Hayden: [00:00:00]
I really loved that interview with Nick McDonald particularly enjoyed his genuineness, his authenticity, his humanness and kind of realness in the stories that he told you. And I'm really hoping that. The conversation that we had uh, resonates with you and that some of the stories that he was able to tell, and particularly his vulnerability in sharing things like his imposter syndrome and other things resonates with you.
He was very human, real, authentic, and the stories certainly resonated with me and I hope they do with you as well, or did with you rather. This section now is really about me [00:01:00] unpacking some of the things that came up during the interview to help you understand some of the evidence and the research behind the things we spoke about, but also to give you my personal views and experiences and share some of my own stories, as well as that hopefully end with some practical tips and tools that if you want to implement some of the things that Nick has tried that you can have a practical tools to take away as well.
Thank you. So if I move into what, what was the key thing that I took away from the conversation with Nick, and it was really about to me, courage, courage and vulnerability and how they go together. And the starting point that Nick had was to admit that he didn't know what he didn't know. And I think that takes a huge amount of courage to admit that and vulnerability to begin the journey that it began.
We focused, as you know, on two kind of broad areas, both well being and leadership, but I'm going to talk about well being and some of the concepts came up there first. He spoke about the fact that he should have asked for help earlier. [00:02:00] And do think that this is a key starting point. And he shared that he didn't know what he didn't know.
And I think particularly for men, the concept of admitting you don't know something is very hard because men are meant to be strong and it's potentially a sign of weakness to say you don't know and you need help. And of course, Brené Brown and the research she's done shows that's far from the truth.
In fact, it's the opposite of that. To admit vulnerability, admit weakness, admit you don't know something is actually a sign of courage and a sign of strength. And so Nick was able to do that. And he even shared on a practical. Perspective. He shared that and it was encouraging listeners to actually, if they're in that space to go and get help, get a coach and get somebody that might be able to help them and support them to develop themselves in some, some way.
So I think that's a key concept to start with. But the second one that I'm going to dig a bit more deeply into is this concept of. imposter syndrome that Nick shared. Now he didn't even know what that term was [00:03:00] when he first heard it for him. He just didn't have a great belief in himself as a CEO. Now I've got to be careful with this because he actually is quite a confident person in general.
But because he didn't have the qualifications, he hadn't studied management and leadership, he came from very humble beginnings as a nurse to build this great company. He kind of felt that he didn't belong in that particular role as the CEO. So I was able to share with him that imposter syndrome is incredibly common.
And in sharing that, in fact, the stats show somewhere between 9 and 82 of leaders feel that. Now it's a very wide range there, and there's a lot of different research around this, regardless of exactly where you land on that. It's actually reasonably common to suffer from syndrome.
Benefit of sharing that with Nick was he felt. That he wasn't alone, that it normalised that and it was okay and he didn't need to continue to [00:04:00] hide it and he could begin to talk about it. That is really crucial because that led us to talk about confidence and self belief. And one of the strategies that we use to help him improve his confidence and self belief to overcome Imposter Syndrome is cognitive psychology.
And what was interesting about that, he shared the story with us about the fact that he knew he was seeing a psychologist, but he thought I'd be much more business oriented. And he was surprised when we went into cognitive psychology from a business perspective, but positively surprised he learned a lot about himself from the approach we took there.
And I shared a book uh, Sarah Edelman and her book, Change Your Thinking, which I think is probably the most powerful and easy to understand book on cognitive psychology that I uh, know. And the simple concept of cognitive psychology uh, when you get rid of the complexity is that it's based upon the belief that our emotions, our feelings are not influenced by [00:05:00] the events that happen to us, by the things around us, but by our beliefs or our thoughts about those situations. There's a simple model that helps us understand that called the ABC model. A is the activating event. So something happens in our lives. We often think that that leads us to the C, the A to the C, which is the emotional consequence is the C.
But in fact, cognitive psychology says it's not the activating event that leads to the consequence, the emotional consequence. It's your B, which is your belief system or your thoughts about that event that leads you to feel a certain emotion. Those emotions could be positive or negative. Positive emotions could be joy or happiness.
Negative emotions could be sadness or anger or frustration or anxiety or depression or guilt, embarrassment. Many of those negative emotions that we all feel from time to time. And so. If you want to feel less negative emotions, then the [00:06:00] secret is to change your thinking about those situations, which often doesn't go from being sad to being joyful, but it certainly reduces the negative emotion in a way that can be more helpful and more realistic.
To do that, you need to look at your belief systems and look at some of the irrational or, as I like to say, unhelpful thoughts. that actually drive some of those negative and unhelpful emotions. Now from a pragmatic perspective what Nick shared with me was really useful is once he learnt to do that, which by the way took about 12 months, it's not something you quickly learn, but once you learn that then he talked about where that was really, really helpful.
So for example, he spoke about where he was in a meeting and he might be feeling frustrated or angry with somebody. And at that time he was able to, in the moment after a long time recognize where that emotion was coming from, that it was happening at all. [00:07:00] And the thoughts or expectations that led to his uh, emotions such as frustration or anger with somebody.
He was able to do that all without talking, all calmly in the meeting, and it led to him having better relationships and better connections to people that he worked with. And so it's a good reminder of practical connection of cognitive psychology to relationships that you need to form with yourself, but also with others.
I've got to share with you before I move off this one, the fact that I learned about cognitive psychology and the ABC model about 35 years ago, many years ago. And I've been applying it to my life and the work that I do for that time. It's not a magic panacea and a simple thing you can wave over like a wand.
But if you work with it over time, you'll absolutely see that it is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful tools you can utilise to manage yourself and others better. We moved on from talking about cognitive psychology specifically to [00:08:00] small concepts like the work of B. J. Fogg, which is on his book Tiny Habits.
And sometimes the concepts like cognitive psychology are big and complex to get. But B. J. Fogg's work in Tiny Habits is very small and very simple. And Nick shared with us that sometimes those small things made a big difference. And so we spoke about changing tiny habits in laughably small ways.
One example of that was to help with helping Nick to get exercising more. Was the night before exercising in the morning to go to bed and put his shoes. By the bed. So that when he got up, he was putting his shoes on immediately. So there was no other distractions. So there's tiny habits was something else that Nick spoke about.
And that's BJ Fogg. And he's got a lot of research around the power of tiny habits. And it's the small daily habits. that build up to be significant long term changes, which are really, really important. And I've found that work to be really important, and I've included that in some of my [00:09:00] habits. It's the daily little things you could change and do it every single day.
A great story around that comes from Simon Sinek. Now, he probably is most famous for his book, Start With Why. And he shares a story of, Cleaning his teeth, which I always remember as a lovely anecdote for Tiny Habits. He says, if you clean your teeth in the morning, you're not going to have clean teeth.
If you clean your teeth in the morning and night, you won't have clean teeth. But if you clean your teeth morning and night, every day for your whole life, you're more likely to have clean teeth. It's the same thing for going to the gym. You go to the gym once, it won't help you to get there. If you go to the gym twice it won't help you, but if you build a habit of doing something almost every day, you're going to lead a fit and healthy life.
So it's the things that you do that are repeatable every day, tomorrow, the next day, and the next day. So that's a very key practical thing you can do. So if you want to change any habits. Think about what you're going to do as a small step tomorrow. And if it's too hard, make it even [00:10:00] smaller is my best tip for you.
And if that's too hard, make it even smaller. Start very small and tiny and then you can do it again and again. And once you've done it for a month, increase it and do it for the next month and increase it and do it for the next month. But make the habit small and make them something that's sustainable.
Something else that we spoke about beyond tiny habits was a concept called the Elephant and the Rider. Now this comes from somebody called Jonathan Haidt, now Haidt is H A I D T. And Jonathan talks about this concept called the elephant rider, which is an analogy about the way the brain works.
We have the prefrontal cortex, which is like the rider. It's the rational brain. And at the back of our brain, we have the limbic system. which manages our emotional side of our brain. And the analogy there is that that's like the elephant. And most of the time as human beings, we like to think that we're all rational and we make smart, rational, thoughtful decisions.[00:11:00]
Sadly, that is not the case. Most of the time we actually make decisions on gut fear with our emotional part of our brain. And then the rational part of our brain looks for facts and data and information that supports our first gut fear. dEspite the fact that we like to think otherwise, all of us, me included.
And so the elephant on the right is a lovely analogy for that. So it's a bit like this, the elephant is the emotional part of our brain, our limbic system and most of the time it goes wherever it wants to go and occasionally the rider can steer the elephant in a different direction and that's the way you need to think of how our brain actually functions.
And so how do we engage the rider more often, uh, the way to do that is to slow down and to pause. and then deliberately and consciously activate the rational part of our brain and deactivate the emotional part of the brain. We can't do that if we're an automatic pilot, if we just continue to do the same [00:12:00] things we have to actively Pause, stop, think, and do that regularly.
Now, even that's not going to ensure that our rational brain works all the time, but it is a good strategy to begin with, to start to activate the rational brain more often, rather than automatically going with our first thought that we think is right, but is based upon our emotional brain. So that concept was something that Nick found very helpful, because, particularly as he was struggling with diet, And exercise and following some of the things we talked about, he would have these two voices talking to himself and one would be emotional, one would be rational.
And that concept helped me understand that well, we're all like that and that's why it's hard. That's why it's hard to change habits and behaviours. That led to this concept that we spoke about which is being self compassionate. which is a concept Kirsten Neff has spoken about a lot, which is around making sure that we're human beings and we all[00:13:00] make mistakes and we're not perfect.
In fact, Jonathan Haidt would say we're very emotional. And when we make mistakes, it's important, and we don't do the things we set out to do, that we start with a compassionate kindness to ourselves. And if we're kind to ourselves, Then, it doesn't let us off the hook, but we can then calmly learn from our mistakes and improve.
By an extent, we can learn from mistakes and not expect perfection. So, the concept of self compassion is a really important one to understand, particularly if you've got perfectionistic standards high expectations or black and white type of thinking, then that concept is a really important one.
The last thing that we spoke about in relation to sort of well being was the fact that we started using a 360 degree assessment. And that helped Nick to have greater self awareness. thought he knew himself well, but he got some feedback that he wasn't aware of and he wasn't expecting. [00:14:00] I helped him through that and he initially got a bit down, but then he was able to learn from that and actually improve.
His self awareness and then go and start developing himself in those particular ways so if you've got a safe environment to receive feedback and You've got a curious mindset Then that is a really helpful way to improve and develop yourself Which gives you a greater sense of satisfaction because you're developing yourself The last area I want to share with you is around leadership And the main concepts that Nick and I spoke about, the first one was around this concept of big rocks and using the balanced scorecard approach to understand your big rocks.
So Nick was somebody who was running around, working as hard as he could, but he didn't really understand what the most important things to focus on was. Where would he put his energy to focus? And so he worked long hours and hard hours because he wasn't quite sure of what the most important things were.
So to understand your big rocks, the [00:15:00] starting point is to have a framework for that. And one of the best frameworks for that is the balanced scorecard approach, which was first introduced in the eighties by Kaplan and Norton. And their view was that The scorecard of the 80s for business success was too narrow and it was based upon one concept, and that is money.
Either shareholder return or profit, those types of things were focused on. And Kaplan and Norton said that's very unbalanced view of a business, and they said a more balanced view is based around four things. Get the people right. are the foundations of your success. Get the processes and systems aligned to your people.
Align those processes and systems to your customers, which is the third thing. And if you focus on the customers with good processes and good people, that will drive long term financial success. So the balanced scorecard approach is much more balanced and it's people, process, customer and finances. I taught Nick that [00:16:00] framework and that was a great framework for him to start thinking about his business, what was most important to focus on in each of those categories.
From that, he knew what the big rocks were. He knew what was important versus what was urgent. And And that helped him to focus and prioritize those top important things. That led us to the next concept, which was a concept of similar to Stephen Covey's concept of important versus urgent. So Stephen Covey talks about focus on important things, not urgent things or less urgent things.
Often we're fighting fires with the urgent things, so something urgent is something that's demanding our attention now, but something that's important may or may not be urgent. And so identifying the important things that you should be focusing on is crucial and a balanced scorecard approach helps you with that.
Another concept or book that we read and talked about that aligns to that. just takes it a little [00:17:00] deeper and further, is by Cyril Puyupian, and he's got a book called Work Smarter Live Better, and it's similar to the concept of Stephen Covey of Important vs Urgent, but it just takes it a little deeper in terms of understanding what do we need to do that helps us be more efficient, and what do we need to do that helps us be more effective in what we do.
The effectiveness is the most important thing uh, which links in to Drucker's work, which is all about saying efficiency is doing the thing right, effectiveness is doing the right thing and if you link that to Cyril Puypian's book. And his concepts, he focuses half of his book on efficiency and half on effectiveness.
But effectiveness is more important in this case than efficiency. That is spending time pausing and working out what are the most important things you should be focusing on, rather than spending more time trying to be quicker and more efficient with the things that you actually do. So we spoke a lot about those [00:18:00] concepts and how Nick can use those to focus on the big rocks.
Another thing that Nick mentioned was the Steeple High Performance Teams model. So we used this framework to help Nick build a high performing team. Amongst his executive team, we actually made some restructures and changed the team and then we sort of built a high performing team. So the high performing teams model that Steeple has been using for a long time has seven major factors.
It says The elements of high performing teams start with direction. A team needs to be clear on its direction, its vision, and to have a shared goal of some kind. individuals in the team need to have role clarity. They do understand their roles and responsibilities, but also it needs to link to the direction of the team.
A team needs to have a level of interdependency. That is, their roles need to overlap somewhat so they actually depend upon each other for shared success. If they don't have any interdependency, They're not a team, they're just a group of [00:19:00] people, so we spoke about that. Another one is around balance and diversity.
Diverse teams, if they leverage that diversity do better than homogenous teams once they manage conflict and once they learn to leverage their diversity. Another factor in building high performance teams is a little about communication. So it's both formal and informal communication. What's the rhythm of the meetings we have?
Are we having the right balance of operational versus strategic meetings? And informally, do we give and receive feedback? Well, that kind of thing. aNother factor is all around commitment. Are we committed to the whole more than our individual functional areas and high performance teams are much more committed to the team objectives.
then they are to their individual functional areas. The final element in the model is all around trust. Trust and psychological safety. This is the glue that holds the team together. And so, do we have a high level of trust and safety in each other? If we do, then [00:20:00] that enables all of those other factors.
If that's missing, That's going to pull the team performance down and certainly cohesion down. So that's a framework that we used together in the work that we did. And finally, Nick wanted to become more of a coach as a leader in the latter part of the coaching work we did. So I taught Nick a leader as coach framework.
A common framework known as the GROW model was something that I taught Nick to use as he coached his team members to help them reach their potential. The GROW model is not a steeple model, it's a model that's a pretty common model out there. It's been around for at least 15 or 20 years in teaching people how to coach other people.
And it's a coaching process, which starts with goals, helping the coachee work out what their goals are and what they want to achieve. Once you've done that, the second bit is R, which is the reality. And that is basically in relation to their goals, what is the current reality, [00:21:00] which really means what are their strengths and weaknesses in relation to their goals currently.
From that, particularly understanding the gaps or the weaknesses that they have in relation to their own goals. Then you go to O, which is options. What could you do differently? What could you do differently in order to improve upon some of those areas where there's gaps? The O is a brainstorming section where you brainstorm lots of options, not just one option.
Lots of different things the person could experiment with. Once they've got lots of options, it's about making a decision and the W in the model is What will you do next? So there's a commitment to taking some action at the end of the coaching session. So it's G R O W What are the goals? What's the reality?
What are the options and what will you do next? So that was a framework that I taught Nick and he found that really simple and helpful, simple to understand, hard to do. So we've practiced many times to become good at actually using the Grower Model for Nick to [00:22:00] coach and develop others. So that is a fairly extensive list of a lot of the things that we spoke about, and hopefully that gives you a good understanding of the models and the frameworks, but also a bit of insight into practically, how can you start to utilize those frameworks and those models to improve as a leader and also to improve your own well being. I really want to thank Nick McDonald for being so authentic, vulnerable and open with sharing his experiences with you all.
I think that was incredibly insightful. I want to encourage the listeners. From now on to ensure that you, particularly if you like what you're hearing, subscribe, leave some reviews, share the podcast with your friends. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please look out for the next podcast, which will be coming up very soon.
Thanks for joining me.
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