And up until now it's been really difficult to do that.

And I was saying we use Stream Live on the Visual Jam. We use the global Map. And the way we used to do it was we would have a Miro map on Miro as an application, and we would ask people to jump onto the url, stick their sticky notes on a big visual map. Now, a couple of problems with that.

Firstly, not everybody wants to now jump onto another tool. It's a bit of a learning curve for some people. People were asking us, how do I create a sticky note? How do I type into it, this, that, the other? So there's a learning curve there. But the other thing was, depending upon when you join the meeting, you may have missed the url.

And so people are joining late and they're saying, Hey, where's the URL for the tool? And by the time someone's listened to them and actually given them that url, we've moved onto the next part of the session and we've stopped that engagement. And so for us it's been a great use case where we put the map on there straight away, and people are typing and it's all being done in real time, and we're seeing people's names pop up.

That's great. The other thing that's been really useful we had a guest recently who said I'm happy to give a prize away. Right during the session and we normally give prizes away afterwards. we do like a competition on the Visual Jam, but he said, but it's gonna be really difficult cuz you know, you're gonna have x number of people on the session.

Unless you've got a mechanism to pick a winner quickly, like it's gonna be difficult. And we looked into Stream alive and you've got a really nice feature on that now, right? Where you can randomly pick a name and it takes all of the names that are on the Zoom meeting, put something to a big wheel and then you spin the wheel and it stopped someone by random.

That was genius and it really helped because we didn't have to do any kind of additional manual effort or labor to set that up. It was very easy and it actually is quite visually appealing, seeing the wheel spinning, why. One bit of feedback on that looks is. We'd be cool if we could have sound effects when the wheel spins cuz I was going.

That was my bad sound effects. But yeah, that would be really cool just to add that extra little element. But that's a small thing. But no really nice. I think, seeing that in action for us and it worked was great. And by the way, this guest didn't just have one prize, they had 10 prizes, so I had to spin the wheel 10 times.

[00:47:28] Lux Narayan: Quick couple of points on that. First of all, thank you for using it. All of one month old. It's a feature we call the winning wheel, where you can define the criterion saying anyone who's commented once or twice or answered this question that you asked five minutes ago. So we're building more and more filters on it and I think sound is absolutely essential.

Thank you for that tip. You will. Hear and Inspired by Patty Ch. Sound went. I'm gonna take the recording and take the chch You just did and play that out there and stuff. But I was just about to say, we love the way you use the magic maps in the beginning. You brought a very pertinent point about Miro, which is also an amazing product by the way.

They create for collaboration and brainstorming and everything. For something like just saying where you're joining from, we think it can be lot simpler because when you're doing to the post-it, exactly what you said happens, people who are late to the party don't know what's being served, and you gotta go to a browser tab to do it.

So you're still disconnecting from the audience because at that time I'm not looking at your face or what's happening. I'm on the browser tab. And I love the way you do your maps. If I recall right, the sessions I joined you actually play banga music during the time that you have the initial thing as people are coming in.

That's so cool. So I think sound is important. That's a lesson I took from your implementation of the maps because it had sound and maybe we should bring in more sound on the platform, maybe arcade kind of a sound as it pins people and things. I'm just taking your feedback , into other extremes saying maybe we should make sounds for the maps as well and bring in sounds.

So people

[00:48:53] Paddy Dhanda: I've got tons of ideas for you look like. I'll throw a couple out there right now. I think even for a meeting, if you could ask the audience to suggest some songs and you could almost build a playlist dynamically based on the responses and maybe people can upvote, downvote, and then.

If there was a quick and easy way for us to then, I dunno, click on a YouTube link of those songs or even, we then have some time to very quickly create a playlist in the background. We can then play that because for us and the Visual Jam, people are always asking us like, a, what song is that?

But I'd love for people to be able to choose the tracks that we put on because when we're doing some of the activities, we put some background music on and I think again, music is so powerful to change the mood of a person. If we want people to be high energy and try and really ramp the energy up, then there's obviously that kind of fast, impactful music.

But then equally, we sometimes wanna slow things down, and I think music is wonderful for doing that.

[00:49:53] Lux Narayan: I think you're gonna love this. If you've logged into Stream Alive in the last four days. Nope. All right. There's a new feature that launched four days ago called Link Library.

Which reads through the text reads through the chat and pulls up all links that people shared and then automatically filters them into, these are LinkedIn profiles, these are u YouTube links, these are Twitter handles, and these are Spotify links. That's one category we have there. We don't yet have the ability to say, combine all of these into a playlist, and I think you should absolutely do that where it says, this is the vibe of this tribe, so to speak, but right now it would pull up those URLs that people have saved and you can click on it and play it, and you can hit a share button and share that as collateral with the entire team.

So first cut towards the vision that you just described. At least that first step is just got launched four days ago. We still hasn some distance to do to go before we deliver what you ask for. We'll get there, Patty. I think that totally makes sense.

[00:50:43] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, look, that's an amazing feature on its own. I'm just thinking about so many use cases just there.

Like one of the great powers of crowdsourcing is knowledge. And especially in the Visual Jam, I'm always amazed even when we have some very, big experts, like these are thought leaders in their field giving a talk. There's always people in the audience who are then suggesting additional resources.

 Could be a book, could be a YouTube video, it could be a TEDx talk. But imagine you've got like 300 people on this Zoom meeting. Those links all get lost in the chat, and unless you download the chat, you lose those links. So you've gotta be very quick. And I think what you've just mentioned there is an invaluable feature because being able to very quickly and easily pull out all of those links in one go.

 What a great feature. I'm really excited by that.

[00:51:36] Lux Narayan: It's exactly what you described, Patty. There's so much of wisdom in the crowd that we lose. in those 56 sessions that I attended while writing the book, there were at least a dozen where I had these oh moments because I hadn't downloaded the chat.

Mm-hmm. In a Zoom session and it, there wasn't a recording for some of them and therefore links that people had shared as great books to read or great authors or great designers. And here is someone who does X, Y, Z service. I lost all those links. So the other thing we did with Link library is you don't have to activate it.

 Once you have let's stream, streamline into the meeting, it's automatically during it to the entire session. You can invoke it any time you want. Because it's that central thing on when you have a session with many people, it's not a speaker telling everyone that I have the knowledge and you're here to learn.

It's just a speaker. The speakers, in our opinion, always a facilitator and is the excuse for these people who are like-minded in some ways to get together and they have so much of knowledge and ideas and tastes to share with each other. We need to be harnessing it a lot more. And especially in this world that's getting more and more algorithmic and things.

We need to bring that humanness front and for. Which is actually a collective representation of everything we've been through, right? Your story has, I can't think of any other Stream Alive user who starts their session with, right? You probably don't have any other podcast guests who started their career with our Chen, but so each of us has our own little story that we bring to four in these sessions, and we should be capturing it, man, right?

[00:52:59] Paddy Dhanda: Yeah, no, well said. And so looks, in terms of the future of Stream Alive, are there other exciting features on the roadmap that you can share exclusively on the podcast?

[00:53:11] Lux Narayan: So a few features we are building. We put a target to ourselves saying every month we need to build at least one new visual interaction of sorts.

And a lot of them are improved, one. So thank you for giving us the sound part of it because one thing is already ticked off after this conversation today for the winning wheel and maybe some of the other features, but. Really conversations like this are what shape, what kind of features you wanna do.

I mean, the winning wheel is born through a couple of conversations where people said it's a pain to manually enter the names of everybody. Can't it happen automatically? So we have someone who is using us in cohort based courses and at the beginning of the classes they ask people, let's say I'm running a course on storytelling.

And I say, how good of a storyteller do you think you are on a scale of one to five, where five is Steve Jobs and one is this baby who can't speak, what kind of scale do you think you are in? Right? And hopefully they come up with maybe an average of 2.3 and they end the class after going through what you are to teach them.

They go to 3.5 or something like that. If they go below where they started off, you've got some recording thinking to do. But, so we are building a feature for that, for example, called pulsing points, which is gonna capture the numbers that people put in the chat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and render it like you don't put those.

This is where we date ourselves a little bit. You don't put those graphic equalizers that come up in the old tape recorder decks where the colors just zoom up and down. Oh yeah. I love those. I love this. So a visualization that when someone types a one, the one jumps up and down. When someone types a three, the three jumps up and down.

 There's something beautiful about cause and effect, right? When you type a button and something happens on that screen that happened because you type something, it's actually a little dopamine. Rush that happens, right? So imagine the whole thing dancing based on what the audience is saying and then saying, okay, time up.

The average is 2.3. So this is a feature called pulsing points. We have this fetish about naming all our features with alterative names. So magic maps, power poles, pulsing points, transient thoughts, winning wheels, everything has to have a , double thing. So please bear in mind anything you suggest to us has to be ative in nature.

That's a first filter. Jumping jackpot is something we're doing as well, a bringing a bit of Vegas. So the winning wheel is a wheel function. Why can't we take the same thing into a jackpot where everyone's names just gets spun in the jackpot. So it says Paddy ls, John, Tina, and so on. And then finally slows down and ends up with John's name and John wins the prize.

So another visual manifestation of that. We are doing a bunch of word-based games, so imagine you could type something that is core to your product. So for example, you're about visual jam and therefore visual thinking is important. So you could say visual thinking and stream, I would jumble that up and make it an anagram.

And in a break it puts up the anagram and the first person who types visual thinking in the chat, it just explodes into confetti and says Tina, that's absolutely right. You got it right. Filling in breaks with little fun anagram games that are based on the core proposition. It's also weird to put a message back if Stream Alive is about engagement and visualization.

Those may be two words I feed into the Anagram machine, and as people are figuring that out, they also get their message off. It's about this. So bringing fun, really, right? It's like the winning wheel. Also, there's something very childlike about seeing a wheel spin and it brings back memories of childhood, seeing it slow down and the physics of it.

So trying to bring all of those is gonna be a central theme around all of the features we're doing. We're also expanding platforms. So we just launched Twitch and Google Meet very recently and as of day before yesterday launched Hybrid. So you can't actually use Team alive on Zoom plus in-person teams, plus in-person.

 The vision is anywhere people meet, live in groups of more than 10 people. We want to enable many to many conversations and ensure that the audience boosts from 95% note to 95% engaged.

[00:56:54] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, fantastic. And I just wanna throw in one other awesome feature that you've got in there. As a host or the facilitator, you actually produce some really nice analytics off the back as well of the meeting.

And you have things like who was the most engaged person in the whole meeting and you do like a chart almost. And you can keep that to yourself. You don't have to reveal that to the audience. And I also love like the feature on YouTube where you can see a little graph underneath the video to see at what point were people most engaged, and again, when was the chat at its most busy during the session.

And it gives you a little graph of that as well, so you can see, was it when I asked this first question or was it during the dancing or whatever you're doing on your meeting. I think that's really good as well. It gives you some insight into what did cause some great engagement during the session.

So I think that's really important. I love the way you've done that as well. In terms of your future vision for the platform. What would you like to see with Stream Alive happen? From this conversation onwards, if in a year's time with sat back here and you look back, what would.

Success look like for this year for Streamer life? Is it just about growth or is there something other than that for you?

[00:58:15] Lux Narayan: So this year it's a function of the stage of company. Just very quickly to react on the analytics point that you mentioned, Patty. That's another thing about Journeys.

Previous company and metric was the social media benchmarking space was an analytics platform. So to some extent we have a bit of an analytics hangover, which kinda spilled into Stream alive in some ways. So I'm glad you liked it because I think it can be pretty useful to plan for a better session next time around based on what worked and what didn't.

 Which is a good segue, so there's a lot of plans for Stream Alive on the roadmap as we discuss in terms of product and making. Presentations better and stuff, right? So we joke internally, sometimes we say the motto is Maga in some ways make audiences great again by giving them a voice and making them heard in some ways.

Right now at this stage of company, it is gonna be a growth number where it's gonna be maybe in a year. Because what we are seeing is a lot of people who sign up for Stream Alive are signing up because they saw it being used in some other sessions. Someone is an audience at somebody. Each time you use it on the Visual Jam, I think we have a couple of signups that happen because people look at it and say, wow, I want a slice of that for my next session.

So thank you for that. Therefore it becomes the challenge becomes how do you get more and more people to discover it? And we've been under the radar. You are one of the first people who discovered us. We went public in December and I think you discovered us that month. So you're one of the early users and you've still been quiet for the first six months of this year.

We're gonna become a lot more vocal from the 1st of July in terms of putting content out there, helping people discover us a lot more and things we're solving a few things before that, like, building an emulator so you can see how it's gonna work so that you get that wow moment much sooner than having to wait for your next Zoom meeting to see it in action.

Things like that before we actually go all out. But it's gonna be a target in terms of numbers, we are hoping that in the end of this year, we'll have more than 10,000 presenters using Stream Alive. Right now we have about thousand 500 and we want to hit way above 10,000 because. It then catches a velocity and momentum of its own because those 10,000 people will present to, maybe if you take an average of 50 you're gonna have 500,000 people exposed to it, and some of them will sign up.

 So it's gonna be a number like that. But the larger term aim is something like this. Patty, I'm hoping that in about three years time from now, if anyone experiences just like I studied in college at a time when people are still using, if you remember those transparencies that they would put on overhead projectors and it would be on a for those of you who have no clue what I'm talking about, it's like a sheet of paper where someone would've written something.

It would be put on a little light box device that would project light through it and put that on the wall. And that's how you see it's called a transparency, right? I'm sure none of us have seen a transparency in the last five years in the same way. I'm hoping that in about three years time, none of us will have to attend or hold a session.

Where we don't give a voice to the audience, whether it's in person, whether it's virtual, whether it's live. It would almost be considered rude and obnoxious to have a session where a person continues to speak, unless it is a five minute session, in which case they can be excused. But for anything more than 10 minutes, you need to have a conversation, hear the audience as well, and the norm becomes one of conversation and dialogue as opposed to monologues is really what I think the wrong term aim is.

You wanna change how people fundamentally communicate in large groups.

[01:01:23] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, it's a fantastic mission and vision. I love that looks, before I jump onto my final question, it's so refreshing seeing someone who's working in tech, actually listening to the real users of their product and the fact that you attend.

Other presenter sessions, like you mentioned, you came along to the Visual Jam just to see how we use it. Maybe you'll pick up some insights around what more you could do with the product and then you listen, you mentioned the spinning wheel where you've listened to some of the real users and then taken that feature up and built it.

I was only joking about the spinning wheel and the sound effects, but hey, if you do it, that would be awesome. I would be, it's

[01:02:03] Lux Narayan: happening. It's happening.

[01:02:06] Paddy Dhanda: So that would be absolutely amazing. Just to finish off something listeners often ping me and say, Paddy, what resources would you recommend on this subject or that subject?

I'd love to hear like just some of your favorite resources that you could recommend for people. It doesn't necessarily have to be about the superpower we talked about today, because I know you're a very diverse. Divergent thinking guy. You think a sort of about a lot of different things and your background is very diverse as well.

So yeah, I'd love to hear like some of your recommendations.

[01:02:38] Lux Narayan: So happy to follow on with a list of maybe URLs or things if that helps. But I think the biggest recommendation I would give is real life. Lot of things that we do at Stream Alive and that I do in the other things that I like to do are inspired by things you see in the physical world, in real life and increasingly in a world where we are all talking Chad g PT and things, I think we forget that we are living, breathing carbon life forms that are existing in Ether and moving around and interacting with each other.

 There's so much inspiration over there for me that really is the biggest thing and just to give a little more legs to what I'm talking about. I'm a big fan of standup comedy. I fancy myself as a comedian. Do sets once in a while and stuff and when I can.

 And I love it. So the reason I bring that up is I not to brag or something, but just explain how it changed my perspective on one simple thing. Before I started doing standup comedy, when I'd be in an airport, I would be clamoring to finish my last email because wifi is ridiculously priced and therefore I don't want to pay for it on the flight, and I want to finish it before I get on the flight.

And I would be oblivious to everything happening around me. Now when I'm going for a flight, I have my phone open because I have my notes open or notion open. And I'm writing ideas that happen from things that people are doing because all of it is comedy for them. And airports one of the best places to get inspiration for standup comedy, right?

So suddenly that changed my lens on how I look at the world. I suddenly started looking selfishly and greedily for material initially, but just made me a lot more observational and a little more in the moment as opposed to being totally disconnected from my environment. In August last year, I was in Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival and it was one of the most magnificent things that I'd seen.

I saw people engaging their audiences in different ways and having conversations. I saw improv shows, I saw so many different things and came back a whole bunch of inspiration and ideas for in general, for life and for Stream Alive as well, right? This year on August, I'm gonna be there as well.

Hey, side note, I'm gonna reach out to you to hopefully on my way between London and there, drop in at Birmingham and say hello if that works for you. But a

[01:04:44] Paddy Dhanda: hundred percent we're gonna make it happen.

[01:04:45] Lux Narayan: Yeah, we'll make it happen, my friend, but things like the fringe and festivals, when you go for a, I told you that the QR code based.

Application of how people interact using a mobile app. And our thing is entirely chat based. The reason it's chat based is because I've been shushed in more events than I can count for talking too loudly when someone is talking on stage. But hey, I pay $350 in network with the guys in this room and not to listen to this guy because the guy on YouTube with exactly the same talk.

So there's so much, I mean, stream alive, the inspiration is born from the virtual world, but we are increasingly taking lessons from the physical world, right? You're taking Bangla, which is a fantastic Punjabi dance form into an opening icebreaker when you're doing things right.

I think there's a lot of inspiration just in real world stuff that we've unfortunately started discounting increasingly because of the kind of things that we are seeing online and at the risk of sounding very old school in this, my biggest thing was look, would be look around you.

 There's tons of things happening that can be photoed for everything from work to life to a whole bunch of other creative inputs as well. Wow. I'm

[01:05:52] Paddy Dhanda: gonna say, looks I've done by the time this episode gets published, we'll have done well over a hundred episodes and out of all of the guests, like you're the first person to say exactly what you just said there around, look to the real world and look to your surroundings.

 I think that's a really useful insight because even when I was talking about my newsletter and I'm trying to get that off the ground, one of my big challenges was, am I gonna have enough material on a regular basis to be able to share with my audience, what could I possibly talk about every other week in that newsletter.

And since I've had this idea in my mind about the newsletter, I've been much more intentional about appreciating what's going on around me. Similar to you. We went recently on a few conferences abroad and I was very observant around what was happening around me, what I was seeing, how people were reacting, how they were talking, and that idea of the check-in with your audience very quickly that all I got inspired by the fact that we had to wait for almost an hour and a half to check in with this particular airline.

The lady in front of us had actually fainted, so I had to rescue her. Oh wow. So it was a very traumatic check-in for me. And when we talk about friction, it was probably the worst example ever of checking in. But it was great because it became really good inspiration for that particular newsletter. So, Thank you for sharing that.

I really appreciate that. Lx we've run out of time and I can't believe how time has flown. I normally schedule these sessions for around 45 minutes and we've blown that out of the water.

[01:07:40] Lux Narayan: I'm sorry, man. I'm sorry.

[01:07:42] Paddy Dhanda: No, don't be sorry. Don't be sorry. My editor's gonna kill me because I now have some support in editing these episodes and I tell them typically every episode's around 30 to 40 minutes, so this one's a double episode.

[01:07:56] Lux Narayan: It's like an Indian Bollywood film. It has to be a lot longer. There

[01:08:00] Paddy Dhanda: you go. That's our excuse when Amitha buttons involved. That's it. It's gonna be an epic episode and that's exactly how I feel This episode has gone for me personally. I hope everybody listening has also found it as equally as useful and insightful as I have found it.

Lux, thank you so much for giving your time today and sharing some of those stories. I feel. A lot wiser than I did at the start of the episode. So thank you,

[01:08:26] Lux Narayan: Patty. Thank you for having me. Thank you for supporting what we do. I'm glad we met in the virtual world. I look forward to in keeping with the theme of what we just spoke meeting you in the physical world very soon.

So I look forward to that. Thank you, Patty.

[01:08:40] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, you're welcome.

Hear the extraordinary journey of a leading Trauma Consultant and how he struggled during his early life against all odds. Mr Ansar Mahmood shares life lessons that are applicable to all of us.

Key topics covered in this episode:

👉🏽 How to succeed even if you were labelled as deprived

👉🏽 Daily challenges of a Trauma Consultant

👉🏽 Importance of teamwork

👉🏽 Future of the medical profession and the impact of AI

Mr Ansar Mahmood, Consultant Orthopaedic Trauma Surgeon MB, ChB, MRCS Ed, FRCS (Tr&Orth), DABRM.

Mr Mahmood is a Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon in one of the leading Major Trauma units in the UK. Fellowship Trained in Orthopaedic Trauma Surgery, with Specialist interests including Major Orthopaedic Trauma, Sports & Tendon injuries & post trauma reconstruction. He is the University Hospital Lead for Trauma Research. Research interests include Platelet Rich Plasma (PRP) and Ortho-biologics and their use in musculoskeletal conditions and wound healing. 

Mr Mahmood is a Senior Clinical Lecturer in the Institute of Inflammation & Ageing at the University of Birmingham and major trauma research lead at the Institute of Translational Medicine. He is one of the first and very few holders of the Diploma from the American Board of Regenerative Medicine awarded by the American Academy of Regenerative Medicine in the UK & Europe. He founded the UK based Academy of Regenerative Medicine which is the premier provider of education and accredited training in regenerative medicine in Europe. He is also one of the few Orthopaedic surgeons in the UK that is trained in Ultrasound and does all of his treatments under ultrasound guidance to enable a higher level of precision and improve patient outcomes from non-surgical or minimally invasive techniques. 

Currently the President of the British Trauma Society he also created the internationally recognised MISTT course which uniquely trains teams to plan and manage trauma in mass casualty situations and is accredited by the Royal College of Surgeons Ed. & recognised by the World Health Organisation. He is invited to lecture and train clinicians around the world on a regular basis. 

He is passionate about the scientific endeavour behind our practice of medicine and surgery and believes big data and machine learning/AI will be instrumental to our decision making for trauma and medicine in the future. He gave a lecture on AI in Trauma at the British Orthopaedic Association conference and is involved in research with the AI research group at the University of Birmingham. 

Links: 

Linked: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ansar-mahmood-ab465135

IG: @regenacademy @dransarmahmood

 Websites:

www.thearm.co.uk 

www.stemcellscience.co.uk

www.britishtrauma.com

🔥 Our Sponsors: How do you know where to invest your efforts when helping your Agile teams? You could simply ask them, but what if you need a more scalable and robust approach? One platform that I personally use and recommend is Comparative Agility. It has the world's largest Agile maturity index with over 4m data points from over 14,000 organisations. You can try it out completely FREE at the following link, and be sure to let me know your thoughts:

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⚡️ In each episode, Paddy Dhanda deep dives into a new human Superpower and practical advice on how you can apply it immediately.

👉 Sign-up to Newsletter: https://www.superpowers.school/subscribe

👉 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/paddydhanda/

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Transcription:

[00:01:02] Paddy Dhanda: Dear friend, thank you so much for listening in to the Superpower School podcast. And on today's episode, I have a childhood friend and when we think back to our friends, It's probably my best friend from school. Still great friends because he's the one person that I would probably turn to for any kind of life advice.

He's just an all around, genuinely smart guy. I thought I'd bring him onto the show today. He is a consultant trauma surgeon. He is a lecturer at the University of Birmingham. He works at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham and is the president of the British Trauma Society. And I'm sure there's a load of other accolades, but I just don't have time for them right now.

 I'd love to welcome Mr. Anal Maud. Hey, welcome to the show.

[00:01:52] Ansar Mahmood: Thanks, bud. Great to be on. Um, looking forward to the questions.

[00:01:57] Paddy Dhanda: We grew up together at high school, and I was gonna refer to you as Dr. An Mahmoud, and then you corrected me just before we started. Tell me more about that. Why am I not allowed to call

[00:02:07] Ansar Mahmood: you doctor? When you said that, do you want me to refer to you as doctor or Mister?

I said to you it's usually mister and the reason for Mister is there is a history behind it. So the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh started just before the UK one. Both colleges, when they became College of Surgery that was over 500 years ago. At that time there weren't really any surgeons.

Because before anesthesia came along that an antibodies surgery was pretty difficult to do well and people, if they ended up reading a limb off or an abscess drain, it either happened naturally or they went to anybody to do it. But one of the people they went to do it, or the physicians would use physicians being the medic you and say something's wrong with you.

 If they needed a abscess draining or something chopping off, they were probably too prim and proper to do it. But they also didn't have the blade skills. They didn't have the practical skills to do it. So actually they used to instruct the local barber barb, as we all know how very good knife skills, uh generally, especially pre Gillette, razors, et cetera.

There are all the brands out there. People used to have to do with a sharp blade. And barbers had very good knife skills. So the physician would send for the barber who later they incorporated the The Barber Surgeon Society, which later became the Royal College of Barber Surgeon, which later became the Royal College of Surgeons.

So Barbaras are always mister, so the doctor would send for Mr. Smith, whoever the barber surgeon was, and the mister would turn up and that would differentiated. It was the physician and the surgeon. And one of the doctor one was Mr. And obviously being England, we keep our traditions going on for hundred and hundreds of years.

That's still the case that when you become a member, when you pass your memberships exams for Royal College of Surgeons, you now call yourself Mr. And in the hospital, it differentiates physicians from surgeons. Not that it really matters anymore.

As I said, when you go to the rest of the world, they don't understand this either. I have to do this whole explanation every time I go abroad as to why you missed that. Because all the other surgeons in the rest of the world tend to be doctor.

[00:04:05] Paddy Dhanda: So on this episode we're gonna be talking about some of your superpowers.

And I don't think there is one specific superpower that we can really pinpoint because there's just so much that you do, but you are a bit of a fixer of people. And as a trauma consultant, I'm sure that is a core part of your job. But before we get into that, I want to take you back to some of your childhood and my first memory of meeting you.

Was quite an interesting story. I dunno if you remember, but I had just moved from Warwick to Birmingham and I sometimes refer to it as moving from Harry Potter land because Warwick's a bit like Harry Potter land with Big Castle, and it's all lovely and friendly to a school in Birmingham, which was more like Jurassic Park.

You only the fittest survived. And I remember on my very first day, I sat at a particular desk, which happened to be your desk, and you were running a little bit late and the response I got from you was like, what you're doing at my desk? And it was like a very, one of those really sort of nightmare-ish meetings because I'm the new kid and I just had no idea like who you were, but you were a lot taller than I.

 Let's take you back to our days at high school. Like for the listeners, could you describe what kind of environment. What's that?

[00:05:34] Ansar Mahmood: Yeah, it's a difficult one cause I know when I went to medical school, I felt quite outta place and it's because about 80 to 85% of the medical school intake, certainly historically and going back 20 years ago, was predominantly 85%, grammar or private school.

 I came obviously from that other 15%. What I do remember is you and I were in like year, what they call year nine now. So like third year of high school and the league tables coming out for the very first time they produced a national league table of schools. I won't name the school, although I probably can actually cause it's gone.

 But I remember having the newspaper, we were all looking through it on the school field and we looked down and the worst borrower in the whole country for children's education was sandwell. We were in Sandwell and the worst performing school in Sandwell was Ley High School.

And I remember looking at this and thinking, does that make us like officially the worst school in the country? And what strange is you are when you are in that environment, you've grown up in that environment that's normal, so you actually have no perception. I remember reflecting back on that, that when someone was said, like with the worst school in the country, at no point did we look or feel or think that we were in the worst school in the country.

Not saying that it was the worst school in the country. Obviously those tables can be, there's lies and statistics whatever they're made from. We know that being the lowest in that borough doesn't mean you're the lowest in the country.

But it's nice extrapolation. It makes better headlines and it makes more interesting conversation when you're teenagers. So we went down with walking around for a couple of weeks telling everyone that I could meet that we were the worst school in the country. And that was slight badge of honor.

Um that was a kind of environment. And I remember government policy made that worse, in our later years because we were quite a small school compared to the surrounding three really big high schools that had over a thousand students in them. And we had about five or 600, but we had much larger fields.

And rather strangely, the high or schools around us were struggling with fields think, well, why can't we just absorb or take over that school? So our school was constantly under threat of being closed or absorbed into the other schools. And because of that, there was an active policy of accepting anybody.

So in our last couple of years of high school, all the kids have been excluded from all the other schools. And so had nowhere to go, suddenly arrived in our school. So we then had our onsite drug dealers and their relatives coming to the school. The gamblers. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. We ended up with a lot of the most interesting elements of society all at the school. Some people would argue that maybe they were always there. I remember one big story, which I still tell my kids, that onco pad, was taken aside of one of the teachers at school and told that he stopped hanging around with Ansar because Ansar was gonna end up in prison.

Yes. In prison. And he shouldn't end up in the same place. But yeah, I remember I said, I remember Paul coming out and telling me that this was, I thought, I can't believe That morning I'd actually helped part with his science homework, which I used to do.

I probably didn't have mine in, but I did his for him. It was a shock to me. So maybe I didn't have insight, but that was the kind of school we went to. I think you were a cheeky chappy in that kinda school. Either teachers loved you or hated you, and I suppose I was a little bit on the cheeky side.

Yeah.

[00:08:49] Paddy Dhanda: I just remember being the new kid, there was this constant sort of competition from many of the males around, they had a league table of who's the hardest in the year, the strongest, the toughest. And whenever anyone new came in, they was like where do they go in that league table?

So you either. Have to defend yourself and prove yourself to get on the table. Or like me who avoided violence. Just hope no one picks on you. The couple of times I did get picked on, luckily I had good friends around me who were always there to help support me, but God forbid some of the kids must have had a right difficult time there.

I know. I felt

[00:09:27] Ansar Mahmood: so sorry for him. It was a tough upbringing and I remember seeing some sort of cartoon or something. I don't spend all that much time on social media, but I saw something that said that there's a praise in that says that hard times generate hard men.

 Then hard men generate hard work. And then hard work generates good times and then good times generate soft men. And then soft men generate bad times. There's little cycle of life. And I worry about that now actually, I think cuz of the background I was from, there was quite a lot of adversity and we were probably used to facing it, but I do remember actually that wasn't the case and that was somewhat individual psychology.

 There's a few of us that pushed through and made it somewhere into a profession of some kind. I remember looking back and we had quite a small year and there's about 120 kids and I think only about 20 of that went on to do a levels or college of some kind. The other hundred literally just left high school and went looking for work or whatever other activity they felt they could earn money from.

And that's not a great statistic. Think of the 20 that went to college. Not that it's always a measure of success, but I think about seven or eight of us probably went to university. So if you take 120 and a success rate is less than 10% going into. Certainly the highest levels of education at university level.

 It's not a great statistic, but again, it didn't feel like that, I'd grown up at Langley Junior School, Langley High School, and although the junior school and the high school are not co-located there, two a mile and a half, two miles apart, so actually you don't ever see the high school or vice versa.

 Not that they weren't in the same building. So when I came to high school, it was a completely new building with a completely different set of people. It wasn't something I had any prewar or experience about. And I suppose being in a high school like ours, it was tough. Yeah.

We didn't realize it was that tough. We just thought that was normal and I certainly think there's lots of things that can break people, you know, a degree of physiological stress, but at the same time, some people thrive under stress maybe, you wanna push through or you wanna get beyond that.

And I think it really comes down, I was reading something or listening to a quick talk on David Goggins that chap ultra runner et cetera in America, the Navy Seal. Yeah. See that's what he talks about. He went through periods of his life where yeah, absolutely miserable.

Then he lost confidence and he gained loads of weight and did nothing else with his life and wasn't really progressing anyway. And it's only when he actually thought, I need to get over everything that's holding me back. Just accept all the bad that's happened. You need to accept it and move on.

Whereas you sit there bathing in it, you're never gonna move on. So lots of reasons why we wanted to get out of where we were. But I suppose I still accept that we were probably privileged, we had stable families and good families and parents that even though we didn't appreciate the time, were always looking out for us and trying to get us on the right path.

I know when I went to university, that's when I first met the first contract. So I met kids who had been to five years high school and two years of college, or seven years of higher education of some kind or secondary, and they'd never seen or been exposed to violence or a fight. Our school, there was a weekly, if not it's a main event, like every day.

 At least a weekly fight of some kind. Yes. So there would always be you, sometimes one a day or two a day. It was quite normal to expose that level of violence. When I reflect back on it, I realized perhaps why we're damaged in the way we're damaged. But,

[00:12:50] Paddy Dhanda: well, I was thinking about like some of experiences of adversity and how they helped us.

One example, I'm sure you remember this, we were in the football team and we were playing a local school called Bristol Hall who were like, way better than us at football. And you and I were in defense and we were losing 10 nil right in this match. And everybody in the team had literally given up hope.

There was no hope of us doing anything in that match. And I just remember for me personally, off the back of that match, I was made captain of the football team because I was the only one who was still encouraging everybody. I don't know why I was doing it. I was just like, come on, we can do it.

We can do it. And then I remember you grabbing hold of the ball on the halfway line and you booted it and you scored this amazing goal from the halfway line. I'm sure you remember that. You must be telling your kids to this day about that goal. And that was like our highlights of the match. But you know what?

Yeah, we lost ten one, who cares? But we walked away with great because I got made captain, you had scored this wonder goal and what a great experience.

[00:13:57] Ansar Mahmood: Yeah. That was an interesting day. Yeah, absolutely. It was the eighties, right? So eighties into the early nineties and what the UK culture was in a stage, we were trying to be American, right?

So whatever the Americans doing, about five years later it was coming into the uk and I think we were just in that period over that period, five years where like colors, gangs were over LA and New York. So Birmingham had this issue with like gangs everywhere, and sort of gang and culture.

School cultures have always been the same, I suppose to some extent there's always rivalry, et cetera. But I think we taken rivalry beyond that level of, we just don't like each other. Cause we play sports against each other. And it got to the point where everyone was like, you just disrespect my gang and my crew and my territory.

People had got this into their psyche and there were lots of gangs around Birmingham at the time that, and they wore colors. They wore orange or they wore blue and people from those different gangs couldn't go into different areas because they were then out their own territory.

That was quite a weird environment, but certainly a high school. We didn't really ever go to the other schools because the level of violence within our schools, it was the same in between the schools. There would be no qualms about putting fists or bats and having go at each other.

Thankfully, mostly always fists. I don't remember the mean much. Weapons, maybe weapons are worse now actually.

[00:15:11] Paddy Dhanda: Another story that sticks in my mind was when we were kids. I remember you telling me about your dad. He had a really good friend who was a gp and he once took you to the surgery and he explained to his friend that he was hoping that you would one day become a doctor.

Could you tell us about that story? Because for me, it still or sticks in my mind even to this day. We look back and we think. How did I end up on the path that I ended up on? And for many of us it's because we may have had some kind of point to prove to people. So could you

[00:15:47] Ansar Mahmood: share that me with us?

Absolutely. I'd come back from work experience at University of Birmingham. I went to be physicist. Remember I was a physics, not loved physics and space science. And so I was gonna go off and do space science and physics. That was my Plan eight university. And then long story, that's for another day.

 I had in the physics department, I had medical doctors coming. Cause we were doing some research on the first pet scanners in the country at the University of Birmingham, which are now in common use in the nhs. But at that time they weren't available in hospital.

We were testing them and we were playing around with these pository emission tomography scanners at the university. And the doctors were doing research on cancer using pet scanners to monitor cancer. But it wasn't proven at that time. But they would turn up in, I would be there, I'd have got there on the bus, the two postdoctoral PhD physics students, and the professor would arrive in a, 20 year old s SCORs, et cetera.

And then the orthopedic or the oncology doctor would arrive in his Porsche outside and park it next to our cars, come in, tell us what to do, tell us what he wanted, and then leave. And third or fourth time he came along, he said to me, what are you doing here? And then we ran into a conversation and ultimately what he said to me, he said, if you do physics, you're gonna be like, these guys, you're gonna be poor forever.

He said, you love what you do. I'm sure. But he said sooner or later, and he said, look, I'm doing physics, but I'm a doctor. I can do whatever I want. We can invent science, so actually do something that earns you some money. you'll be respected and then you can come and do science if you want.

You can be a researcher within medicine. And he gave me that idea. And obviously being relatively. Now they call them deprived kids, but certainly I wasn't well off one of six kids and a dad worked in a shop or a factory. It was challenging in a single income household.

 We were never flushed for cash. I'm not saying we ever went hungry. My dad was great and he worked really hard, and then we always had plenty of food. So I didn't really notice that we were plus for cash until I saw the people and that's when I realized that.

And you always know I was growing up that some people are a bit wealthier than you, and some people are. That's where you see their houses and their cars, the way they live. You're always appreciative of that. But I don't think we necessarily felt deprived until I got defined as deprived when I applied for the university.

 That was one of the things. I decided to apply for medicine. When I made the decision to apply for medicine, everyone just laughed. And that's actually what annoyed me the most. They knew I I wasn't a star student, you said I was pretty bright.

 I was never the one that stayed and did extra homework or got things in on time. You mentioned being at my desk cause I was late. That's cause I was awful late. That's unfortunately, I have to admit, even now as a doctor that stayed with me in life, I'm one of those people who always thinks, let me get this done.

And what's funny is that gives people the impression you're lazy. Anytime through my training being called by the old consultant or boss or training director as approached me and said, you must be lazy cause you've done less of the paperwork than your other colleagues.

I told them to do this. And you've done it, but you've done half as much as they have. So you either don't listen to. I remember one in my very first year of higher surgical training, at the end of the year, my program director, it was a nice chap actually. He had for the right intentions cause he explained it to me later.

 He said, you're either stupid. He said, I don't think you're stupid cause we hired you here as a higher surgical trainee or you're lazy. He said, those are the only two reasons why you haven't done what I asked you to do. And it was about sub updating your cv. And I remember being told off like that, about not updating my cv.

Cause he said you have to update your cv. And I thought, being the logical, pragmatic person, I usually am. I thought, I'm not applying for any jobs, right? So what? And all I'm gonna write is I've done one year more of training. Why bother? So I I didn't bother. I just said, it stayed as quo as far as I'm concerned, didn't bother objecting the CB.

 All he wanted to do was see that one line of the new place I'd worked in for the last year. That's all he wanted to see. And I didn't put it in. And he had this scope and he said, you are the stupid. Which I don't believe or you're lazy. I remember hearing that and I heard it a couple more times through my training and that, and I'm no, irrespective of anything else, I'm always the hardest per working person in the room.

Generally, in life, I've never really been the one who slacks. Once time I'm at work, I work twice as hard or three times the hardest as, yeah. I'm always the person trying to juggle three tasks at the same time and I overstretch myself. But I'm the one who say no and just gets on with it.

And if 20 patients are in clinic, or 40 patients in clinic, or 60 patients in clinic, just see them, , I don't sit, they're going, well, I'm supposed to see 10, whatever needs to be done, you get it done. That's always been one of my values.

More and more people shunt it to you. I sometimes get that problem now. I'm struggling to actually manage my own workload. Cause I'm spinning so many plates at the same time, and you then can't give the due attention you need to. So at the moment I'm in shrink wrap mode. I'm trying to shrink my life back into a more controllable box.

 I can dump some of these projects, but that story that you mentioned, sorry, I'm going through that probably 20 seconds. I had no friends who were, I had no relatives and no advice. We were the first generation to think of university. My sister had gone the year before me, but that was that first generation in this country that's gone to university.

So we had no contacts. My dad thought, if he's now thinking he wants to do medicine, let's get some advice. So he went to the local gp, who's a friend of his, cause that's same background, essentially Pakistani immigrants who came over. , this chap laughed at my dad slightly and not that he wasn't trying to be unhelpful.

He was actually, I think in his own head, trying to do my dad a favor and say, don't be unrealistic. What I remember him saying to my dad is that he said, look, my dad's name is Mohammed. Like most men of that generation and Mohamed don't carry these kind of hopes in your head, he said, because people like me who are highly educated and medical themselves, we worry, we don't think our kids will get into medical school.

He said, I want my kids to go to medical school, but I'm not sure they're gonna get in even though they're a private school. So he said, I've got my kid in a private school. I'm a doctor myself. I don't think my kid's gonna get into medical school. Your kid's got no chance. That's what he sort said to my dad, don't bother chasing these dreams, just go away and do something more realistic.

And that was the advice he gave. I said, I suspect with the right intentions, But he said that to my dad and my dad came back and tried of sock it a little bit, but that's what he'd said. And I thought, okay, but that's probably, yeah.

 I'm not somebody, I say this to my kids now, don't let anybody limit you. Don't let anybody say, if you're not passionate about something, that's fine. Yeah. You should just stop doing it. There's no point hanging on something you're not passionate about ultimately.

But if you think you are passionate about something and this is something you should be doing, don't let somebody say you can't do it. Because I was told that again and again. Even then when we were doing a Levels, my headmaster day and the headmaster of the school, cause he knew me as a slightly cheeky, turns up late lad.

 He actually refused to predict, give me the grades I needed to get into medical school. Even apply, he refused. He said your performance hasn't been at the level of a medical applicant. We've only had one per year for God knows how many years. It wasn't a high performing college particularly.

 And he said, we get very few kids that ever get into medical school and they would have to get sort of predictions, at least to be a's generally. And he said, and you are performing. I've spoken to your tutors and they're telling me maybe you B or C, and if I don't write a on the form, you can't even apply.

Which is the same saying, you haven't given me the grades I need to make the application. I did have my physics grades there as a backup. I actually knocked on the dogs cuz I remember initially thinking, should I just accept it? And I thought, no. I knocked on the door, spoke to him, and obviously he's a headmaster and he is a little bit annoyed at me.

Whereas you are telling me that you are gonna get better grades than this. And I remember saying to him, I now in retrospect I can see why he got so annoyed, but the time I didn't understand why he was so annoyed, because it sounds incredibly arrogant, because when I think back on him, but I said to him, that's because they think they know me, but they don't.

I know me. I know what I can do. And he got really annoyed. I didn't think that would trigger that. He got really annoyed. He asked me to leave the office and stop wasting his time. I walked out of the office. Cause that was a slight shock for me when he got angry and threw me out the office and I'm, whatever the 17 years old thinking I'm applying for college or university.

And I walked out the room and I remember walking outta the room out of the office and then standing in the corridor. And then I thought to myself, if I do nothing, this is my life. This guy's throwing my life or dictating where my life goes. And I wasn't happy with that. I thought, it's my life. At the end of the day.

If I don't fight for it, who's gonna? Why should they? And so I went back in, and I spoke to him and I said, sir, I gave you my explanation just saying that I will work really hard. I will show you that I can get this. I know I can do this. Maybe outta frustration or whatever it was, he said, look fine.

 He signed me off as a predicted for race. Which I know was a gamble. I think Mr. Harland, his name was so, I know Mr. Harland, cause he did change it. It was a gamble cause a lot of people wouldn't have done it. And I then applied to university and then on the application system, because of the postcodes we lived in, went to school in, we flanked as deprived.

I then went to this special interview or meeting when I went to the open at university, where they took me inside and I remember them asking me questions that I hadn't even thought about ever growing up. Do you have a desk to study on? Do you have your own bedroom? So you can have quiet and yeah, there was all these sort of questions.

We didn't have a desk in our house. Yes, I

[00:24:57] Paddy Dhanda: remember cuz you and I used to play on the computer in your bedroom and I think it was like on the actual bed or somewhere or on

[00:25:04] Ansar Mahmood: lamp. Yeah. There was no desk in our house. Again, I didn't know that was unusual that our house, everyone just had to fight for the coffee table or you put in your lap and you wrote on your books.

So I remember answering questions that the realization coming into my head, these guys think I'm really. Because they're asking me, do you have this? I'm like, no. Do you have this? No. How many siblings do you have? More than two. Yes. Do you any of your siblings share rooms? Yes. And this questionnaire just like making you feel poorer.

And I was like, I didn't realize I was in this bad a place until I applied to university and they're just telling me like the only advantage it gave me is they gave me a grade up or one lower. , to get into medical school there. I got through the interviews and at that time you had to be predicted three ass.

But most of the medics gave you a prediction of two As and a b or three ass. You. They would say something like that and they'd let you maybe slip 1 grade was the theory. But they gave me a one grade lower offer. They said we usually give a B, you're gonna get A, B, B. So that was it. After all this.

Soul searching and deprivation and background. You came to one grade, we're gonna drop you by one grade so that Cause you're poorer, you can come in if you get a B in something. I'm not sure those interviews are worth it, but go for it. And long story short, I ended up getting the grades I needed.

I ended up in medical school. Medical school was funny. Kids I didn't really have any empathy or commonize with you tend to find your own eventually. So I ended up leaving medical school probably with five or 10 really good friends out of a year of 240. And I think the other 230, I have no idea what they did or where they went in life, other than the odd Facebook, thing that pings up maybe sometimes.

And that was it. I've always been someone who's, has five or 10. Yeah, a small group of very good friends and I don't feel I need hundreds of friends. Not one of those people never have been. To me quality is definitely better than quantity. Yeah,

[00:26:56] Paddy Dhanda: no, I can vouch for that. I was just thinking about a few things he was talking about there, especially about being late and all of those things.

 I think some of your lateness must have rubbed off on me because I'm always late now, always for meetings. The ironic thing is for this episode, you and I are both late. I said, oh, we're gonna be late. I'm just grabbing a tea. And you went, oh, likewise. And so we ended up starting late. So it's going back to your job, right?

So you've talked there about how you got into medicine and then the struggles that you went through. For anyone that doesn't know about trauma, can you explain, first of all what it is that you do? Because that'll be great for me as well. I have a vague idea, but I've never really spent that focus with you to understand it deeper and also, what are some of the challenges that you face on a day-to-day basis?

Could you give us a typical day in your life at work?

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[00:29:24] Shure MV7-2: Now let's get back to the.

[00:29:27] Ansar Mahmood: I do trauma. The hospital Birmingham was a major trauma center and about almost 15 years ago, they decided that centralizing big complex trauma cases into big hospitals, they could have all the specialties that could deal with them in the uk, was the best way forward So they created that model.

So we, in the UK we have something like 20 odd, mid twenties, high twenties, major trauma centers. Birmingham's a regional one, for the city metropolitan area is the qe. So all of the complex trauma, whatever, however it's caused, comes to us. That's the hospital that I work in.

 One of our key professors who's been the bit, a big name in trauma across the UK and in the Midlands region. He is Professor Keith Porter. Uh, well, professor Sir Keith Porter. He interviewed me and was one of the people that helped me come into the trust at University of Birmingham.

Him and Julian Cooper. Shout outs to both of them. For the job in my first choice hospital that I wanted to when I finished. So I've gotta give him that credit. But prof shaped. Porter shaped a model of care, which was the same actually makes sense in anything.

You're a specialist in something and as a specialist in a disease, you make differences to people. Cancer specialists, even cancer, are now, people who deal with lung cancer specifically. People deal with all the types of cancer, et cetera. So we know specialization is, tends to improve outcomes.

And he had the idea that trauma's a disease. It's not a broken bone plus a broken head. They link, they create a physiological response in the patient. So we need disease specialists who created a major trauma service. And myself as a trauma surgeon, what I do is if when I'm on call in the day, or available in the day for the hospital, I see everyone that comes with injuries.

And I do two layers of on call. I do a trauma orthopedic on call, which deals with broken bones, dislocate joints, associated with anything car crashes through to just falling over and twisting your ankle and breaking it. That. So it needs fixing. They come to us. And then in the major trauma side, I deal with undifferentiated trauma, but that means it can be anywhere.

Cuz trauma , it's not selective disease. You know, cancer may only effect one area of your body for trauma. If you get hit by a bus, you tend to get hurt everywhere. You end up with a bad brain, bad face, bad chest, bad belly sometimes, and broken arms or legs. So in those sort of higher energy crashes, we see patients with lots of different problems.

 What a trauma specialist does is resuscitate and deal with that early part of keeping the patient alive, stabilizing them, but then follow their care through and understand what their priorities are, physiologically, making them back to normal. What the priorities for.

Reconstruction or et cetera. So we have that knowledge where we understand the disease very well. We know how to resuscitate, keep people alive in the very early phase. And then following that we operate on them. And I, as an orthopedic surgeon from background, tend to pick the bone side. And we have sort the specialists who do with brain and chest, et cetera.

Although as a bone surgeon, I do pick root fractures as well at QE Birmingham. We offer that service. That's sort of day job of a trauma surgeon. Most doctors probably hate trauma, it's fair to say. And the reason is it's unpredictable.

The patients you're gonna see every day are different and challenging and sometimes very challenging. We lose patients. They're dying our resource if they're too severely injured. And so that very hyper acute, sharp decision making that's required and sometimes losing people, having the stress of that.

It's something that I think most people probably shy away from. And so a lot of doctors really dislike trauma because of that hyper acute side of it. But I never have, and I think, one of the things I firmly believe in, if people ask me for career advice, I said, what you need to have is some insight into your personality.

And I think possibly growing up, it may be cause of reading or it may be why I went into reading. Actually. I'm not necessarily super humble and intro. I'm certainly not introverted. I don't think, although on I, I've done one of those Myers Briggs things and one of the one time it did say I was introverted science.

 I thought that was interesting. Oh, that test's wrong. No, they don't know what, yeah. Yeah, probably. Cuz most of the time I sit on the other side, but I'm not really an introvert, but I do set, reflect on myself, on the actions. And I remember growing up, even at school, if I saw somebody being bullied, Or I'd done something to somebody, it would make me feel bad because I think sometimes peer pressure, you'll say something horrible to somebody if your friends have said something horrible to them.

I suppose that's gotta be probably some nurture, there's nurture element to that. You know, nurture nature. I don't know what makes somebody kind. But I didn't like ever beating or threatening younger kids for instance, or trying to take things off people.

It was something that just inherently felt bad to me. I would leave that encounter thinking I wish that had happened. Even if it ended up being that somebody, one of my friends or friends circle to ended up taking something off somebody that wasn't, that belonged to them or had bullied them or hit them.

You wouldn't have wear stop it because it was peer pressure. Although I think I got the confidence as I grew up became a bit bigger and taller. I did actually use a stop quite a lot of bullying, which I am still fairly proud of. Or at least I would divert it away and say to people, what do you get out of doing that to somebody?

Whatever situation they're in, you shouldn't get a kick out of being horrible to them. But you know that in a broey sandwell accent, black country accent as a teenager, I make it sound very eloquent now, probably, but it wasn't quite like that.

 I didn't see the point of bullying someone, I never understood that. That probably shapes that I sort of fit into medicine, but I realized very early on in my very first few months outta medical school for a period, I actually thought I might even do medicine.

I might leave and do something else. But once I started working in it, I found one, I had the sickest patients that I really had to fix. That's what stimulated me. My brain woke up. I wanted to fix them. I wanted to go and read. I wanted to investigate. I wanted to see what their tests were. I didn't wanna leave the hospital.

I wanted to make that patient better. Once you get the patient's story and you get the background, you realize a bit about them. They mother or father or brother or sister tells you that this is so and so. This is John, my brother, and he's usually really funny and he fought in the army and he died from whatever shrapnel injury.

You get that sort of background. Suddenly you are invested in the case. And I think those first few patients that had been shot, run over, were very sick, stimulating me in a way that I thought actually, this is what makes me like this job medicine. I like medicine because people come in super sick.

I have a period of time to try and get them better. And it's up to me to find out what's wrong with them and to try and fix it. And that for some reason stimulated me. I can't tell you what I said, what kind of adverse personality disorder that gives me, I thought that stimulated me.

And so I went into, right from the get-go, went into trauma surgery, wanted to be a trauma surgeon from then, and trained in surgery, went to the busiest trauma centers in the country, went to a fellowship training in trauma. So I'm fairly broadly trained. And, um, ended up, at QE Birmingham, which as I said was my first choice for both family reasons and professional reasons.

It's a royal center for defense medicine. We see a lot of casualty from all around the world, and it's a good place to work. Obviously famous prop portal was there, so I was quite keen to go there and work with the guys there to learn from them. So I ended up with QE as a traumatologist.

I still deal with very sick patients. I think devastating cases you see that do stay with you. I think particularly younger people. Also some of those people that you've spoken to and taken a whole background from and created a bit of a personal link to, and then they end up dying.

It's challenging. It's definitely not an easy job. I enjoy it. I enjoy the challenge of coming in every day, having a different set of patients, getting it called in an emergency. And again, I dunno what kind of personality that gives me. You're getting it called in to try and help someone when they're in serious trouble.

 And just doing your best for them. And as I said, it's something that I've always enjoyed. I enjoy being at work at night and that sounds really strange, cause I do like to sleep. But when you're at work at night, it feels very personal. It's you against the world.

It's just you and the patient. I really like that interaction. When I'm on call, I like to see patients. I like to go and see people, find out what's wrong with 'em. It's one of the great frustrations I have when I see junior doctors complaining about being on call.

Cuz to me, that is what a doctor should love to do. Be on call, see patients, diagnose what's wrong with 'em, what you may be the first person who's actually gonna work out what's wrong with this person. See them, take that history, do the examination, find out what's wrong with 'em, then try and fix them.

That's what we were trained for. I always disagreed with how medical schools are vetted. I don't think it should be academic. Because we know the dropout rate people are now talking, it's really hot news at the moment.

But recruitment and retention, the nhs, that's why there's a, now the fifth junior adopt strike about to happen. And a consultant. Strike ballot in the N H s, which I don't think has happened in 40 years, has just been successfully validated for, so consultants will also go on strike in July, 2023, which is, like I said, almost unprecedented.

 This is the stress. The n h s currently under just a symptom of that stress. And I think post Covid, that stress, all the cracks that were already in the system have been completely exposed by Covid. The current global pandemic changed culture. It changes expectation, it changed the pressures in the nhs and people in the NHS realized how actually the job they do is quite special.

But not just specialists, it's specialized. So what they do, they do well. When you're trained in the nhs, you get fantastic training. Generally you've got far more patients than you can ever deal with. Mm-hmm. Which means you actually get a lot of, generally very good experience. Most of the trainers in the system are pretty good invested in training you.

Because that's the culture. That's one of the great positives of NHS culture. I'm not afraid to train people, whereas I've gone abroad and found people protect techniques because they don't wanna share it because private practice and people stealing their skills and it's actually a very, strange, when I go there and people are reluctant to let you come into theater to see what they're doing.

It's only happened a couple of times. I think most medics are very collegiate and want to show people what they do and how it benefits patients. Cause certainly if you're from abroad, you're not generally gonna threaten them, but in, they're very worried about their own environment or their own local surgeons finding out what they're doing.

That's not the NHS at all. I think almost nobody protects any of the intellectual property. We just give away knowledge and training. We expect wherever university hospital, you have medical students. It's been an interesting journey and I think still when I go to work, I enjoy being at work.

I think I'm lucky from that point of view and I think the consultant strikes are driven by frustration. The fact that they seem to be penalized for when the NHS off most consultants, it's common knowledge, earn extra money by doing extra work over time. An extra operating list or an extra clinic because the NHS is always behind.

There's a waiting list, right? So by definition we're always behind. Otherwise, there'd be no waiting list. You'd walk in and get your operation on the same day or the next day. There's a waiting list. Everyone knows that. So consultants are incentivized often to, well, can you do a bit extra work?

And then most people probably aren't aware. But in the last few years, the government created change in certain laws, which meant that if you do that over time, your tax burden suddenly accelerates because of a pension trap that they've created for doctors. It wasn't for doctors. They were trying to close a loophole and didn't analyze the unintended consequences of that.

Potentially, or maybe they did and really crafty and just thought, we'll get all these middle class people to pay billions of more tax by the time they've complained about it. It's taken a few years to sort it out. We have a few more deniros in the in the treasury being cynical now.

I dunno what drives politicians, it isn't what drives me. The NHS really is in a, so straight affairs, nothing unless somebody sorts that out we're gonna be in trouble. But I'm hugely loyal to nhs. It's one of the best things this country ever did, and it's a trauma traumatologist.

 You're not gonna see trauma anywhere else. There's no money in trauma or certainly not the doctors generally. But there's nothing in it for private hospitals. So nobody's interested in taking big, complicated patients that spend hundreds of hours of medical time and thousands of hours of nursing and therapy time.

The NHS takes on that burden, and so trauma would always be in the nhs and that's probably why I'll always be in the nhs.

[00:41:20] Paddy Dhanda: Yeah, at the moment, I think there's a big dilemma for many of us around what jobs are gonna continue in the future.

 Which sort of brings me on to some of the current themes around ai. And I know you are quite passionate about this as well. I heard there's a few countries doing kind of these tests at the moment where they're comparing doctors versus AI and who's managed to come up with the most accurate diagnosis in the most quickest speed.

From that perspective, are you afraid for your profession? And what's your opinion on ai? Where's it gonna go?

[00:41:58] Ansar Mahmood: I'm gonna say the same, everyone else's huge potential, possible danger. And I think the opportunity is certainly bigger than the threat in probably working life practice, but you're right, doctors, and certainly in my lifetime, you won't see surgeons going anywhere.

We may operate, do what we do differently, but there's nothing anywhere near on the horizon good enough to deal with the variations in human anatomy and the handling and the skills and the conceptual skills, what needs to be done in a controlled operation, but uncontrolled operation we saw in the case in trauma, cause we've tried to do simulated training, we've even tried to do computer based training, virtual training, and we just do not have the visuals or the haptics yet to replace bodies. We still train, we have to train through in trauma, in that heart decision making environment where you've gotta get in there and your hands get dirty and you've gotta actually do something to somebody to fix them immediately.

 That really can't be trained on anything else. I'm a big fan because of the data side. We know so much. We collect billions and billions of data points on patients, and yet the NHS doesn't have a clear way of analyzing this, and the NHS doesn't know our systems that talk to each other's.

It's crazy. We're not really a national health service, certainly from an infrastructure perspective. We don't share data anywhere near as well as we should. But if we analyze large bits of data, we've got it all. Now, if you think about it, if you had a sore hip from arthritis, and I've done an x-ray, knew you had arthritis, you know the, we've already got the technology, you're probably wearing a watch on your hand that measures your heart rate your steps, how long it took you to walk those steps.

So already this thing is already judging. Your fitness, your cadence, your walking rhythm, what your heart rate goes at, how fit you are, et cetera. And then we know you've got arthritis of the hip. We know how old you are. We've got millions of data points in the UK and around the world of people who have had joint replacements.

So like hip replacement before. We could literally be in a position and the tech that could put us there is already in existence. It's a pipe dream in the future. It's just the algorithm we have to get right software side of it. And that's something that we feed in.

But we already have the tech that if a patient comes to me for a hip replacement, as they walk into the clinic, they walk over a force meter and APL walking plate. We can have a 3D or 40 camera, which we already have, which assesses your gait as you walk. And on top of that, I've got all your wearable tech information.

When you're walking to clinic, I just need to look at an x-ray and say, your computer's already done all your maths. We know what you weigh. We know your fitness levels, we know how you walk, we know your gait pattern, we know your age, your Asian, your bone quality, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Based on all of these AI parameters and machine learning that we've gathered, this is the hip replacement you're gonna have, and this is the outcome you're likely to have.

And the computer says, go ahead and you can, and would this be in three weeks? It's that tech already exists where it will tell you specifically what your problem is compared to the other person, what the best solution may be. That's just looking at one aspect of orthopedics. If you step that into medicine, it goes on.

And the biggest threat, I always thought this when I first heard of AI, is radiology. Because radiologists with their eyes and all the experience they have ultimately are just rep doing pattern recognition all day long. They're just looking at pattern recognition. And anything that is 90% pattern recognition, the computer can do better than human.

 If you start to just feed trillions of pixels, Into a computer, say, pick out when you see certain patterns, it can do that beautifully. To some extent that's where it's been proven. Some of those headlines you're seeing are usually around radiologists being outperformed at looking at a CT scan or MRI scan by DeepMind or by a computer.

There's a couple of studies out there now where there's a few that computers have come out inferior. There is a few robust ones now showing that they can pick up certain things very quickly and you can see the rate that's gonna accelerate. We've seen what's happening cause you can just feed in scans for learning for a computer day and night, second by second.

 It would absorb hundreds of thousands of scans, which a radiologists will never, you don't live long enough to see that many and it will just absorb hundreds of thousands of scans. As long as you teach it correctly. It will start to become very accurate very quickly. And it's been shown to our perform humans.

Where that falls apart slightly is when there's something that's unusual. There's something unusual or there is something that is rare. You see something what a radiologist may only see five times in a career once they become a specialist or the rest of the guys from around the country send it to you as well.

So they may have seen 200 and everyone else has seen 10. You suddenly become the global national specialist. That's the word. You do something rare and you become a specialist very quickly. And I think they're certainly a threat. But in this country, no doctor feels a threat because when you look at comparative economies per head of population, we're the most depleted per head.

All of the English speaking countries, most of our European neighbors are something like three to four times as many doctors per head of population. That's why I don't think any of the medical force in the UK feels under threat at all by anything and probably won't need to for the next 10, 20 years.

But AI will certainly threaten some specialties more, but I think it's not necessarily a threat, it's simply a case of moving what you are good at. Cuz I don't think we're a very long way from AI replacing humans, even if it's just out to being a technician.

 20, 30 years maybe we'll be able to do radiological procedures better than a radiologist maybe sooner if people really do accelerate. But it comes outta the r and d. Most doctors do not feel threatened by AI other than perhaps, it still feels very far away, it feels like Terminator.

[00:47:35] Paddy Dhanda: It feels like it's a bit of a toy at the moment. I drew a visual on Instagram the other day, and I drew a little pet dinosaur and as humans we're petting it. It's a cute cuddly little thing. And then I drew another visual about.

30 years into the future and then like the dinosaurs got a chain around the human's neck and now wear the nice cuddly little thing. I'm obviously being quite negative and extreme about it, but I think some jobs will probably end up like that.

 One of the things I wanted to very quickly explore with you is in a lot of jobs that we do, it's about the team around you. I'm sure the same is the case for yourself, that having other humans around you are really there to support you and help you. And I guess we can't do the jobs we do without that support around us.

How does a team impact the work that you do and are there any techniques that you guys use to, for example, run your meetings or even reflect on if things are going well or not? Like how do you guys

[00:48:35] Ansar Mahmood: work as a team? I think surgeons have traditionally got a reputation where most people think they're a bit arrogant. They're shouty louder, taller and so they tend to tell people what they do, what to do, et cetera.

These are all sort of stereotypes around surgery, but I think surgeons are acutely aware that they're part of a team. So I almost can't do anything to most patients unless you are wide awake and low anesthetic surgery is really expanding. It is never gonna replace all types of surgery where you've gotta bit to sleep at the end of the day.

 You need people to help you. The equipment we use is increasingly complex and there's hundreds of bits of kit. So most surgeons now rely on scrub staff, theater staff, everybody to know all of this equipment, know where it is, make sure it's ready. you don't do it yourself.

You go about for 30, 40 years and surgeons have to look at stuff themselves and go, I need that, that, that, that. And if I don't have it, and we'll have to water it, it'll come in 48 hours or they'll, or next week even, somebody has to make it for you. That was a situation 40, 50 years ago.

So it was almost custom made and you ordered what you needed for that week on the Monday when you did round and it arrived on Wednesday and you did an operation. I remember seeing professors telling me that's the way you worked in the seventies and eighties. The world has certainly changed, but your team's crucial. And when you're dealing with complex trauma, a severely injured patients, the teams are massive. I mean, sometimes actually in what we call code red patients, those are people who are actively bleeding.

So they've got a life threatening bleeding, but it's ongoing. Those patients need an answer fairly quickly. And so what we tend to do is we do an even larger call out. There's a trauma alert that goes out, emergency beliefs, buzzers, phones for the doctors in the hospital and out of the hospital potentially.

And they will descend on that resuscitation room over the next few minutes, patient arrives and they sometimes have a team of forget five or 10. It can be 40 or 50 people in the room waiting for one patient to arrive. And that's something the NHS has, if you look at that response, it's enormous, the cost to it, the specialty in the nhs.

This is one of the beauties of it. You can arrive in hospital and have millions of pounds worth of care. See, we're leading specialists and it doesn't cost you a penny. It is quite incredible that you can get that sort of response. I appreciate that's probably the detriment of some of the poor patient who probably just needed something simple doing and all those teams instead turned up in a and e to deal with this very sick person.

But it depends which shoe you are wearing. I think the team working is crucial. We teach it. We set up our own course for the major instant surgical training, course for teams. It's a teams focused course. How to think about it. You do work in teams and I'm gonna do another shout out to a good colleague, a old friend of mine, Chris Turner, is an A&E consultant, actually here in the Midlands.

And we worked together in some tough times. We were juniors in training together. And he created a campaign called Civility Saves Lives. And Chris did some great work with a team of people. Where he gathered data on this and he actually found that For instance, if you shout at the people in the room with you, if you're the senior surgeon and your team aren't performing very well, you may shout at them and say you need to do this better. Also, same with junior doctors or same with a nurse.

 Anybody if you're disrespectful and you're not civil to them. What he did was he gathered data on this and what happened to their performance, how effective their psychology, how effective their turnover in theaters or efficiency of services to patients and effectively no surprise every parameter drops so that people don't get better.

if You shouted at them. You could argue lots of things in this area. Cause I've spoken to very senior surgeons around the world and they say no, if you don't do that, then they don't get better. If they get better, which we then don't measure, they get better steadily over time and they get better quicker.

It may be even a added shouting episode. So I know there's always two arguments to any coin. I've worked with very senior others in other centers in the uk The hierarchy's very flat now for people in hospital. Surgeons don't dictate what happens in theater. It's a team exercise and everybody decides, and if we don't have the runner available in theater and they're crucial to that operation, the operation doesn't happen.

It doesn't matter how the, or the anesthetist or anybody else wants it to happen. We have of. There are sort of mechanisms, if there's people you need them. Right? And there's no real hierarchy. And the NHS has flattered that off quite a lot. Obviously there's decision makers like the surgeon underneath this who will be deciding what happens to the patient.

But you need the whole team, without 'em you can't do a safe procedure sometimes. So the sort of team working is crucial. We build on that, we do training around it, but it's still, after all of that, it is the most difficult thing to do.

 Actually outside of the nhs, I run a small business where I've got employees and actually employees are the most difficult part of a business. It's not the business, it's actually the workers. The relationships, trust, all these sort of things. Hard work, what people want.

Remuneration getting a culture. That doesn't matter whether you got a team of two. A team of 20, or a team of 24,000, which the trust. I currently work in the biggest in the country. If culture's wrong, I remember I've been sat in quite a few meetings recently and I've heard this repeated many times, which is culture eats, strategy for breakfast and no matter how good your strategies delivered can change.

If the culture is wrong or people don't feel they're being adequately recognized, rewarded, whatever it might be, it creates a hostile or a toxic environment. It doesn't matter how good your strategy is, who you hire or fire. If you don't change that culture, the performance doesn't change.

And I'm unfortunate gonna say now that my beloved NHS is in that trap, the culture is wrong. The rewards are inadequate. I'm not even just talking about financial rewards. You just be wellbeing, wellness at work, people struggle to get food. If they come in for a night shift, they may be doing a 12, 13, 14 hour night shift.

There's not food at some of the hospitals or they're on a vending machine. That's the only thing available. The vending machine breaks down. And then you've got busy doctors, nurses trying to order pizza in from a takeaway in the middle of the night trying to get fed, and that's just a small example. No rest areas for doctors. And there's lots and lots of things that be taken away and no replacement has come in. And then it's all these little things and you think, you know what disgruntled people. What is interesting is you don't remember being in a position where you were without, once you've got what you've got.

I think that's something that people should reflect on. Cuz I now hear, and I'm one of them, I do it fairly regularly, but I see the junior doctors complain about their workloads and I think, oh God, you know what? Funny years ago when I was there, I worked three times as hard as you did.

There was no hours restrictions. I was working a hundred hours a week. I was. Day and night, whatever the patient or the doctor or my consultant needed, that was a different working ethic slash relationship. But then I also had free university. At Free university. I left university with lower debts.

We were in a generation where pay and conditions are generally improving over about 20 years. Over the last 15 to 20 years, the reverse has happened. We've now got a generation of people who are gonna be poorer than their parents for the first time since the Industrial Revolution are probably gonna drop life expectancy for the first time since the Industrial Revolution.

We're not in a equal place. And wherever there's that level of imbalance in society and lack of opportunity potentially. And again, we're talking about the UK here. We're talking about lack of opportunity. I don't think there is lack of opportunity in the uk.

I think there's plenty of it. I don't think the culture is there where people wanna harness it. We don't give people, we don't empower people with the tools and skills and simple things to have access to. Why should you have to get GCSEs or a levels to progress? Maybe your strengths are somewhere else ?

 I think the pendulum always swings too far, right? Nowadays I see lots of kids being diagnosed as a D H D or having some sort of a special educational need, uh, attention deficit disorder, whatever it might be. Borderline spectrum, Asperger's and there is a diagnostic criteria for giving people these labels, right?

But in our days, what was that? It was just a slightly naughty kid, wasn't it?

[00:56:29] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, problem child. Yeah. That

[00:56:30] Ansar Mahmood: was like, yeah, problem child tell you, difficult control, poor behavior won't concentrate is immature. All these sort of labels were given, and I think now we've over medicalized. You and I see kids who are a perfectly normal child.

They're likely attentive. They're a bit cheeky and they wanna run around a lot, but now they've got a diagnosis instead of just being, well, you'll grow out of that, which they will. I've seen some of those young kids that were given all these labels. I've seen 'em three years later and they're completely different.

 I think if you give someone a label, they should have that generally, and they may adapt for it. But if you've got d adhd, I think that impacts you mostly of your life. It doesn't just switch off. And I think a lot of these kids that get these labels, you see them five or 10 years later, they don't seem to have that adhd.

So I suspect I never had it in the first place, or maybe it's a transient thing, but I'm going into a specialism that I don't really understand. But I think kids is wrong. I think schools actually, I'm going off on tangent slightly, but are slightly better now overall, I think, than they ever used to be.

That, I dunno what your feelings are on that, but I get that impression. One thing that I remember hearing very recently on a radio show or a podcast, was that we've now currently got the safest generation who ever lived in history, okay? According to all statistics, whether it comes to disease and malice and violence and death by whatever, a violent ending, safest generation ever lived in history.

Yet, if you look at all the anxiety indexes and the depression scores and the societal indexes, we've got the most afraid generation ever lived in history, coupled with that, them being the safest ever. And so what is it that's creating that level of societal global angst. I don't think we've really got a handle on that.

And I think if we don't have a handle on that, we don't know what's. Driving wellness in our communities society, you're only gonna see a downward spiral. I don't wanna be negative about it, but we saw a reduction in interpersonal violence in the trauma world for 30 years until 2018. And then 2018, it started spiraling back over 7%, 10% growth year on year.

What led to that? What was the trigger? We don't know. That's what I'm saying. Actually, we don't know. I've asked police officers, I've asked social workers, I've asked all the trauma docs, people don't really know. I've got my own hypothesis. So I've spoken to lots of people, seen lots of things over many years.

And what I do remember is around 2008 when the financial crisis happened, kids at that age were bystanders. And one thing I've learned about kids and having my own kids is that they pick up and absorb far more than you ever give them credit for. Okay. So we think they're not really listening or understanding what's happening around them.

They prove us long wrong all the time. And I think that in terms of an eight, myself and my wife, and my wife is a lawyer and I'm a trauma surgeon, so we tend to deal with that echelon of society that's challenged a lot of the time and we both went, oh, we're gonna get really busy.

We're gonna get really busy over the next few years with this financial crisis. And we could see this recession looming, and the banking problems and the housing issues. We thought, God, there's gonna be people unemployed and poverty. And interestingly that did happen. Everything got stretched and we went into this period of austerity that everybody talks about.

 But they didn't happen, right? The crime rate didn't go up. Violence didn't happen. And I think there's two elements that, one is fairness. The bank, I say everybody. In fact, it's one of those rare crises that sometimes the riches got hit even more than the pool. So actually everyone looked around at everybody and went, everybody's screwed.

Right? Everybody's screwed. And that's fair. That's fair. I think if society feels something's fair, it just writes it. Everyone's taking a hit. So nothing happened. We looked at the crime rates for the next five years. No crime rates went up. Trauma didn't go up. The trauma steadily goes up a little bit each year anyway, usually cause of the elderly, we get aging population.

 But nothing happened until 2018. What happened in 2018 was the kids who were eight or nine or 10 or 12 were absorbing uncertainty, stressed parents, marriage breakdowns, mortgage, repossessions of houses, whatever it may be. They were hearing all of this uncertainty in the world that they were children in.

And that went on for years and years and years. Being told your opportunities lower, your jobs are lower, your prospects are lower. We can't afford this, we can't afford that. We can't afford this. All the services across society, were sort of cut back that I think that's the generation we're facing now.

Cause those 10 or 12 or 80 year olds are now 18, 20 and 22. They've grown up in a slightly different environment with different expectations and I don't think we ever really analyzed that psychologically. We've got the power of social media, the internet, and all the other things that we can see.

So I think people, what they see and what they want from their lives can often be stratospherically different. And I think people's tolerance of accepting that is lower than it ever was previously. Their coping ex mechanisms are probably poorer cause society hasn't given it to them. We've isolated our kids and teenagers more than they ever have been because they can disappear off into a virtual world.

Onto a Facebook or platform or an Instagram. You don't even have to interact with people ever. And we allow that to happen. Our kids on their devices 6, 7, 8 hours a day, they certainly aren't seeing relatives or talking to adults that period. They're usually not talking to their friends.

They're just often I just see them sitting there and they're just absorbing. They're just watching again and again and again. Your audiovisual learning is most powerful at that age. I do think we're letting our kids down slightly. We need to give them different coping mechanisms.

 We need to tell them that life's tough and good. Most people put their best photos, what holiday they're on. You know how amazing their family is.

Look at the family meal we're having. They don't do what happened to me yesterday in a restaurant. Went to lovely family meal. And my older teenager bothered. My younger teenager, reached out, drink, went onto a lap, he responded by slapping the source out of my daughter's hand.

That, and you pull over a dress, so then there's a fire. And I was crying and I'm shouting at people, you're embarrassing me in a restaurant. You know, that's the real world, right? That's what happens. And I should have put down on Instagram with all my kids crying around me at a eat.

I think that would've gone viral as

[01:02:42] Paddy Dhanda: that, that sort of thing is like what people wanna see that's relatable.

[01:02:46] Ansar Mahmood: The Coke medicines deal with the fact that their life may be poorer, cheaper, less so than what appears to be the case for other people. The grass is always green on the other side, isn't it? I think there's a huge world out there. Deprivation is increasing, not decreasing just in the volume of people probably cuz the population's expanded so quickly.

But it's incredible that we're traveling more probably, although again, that's reduced in the last number of years since the pandemic. But we've got kids who are interestingly more aware of the world because of the internet and the global space, and are probably less racist misogynistic than the previous generations.

 And are more accepting. So there's a lot of kindness in them. Actually they don't really have the social skills graces and practice to get what they need from that. And that's where the adults are letting them down. Maybe our adults let us down. We're not teaching us, we're not teaching our kids now, but it is an unprecedented world.

I still remember my oldest boy growing up before the first iPhone came, and I remember Google being launched while you and I were at university. It was MSN and Yahoo Messenger or something. And that's all you had? Yeah, AOL and net. Yeah, aol. Yeah. And you searched on that.

Suddenly this silly little thing called Google came along, that just sounded like an interesting name and nobody really understood it. And then look where they are now . It's become a term of actors use, just Google it, it's the brand name in every house in the world. I think the way lives have changed, it's been unprecedented.

No generations had to see that sort of accelerated. Parents should be kind to themselves as well, but what they do need to do is, get slightly old fashioned about discipline. Might sound very old like that. Yeah. But discipline and set expectations.

If your kids want, rights, you remind them of the responsibilities before they get their rights to pocket money or whatever else it might be that they want. Well, I'm having that

[01:04:39] Paddy Dhanda: dilemma right now. As we brought ourselves a little puppy and it was because the kids were badgering us for probably the last two years.

And I finally gave in and my daughter's okay. She seems to do her little chores with the dog. She brushes him, she brushes his teeth, all that kind of stuff. But my boy, he's slacking a bit at the moment, so I need to have a word. He promised me, as they all do that, he would take it outta walks.

He would pick up the potty stuff, like all of the things that I was dreading. None of it's come true yet, but we'll see. We'll figure that one out. We're fast running out of time and this episode we have explored so many avenues and so many insights, so thank you for that.

My one big question for you, having gone through the experiences that you've been through and being on that journey, looking back at your younger self, maybe at the age of 20, what would you tell yourself now that

[01:05:37] Ansar Mahmood: you know what you know?

That's a good question. That's somebody that maybe should have insight into that, but I actually what I say to everyone is do what suits your personality. I've always gone with that philosophy. The problem with that is you can make someone really difficult to live with.

And I think you have to accept that. I have a long suffering wife and kids and one of the reasons they don't wanna be doctors is cuz I can do seven days a week or sometimes weeks on end and it's not always just medicine, it's cuz of my other positions and lectures and conferences and other things I go to.

If I accept, go into these things, I can be. Away a lot and busy doing seven day weeks where I'm not around doing all the kind of things. I spend time with family, birthdays, anniversaries, weddings. And I usually make time, we're always try and do whatever I can, but I am getting to a point where I definitely need to shrink wrap that life and that box.

And so what I would probably tell my younger myself is give them that advice. Just say, focus on what's important. Probably get more focused. I think again, what drives your personality through experience. And I'm somebody that likes opportunity. I make my own opportunity. But then what I probably don't do is, so I want to do everything.

I'm not somebody who likes to drop something. I wanna do everything. I want to go everywhere. I wanna see everything. I think at some point you've gotta talk to yourself and think, what is it that's important to you? And people don't wanna be surgeons now because it takes 10 years of training.

 When I remember looking back in it, I'd committed. That's the way surgery works. And you had to accept that. Because surgeons had that reputation even as trainees then it's hard work. And you get, it's a craft specialty. The only way you get good at it is by doing lots of practice. You are seeing patients and you've gotta do your procedures and that's how you get good at surgery and be well trained and all the rest of it. Cause that reputation is a lot of competition to get into medical school. There's a lot of competition to get into surgical training and then even more competition to get into higher surgical training specialist. Then you become a consultant and by the time I became a consultant, I'd been studying medicine for 20 years, if you include my medical school days.

 I've now finished my last exam 20 years after I entered medical school to become a consultant surgeon, which is what I'm doing. It is a long haul journey and I think That puts people off. But I think it is potentially hugely rewarding because my wife always asked me, if they didn't pay you, what would you do?

And I said, I'd as in if the country ran outta money. You've gotta earn money. So I'd have to find another job. But the skills you have, I think in medicine isn't just all about money. I think it's sounds really old-fashioned, but the vocational element to what we do, you have to be willing to do it anyway.

And I couldn't see somebody injured and I've got the skills to do something and not treat them. It's one of the reasons I didn't do many fellowships or go abroad very often to the healthcare economies. Cause I believe what the NHS does and I think we do it as well as anywhere else. And when I have been abroad I've troubled quite a lot now.

I don't see anything better happening anywhere else is the honest answer. There's some better systems, there's more efficiency, there's all those sort of business aspect things. The NS needs to do much better. But we're as good as many other countries when it comes to what we actually do to patients.

The way we work, collaborative, the complex surgeries we do, and were as well practiced as most of the surgeons. The first time I went to the US I was expecting these guys to be brilliant. Because they do so much more experience and cutting. But you realize the training's much shorter.

The training is much shorter in the US than the uk. It's a post-grad course. Some mature people come in, learn what they need to learn and then become surgeons and they're very good at talking. And some of them are excellent surgeons. I'm not saying that they're not any good, but what I was surprised at is I thought all US surgeons would be a step above, say the UK surgeons.

What I actually found is almost the reverse, because most of our surgeons would do several hundred of any procedure. Cause there's so many patients and there's big waiting list and there's less competition and there's less doctors. We see a lot. We do a lot. And some of these guys only do 10 20 of those big procedures a year.

But there's a big differential in quality. I don't know whether I'd do anything differently. That's really difficult and it'd be a challenging question. I think for me, I'd have to really reflect on that, beyond the length of this interview.

But I think I would probably just give myself some of those advices and maybe give my wife a heads up cuz she might have changed her mind rather than my mind. And she does certainly says to my kids, don't marry a surgeon because, but I always say to them, it's not about surgeon, I'm just slightly different to most surgeons as well.

Cause I think all of my colleagues, I certainly do too much and take on too much. But I'm somebody that won't accept the status quo. And I dunno what drives that from me. I can't accept where I am. And I think somebody who sets their goals, As being, I'm happy where I am. I know there's a lot of happiness in that, but I never am, I always think there's a way to be better.

You can do this, you can do this, you can do this. I don't believe in being stagnant. I don't wanna be doing the same thing this year as next year. So I'm always thinking, well, what else can I do? What else can I develop? If there's more skills, whether it's in surgery or without surgery, I'm always trying to do something new.

 I was just telling you about exams for 20 years. I'm actually sitting in a university course again at the moment, people crazy with how busy I am, and I'm still sitting in an exam course at the moment and I've just done a US board exam last week. Stuff that a lot of people would say, what are you doing it for?

It's voluntary, right? So you don't need to do it. But to move on and learn. I do enjoy learning. I got that feeling. But,

[01:10:51] Paddy Dhanda: but, and thank you so much. From my perspective, there's so many things in there that I had no idea about. And I think that's a really good way to finish off is that constant learning, constant upgrading of our knowledge.

 Even we touched upon ai, but the fact is we've gotta constantly adapt. There are gonna be tweaks to our day jobs. There are gonna be tweaks to our careers. We've gotta be prepared to feel a little bit uncomfortable. In the intro of the podcast, I always say to people, sit back and get very uncomfortable because for me, whenever I felt uncomfortable, yes, it's scary, but.

Afterwards you feel great. Like when sometimes you're asked to present in front of tons of people. Yes, that's a scary thought. But once you've done it, that dopamine hit, you get, it just makes you want more. Obviously we can always improve and do better for next time, but I think just having that mindset is fantastic.

You were probably the one person who introduced me to reading a lot early on in life. You were just a bookworm. You read so much I never used to read. And this podcast has reinvigorated that hunger for reading. And I can't say I'm still the most avid reader, but I certainly spend a lot more effort trying to read now.

I just wish I'd done it back then when you and I were were growing up because I remember you used to recommend these books. David Gemmel was the author.

 Anyway, just before we go, just really for you to give a shout out to any other great work that you are doing. I know you mentioned you've got some other work that you do as well. Anything you'd like to share with the listeners on that?

[01:12:22] Ansar Mahmood: I teach around the world now. But most of the teaching I do know is either trauma related, which makes sense. But actually I do a lot of what we call regenerative medicine.

Regenerative medicine, I got really interested in from a trauma background, you know, healing people using their natural growth factors, doing sometimes things to wounds, to bones to get them to heal without big surgery. So it is something I got interested in, like most things you geek out running for a number of years.

At what point do you realize, and I've thought this, cuz now I'm seen as I get a lot of people saying, you they give you titles like he's Mr. P R P, whereas he is the regen guru. I've been, or recently when somebody introduced me to someone and I thought, you can't speak like imposter syndrome.

I sit there thinking, yeah, I know quite a lot about this stuff or because I've studied it for a long time. But the difference I think is that people appreciate is there's not many people in the world that know the science, know how to do it, and then actually do it to patients and then have that live sort of cycle of feedback where you're a researcher, you're a practitioner and you are the translational person in between those two things as well.

 I think that's quite unique and that's what's given me a perspective where I, from end to end know the business. Cause I stand in conferences where you've got very senior professors, world famous scientists, but they've never treated a patient. So they don't actually know what happened when you do this procedure to somebody.

 That doesn't damage their credibility in science. But certainly to me, when they're telling me what to do with patients, that doesn't give me any, I. Particular credibility in what they've got to say. When I treated hundreds of thousands of patients with various things and seen the results, sometimes they gone on for years.

So people will tell you it might be a placebo effect, right? Cause that's quite powerful in science. But actually placebo effects don't tend to make people better for years and years and years in my experience. It's an interesting area and again, you've established before that I like change and I like development and it's the fastest developing area of medicine.

Probably genomic therapy and regenerative medicine. They're changing all the time. There's something new coming around the corner all the time. There's lots to study, lots to learn. Huge amount of potential. We haven't all harness even we're only just getting the start of this really, and what it can potentially deliver to us.

Cuz gen medicine is the art, it's a science of modifying the way disease progresses. We're also turning it off potentially, you can turn off disease, you can turn the clock back on disease. You can literally make people a bit younger. I say a bit at the moment cause that's where the evidence is, but with the aging medicine, inflammation medicine and regenerative medicine, all coming combining, that's where we're heading.

[01:14:55] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, wow. That's a whole episode in its own right. We'll do a deep dive on that, maybe another time when I get the opportunity to speak to you again. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Good luck and thank you for everything you're doing.

Discover the superpower of embracing your identity and uniqueness. In this episode we delve into the problem of pigeonholing that plagues our society, where the world expects people to meet their expectations. Discover why your uniqueness is important and why you should be proud of your identity. Get to know the importance of healing your traumas and balancing your day remembering about the inner child that everyone has. 

Key topics covered in this episode:

👉🏽 Impact of earlier experiences while making decisions

👉🏽 Embracing your uniqueness

👉🏽 Things that consume your brain energy 

Toni Liu (Leadership Coach/Careers Coach)

As a qualified Careers and Executive Coach accredited by the Association for Coaching and with 10+ years of coaching talents at leading international business schools, Toni is passionate about helping clients maximise performance and develop potential through raising self-awareness and clarifying tools of actions and purpose. She enjoys coaching professionals for career transitions and leaders going through significant periods of change or facing particular challenges in their personal and business lives. Her expertise lies in getting clients to unblock limiting beliefs, gain true confidence with authenticity and develop practical strategies for obtaining transformational business results and personal growth. Toni also holds strong interests in holistic wellness to enable healing and growth on a deep rooted level for personal transformation. She is a qualified yoga teacher and practices ancient techniques such as mindfulness and Jyotish.

LinkedIn: Click Here

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⚡️ In each episode, Paddy Dhanda deep dives into a new human Superpower and practical advice on how you can apply it immediately.

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Transcription:

[00:01:06] Paddy Dhanda: Thank you for joining us for another episode of the Super House School podcast. I'm your host, Patty Daner, and on today's episode, I have an amazing guest. I often say amazing guest in most episodes, but I really do mean that today because even our conversation prior to kicking off the recording of this episode, we were talking a little bit about what we might cover today.

And I'm super excited because I think it's a topic that I personally will get a lot of value from and I'm hoping then I'll be asking some really good questions. So for this episode, we have. The amazing Tony Le, who is a London-based leadership coach, she has been coaching at some of the leading. Educational institutes, including Imperial College, Cambridge Bays Business School, and a few others as well that I can't pronounce. So, I'd love to welcome Tony to the show today.

[00:02:02] Toni Liu: Thank you so much, Patty, for the kind introduction. Me too. I'm really excited to really impart on the knowledge and experience I had developed and hopefully we can bring something really exciting to your audience.

[00:02:13] Paddy Dhanda: I know I said to her at the start, I'm super excited about this and just hearing a snippet of what you're gonna talk about got me really intrigued. Tony, what superpower would you like to bring to this episode?

[00:02:25] Toni Liu: I'd really love to explore the topic of lost in careers and that lack of motivation in what we do in life.

Because I've really observed many of my clients currently experiencing similar obstacle when they come to pivoting careers and when it come to progressing. And navigating their life. So I feel like there is something I'd really love to explore with you together and hopefully bring some insights to our audience and for them to make better decisions and help them create a better and healthier life.

[00:02:59] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, fantastic. And before we jump into the subject matter, we were talking briefly just before we kicked off about your background and the fact that you've traveled to many different countries, you've. Had this worldly experience. So I'd love to hear more about your background and how have you managed to get to where you are today?

[00:03:22] Toni Liu: Really good question. And I think very often our decision making career is also rooted from our family values, family education and the belief system we carry in our private experience. So I was brought up in a very traditional Chinese family and as an Asian from a later age.

And my parents expected me to achieve academic excellence. So I was basically sent to New Zealand on the age of 17 to complete my a lab. And interestingly enough, at the time I didn't thought there was quite a traumatic experience, but actually years later, identify actually was. But nevertheless, as the only daughter I just felt like, under the financial obligation as well, my parents pay high sort intuition fees every year for me. And I decided to study abroad graduated from university and started working in sales and marketing for some the corporate business in New Zealand and Australia.

And then at some point after finishing my, university and started working in New Zealand, there was a inner calling to come to Europe and I couldn't explain it, but I knew I had to leave. I knew I had to jump. And no one in my family agreed with. I think they all thought I was mad because my life was extremely stable in New Zealand, I had everything I wanted and, lifelong friends that I can always go back and really always being there for me. And so that nobody really understood why I wanted to let go of a very stable life and to come to the uk. But I followed that inner calling because I felt like, the world was, Much bigger than what it was.

And I always wanted to explore different cultures and different people. And funnily enough, as soon as I arrived in the UK I fell home here straight away and most people said, oh, subway in Cub, I was extremely busy and now I completely fell. I was home as soon as arrived in London. And I've never requested the decision, even though the start of my life in London was extremely difficult, right?

Because you had to start somewhere from zero. And I arrived in the country in year 2008, which was the beginning of the financial crisis. So I was under a lot of financial pressure and to really reestablish my life from zero. But that experience really helped me to learn letting go.

 Very often in career, I think one of the most difficult thing was to actually let go. It's hard to imagine because we don't know what is ahead of us. But I always say that if there's a piece of inner calling within yourself to do something, it's gonna be very meaningful to you.

Then the risk is definitely worthwhile because what is worst can happen. I told myself at the time, the worst could happen was just that I just moved back to New Zealand. That was the worst that could happen to me. I think I'm been always interested in different cultures and interested in exploring the world and, here in the UK and Europe just always been very dear to my heart and it has really, I felt like I met a lot of kindred spirits, if that makes sense.

Since arrived, In the UK and, many of the people I met, I feel like I've met them in my private lives, or I just know them. So it has been really a great experience for me and along the way I've learned a lot as well. I've learned that not to really, to get attached to.

What you used to do or what life used to be? When I first arrived in London I had to live in a hostel. Because I only had like 7,000 pounds in my bank account, and I knew it wouldn't last me very long. And at the age of 26, I just knew that I had to start, there while I'm looking for a job.

 I had a comfortable life in New Zealand where I work in sales and marketing for, some big brands, really. And I think just taking that risk and taking a step down to restart my life, that was a good lesson for me to learn in my twenties, and I'm quite grateful, actually, I learned that in my twenties.

[00:07:13] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, brilliant. I was gonna ask you a question on that actually, Tony, because first of all, I'm an only child, so I are, you completely relate to having Asian parents who have high expectations and expecting you to do great academic things. I don't think I lived up to any of that, but anyway we'll move on from there.

 I've got this sort of mindset now that with my kids, I would love for them to get outta their comfort zone more and more. My daughter the other day was having to do a talk in front of her class, and she was really nervous about it. There was lots of anxiety and no matter what I said, she was anxious.

But what I found from my own personal experience is every time I've put myself out there a little bit, tried something new, it's helped me build a little bit of strength or immunity to anxiety. I can't say that I'm not anxious now when I do a talk or, go to a new place. But I feel like having those small experiences has really helped in your situation, for a young girl of 17 years old, moving to a whole new country all by yourself, what were you thinking?

What was your mindset back then, and how do you think you then had changed by the time you came to England? Because at the age of 26, you would've had at least nine years of, really feeling uncomfortable.

[00:08:41] Toni Liu: I think ever since I was little, I've always been interested in foreign cultures and maybe that was a bit of uncommon thing as well.

And that's why that I talk about identity at the very beginning. Even now, even though people can say, oh you, are you Chinese or you are Kiwi or are you British? I go of that because I feel like the more you're attached to identity over identification always leads to suffering.

 You might be a fan of, Chelsea Football Club and, joking Patty, but what I mean is that, you can't always win. And the day that you lose, that's where suffering will kick in. So, I might be overly passionate about, my nationality, for example.

I could be so proud of that I'm Chinese whatsoever. But then the over-identification thing one day or another, it will lead for some form of suffering. I find it's very difficult for me to call myself a coach or a Chinese, British whatsoever.

Cause I feel like these days we're extremely complex. For example, you are that you are the only child you are very loving son, and you are loving husband and you talk about some of the amazing, things you're doing simultaneously.

I think it's extremely difficult, to do that. I think that kind of understanding early on maybe my interest was, the foreign culture and the fact that my mom sent me to learn English when I was seven. That I've. Always been interested in western pop music, since I was very little.

I think all those early experience authentically from my interest had really led me to step outta my own country. A lot easy because I was genuinely interested in this. So people think immigrants move to another country, you get a better life. I don't agree with that.

I think it's not about, getting a better life, but it should be extremely interested in their culture. Just a natural sort of interest towards learning more about why they do what they do and, why people would actually, Talk to each other in a very polite way or why would they shake hands differently or why certain cultures will kiss us on the cheek and they'll shake their hands or they'll give each other hugs.

 All of these human aspects just interest me in a very kind of deep way. And I felt like I've always follow that. In a way that I think my mom wanted me to pursue my academic excellence but for my own, sort of interest it was slightly easier for me to leave my home country because.

Genuinely I had that interest. Similarly to my experience moving to London as well, I was genuinely interested in the British culture. I was interested in exploring the amazing arts, theaters and cultures and exhibitions and just all the creativities that London has to offer. And I knew that, to seeing the rest of Europe, London would be a really amazing base.

 That was something I really wanted to do in my twenties. Similarly when it come to careers as well, is very often I think people make decision based on the fact that, oh, I learn math, or I learn business analytics and therefore I should be an analyst, or I should work in a bank, or I should deal with numbers.

 Actually I was reading something really interesting by Dr. Arlene Taylor. She is a brain function researcher and it's really interesting, she said that in life in order for us to be content, you need to fund your band. Bent is every one of us has something very unique giftedness, so extremely positive aspects.

 Some people may have one. Uniqueness and other people have many uniquenesses basically. It is really just about the fact that we can identify the uniqueness and hold it. And the wisdom is that she said if you can match 51% of the tasks, you do align those with your uniqueness and you live.

A happier life, than the majority of the people. It's proven that you'll be healthy and happier and, live a longer life. But unfortunately I think most of us are actually adapting in life. Most of us have learned very well in certain tasks we are trained at.

 I think if we wanted to train to be investment banker, consultant to a certain degree, I think we can all. Not train pretty well to do that. But the differences are that if the tasks don't really give you energy, because our brain consumes energy, right? So our brain constantly consumes energy because it really relies on the bloodstream.

So what it does, the amount of the nutrition, the brain consumes, Basically fees a consumed energy. If we understand that the brain consumes energy, then the brain recognize the best on the things we naturally good at. So when we adapt to the task, the danger of that is the brain consumes more energy.

 But if we tap into the things we naturally good at, Then that we saving energy for the brain and therefore actually it will create a more healthier and immunity toward US wellness. Whole thing is really around that, it's not really about doing things that we are trained to do or we are trained From our educations or, whatever there is.

It's really about combining that with our uniqueness and without seeking the external validation. And as parenting, I think one of the things you mentioned really interesting as well is to really want to give our children the best. How do we do that?

I think one of the things we should also do to ourselves is that we should treat ourselves. Many days everyone talks about inner child, right? Inner child healing. If we can treat ourselves as our own kids, our own children, How do we then make decisions differently to identify the uniqueness of ourselves and what naturally drives us energy, and it's not difficult to identify them.

So if I can ask you, think about your day, what are the tasks you like to procrastinate. Because if you identify them over a period of time, there is a pattern patty, and you'll be able to identify those things. And you see them as things that I guarantee you those are, things are not, the things will naturally give you energy.

For example, I'm really bad at accounting side of the things, like doing my tax return is just driving me mad as a result now I just outsource them. It's really important to recognize those things And if you can let go of those things and focus on the things that really gives you energy naturally if you can only just do 51% of them, this is what this doctor says, right?

51% of them you can sandwich the tasks between and naturally it will give you a much better satisfaction at work now.

[00:15:32] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, that's so interesting and fascinating because I do some crazy things outside of my day job and. Part of that is podcasting. Part of it is some of the visual thinking work that I do as well.

And my close friends and family are always saying like, why? Why do you do that? What are you getting out of that? And yes, there are intangible benefits. Like I meet amazing people and we have great conversations. But I think thinking about what you've just said there, I think that there's definitely an element of truth in what you're saying because I don't feel that takes a lot of my brain power like running this podcast ab absolutely, I have to think of the questions, but often it's a natural conversation.

I'm not having to really try hard, it's not something I've studied for and I really enjoy it and it feels really natural. Whereas my day-to-day work is obviously a different story and I feel it gives me balance. It gives me that balance because sometimes I do want to be intense and go, real deep on work stuff, but then I want to be able to balance my day with other things that I really enjoy, and I think it gives me that.

So I really do relate to what you've just said there for myself anyway. I don't know how other people out there feel, but I think when you're in just solid work mode all the time, it can be really tiring as you mentioned.

[00:17:02] Toni Liu: It's really interesting. I've got some data here as well and it's all about energy consumption at the end of the day.

 It's actually another research by Dr. Richard Care. It says that, the brain consumes oxygen already. It's 20% of oxygen constantly we need from our bloodstream. And if you force yourself to do things or adapt yourself to do more things you are not interested in, or you are not naturally talented of or good at, the brain needs more, glucose to function.

So naturally you get exhausted. So another interesting thing is really interesting to notice yourself. What tasks do you do? Really exhaust, you you recognize your energy level. Sometimes it could be just, something that you can do them really well as in society that we trained to perform.

But if we simply perform and without noticing, The somatic side of things and how our body feels. We are working against our brain, against our system. And as a result, that's how people get sick because it's a clear correlation and research there by UCL and the National Health Institute really on the physiology side of the things and our emotional wellness.

When we suppress our emotional energy, what happen is that it impacts our physiology side of the things, and it is directly I impact on immune system. That's how people get sick. To me it's even a small topic and to say well I want the pivot to my career, but actually, we need to think about holistically, re choosing our life in a light.

 That a allows us to live longer and a healthier life. That is a fundamental our life, isn't it? It's not just about the material side of things. Think our society focus so much on that these days. It's about the material success and our identity. It's like if I'm not a banker tomorrow, or if I'm not being seen as X, Y, and Z, then I'm no longer having a position in life and then I'm lost.

 What I would challenge you to think is that try to let go of that piece of identity. Cause. As soon as you identify yourself there is probably a limitation there. And Buddha will say it is a illusion. And one of the things to pursue enlightenment is to think that I'm nothing.

Actually, that's a good way to start. See, if you think about, I'm nothing. Then there's no kind of this energy to please anything or to seek external validation, isn't it? If somebody wanted to shoot a deer in the forest, the deer is too big, so it can be shoot very easily.

But if I'm very small, I'm a worm. If I'm a aunt, then I might the one that can to target me. So that's a nice thing. Best place to start for someone who really had to go of their identity to just not, to take themselves too seriously for a little bit and ask themself to just relax.

And actually, you know what? People don't really care about what you do in life. If I say to people, tomorrow, Patty, I'm gonna quit my job and I'm gonna just be a housewife for a little while, do you think people really care? Not really. And another really interesting piece is also between the parenting as well.

 Another thing to find our place in careers in life is to heal past trauma, believe or not. We talked about puppy before, right? I share the story with you that when I lost my puppy I was really traumatized because for a little kid, you can imagine it's actually a traumatized experience.

And as a parent, maybe sometimes we like to comfort them. So we'll say, oh, stop crying. It's okay. We'll get you another one. What happens there is that a lot of the emotional validation is missing in a child earlier childhood. Sometimes people zoom, all a five year old, two year old don't remember anything.

No, it's not really true. I have clients who can remember. Very clearly the incident happened to her when she was six months in her court where she mom refused to give her a bottle of milk. Imagine that. So actually, the earlier experience has a huge impact in the decision we make later in life.

 As parents, you of course, we try to protect our children. We make the best decision for our kids, but along the way without knowing we are hurting them. Because as soon as we project our own fear and insec and I met these on our kids, they start suffering.

So I didn't make a my university and therefore I want my children to do that. Or I really wanted to play instrument, but my mom told me I shouldn't be doing that. Academic excellence is more important, so that part of me where I felt unique and gifted was suppressed.

Big time. My emotional needs are not answered cuz I've always suppressed, how I truly felt. Even though my parents tried to comfort me, all the puppy diet is okay. Don't worry about it. Don't cry like big girls don't cry. Like no tears needed. You are stronger than that. What happened is over time our subconscious become numbs by our emotions.

 People walk into the career option and goes, actually I don't need to feel cuz I'm numb. Because my emotions never need to be validated. Those are not important. It's about survival. Therefore people choose careers based on, the material level, right? And the social expectation, the external validation.

But deep on the inside is past trauma, which really needs to be looked at. The trauma may be quite a strong word, but actually It's nothing, everyone has traumatic experience. Because it's life. At some point we have loved, we have, lost our loved ones, lost our puppy, or lost our, grandparents.

At some point it's inevitable experience. It's not about really dwelling too much about what happened in the past. It's about. What is emotion in the past or emerging for us now doing to us and what is available to us now and how I can respond to this differently.

 I think when I come to career pivoting, these are the pillars . The self one is peace and obviously, If you're really not into kind of diving deep there, there's 360 s questionnaires that you can use to identify your strengths ask your friends and families and just stop observation.

What are the things I like to procrastinate on and what are things really naturally giving me energy of it? These really can give you lots of information, data about who they are and, what you naturally good at. Another pillar, as I mentioned, is really funny of your motivations.

It's sometimes interesting when we speak about motivations. People think, oh, what am I motivated about? I'm motivated, by achieving X, Y, and Z or by money and. Again, I think motivation sometime, believe it or not, is strongly related to purpose and some, the negatively emotional trait can be a strong factor for motivation and identifying purpose in life.

Some of these things come from shame vulnerability. Past trauma, it could be that we've seen a lot of successful people have actually come from very traumatic past experience, and therefore they wanted to change their outlook, and to do that thing to help other people to achieve the opposite, to heal others.

 Sometimes the negative traits in whatever happened to our past can be. A brilliant gift and present. So I would say never disregard on a negative face. Obviously we don't want a kind of freedom, but some of them are very interesting to look at. Really funny, all the motivation and purpose.

Then next layer, I would say is really to heal. To heal our trauma. Understand means the famous psychologist Eric Burn and his work on transactional analysis. The parent, adult, and the child is really interesting. Research I found where he found actually a lot of. Adults behaviors is actually based on the childhood experience.

 We don't realize actually we were around as an adult, but what we do is actually from the unmet knees or from our inner self in inner child the past. It is really about identifying careers, but partially it's about growth. And finding out our vulnerable path, because when we identify that and there's a room for healing, there's a room for growth.

 Once we heal that piece of trauma and then we can actually say I know why I don't choose to do the things I really love. I know why I keep self-sabotaging my behaviors. Of not waiting to let him go of my identity or, not waiting to allow myself to live a happy life. What is that stopping us?

A lot of this is really deeply embedded. Behaviors, beliefs, and, parenting styles habiting us to flourish in life. last layer I would say is really around the whole kind of healing bits and, self-confidence.

We all have confidence issues and self-esteem issues and there are some tools in leadership coaching that we do, so of excellence is actually similar to the work you love to do around visual work. And I love that so of excellence tool. Could

[00:26:46] Paddy Dhanda: you tell us more about that, Tony?

[00:26:47] Toni Liu: So I suffered a big time when I had to deliver a presentation in front of 109 bas at London Business School. This about 10 years ago. I had to deliver a topic where, I don't have any expertise in. L B S is a top global, top three rank to B school.

And they've got some of the most intelligent people in the room. And I've never done n mba, I've just got bachelor degree and I was never really into. Intellectually, like, a high achiever. I was never seen as that regard, and I had to deliver that presentation on the topic in finance, imagine I wasn't a finance students but I had to provide a sector introduction to those people.

 I was really struggling and I've always been very shy. I never liked to talk in group settings or whatsoever. I don't like to be seen. I really found experience extremely challenging, therefore, that I had to seek help. So I came across these techniques is neurolinguistic programming, NLP approach, and one of the tools is called the Circle of Excellence.

What it did basically is to allow you to tap into a past experience where you had confidence before. Probably not in public speaking, but it could be when I was feeling really confident, once when I was playing piano or whatsoever, and I was performing, in a.

Audience and I was just really in our, with myself and my audience and everything, and I really enjoyed that. So it's about the typing into the qualities and the emotional state feeling the confidence. And then we'll get you to visualize. It's a bit of somatic experience as well.

Tap into your body where in the body you feel this confidence in. I feel my chest is uplifting or I feel my tummy some sensation there. It feels warm, and it could also take colors and people get different things, and to me, the color of yellow is very strong.

When I was in my confidence, Visualization exercise. And what you do is once you identify the things impose the quality of confidence for you, then you're gonna take that state into this future state where I had to present in front of this a hundred, mba. So what you do is that you step into the future and you visualize you are in that lecture room.

And you wanted to throw all of these quality together and make them into a metaphor. Or you could just, infuse the yellow color all around you. Or you could just type into the qualities and just visualize that you are in that state. It's almost like we are putting a vessel on ourselves.

You're typing into this superpower. Of confidence and then you deliver. Another techniques is something that I learned from the West End performer. I was reading into clowning performance and that type of thing. And it all, the West End performer, when we go to watch a show, it is interesting, isn't it, because it's such a big stage, but then when the actor and actress locate themselves in a Pacific spot on the stage, they could still engage with the audience in a very powerful way.

Now, how do they do that? They use visualization to do that. What they do is all about setting the stage. So when you walk into a meeting room, for example even in a Zoom setting before I come to session today, I would pick a color or I could set my intention of, I really wanted to engage with Patty really well.

What color would that be? Pink, right? I would just visualize that, fill the color in my room and in your room as well. So that's how the West End performer for decades of how to setting up their stage and engage with the audience in a live setting. So I combine those two techniques to help me with my public speaking and.

 That's how I got through it really. And that's, how I really believe in coaching and the techniques sometimes really can help people. You can argue it, confidence building is a long-term thing, which I agree with. But I think temporarily are there techniques?

Definitely there are techniques. Because what it does is that it shifts your focus from fear and nervous away from your intention setting, from manifest to manifestation, and that's very powerful.

[00:31:13] Paddy Dhanda: Tony, there's so much there that we could unpack probably, three or four episodes worth, but I wanted to take you back to when you were talking about.

Identification and identity. Yes. Now, I love that for most of us, we are told, especially if we're doing some kind of social media work or we're trying to build our personal brand, people say you need to niche down on your specialism. So then people know what you are good at and what you're famous for.

So if somebody out there is a coach or they are visual thinker or whatever the title is. How should they then market themselves, I guess is if they don't have a very defined identity, how could they still, see success but without being labeled as just one of these?

[00:32:11] Toni Liu: That's a good question because I think the identity in Latin means sameness. I think the most important thing is not to go against your authentic self to be the same with someone else. That's first of all. Because as soon as we do that, then you lose your authentic self. You lose your uniqueness, and you stay away from your giftedness just to fit in or just to be part of something.

And that shouldn't be the pure intention of doing what we do, right? What we do is because we enjoy the creative processes of creating any, podcast. This is what we love to do. I think the more that you can find your zone the more you can find your energy flow.

Where helps your energy flow. And where that is, your true power, your superpower, I like your brand by the way. And I think that is my tip because the lot of thing is about like family identity and stuff, but again, to me that's very a economical and, social thing really for us to believe that we are someone.

But underneath the little girls and little boys within ourselves are traumatized. Not really pleased with the outcome, not typing into our superpowers. I think it's like dead zombies walking straight with the big, thing written on their forehead and go, I'm a banker.

Do you think people really care? And this one precious life at the end of the day is ours. I think at the end of the day, the person are responsible for number one is ourselves, isn't it? So I feel like if we can sort ourself out, kind of let go of the acts to validation slightly and to type into our own authentic self then we can certainly, Go beyond to secure a brand identity even.

But I think brand identity is slightly different from identification, right? Brand identity itself is a marketing tool, and it is important that, we are professional when it come to marketing perspective, keep everything consistent and how we execute the marketing side of the things. To me, that's really a marketing branch and branding branch.

But I think when it come to our individual self, our individual identity is. Probably important to get hold of our authentic self and not to be threatened by our own superpower, to create something that allow us to be in the zone of flowy energy.

[00:34:45] Paddy Dhanda: Just before we kicked off, you were telling me a story about how some of the students that you have been coaching on, some of the prestigious MBA programs, they all have the dream of becoming a banker or working in finance.

And then you mentioned. They feel a bit disappointed. Could you tell us more about that? Cause I thought that was a really interesting insight.

[00:35:10] Toni Liu: Even now, I still have students come to me and you see somebody studying something, let's say that they studying act actual management and they wanna get insurance and that line work and they go, oh, actually I don't have a passion for it.

I do this. It's because my parents will ask me to do it. Or like my father owned this business and they expect me to run their business after graduate and they carry huge amount of expectation from their parents. I think one thing I would say is obviously we're not perfect, but I think as.

Modern parents. We gotta be so careful with not to project our unmet needs and our kids because it is manipulating, because on the surveys we'll be like, oh, I love you so much. I love you. I'll do everything for you. And then underneath you go, oh yeah, if could get into Cambridge or if you can, do this degree, then you make me very proud, or I think that's a better path for you.

But who are we to give any and solicit advice to anybody? And the word should itself is dangerous. No one should do anything. It's like, oh yeah, you should listen to your parents. I agree. To a certain degree. You should listen to your parents. It depends when you cross the road, there's a dangerous car coming.

Yeah, of course. But when it come to making life decisions or connecting our true, authentic self, should we listen to our parents because we carry on a lot of the family traditions genetically as well. How we think, how we behave bloodlines and that type of things really into our presence.

And I think the more we can be aware of who we are by unlearning some of those expectations, being forced upon us and having the courage to truth differently. Having the confidence. A lot of it's really about self-esteem as well. People can't let them to be who they are cuz they feel like the power is gone, the superpower is not there.

 It's really kind of rebuilding that, allowing themselves to realize the dynamics of relationships. And how entangled it gets, but how we then regain the clarifications by peeling off all these layers to see who we really are in naked eye. Recognize actually, these are my true qualities, my talents, and I'm fully accepted.

I give myself the power to be who I am, not to be afraid of being judged or being seen differently. That's not a scary thing because if you're not the banker, who are you if you're not the lawyer or if you're not gonna be becoming this and that.

[00:38:04] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, I just reminds me of when I was starting my.

Sort of journey beyond high school, and I was super creative. I used to love art, and my art teacher even sat me down and said, please make sure you continue this subject beyond school. And I left high school with this kind of dream of becoming a creative, and very quickly that dream was destroyed because everybody around me was constantly.

Criticizing and saying, why on earth are you gonna become an art person? How are you gonna earn a living? That's not a real career. And at the time, technology and, it was becoming a really big thing. And I then decided I needed to earn proper money and have a proper career. And I moved over to a technology career and the creative side just got suppressed.

But that was my authentic self. I feel just hearing what you are saying there, and it's only probably the last like , 6, 7 years. Is when I've rediscovered some of that creativity and now we live in a world where creativity is embraced. Like everything we see on social media, it's all about creativity. A lot of, organizations are trying to be more creative and innovative and all of these good things.

It feels like we've gone full circle and now creativity is having its day, but. I have to say from what you're saying is I definitely were one of those people who suppressed this true, authentic self for many years. And I can't complain, like technology has been great as a career, but it wouldn't have been nice to merge that with all of these other great things as well that I was passionate about.

So for me very relevant what you're saying there, Tony. As we are running outta time, I'd just get. You to give us maybe one or two bits of advice. If you were looking back at your younger self, what would be one or two bits of advice you would've given yourself?

[00:40:09] Toni Liu: Oh, I would say don't give a damn about what other people think of you.

And don't be afraid to be yourself and don't be that good girl. Don't do that to please other people. I felt like I've just always been pleasing other people a big time, right? From because I was extremely sensitive kid, I think I was very intru of other people's emotions as if I could read what I wanted.

And therefore, I think as a result I did things to please other people because in my culture and in my family being the good girl is seen as to be loved. If you want to be loved, then be the good girl. You know what I mean? So I think, I never actually, like you, I was reading into arts and creative side of the things, and in fact, I never liked the school.

 I've suffered many years in school because especially the schools in China, it's very academic driven and is very rigid, hardcore and I never understood why I had to go to school. For all those years. Crazy. And I did, it was because, it's about survival, right?

Again, it was about survival. It was about what my parents wanted me to do and I needed to be that good girl. For years I had to play other people's games, and I'd say that please. Be honest to yourself. Be honest to your feelings on the inside and having the courage to rero your life again. Cause it, it is never too late.

I have a friend who's amazing glass artist in the uk and she started making glass and amazing glass dresses. When she was 62? No, she's 78. I just thought this never too late in life. Only just have this one life to explore. And if you can even, discover, just that one uniqueness and giftedness and Be there to use that to enrich your life and to bring more joy and positive vibes into yourself.

Then what it does is actually it transmits and it actually creates more joys around you. One of the things I always say to students, cuz they're like, oh yeah, but that's what my mom want me to do. One of the things that I always ask them, if you were not happy and if you did what your parents do and you're miserable.

Two or three years down the line, how would your parents feel? They would be sad. Like the immediate also be like, oh, I think they'll be sad because they want me to be happy. There you go. So what is really missing is the communication piece between the kids and the parents to express their emotions in a very honest way.

And that requires vulnerability. They require us to open up and to be vulnerable. To be vulnerable, express our emotions, and to say how they make us feel. Validating our emotions, validating our children emotions are extremely healthy. Cause if we don't do that, then the chances are the kids gonna carry those emotions and behaviors into their future relationships and gonna go run down the family line.

And that's not what we wanted for our future generations. So it's about stopping here. Think about it, it's about that responsibility first layer of responsibility towards ourselves, but also to protect our families and to our future generations to see it in the broader sense. If you can't love yourself, some people find it or I just can't do it, what whatsoever?

But then think about in the broader sense and how your decision would actually impact your kids and or your parents' wellness. And those ones around us.

[00:43:37] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, great advice there, Tony's. Thank you for that. And as we wrap up, I'd love for you to tell us how people can stay in touch with you if they would want to continue the conversation.

And if you could also share one or two resources that you would recommend for anybody who wants to seek further support and help in this particular subject matter we talked about today.

[00:44:01] Toni Liu: It's a really interesting point you touched on Patty, because I'm in the process of thinking about writing a book.

It's a very early stage. But I would hope to bring more interesting content out there to the audience. Should I be ready? But in the meanwhile I have my email address tony do love gmail.com that people can, get in touch with me. If there any questions or areas you like to explore, I'd be very happy to continue the discussion.

Some resources I would say that, don't be afraid to seek help. If you need a therapy, find a good therapist. If you need coaching, find a good coach. I've seen all sorts of instruments over the years and nothing has wasted my time cuz it's all about drawing information about ourselves.

It's all about the growth. And it's all about healing. Life is very much part of that. I will say try different type of things and sometimes people say, oh yeah, I try that, but that never works and perhaps it's just not the right therapy or perhaps was with a coach maybe you didn't have much chemistry with.

But I would say just keep trying, keep experimenting it as long as you hold intention to, and to heal yourself, you will come across the right person I would say. So that's number one. Never be afraid to seek help if you need, and I really think that in our society, somehow it's being seen as a shame to seek help.

Especially therapy support and that type of things. But I think it's so not. It's like we all have trauma within ourselves. Like I said earlier, I mean my puppy died when I was little, was a very traumatic experience for me. And I went to New Zealand on my own, was a very traumatic experience for me.

And even sometime when I lost my grandpa, it was extraordinary. I couldn't go to school and, because he was very dear to my heart. But as a little person, that you needed support and we haven't worked on that. And we just build up into the adult life. So we all have loss and if you have loss, and then there is.

Some parts of you that perhaps, can be healed. And another thing I would just say said that there are lots of good talks on YouTube. Obviously I love your channel. It's really amazing some of the techniques that, you share. It's really good platform. But there are others.

I follow This therapist is a family, family therapist called gaba. You probably know him. I really like him. I think he, some of his work and research is extraordinary. I really love his work. So I'd say that will be a good starting point to explore family therapies and the correlation between the parent child and adult systems and figuring out herself better.

[00:46:42] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, fantastic. And we'll try and post some of those links in the show notes as well. I will try and get those from you afterwards. So thank you so much, Tony. It's been a real pleasure hearing your story, your experiences, your background, and it's got me to really reflect as well on some of the things that I'm doing well and not so well.

So, that's always a good thing. Thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:47:06] Toni Liu: Oh, thank you so much Patty it's a really great pleasure and thanks so much again. You're a fantastic host. I really enjoyed myself as well. Oh,

[00:47:14] Paddy Dhanda: thank you so much.

In this episode, we discuss what tools you need to peak your career. While possessing the necessary skills and expertise is undoubtedly crucial in any professional setting, this episode unravels the truth that skills alone may not guarantee career progression. 

Key topics covered in this episode:

👉🏽 The importance of nurturing connections with coworkers

👉🏽 Managing the egos of colleagues

👉🏽 The art of self-promotion in a competitive environment

Laura Chattington

Founder of Activate My Career Live.com, Laura has nearly 20 years’ experience of directing multi-million-pound global communications accounts, managing multi-disciplined teams and communicating up to c-suite level executives. Specialising in presenting and influence, Laura is a master of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and certified coach, having trained with one of the two co-founders. Laura has delivered and facilitated events and training sessions to hundreds of people around the world including London, Lisbon, Singapore, Geneva, and South Africa. A member of Toastmasters International, the world’s largest public speaking organisation, Laura has delivered speeches to audiences for the last 15 years and regularly competes in competitions. As well as individuals, she has trained teams from companies including Oracle, Deloitte, IBM, Facebook, Social Finance & NHS. ----- If you feel stuck, frustrated or like your career is plateauing ... even though you have spent years working hard... and YOU KNOW you have all the experience and skills to be much further ahead... I know how you feel. My name is Laura Chattington and I specialise in equipping professionals with an outside-the-box approach to end the plateau in their careers and initiate fast progress. When being made redundant after delivering a big project successfully I recognised my professional competency, experience and putting the hours in wasn't enough to move my career forward. A new path began and I discovered how to find my voice, show up and confidently communicate, influence others and become recognised for my efforts. If you're ready to stop your career plateauing and make progress faster before running out of time, making the impact you want in your professional and personal life, go ahead and join free masterclass now on the link.

👉🏽 Join the Masterclass: Click Here

👉🏽 LinkedIn: Click Here

🔥 Our Sponsors: How do you know where to invest your efforts when helping your Agile teams? You could simply ask them, but what if you need a more scalable and robust approach? One platform that I personally use and recommend is Comparative Agility. It has the world's largest Agile maturity index with over 4m data points from over 14,000 organisations. You can try it out completely FREE at the following link, and be sure to let me know your thoughts:

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Transcription:

[00:01:03] Paddy Dhanda: Thank you for joining us for another episode of the Super School podcast.

Add on today's episode, I have. A lovely guest who is the founder and trainer at Activate My Career Live. She and I had a conversation briefly before this episode and I was really intrigued by the work that she's doing. And I think anybody who's looking to find out some of the. I guess deeper secrets about how you can get the most out of your corporate career.

She's the person to talk to, so I thought I'd bring her along onto the show today. So welcome to the show, Laura Chudon.

[00:01:42] Laura Chattington: Hi. Hi. Thank you for having me and thank you for that lovely introduction, Patty. I appreciate being here.

[00:01:48] Paddy Dhanda: Ah, you're welcome. Laura. I have a thing about backgrounds and I was looking at your background and it's very minimalistic.

So for anyone that is watching the video version of this, we'll notice it's very minimalistic, but I think you can tell a lot about even the one or two things that people have behind them. So you have there a Tate gallery. Picture What? What's that all about?

[00:02:11] Laura Chattington: It's a Peter, Mr. Hockney, Peter Blake, and I've actually got lots of pictures that I've collected over my lifetime.

And it's funny actually, I've got backgrounds on video. You spend looking at what people got and what's in their background. And I've gone from lots of things in my background, nothing in my background to, actually, this is one of the favorite pictures I own.

And I just really like it.

[00:02:38] Paddy Dhanda: So Laura, on this episode, what superpower would you like to bring?

[00:02:43] Laura Chattington: I would like to bring the superpower to give people the confidence and the tools that they need to really peak their career and truly perform at their best.

That is my superpower and that is what I'm looking to help my clients with is really be able to shoot for the stars, perform at their best, and accelerate their career.

[00:03:06] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, fantastic. And I think probably every single person listening to this episode will connect with that because I'm sure we are all quite passionate about our career.

So, if anybody can help us strive and get better and get the most outta that career. I think that's invaluable. So Laura, I'm sure you weren't doing this as a kid. So I would love to know a little bit about you and maybe some of your early childhood. What's shaped your thoughts over the years

[00:03:36] Laura Chattington: that far back?

 Actually I dunno if I should admit my early childhood on a podcast, but I had quite a colorful childhood and teenage Time. And without going into many details, I actually didn't go to school that much. I certainly hadn't found what I was born to do other than my interest in my friends and my social life.

And believe it or not, long story short I ended up. My mother was a teacher and I ended up doing A Levels, I think of my friends. I was the only one, and I proudly got. Two, season two E, which was awful, but actually got some, and it was at that time when the internet was becoming mainstream.

I'm that old and I actually, and my mother who was worried that I was gonna end up in the gutter, I think was keen for me to. Go to university and I ended up blagging my way in through an interview onto an accelerated degree course in computer science because at the time if you were female and you had two heads and six arm, they would've let you on.

No matter what your level results were. So I ended up, and it was the first time I had found something in life that I was really interested in. And I'd come off the back of being a delinquent teenager and then really focused on my degree and worked extremely hard and came out with a computer science degree.

And actually at the time, again, I'm showing my age. It was before Google and I was a software engineer and the coders were kind of stuck in a dark room, hoods up. No one spoke to them. And I could speak to them and I obviously work with them, but actually I could also talk human as well as, Software, which was a very unusual skill back then.

I mean, it still is reasonably rare, but back then there was literally nobody who bridged that gap and I was female again, that was really unique. I think on my degree course I was probably one of four females of 200 or something like that. It was really not normal.

And so I ended up becoming the kind of conduit, I guess the communication conduit between the tech and the business. And I was very interested in business and I ended up. Working and directing big projects quite early in my career because I had that understanding of both worlds.

And that's kinda where I started getting into. Human communication and influence. I started becoming very interested in the fact that you could communicate and influence and present, and I had some bad experiences and I wanted to find out how to do it. And I remember there was one particular incident.

Sort of very early on in my career and I remember getting called into my boss's office and sitting there feeling like, sitting on my hands feeling like a sort of teenager who wasn't quite comfortable and trying to look like I was totally in control and I knew what I was doing.

And he started saying to me we're sorry, but actually we're gonna make 20 people redundant and you are one of them. And I remember thinking, oh, I've just worked my backside off for two years delivering this core project and now you're making me redundant.

And actually they kept this other guy, James, he was kind of my counterpart and I did most of the work and he seemed like he wasn't doing as much work as me. And I remember getting that post being made redundant. I remember getting to my parents' house cause it was around Christmas cuz you get made redundant just before Christmas cause of the tax year.

If anyone watching this or listening to this, that is the kind of where companies make people redundant. And I remember sitting at my parents' house and everyone's chappy and happy and celebrating, and Christmas is coming. And I remember feeling quite desperate because I'd done all this work and had ended up being made redundant and I didn't know what I was gonna be doing.

And I remember walking around my parents' garden and. Sort of thinking through why did James get, he and I didn't? Because I was the one doing all the hard work and I was like, he's not smarter than me. He doesn't have any more experience than me. He doesn't have anything different to me. And then it occurred to me that actually there was a difference between how he did his job and how I did my job. And actually it was a real light bulb moment for me in my career. And I thought he's not doing enough work, but actually what he was doing, As he was developing the relationships with the senior team, he'd spent time talking to our boss. He'd spent time dropping into offices and things like that, whereas I'd spend all my time working hard and getting the project delivered, and it was a kind of quite a pivotal moment where I realized that actually to get ahead in your career, you need to spend time and develop.

Skills and use tools that enable you to do that communication part and build those relationships. And at that time I went. Oh, I'm slogging my time out here focused only on the work and not doing anything else, and it really had an effect on me. And at the time I remember seeing an email about neurolinguistic programming, a course running on neurolinguistic program.

And I come across that earlier in my life. So I went off and did that. With one of the two co-founders. And a friend of mine had also recommended that I went to Toastmasters as well, because I'd had this presentation, which was like, I'm sure everyone's had one of these presentations where you're just like, oh, I want the ground to swallow me up.

It was awful. And so I ended up, Going down that sort of road of developing communication and influencing skills and then bringing them back into the workplace. And actually at the time I hired coaches to help me apply it back into the workplace. And what I noticed as time went on was that you don't actually need all of.

Tools and you don't need to be a master of N L P and you don't need to be a distinguished Toastmaster actually. You just need a set of tools that you can apply in the workplace. And that's where I've ended up in a non-straight line journey.

[00:10:47] Paddy Dhanda: Ah, fascinating. And I think we all know a James or two.

In our sort of careers and we come across them. I remember my good friend Phil. Phil and I started as graduates way back. And Phil, really smart guy. I've actually had him on the podcast as well. He's phenomenal. But Phil probably didn't work as hard as the rest of us. And I remember there was myself and a couple of other graduates and.

We would be slogging away. Exactly what you were saying there, Laura. We were software developers and it was just ironic that Phil ended up accelerating his career. Before we knew it, he was working in the CIO's office of a big global telecoms organization, which is who we work for, and we just couldn't understand it.

And we put it down to he just had the gift of the gab. But there was more than that. Surely it's not just him being able to crack a few jokes and being able to make a few people laugh. There has to be more, and I'm really intrigued to understand a bit more about. Mm. Building those relationships and how you go about that.

So I'd love to know from you, Laura, what are some of the ways that if somebody was at home thinking about their current situation, they could go about this sort of approach that you've mentioned?

[00:12:11] Laura Chattington: Yeah. And as a fellow software engineer I'm not criticizing in any way software engineers not being able to communicate.

It's just like your friend, they are doing something different. And I think it's also important because depending on where you are coming to this, some people are outwardly going and some people are not. Maybe more inward, facing and it isn't about personality.

You are right. I think people with very Confident outward personalities perhaps do this naturally. So your friend, develop those relationships and develop those conduits of being seen in the workplace. And I think the first key thing to do is to really decide

that you are actually going to do this, make a decision that this is where I'm going to aim for . I was the same. I was working, we were all delivering on our projects, but we weren't putting this extra 20% in our working week. So I think that the first step is to decide on.

Where do you wanna get to? And thinking through who do I have to be that person at that level? What are some of the attributes? What are some of the behaviors? What is it your friend was doing that you weren't doing well? He was communicating them, he was being visible like every human being.

Those senior stakeholders in your workplace, they're human too. And they're not thinking about you and your career path and what you are doing on a daily, weekly basis. You need to be visible to them. So you need to go to them and talk about the value that you bring and the experience that you bring.

So I think before you start thinking about, oh gosh, how do I do that? How do I communicate? I think you really need to decide that you're gonna add this into the scope of your weekly work because it's a process that you build on and it compounds over time. So that's the first thing I would say that people should do.

I. The second thing is communicate, and this is obviously key I was good at communicating. It wasn't that I couldn't communicate, but actually there's a bit there about how do you communicate and present yourself and put yourself forward and promote yourself in the company in a way that A you feel good about doing it, and b, that it is in a way that really influences the people that you're talking to. We all know those people you're go into a meeting and they're like talking about him, and you're like, Ugh he's talking about himself again, or she's talking about him.

We don't wanna listen to that. But there are ways of. Promoting yourself in those conversations and in the workplace that you want to get those senior stakeholders who are making decisions about who's going on projects or who's coming into the c o office, and they're gonna be thinking about the people that are front of mind and present for them. So you need to be able to communicate the value you bring to the workplace, to the people that are gonna be making the decisions about who's on which project in a way that is appealing to them and positioned in a way that they're like oh I'm gonna get Patty on this project cause I know he can do X, Y, and Z, and that's exactly what I need.

And again, remembering that those senior stakeholders, they're humans too. And the way you can influence and communicate with them in a way that is gonna resonate with them is what is a priority for them. Being visible on a regular basis is really key. To give you an example people say, oh yeah of course I've worked with clients and they're so focused on not to get delivering their work, that they won't join the drinks at the end of the week with the senior stakeholders. They won't be. Joining the case study discussions about certain projects and it's really thinking, I've gotta put time in my diary.

To be visible in the workplace. And then I need to be able to communicate about myself competently and tactfully so that I just become front of mind. And that's really about working, moving clients through this process, putting together an activation plan. It's like a personal marketing strategy, putting into place a plan so that you can go, right, I'm gonna do this, and this is when I'm gonna do it, and this is who I need to speak to and this is what they're interested in and this is how I can bring value into that conversation.

So it's three steps, decide, communicate, and activate. And I think it's about putting that 20% of time in your diary every week. To keep developing the relationships that you want to develop.

[00:17:08] Paddy Dhanda: How do you measure progress in that journey? Because you could be having conversations with all the right people, but then how do you know if this is going in the right direction?

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[00:18:52] Shure MV7-2: Now let's get back to the.

[00:18:56] Laura Chattington: I think the obvious ones are promotion, getting jobs, getting pay rises, and actually having the right relationships. I'd be measuring against those things. Lots of times I'm working with clients and they're like I know that other people are getting paid more than me.

How do I get to that level? How do I ask for that salary increase? How do I get the promotion? How do I line myself up to get to? It's very tangible things at the end of the process, and I guess continually. Throughout your career, most people wanna get paid more money.

They wanna get promoted or they wanna change jobs or they actually want to say, okay, at the start of this process, I had relationships with my boss and occasionally my boss's boss, but I know that if I invest time and resource and I map the relationships across the company and externally to the company.

They are gonna be valuable for me, maybe not today or next week, but certainly six months down the line. We go through cycles in companies and you have your end of year review. And those conversations are sometimes very much, how have you done, you've done this well, you've done that well, and so said this about you.

And those kind of conversations. But actually using some of those pivotal meetings and maybe putting quarterly reviews in with your. Boss to say, look, I wanna get there. That's where I'm going. So how do I do that? And having a very specific plan in place to do that. So the success factors are quite tangible in the ends.

 I guess the slightly less tangible one is feeling like people work so hard, we make such a commitment of our time. And you can be dealing with people that maybe you don't want to be dealing with so much. Maybe you are focused on work that you are good at, but actually you don't love doing, all those things.

So actually feeling like there is a purpose and a point to the work that you are doing on a regular basis.

[00:21:06] Paddy Dhanda: Laura, imagine I'm one of those stakeholders and you are in a role where you are looking to. Create that visibility across the senior stakeholders. What are some of the examples of conversation that you could come up with?

Because I suspect it could be quite daunting for somebody to. Hey, I've gotta now make the effort to speak to someone more senior or somebody who, I don't really have that relationship, rapport.

[00:21:33] Laura Chattington: So how do you go about that? That's very common for everyone, I think.

And depending on who you are talking to and where you are talking, it can be very intimidating. You might be going into meetings with those people and it can be very intimidating. I've certainly been in a few, in my lifetime. I think that there are two things that people can take away and implement without getting into too much detail.

So number one is to think about what is it that senior stakeholder. Cares about the most. What are the things that senior stakeholder cares about the most? Now, as humans, we go into our meetings and our interactions, and we're thinking about our perspective of the world, right? You're normally going into those senior stakeholder meetings, having to report on a project or.

 Update on progress or ask for more budget or ask for more resource or things like that. And you'll come into that conversation from the hard work and the world that you've come from, cuz that's the natural human thing to do. But actually thinking about what is it that they are particularly interested in as opposed to what are you interested in? At a random guess, most senior state, depending again on how senior they are, they're gonna be interested in finance, obviously profit and loss and things like that. That's an obvious thing to do. The other thing that isn't so obvious some of the time is reputation, ego. As you go up in the company ego and Reputation. Are even more important because it's kind of the way the world works up there and You might not be thinking about their ego and reputation as you're going into that meeting, but if you damage or risk or potentially out them for anything that might look bad for them, what is their natural response to that gonna be?

Where they're gonna be like I don't want them in the room so much. And again, it's that human interaction. Of what is it that they want and what is it that they're gonna want people on board in their work streams. So if you make them look good and it's not that I'm saying you shouldn't go against what they're saying, but you just need to be politically aware that the egos and the reputations become more and more important as you go up.

So it's really about mapping. What they're interested in with what you do and what value you bring. So when you go into those conversations, you are talking in those terms rather than in your terms, because you wanna meet them where they are and show the value you bring. And then they're gonna be like, oh great.

I want padding on board cuz he knows exactly what I want, when I want it and how I want it. And one of the things I get my clients to do is when you don't necessarily have those relationships intact and you don't necessarily feel like you can go in and start going, Hey, I'm brilliant at this.

One of the good ways of doing it is to ask good advice. If you have some connection you can go in and ask pretty much everybody in the company.

And one of the ways of developing a relationship is to go, Hey Patty we're working on this project, I wanna come and ask your advice. Could I put like 10 minutes in your diary? And when you ask people's advice, they're sure.

Cuz there's no pressure. Takes all the pressure away and they'll say, sure, I'm happy to talk about my experience on whatever the project is. And then once you've got into that interaction, here's an update on where we are. We're gonna be running into, I dunno, marketing.

Tasks, and I know that you're an expert in marketing and I just wanted to get your advice and your feedback on what we're doing and make sure we're going in the right direction. And they're like, yeah, sure. And I feel great because I'm being asked my advice. And then after you've had that kind of interaction, the best thing to do is say to them, great.

Really appreciate your help. I'm gonna come back to you and update you if that's okay. In two weeks time, once we've implemented the stuff that you are telling us about, or once we've taken that into consideration, so the advice is helpful, right? The advice is helpful, but you're starting to put in place reasons to keep that communication going.

And depending on how busy they are, it might be, can I come back in a month or can I email you? It's just about being front of mind for them. And developing the relationship with them. So that's a really good way of doing. There's lots of ways, but that's a really key strategy to use.

[00:26:21] Paddy Dhanda: I think all of us love to share our wisdom in some way or other We do. Definitely. We'd love to talk about ourselves if somebody asks us. So I think. It doesn't matter how senior that person is, or you may feel really intimidated by the fact that you know it's somebody you haven't spoken to before.

But actually soon as you ask somebody, Hey, I really love the way you do this. Can you help me? And I think that just lets their guard down in a way that I can't explain what else would do that, but that's a really great tip there. Laura. I was just thinking about an example as you were talking through the other point about thinking about what do people care about and then talking about something that then connects with that person.

And an example came to mind of many years ago when I was working for this big telecoms organization and we were in this meeting, this big workshop. And we had a very senior person laying out their plans for how they were gonna implement this new operating model. Every company has an operating model and people in the room were quite negative about what was happening.

Cuz A, I think people were resistant to change. And that's something we see you many organizations, but generally people just weren't on board with this approach. And I was in the room at the time and I was quite naive. I was quite young at the time, and I could see the problems, but then I could also see the value in what we were trying to do as an organization.

And so it wasn't purposely done, but I started coming up with ideas to challenge some of the thinking in the room. So when people were objecting to certain points, I was almost defending the operating model to say surely. This means we have much more consistency, we are able to collaborate more. All of these good things.

And what was really interesting was a couple of days later I got a call from this very senior person and they had no idea who I was before that. Yeah. And they applauded my attitude during the session and I wasn't trying to be teachers pair or trying to suck up to this person, but it just so happened.

 I guess they value the fact that I wasn't also bad mouthing the initiative and they asked if I would come and work for them for a while. And and off the back of that conversation, I ended up touring India and rolling out the operating model to a whole bunch of people in India.

And it unlocked so many doors for me. That was my first taste of delivering training as well. And now I do training as my. Professional career. So that's probably the thing that unlocked that the very start of my career. And so it just goes to shows. Sometimes you just don't know where these conversations are gonna lead to, but you've gotta sometimes just go out, step outside your comfort zone a little bit and just try something a little bit different.

[00:29:17] Laura Chattington: I think that's a really good example of you don't know what's gonna happen. All we know there's kind of principles that we know. One of them is that the more relationships you have, the more value you are perceived to give, then you are gonna get opportunities.

And it may be in a situation like that, it may be that you have to be more at the forefront of raising your hand and saying I can do that. I want to be part of that. I think also, There are principles you gave a really good example there.

I was working with someone the other week and a similar but different where there are principles of human behavior again, and if you come into a room, Whether you are speaking to senior managers or whether you're a senior manager talking to the team, when you come in with your perspective, that's not necessarily gonna resonate, although the solution might be the right solution.

And actually, I was working with someone talking about this a couple of weeks ago where again, it was the same sort of environment. The senior manager was there and then they had the workforce and they were there trying to. Sell in. I think that they were wanting them to do it.

It was something to do with the overtime model over the bank holiday or something like that. And from the senior manager's perspective, it was about making sure they had the right resource, making sure the communication lines were and they came into that meeting from that perspective.

But actually everyone in the team, All they cared about was how much were they gonna get paid. In that dynamic of that company is we're not even gonna negotiate until we know that you're gonna pay us double or whatever it was. And that's what are people coming into the meeting with.

 Is that they're interested in. And if you can tap into that, which is kind of what you did you're probably saying very similar stuff, but you just changed. How you set it to the target audience. If you can map those two things and map the value you bring to that, people are like, yeah, this is awesome.

This is awesome, no matter who they are. But we're human, we have the same challenges, we have pains, we have, aspirations and if you can work out, especially at a senior manager level what are the pain points that they've got and show them solutions, then they're gonna start paying attention to you and they're gonna invite you to come and run their training rollout in India or whatever because.

You are talking their language and it's resonating and it doesn't matter who you are. It's this principles of human engagement.

[00:31:57] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, fantastic. Really important. Yeah. Many people, when they're looking to move on to another organization, they always say the thing that.

Holds 'em back is the great relationships they've built, and it's usually the people that keep you in an organization as well. So I think so. Why build those relationships?

So Laura, I know you run a masterclass, so could you tell us a little bit about that? Because if people are interested in going deeper on this topic how can they do that?

[00:32:26] Laura Chattington: So we run a masterclass, which is really for people who feel like their careers are plateauing or they're not progressing fast enough and they want to be able to elevate themselves in the workplace and accelerate their careers. Exactly what we're talking about today, and the masterclass really takes.

The attendees through this process really identifying where they are, what's holding them back how do they develop themselves, takes 'em through the system and gives them the tools and the kind of direction in where they want to go. And I think it's hugely valuable if you're at a place where you're feeling that sort of frustration.

You are thinking, I'm working really hard, but I'm not progressing as fast as I can. What am I missing? What else do I need to be doing? So the masterclass is the four hours, it's a really good length of time so that you can get through that process and.

It's free to register, you sign up or activate my career live.com, and from there it runs every month. So you can get on the next masterclass and go through this process. So I would invite everyone to go there. And I think there's gonna be a link at the bottom of the page two.

[00:33:45] Paddy Dhanda: Absolutely. We'll share that link in the show notes of the episode.

So if anyone's interested in that awesome masterclass, then I think that's great. Value free for four hours and then hopefully that helps people unlock some opportunities, I think.

[00:33:59] Laura Chattington: And it's also about just getting what we've covered today is a great insight to the stuff that we cover, but to actually go a little bit deeper and to get some of the tools that you need and really the map of how you get to the next level, how you really unlock your next career path so that you can just get some acceleration in what you're doing.

[00:34:24] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, brilliant. Well, Laura, we're. Just about at the end of time. And I think I've certainly picked up some great tips from you today and I might start applying some of those immediately after this. So, my, my bosses won't know what's hit them, but thank you so much for joining me today, Laura.

[00:34:40] Laura Chattington: It's been a pleasure. Thank you. It's been great to talk to you. Thank you for having me. Oh,

[00:34:45] Paddy Dhanda: you're welcome.

In this episode we delve into the journey of a fighter pilot. Dominic shares important life lessons, such as the importance of perseverance and how sticking to what we believe is the key to success. Discover how you can use a fighter pilot mindset to succeed at work.

Dominic Teich

Dom “Slice” Teich brings his fighter pilot background and applies them to guide pilots, athletes, business owners, and students with afterburner techniques that American fighter pilots use to ensure mission completion. As an Amazon best-selling author, business owner, entrepreneur, civilian and military instructor pilot, he knows that busy individuals and teams struggle with information overload.  

Since 2002, “Slice” has guided hundreds of students toward their goals. His blueprint is called Single Seat Mindset; an impactful group of 40+ fighter pilot guides with a combined experience of 700+ years. They share proven formulas and life advice to the insider circle community to ensure success and big goal achievement all while avoiding overwhelm, overload, and flameout. They dive deep into the productivity world to provide guidance through short, impactful steps.

You won't find any other cutting-edge community like ours as we provide unique life experiences learned in the 3rd dimension.

SingleSeatMindset.com

🔥 Our Sponsors: How do you know where to invest your efforts when helping your Agile teams? You could simply ask them, but what if you need a more scalable and robust approach? One platform that I personally use and recommend is Comparative Agility. It has the world's largest Agile maturity index with over 4m data points from over 14,000 organisations. You can try it out completely FREE at the following link, and be sure to let me know your thoughts:

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⚡️ In each episode, Paddy Dhanda deep dives into a new human Superpower and practical advice on how you can apply it immediately.

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Transcription:

[00:00:00] Paddy Dhanda: Before we jump into this episode, I have some exciting news. This is in fact, the 100th episode of the Superpower School podcast. Yes, that's right. That's a hundred episodes, which equates to around 4,000 minutes of conversation that we've recorded over the past 14 months. So I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued support and all of the lovely messages that I receive through LinkedIn and through email.

The podcast has gone through many changes since we first started. Everything from better tools to more recently the launch of the newsletter.

But one thing that hasn't changed, And that's the mission. We focus on human skills for the future to help us thrive in the age of ai, and if anything, it's become even more important now than ever. I wanted to bring you a very special guest to mark this 100th milestone, so I do hope you enjoy this conversation.

[00:01:09] Dominic Teich: my superpower is strapping a rocket engine to my back and taking off

 Let me just take the next step.

 Make your plan just about the next step, What are you gonna do every single day?

 I call it the five minutes for freedom.

 You'll learn from it and you'll go down a different path. there's a lot of days where I did not like getting beat up and learning and failing as a pilot

 ​

[00:01:42] Paddy Dhanda: Thank you for joining us for another episode of the Superpower School podcast. I'm your host, Paddy Dhanda, and on today's show, do I have a guest for you, he's a dream guest because I don't know about you, but I'm a massive fan of Topcon and I've always thought, wouldn't it be cool to interview a fighter pilot and you don't often. Bump into those people very often cuz they're always flying up in the sky. But today I've tracked one down and... he is a fighter pilot.

He's also a business owner and a family man and someone who's very passionate about entrepreneurship and business. I have the amazing Dominic Teich on the show. Have I said that right, Dom?

[00:02:27] Dominic Teich: You did. Thanks, Paddy.

[00:02:28] Paddy Dhanda: And his fighter pilot call sign is Slice and I think that's the coolest thing ever.

So, should I call you Slice or Dom?

[00:02:38] Dominic Teich: Whatever you'd like. I've been called a lot worse.

[00:02:42] Paddy Dhanda: Okay. I'm gonna stick with Dom, because otherwise I don't think I'm worthy of calling you slice. That must be like a pilot thing that you guys do, right?

[00:02:50] Dominic Teich: I don't know. I'd, I'd call you worthy. If, if there's any sort of, uh, authorization for that, I'll, I'll, I'll authorize it.

[00:02:58] Paddy Dhanda: Awesome.

So, um, I'm just intrigued. First of all, what superpower would you like to bring to this episode?

[00:03:04] Dominic Teich: Well, as you mentioned it I think it took many years of struggling and failures, but I found myself in a single seat fighter jet. So I'd say my superpower is strapping a rocket engine to my back and taking off and flying in a single seat fighter jet. It's a pretty incredible experience and I feel I still, there's still sometimes I walk out to the jet and I can't believe that they're letting me do it and turn around sometimes like... nope, nobody's following me. I still get to do this.

[00:03:30] Paddy Dhanda: Wow. How much, what are those jets worth on average?

[00:03:33] Dominic Teich: You know, I think it probably ebbs and flows. I would say just. Just a number that I've heard or thrown out like an F 16 is probably worth about 40 million. And then, you know, the newer fifth gen aircraft are probably into the several hundred million per aircraft type of cost.

[00:03:54] Paddy Dhanda: I love that you don't really care about how much it's worth or you don't really ask, because even I like get in a car, I'm normally really conscious like going, oh, is this worth a lot of money? And, you know, then I'll drive accordingly. But yeah, it's almost like, ah, it's just another plane.

I'm just gonna jump in.

[00:04:09] Dominic Teich: Well, no, I mean, there's a certain respect that goes to that, but I don't think it has, I don't think a fighter pilot is thinking about the cost, at least in, from my vantage point. I call 'em the girls. So just like I grew up around horses and cows and stuff like that. So, you know, it's more of we're just taking care of the aircraft that we fly.

You know, and also it's a big shout out to all of the support that goes behind us being able to fly. So the aircraft are, you know, the ladies and gentlemen of the US military that are wrenching on these things and they've got grease on their hands and they're making sure that the jets are ready and they're safe for us to fly.

You know, they're the ones that are really, you know, they're out in the heat. Cuz we live out here in Phoenix, Arizona, and the tarmac gets really hot. So, those, I mean, there's a huge amount of push behind all of the support personnel that goes into what we do. So, I'd be remiss if I forgot to mention them, which I've done before.

Oh yeah. We take care of them. And I don't think that there's really a feeling of like worth in regards to dollars and cents, but the worth is more of, you know, these are our aircraft, we gotta take care of 'em. And that way we get to have, still have fun and fly 'em.

[00:05:17] Paddy Dhanda: Yeah. Oh, amazing.

So, Could you tell us like, how did you get into this? I'm sure. Well, yours is one of the rare professions that even as a 10 year old, you wake up and you say, I want to be one of them. Yeah. For most of us, like we don't. We don't aspire to be like a business coach or you know what sort of a banker it's something that you fall into because it pays the bills.

So, yeah. When you were young, like, what was your thinking about when you're gonna grow up, what you want to be and how did you stumble into this?

[00:05:47] Dominic Teich: Yeah, so I think, you know, your personality and I'm a big mindset guy and I know that you talk about superpowers and I think we can kind of link those together.

I was talking to my dad, I don't know, probably six months ago, and he said, and it's true, he said, you know, when you were a little kid, you, it didn't, you didn't really have the personality traits that I would've fit in what a traditional fighter pilot type career field would demand. And I think the important piece of that for anybody listening, whatever age you're at, Is that you can learn a lot.

Your brain is plastic. And I know that you ain't in the green room before we, we opened up the show, we talked about artificial intelligence and all of this kind of stuff, but humans, we have a pretty incredible brain and... I learned those things over time, right? Because I was a fairly introverted and quiet kid growing up.

However, some things that I really loved doing is, and you know, you had asked for stories, but this morning I dropped my kids off at school and as I was driving home, there was a huge ditch that was filled with water and muck. And there was a guy on a big tractor with a huge arm and a bucket on the end of it, and he was reaching, it was like a huge hand reaching into this muck and he was cleaning out the ditch and I looked at the indivi.

He had his door open and. On his tractor and he must have been listening to music cuz he was having the time of his life, Paddy, he was jamming out and bouncing in his seat and he's just, he's literally shoveling and moving muck and he's having the greatest time. And just as if that wasn't enough, a large dump truck past me on the road and the girl driving it, female, she had big old bows, headsets on and she was jamming out, driving a dump truck. And so that, that kind of brought me back to my childhood because I grew up out in the country and dad had a tractor, grandpa had a tractor. My uncles had, you know, backhoes and I grew up driving tractors.

So I just liked operating machinery and... I think all of that to kind of congeal it together is that you can have a lot of fun in jobs that maybe other people don't want, and that's totally okay. But you can also learn that. And so as a kid there's, there were certain events that happened in my childhood that really sparked an interest in aviation.

I think that probably, you know, kids look at the sky and you'll see it in their eyes. They look at airplanes and they're like, wow, that's pretty cool. But then I had, you know, some fairly key moments in my childhood, of which it started at seven years old, like you said, 10. But at seven, dad and I built a little F four fighter jet on the kitchen table.

It's actually on the shelf behind me still. But that little jet, I looked at that and I'm just like, I'm gonna fly this thing when I get older in, in my mind. And a lot of kids will have that, but then you can lose that as you grow up and that's. Fine, but it takes time, I think is what I'm getting at there. And then don't underestimate the power that you have you know, to inspire others to seek out their own superpowers, right? And you just never know the interaction that you'll have with somebody and what kind of long-term effects that can have. And oh, by the way, it can have really negative effects, especially if you dissuade somebody from their dreams.

Now there are certain qualifications that you need to fly a fighter jet, right? You need to have decent eyes and you need to be fairly physically fit, because the pressures of flight are pretty extreme. But that doesn't necessarily mean you can't be a pilot.

[00:09:15] Paddy Dhanda: Well, what if you are scared of heights?

Does that rule you out straight away or can you overcome that?

[00:09:18] Dominic Teich: I'm glad you brought that up because, in a jet, I mean, especially our aircraft. There's, I think it's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. There's five different buckles that hold onto our seat kit and strap us into our ejection seat.

And then there's a shoulder harness that's hooked into our ejection seat, but also as the ejection seat falls away, if you un unfortunately have to ever get outta the airplane, you're now connected to a. A canopy, which is called a parachute. I don't know why that escaped my mind. So, yeah, then you can parachute down.

So I think being strapped in. Gives you a very good sense. Now I've never been scared of heights, but I can tell you this, if you put me at the edge of the Grand Canyon and I didn't have any, you know, I was just standing there and it was windy or you said you were in Vegas this last week, if I was at the top of one of those towers and I was standing on the edge of it, I think I would be scared of heights in regards to like, I'm just scared that I could potentially fall off.

Now, if you put a harness on me, you could lean me over the edge and it wouldn't bother me at all. So I think there's, maybe there's a level of how people perceive what is safe. And honestly, I've never been asked that question before on a podcast, so I think there's something to that. And I think it's just something that maybe in your mind that you build up as a, as kind of something, you know, if I stood in the batter's box for major League baseball and I'm getting 102 mile an hour fastball pitched at me, I think there might be a level of fear just because I haven't been doing that for a number of years.

I haven't played baseball in, you know, 15 years or so. So I think that it's just a matter of like training your mind what you can be scared of and you know, there's different safety measures for that. Guys that do the those body suits and jump off mountains, right? Their safety factor is their body suit.

But that sounds incredibly dangerous to me.

[00:11:09] Paddy Dhanda: Yeah, I mean, I, I get scared just by climbing up a ladder, like I'm awful with heights. So yeah. If I had a harness, how would I feel then? I don't know. I probably still would be frightened as hell, but

[00:11:22] Dominic Teich: Yeah, maybe, but maybe less, you know, maybe you could train your brain to just know, and then maybe you could even.

Do some training. If you were really scared and you wanted to do that, still you could train somebody to knock you off the ladder and then you would trust your harness.

[00:11:36] Paddy Dhanda: And you're right, like, you know, I'm fine as a passenger on a plane, like I have no fear. Then I'm, you know, assuming the plane's gonna work and it's just gonna take us there.

So I can see that if I were there at the controls now, I don't know, but... that's that's one to be tested. I think one day maybe we'll see. Yeah.

[00:11:54] Dominic Teich: Learned behavior.

[00:11:56] Paddy Dhanda: So how tough is it Dom to become a fighter pilot? Because, hey, Let's get the elephant in the room, you know, top gun. Everyone who is sat at home listening to this has probably seen that movie or heard of it.

And Tom Cruise, he does some crazy things in that movie. I dunno how much of it's accurate. And that's something else I would love to hear your opinion on in a moment. But, you know, it looks really tough. So can you just put into perspective?

[00:12:22] Dominic Teich: Yeah. So I, what I would say to Those that maybe are aspiring to be fighter pilots or that want to give it a shot or want to rather something, do something in your life that's incredibly difficult, right?

Whatever that happens to be. If you want to go to space and be an astronaut, if you want to be a doctor, a lawyer, a professor at a college, I mean, those are all kind of difficult things to get into, and you can probably attest. It takes time, it takes grit, and there's gonna be, I think there's this false notion.

Nowadays more than ever, that just do what you love, right? You hear these types of cliche things that just pop out, and it's if you're doing what you love. Well Paddy what I can tell You is there's a lot of days where I did not like getting beat up and learning and failing as a pilot, but I knew that's something that I could grow into.

And a lot of people don't know this, but I grew up playing bluegrass violin. So I went to fiddling competitions. My family had a band, so we would travel into Canada and all over the states just playing music. And there, I can tell you this, there were a lot of days where, I did not like playing my violin, because it was a lot of work and I wasn't very good at it.

But as I got good at it, I really started to love it. And so the message behind that is even as a fighter pilot, now that I'm an instructor you know, I've been teaching in the schoolhouse here. I've been teaching young new F 16 fighter pilots for seven years now. And so now that I've been an instructor for over 20 years flying airplanes, What I can tell you is that it is incredibly fun.

It is. I, and I love it, but I can tell you that path wasn't laid out like a red carpet. I didn't step on the carpet and be like, oh, I love this. I just love flying. Because it's very, it's a very difficult thing to do. You know, even I can imagine, even if you became a college professor your first year, There's gonna be a lot of learning still that's going on.

There's probably gonna be some days where you don't really like what's happening. So I think my message to a lot of you know, I would say the younger crowd, maybe you're in middle school, high school, college, you've just gotten outta college, is that. As a new person, even if you're working at a bank, right?

If you want to be a big time banker, you're gonna have to go make coffee and you're gonna have to serve your boss and serve the people around you. And a lot of times it's not gonna be fun. But guess what? When you're the big time banker. You may end up loving that, and you may be on top of your own world, you may be just the best dag gum tractor driver on this side of the Mississippi.

But, that doesn't just happen overnight. So I think that is the, a big thing that I try to tell people is that don't do the easy stuff because everybody can do that. What are you gonna do that's gonna take some time that you love?

[00:15:16] Paddy Dhanda: Got it. And what is the process for becoming a fighter pilot?

Like is there different levels of qualification or is it like one big program you've gotta go through?

[00:15:26] Dominic Teich: I mean, it's very restrictive just to get even selected to be a pilot in the military. And I would say there are even, you know, there's even qualifications in the civilian world. I'd say the difference in the military is that there's usually a cutoff for age.

So if you can imagine. You know, if you're 55 years old and you wanna fly military jets, it's too old. I think the age is actually 36. There can be waivers, but they typically want to get the younger. What's that?

[00:15:52] Paddy Dhanda: I said, damn, I missed out, but go on.

[00:15:56] Dominic Teich: So yeah, there's a ton of qualifications to just apply and then there's three different.

There's three different commissioning sources to become an officer. So, one qualification you have to have an undergraduate, you have to have a four year degree at a minimum, so you have to go through that whole rigamarole. You have to go to college. So you have to be educated and you have to have a degree.

That's one qualification. You have to meet age qualifications and then there's all sorts of health, vision you can imagine. All the different things that the military wants to make sure that you have, right? Obviously if you are... if you've got diabetes and you've got heart issues and you can't see, that's becomes very difficult to fly fighter jets or even fly any military aircraft in that, for that matter.

So there's the selection process. Once you're selected, then you go through some sort of bootcamp for lack of better term. And then once you graduate bootcamp, then you go to flight screening and they screen you to see if you're gonna in smaller aircraft. Little two, maybe four seat aircraft, and they just go up and you fly for probably 10 or 20 hours and they screen you.

Are you gonna be throwing up all the time? Do you get dizzy? Do you have any flying aptitude? Can you learn how to do this? And then if you pass screening, then you go to undergraduate pilot training and you're flying a 1200 horsepower turbo prop, jet engine, little go-kart of an airplane with ejection seats. It's a really fun airplane. And then you go through that training, and if you graduate there, then you go onto your different tracks So there's tracks for flying, helicopters, flying, heavy aircraft, fighter jets. So there's different tracks, and then there's different levels of competition, right? So if you're, I would say by and large, Many students want to go to the fighter track just because of Top Gun and there's that allure.

However, I will say I have met some guys that were the top of their class and they chose to go through the heavy track to fly big airplanes. So then you go to your... then you get selected to go to the fighter track, and now you're flying a twin engine jet. Supersonic airplane and you're flying in formation and learning those skills.

And then if you pass that, you get your wings and you have to go to other training, it's introduction to fighter fundamentals and you're flying a jet there and then, and only then if you graduate there, you get to go to fighter pilot training in an actual fighter jet. But then you have to make it through that program.

So there's, let me think. Flight screening, u p t one, the track to number two, I mean, and then the actual fighter jet training. There's six, six steps to even go through six different flying courses to where then you are now an actual fighter, jet wingman, and you're not even, you can't even lead other aircraft, you can just fly the jet yourself and employ it in combat. And then there's flight lead upgrade training. So then you learn how to lead other aircraft around and then, and only then you jump to instructor pilot upgrade training.

And then if you're really good and the timing and everything lines up, then you can get selected to go to Top Gun School and go through the weapon school to become an instructor of instructors. So as you can imagine, there's there were many days where, you know, I was pushing 14 and 16 hour days for many years learning how to do all this, and it just wasn't fun. But I loved flying fighter jets, so there's that I think this could be fun and I think I could love this forever type of feeling behind it all.

But it took some time.

[00:19:15] Paddy Dhanda: Wow. I'm speechless like that is phenomenal, that journey. I mean, what percentage of people drop out or, you know,.. Out of the number that started?

[00:19:28] Dominic Teich: Well, so in my, for my class it was, I think we started with thir... now we, I think we had a little bit higher of a washout rate than most, but we started with, I believe 28 or 30, and we graduated with 20.

So, There was from the time, I think that was step three, right? So from in step three when they're flying that higher performance jet engine, turbo prop airplane, we lost, you know, a good chunk of the class, eight or 10 students. And now granted, three or four of 'em were actually really awesome dudes.

They just kept throwing up. They couldn't stop the, they got motion sickness. And as you can imagine, if you get motion sickness and you're throwing up, you're not flying the airplane. So that's kind of a dangerous combination. So... another story for you, Paddy. There was one of the students, he was one of the happiest, hardworking, just a pleasure to be around and he, every time he flew, he would throw up. And there's this chair that's on really good. Ball bearings and you sit in it and it's got a cage rounding. So you strap yourself into it and then somebody stands on the outside. It's like a merry-go-round from hell and they just spin you, really fast.

And so it's to essentially train your inner ear, right? Cuz you have you have water in your inner ear and it's, when it spins around, that's what can trick your brain. And then that can trigger that response of I want to throw up. Well, this kid would go over to the, we call it the Barony chair, and he would spin every afternoon and he would violently vomit every afternoon.

He was determined. He was determined. Well, he hit his bust limit, so he kept, if you throw up in the airplane, you don't pass the ride. So he hit the bus limit and unfortunately he washed out. But I have... there's very few people that are so determined to do that. Just, I mean, throwing up every single day, multiple times, just to try to see if he could get over it.

And I think the important message to that is that I would imagine that whatever career field he is in now, cuz I, unfortunately I haven't kept up with him, but whatever career field he's in now, based on his attitude and his perception, how he trained his own mindset. Pilot training wasn't a failure to him.

He learned something from that and he learned what he wasn't good at. And so I can imagine as he went into his next career field, there was maybe a little bit of hesitancy to "oh, I washed out of pilot training", and that follows you. But I can imagine within a week or two he's probably back on his horse just going, you know, this is my new life and I'm going to grow into this and make something out of it.

[00:21:57] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, I love that. Think you're so right. Every experience that we have, we take a little bit from that to shape. Where we are going. Steve Jobs did this, his most, that famous speech about joining the dots. And you know, he looks back at his life and he goes "I attended this calligraphy class". And people were saying like, what are you doing?

But yet look at the outcome at the end. Like, you know, apple, they have the most beautiful fonts and all of these great things and it's all because of all of these little experiences that he had along the way. And I think looking back and joining the dots and going "That was a reason why", like, there was always a reason for having these experiences.

I, I think is absolutely true. Going back to Top Gun. Tom Cruise, the stuff they show in that movie, is it like acurated or is that just way over the top and did he do a good job in it for you? Do you think, like, as a fighter, pilot yourself, as a practitioner, as someone who's been through, you know, to Helen back watching that movie, did it make you cringe or were you proud of what they produced?

[00:22:58] Dominic Teich: So, I would say that from, I think it depends on the person that you ask, right? So this is all personally biased, of course, right? This is just my own personal opinion. When I watch Top Gun, and I'll say it right up front, I enjoy watching Top Gun One and Top Gun two. I think they're from a cinema cinematography standpoint, they're phenomenal and there's a reason behind that, and I wish the Air Force would freaking publish a movie or at least get something out there on the same level. But we've, we haven't done that. So the Navy and the Marines, they get all the, all of the Hollywood glory. But so from a cinematography level, it's phenomenally produced.

Clearly you can see the differences in technology 30 years into the future, which is, you know, if you watch Top Gun Maverick versus the original one. They've, you know, basically graduated leaps and bounds ahead from technology. Now, from a fighter pilot standpoint, a lot of people don't know this, but I, Tom Cruise, outside of any personal life things that you know about Tom Cruise, he's actually, he's a jet pilot, so he has his own jet and he can fly in those jets.

And then from an actor standpoint, they had to train those actors to actually look and do the things in the videos. Now granted there's scenes where the fighter pilots have their masks down and they're pulling a lot of Gs in the jet, which is just a lot of pressure on your body in real life.

We don't drop our masks when we're doing that. We need the pressure air to, to make that happen. But in the movie, from a cinematography standpoint, you may not know what actor is doing that, so they need to show your face. So, There's little things like that. I watch those movies for entertainment and for comedy.

If you want to get into the, would we do this in real life, in war, we... it's stretched a little. I'll just say that. So the scenario that they had on the second movie, There are so many different assets from a military standpoint that could have done that job, that didn't involve fighter pilots.

If you catch my gist, so, there's got it satellites, there's ballistic missiles, there's cruise missiles, there's boats and ships and all sorts of other stuff. If you really wanted to drop a bomb through a thing like that, you probably from a military standpoint, Would not use fighter jets again.

[00:25:19] Paddy Dhanda: That would've been a short movie though. That would've been like a really quick movie. It doesn't matter. We need two hours of content, right? Yeah.

[00:25:27] Dominic Teich: The buildup is one guy sitting at a desk like Homer Simpson and he hits a red button and then the movie's over and they win, right? Like yeah. From, again, from a Hollywood standpoint, that wouldn't work.

Now, I will say that flying low and fast like they did, , that's difficult to do cuz you're, you are actually hand flying the aircraft at that, those low altitudes. So, you know, your attention has to be on that, you know, you do. There are missile systems that can shoot you. So, there's that aspect of it.

So I would say as they got into the later part of the film where they then took off in the old school F 14 and fired that thing up and took off and there's like fire and the runway's broken apart. I just, I was laughing because I considered that Comedy. It's completely... that's not tangible. You can't do that.

Like fighter jets are very finicky. Like I said earlier, I call 'em the girls. You have to take care of 'em. You have to... They're like, they're alive. I think they, you know, the jets have their own little quirks and you have to have the right maintainers taken care of 'em. So for them to just jump in a F 14 that hadn't been potentially started in years, like the chances of it actually starting and taking off and doing all that stuff is, or breaking is probably pretty low.

But again, personal, that's Dom slice. Tykes personal opinions on fighter pilot movies does not represent anything in, you know, I'm not representing the military or any of that stuff. Cause I know people will be like "you're not allowed to say that".

[00:26:59] Paddy Dhanda: Got it. Oh no, that, that's really great insight. And Dom, so in terms of the work that you do, you utilize a lot of your experiences from your fighter jet? Pilot experiences and you bring them into the business world. So, could you give us some of your insights there? How has that fighter, jet pilot mindset helped other business leaders in the work that they do?

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[00:28:56] Shure MV7-2: Now let's get back to the.

[00:28:59] Dominic Teich: Yeah, so where we are now is a number of years ago I started a real estate business where we buy multi-family properties that are distressed and we renovate them, and then I raise capital from investors. And I wrote a book about it so that I could give that to investors so that they could learn about the process and all that stuff.

So I think being a fighter pilot and everybody's different, right? You have your own strengths. And I think my, one of the superpower strengths that I didn't know I had is that a lot of times, I am not standing there worried about what other people think, what I'm doing, because if I know that I'm, if I know that I'm on the right path, I'm going to run down that path.

But for me, I don't need group think. I don't need people behind me saying, rah, I don't need likes on Facebook and all that kind of stuff. And I find that a lot of people nowadays are very worried and concerned about what other people think that they're doing. And I will say my path is much different than what most fighter pilots take. Not all but a lot of fighter pilots though, will retire from being a fighter pilot and then they'll go to the airlines and fly for the airlines. That doesn't really appeal to me. I would do it if I had to, and I have all the certifications and qualifications to do that. But it doesn't appeal to me and I don't love the idea, and it just sounds tedious to me.

But I would say that the large crowd does that from my standpoint. One of, if I would say, you know, if I could give my superpower is, granted, I learned a lot as a fighter pilot, but my superpower is that I'm kind of unhindered by suggestions from people that quote unquote, want to be helpful but that aren't right, and they're trying to hold you back.

So those are the villains in my life that they say something and I go, well, You're not gonna do that, but I'm gonna do that. So for me to start a real estate business that raises investor capital and writes a book and has now multiple websites, and I've started multiple businesses and we are getting ready to publish our sixth book this year as we're talking.

And I think out of all of that, as you talked about connecting the dots, right? Well, I never thought I was gonna write a book, but I wrote the book because I found I was teaching a lot of people what I was doing in my business. And so if people had an interest, I'd go, well, I'll just congeal all my notes and put 'em in a book.

And then when they ask, I can hand 'em a book. And then they'll go, holy crap, dude you wrote a book? And I'm like, well, yeah, this describes my ideal investor, so if you fit this book then let's talk. But then that saved me a ton of time. And then when I wrote that book, I started talking to other fighter pilots during the Covid 19 debacle and I said" Hey, have you ever published your story?". So we started publishing short stories and we put those in a book called Single Seat Wisdom cuz we're single seat fighter pilots and it's just the perspective of a fighter pilot in a 10 minute read with a short, impactful thing at the end of each chapter. So each book so far has 20 different fighter pilots writing stories and we put those in single seat wisdom.

It's a series now we're getting ready to publish volume three this year in 2023. So, I think, like you said, connecting all the dots and then a lot of times for many years I felt very uncomfortable doing what I was doing because there were so few people that had done it before. So I think that's maybe my superpower.

You can call it a gift, a talent, right? If you're a more of a spiritual, like, you know, if you read the Bible, like they'll talk about, God gives you talents, you have to find those talents. And I think one of them is, I'm usually not worried about what other people have to say if I know that I'm on the right path and I have good intentions behind it.

And it's for the greater good. That's kind of where I've caught a lot of my accelerated acceleration as Bucky Fuller would say.

[00:32:52] Paddy Dhanda: Yeah, no I totally aligned with what you're saying. I think I was talking to a friend of mine the other day about kids of today, and I sound like a really old dinosaur right now, but I've got two kids, you know, one's 11 years old and my daughter's 13.

And I think about, How much they are probably wrapped up in cotton wool, as we say in the UK. Like they're mollycoddled so much that we always protect them from, you know, any kind of trauma or any bad news. And, you know, we always go, well, "back in my day it was very different". Or, you know, "my parents will even say to me", "back in my day, it was even worse than your day".

And I, I sometimes think that they're gonna grow up. To be too soft and then they are gonna face real trauma and they're not gonna be able to deal with it. And we hear about a lot of mental health issues, you know, at the moment. And lots of people you know, are really impacted by the negative impacts of social media and all of these things.

And I think to what you were saying, almost this toxic environment that you are sometimes. Within. For some people they, they don't have that willpower to be able to deal with that. And but you know, it sounds like you had that mental toughness to go, Hey, thanks for that, but I'm gonna do it anyway cuz I'm mentally tough.

How does one build that mental toughness to be able to, you know, just still push forward with what they believe in?

[00:34:19] Dominic Teich: You know, I think that there's I think it's just you have to realize where your strengths and weaknesses are, and if you're one that, that caves easily to that. I think it's just, it's knowing yourself, right?

That's, I think that's even scribed on the temple of Apollo. It's in Greek, but it's know thyself and I think part of it is just bringing that to light, saying I really cave easily to peer pressure. And knowing that about yourself and then you've now identified it. I really get negative when I scroll through Facebook or I scroll through any social media or if I binge watch YouTube or so as soon as you identify it, cuz we're creatures of habit.

You'll have to identify it first. You have to know, you know, just like how do you know you're at war? You have to declare war. You have to know. So I think the biggest thing is just going "Hey, I am weak in these situations" and then identifying that. And then the next step is figuring, having a plan. So fighter pilots, we have, it's a very simple mantra.

It's plan, execute, debrief, and box Johnson, he's a astronaut, test pilot and fighter pilot. He wrote a chapter in single seat wisdom, volume two, called plan, execute, debrief. It's a very simple mantra, but you have to identify the problem first, and then you can start your plan. So go, Hey, I am weak at this point.

Now this is my plan is I am gonna restrict myself to looking at social media 15 minutes a day or whatever it happens to be. And then hold yourself accountable to that, and then put your plan. Into execution and go to starting tomorrow, I'm gonna do this. And then debrief yourself At the end of the day, go, did I do my plan?

And if not, either tweak your plan and re-execute different so you can kind of throughout your day. And that applies. That's very simple. It's a very simple construct, but I think naming what you're having an issue with helps you build that. And you're, and it's, it's more like a, it's more like walking up steps versus doing like a box jump.

You know, you see a, it's very common nowadays to see people at the gym jumping up on a three or four foot box and you're like, how'd you get to that? Well, they started with little box jumps. So do little steps. And that builds along your life. And as you get older, if you're used to that and that becomes a habit, it grows on itself.

But I can tell you right now, Paddy, I was not that type of person. It just didn't happen overnight. It takes time. You have to practice it. It's just like hitting a fast ba, you know, hitting a fastball, standing in the batter's box and hitting it. And I don't know, maybe cricket is more prevalent over there, but, you know, just, it's the same thing.

You gotta practice. And if you don't practice, then how are you going to, and if you, one, if you don't practice and you don't know what you're trying to battle, if you haven't declared war on something that's dragging you down, then how do you know where to start?

[00:37:11] Paddy Dhanda: So there's this great TED talk that. You just reminded me about, which is by a guy called J what I learned from a hundred days of rejection. And this guy, he's just amazing.

He talks about how he purposely set himself a challenge of trying to get rejected every day for a hundred days. And he does like ridiculous things, like he turns up at some random person's house with a flower. And a pot. And he basically knocks on the door and goes, Hey, you don't know me, but I'd love to plant this in your front garden.

And the guy's like, no, but Joe over the street, she likes plants. Maybe you want to go talk to her. So like he just does his ridiculous things to get rejected. But then he shares his learning. And it's, for me, it kind of reminds me of that because if we don't have these setbacks and sometimes a big setback can be overwhelming, but if we have small setbacks, then over time they accumulate.

And I think we do get conditioned in a way Sure. In which we are able to deal with it. Otherwise, yeah. If we've never had a failure and then all of a sudden we get a big one, then that can be very traumatic for many people. So I love that. I think, you know, we've gotta have those setbacks as you mentioned.

But, you know, embrace them and use it as a learning for the next one. But yeah, I need to do that a hundred day challenge at some point. If you're in, let me know. But I would love to do it with someone else so we can both push each other. But I haven't found a volunteer just yet who wants to do a hundred days of it.

[00:38:47] Dominic Teich: I think I'll re... let me wait till I retire here in a couple years from the military and then I'll start doing ridiculous things like that.

[00:38:54] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, awesome. Then we'll be knocking on strangers doors and going, Hey, can I plant this? Awesome. Dominic, I have one other burning question I was gonna ask you... has there been an occasion where you've had a near death experience through the work that you do? Or what has been the most scariest or most dangerous moment for you?

[00:39:13] Dominic Teich: Also, I would say you hinted at it, the word failure is it's a big one. And people and I think your initial reaction to hearing the word failure will determine a lot of how you are able to process what happened and learn from it.

Because you said, I. You know, in, in shorter words and in better, you said it better than I can, but when you fail, do you consider that a failure as a person or do you consider that a lesson learned? And so a lot of times when I fail as, as much as I don't like to, and it hurts and it's embarrassing at times and all of the things you learn from that.

And so as a young fighter pilot, I was for lack of better term, I was dog fighting. So we were doing very close in. Very fast dog fighting, and I was fighting an instructor who was much better than I was and I got comfortable on the flight that day. And on our sixth engagement, I broke a training rule and pointed at his aircraft too long while I was taking simulated shots.

And we passed. I passed his aircraft very close. We had a very close pass. And, but it happened so fast that it was almost like I didn't have enough time to be. Scared of it, but as it started to settle in, and then we started to look at our tapes in the debrief, I realized that I had a very near death experience.

And so I got you know, the very tight-knit communities, whether you're a police officer, firefighter, you're on a baseball team, maybe even doctors and lawyers do this in their close groups, but they name each other. And so fighter pilots have a naming ceremony and it's not really a naming ceremony.

They drag you through the mud figuratively, and then you get your fighter pilot name. And I've been named a lot of bad names throughout my career, and so I'm lucky to have gotten Slice, one because it's a PG call sign and some of the other ones weren't so good. But then now Slice means to me that I failed on that mission.

On that training mission, I almost died and I learned a lot from it. So now that's something, instead of running away from that and fearing that, I can now teach the young students and say "Hey, if you want to die or potentially die or get really close to death, then you will do this and by the way, that's how I got my call sign".

So it's a lesson learned. There's another story that I wrote about in single Seat Wisdom, volume one, and that was another near death experience in fighter jets. But for the interest of time and kind of as a hook, if you would like to read about that, you can find it in that book.

[00:41:40] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, you got me on the edge of my seat now I'm like, oh my God. I wanna know more. I wanna know more, but I see the book is behind you. So, I will certainly check it out and will include the link in the show notes as well for anyone that wants to get hold of the book.

[00:41:53] Dominic Teich: Great, thank you.

[00:41:54] Paddy Dhanda: Dom, how can people get in touch with you and how can they find out more about the great work that you do?

[00:41:59] Dominic Teich: So we've distilled everything down. I say we, because we're up to 52 fighter pilots now in the single seat mindset community. But single seat mindset.com, that's our landing page. And there's also free resources. One of the main thing that you'll see on the landing page, if you wanna learn more or develop this, your own superpower.

I started a program that now has other fighter pilots contributing ideas to, but it's called the Competent Wingman, and it's right on the main landing page of single seat mindset.com. It's completely free. It's a two minute message sent to your email once a week. I don't sell your data, I don't get anything at out of it.

It's just us sharing some lessons. You know, miles high lessons from the third dimension for people to kind of read and see what it's all about. And if you don't like it, just unsubscribe from it.

[00:42:50] Paddy Dhanda: Absolutely, I agree. And yeah, we control what comes into our mailbox, so, we have that decision to make, but it sounds like a really valuable resource.

So, thank you for sharing that, Dom, it's been such a pleasure to get to know you over this episode. I feel like we're friends from old, even though we literally just met about an hour ago. And that's what I love about doing this. Show because I, some people say" Hey, shall we have a pre-show catchup"?

And I'm like, no, I don't want to do that, because we'll then talk about all the good stories that you're gonna talk about and I'd much rather it be raw and we hear about them for the first time and we're on the show. So, really appreciate you sharing your background and it's been really inspiring for me.

I mean, I can't even imagine like, how you've got to where you have, I mean, it just sounds like mission impossible, but you know, you've persevered and you've, you're at, you know, at such a, such an amazing level in, in what you do and I hope that inspires other people out there as well, because, you know, yeah we sometimes do, we look at the ladder and we go "oh, it's too high. I'm not gonna even bother. But one step at a time and then"... We'll get there. Yeah. Yeah. Last word over to you, Dom.

[00:43:57] Dominic Teich: Paddy, you took the words outta my mouth. I was gonna say, when you are scared of that, very lofty, you know, they call it a bhag. A big, hairy, audacious goal. Just take the next step.

And guess what? What you're visualizing as the end game, you might end up on a different path, but you would've never known if you didn't take that first step. That first step may actually be in the wrong direction. You'll learn from it and you'll go down a different path. So that's, that is all I've ever done in my life is I see, oh, that what sounds cool.

I'll do that. Let me just take the next step. Let me just take the next step. So don't overwhelm yourself when your plan executing and debriefing. Make your plan just about the next step, not the huge plan, just a short little plan. What are you gonna do every single day? And then, I call it the five minutes for freedom.

Five minutes for whatever intentionality, but in the morning. Wake up and just spend five minutes. Don't go to social media, pray or meditate, or just sit in silence, but get your intentionality squared away for that day so that you can then execute your plan. So, at the end of the day, you're not debriefing yourself getting down on yourself because you mess it up.

[00:45:06] Paddy Dhanda: Oh, what a lovely way to finish the episode. Thank you so much, Dom.

[00:45:10] Dominic Teich: Thank you, Paddy.