Hayden: [00:00:00]
I really enjoyed that interview with Paul Lacy and particularly found it to be incredibly raw and real and helpful as well. So I want to dig into that a little bit now. The purpose of this section now is to really unpack some of the things that came out of the interview with Paul, and to explain where possible some of the evidence or the research behind some of the things we spoke about, but also leave you with some practical tips where possible and appropriate, around some of the key learnings and lessons in the things that we spoke about.
In particular, we spoke about a whole range of things, four or five things around leadership [00:01:00] and some of the lessons that Paul had about himself and his own leadership. We also spoke a lot about his well being and some of the things that were challenging and some of the things that he succeeded in with his own well being.
And I guess we finished with some reflections on. key lessons and learnings around both leadership and business and on the well being on the other side. and we'll delve into those deeply now with you. The first sort of area that we spoke about. Was all around, how you need to change your thinking to change your habits.
I mean for me a key element of what Paul spoke about was habits and a key part of that is your awareness of some of your own habits and the starting point for your thoughts and how you might need to change those thoughts in order to change yourself. In particular we spoke about the concept of of Change Your Thinking by Sarah Edelman, a book on cognitive psychology, and one of the thinking traps that Paul highlighted and remembered most was around catastrophizing.[00:02:00]
Now, for those who aren't so familiar with cognitive psychology, catastrophizing is a type of thinking trap, uh, that a lot of us sadly suffer from where we take one issue and we blow it out of proportion and we make it bigger than perhaps it needs to be. Uh, and whilst it may be something that's important, catastrophizing doesn't actually help us feel any better.
In fact, it exacerbates things and makes things worse than they are. Uh, and makes us worry and become more anxious and a whole range of negative, uh, emotions. It was really fascinating to understand Paul's memory of some of the things we spoke about, even a few years later, and particularly, that catastrophizing factor, but also the awareness.
He, like many other people, were going around being totally oblivious, and unconscious to the fact that their thoughts actually had an impact on their emotions. Once he learnt that, he was able to start to tap into those thoughts and emotions and recognize that [00:03:00] those thoughts were not him. He could let them go he could choose to change them. So yes, that's a theory around cognitive psychology. Uh, and also some of that is around a more recent aspect of cognitive psychology called ACT, which stands for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy which really is all around, rather than changing your thinking, the starting point is awareness of your thoughts and then making a choice as to whether or not you choose to, uh, sort of fret about and worry about and ruminate about those thoughts or whether you gently let them go and that those thoughts don't own you, that you can make some choices about what you choose to do with the thoughts rather than letting those thoughts just become, like runaway trains, if you like and make you a bit less strong in terms of your own emotional management side of things. So that was a fascinating thing that Paul started speaking about. He also spoke about some simple things, like diary management. and how he started focusing on putting, for him, was what he [00:04:00] wanted, which was three hours a day of time in his diary that's blank space because he felt he was rushing back to back meetings with no time to reflect, no time to do things that were happening throughout the day. Now, that sounds like something simple, easy to do, but actually is, is hard to do sometimes. Now the work around this, I guess the, some of the research for this comes back to Stephen Covey and some of his, focus on important versus urgent work.
But more recently, uh, there was a great book by less known person called Cyril Peupion, and he wrote Work Smarter, live better. And within that, he was focusing his efforts on the important versus urgent kind of concept from Stephen Covey, but he took it further and focused on simple things around diary management and looking at a diary that was either too busy with too much stuff in it, back to back meetings or another, the opposite of that, another diary that had very [00:05:00] little in it at all. So, you know, the ideal management from Cyril Peupion's perspective was something that out of an 8 hour, 9 hour day there was periods of let's say 5 hours out of 8 were sort of booked in but roughly 3 hours left, uh, with some some blank space. and so Paul, uh, focused on that concept and was able to implement a change to his diary, which helped him with his well being and with his leadership as well.
The third thing Paul spoke about was, uh, really about the power, uh, the team behind you. He spent a lot of time, focused on building a great team around him and building a high performance team. Now, there's a lot of people would say, yep, that's what you need to do, but there's a massive gap between knowing you should do it and actually doing it.
In fact, I should share with you that I remember running a business breakfast event on one occasion where we had a room of about 40 [00:06:00] leaders. And I ask a few questions, what the first question I asked around high performance teams was, who thinks building a high performance team is very important? And everyone put their hand up.
I then asked, for you as CEO, do you think it's one of the most important things you need to do? And they all put their hand up. I said, do you think it's in the top three? They all kept their hand up. And do you think it's the most important? And many of them said it's the most important thing. So then I asked, how many of you have ever built a high performance team?
And only about 50 percent of them said they had. Then I said, of those who have built a high performance team, How long do you think it stayed high performing? And probably only about half of that group said it stayed more than 12 months. So I guess the message there is that everyone recognises if you're a CEO or leader that building a high performance leadership team is crucial to success.
But not as many people have actually [00:07:00] ever done that and maintained it for time. So Paul talked about that and the focus on building a great team around him, which he said he was able to do. and he focused on building that team where the team very much supported him and he supported the team to lead the organization.
So that's something that's really crucial to long term success as a leader. The final thing that he talked about in relation to leadership was that little things really matter. While you are driving success, you need to make sure that you're also taking care of yourself. So it was a balance between the two.
And he gave the example of a little thing, which was ensuring that each day, uh, where possible, he had a walking meeting. So for any meeting where he didn't have to sit down and take notes, he would make it a walking meeting. So. That's something that Paul did, and there are many other examples of things that you can do to make a difference on a daily basis.
But the key is to focus on the little things, and it's the [00:08:00] culmination of lots of little things that make up a successful leader. I know the research behind that, I guess behind habits, if we talk about habits there, Probably the most well known person on tiny habits is BJ Fogg and he wrote a book called tiny habits and It is those little habits that make make a difference So I guess a couple of lessons for you and practical tips around that and the other things I've spoken about with respect to habits Start small BJ Fogg says laughably small.
So make your habits small like walking meetings or other things you might want to do. build a team behind you, a great team behind you and focus on the little things as part of that. diary management, have a look at your diary and make sure that you are managing your diary and it's not managing you and leave at least two or three hours each day of spare time.
So you're not in back to back meetings. And I guess from a habit perspective.[00:09:00] in terms of changing your thinking and changing your habits, awareness is a really important starting point, but you need to go beyond awareness in order to change some of your habits and the, the challenge in execution is one of the things that you need to focus on.
So go beyond awareness and focus on the tiny habits that you need to make and change in order to build new habits. We moved on from focus on leadership to a focus on well being. And as you can see, even in the first sort of elements of what Paul spoke about, there is an overlap between well being and leadership there.
Paul spoke about doing a 360 degree assessment, to increase his own awareness of himself. And in that, 360 degree feedback, there was some feedback that was quite confronting and challenging and emotional for him. But he received it really, really well. And I guess this is the second thing that's really important, is that he had a mindset of curiosity.
And in that mindset of curiosity, [00:10:00] he was able to receive that feedback really well. What's really important too is, I mean, I gave him that feedback, uh, from the feedback that we collected. And one of my goals as the psychologist helping with that was to focus on creating a safe space for Paul to actually be able to receive it well, making sure he was not being judged.
He was taking Uh, this as a learning opportunity and even when he got feedback that he was not expecting or that kind of hurt him emotionally, he was still able to separate out that emotional feeling and stay curious to receive that feedback really well in order to develop and improve himself as a leader further.
So I think that was really powerful, that message of staying curious where possible. One little tip I can give you to stay curious is try to separate out hearing the feedback from evaluating and judging whether you agree with it, disagree with it or not. And then go beyond that to, what do I want to do about it?
Do I [00:11:00] want to do anything about it? What we often try to do is hear the feedback, evaluate, judge it all in once. So almost mentally draw a line down between. Listening to, hearing it, understanding it, and then making some judgments and evaluations of whether or not you, what you think about that feedback and even thirdly, what you want to do about that.
Slow your thinking down to receive that feedback as best you can. Another thing that Paul spoke about was the challenges in changing ingrained habits despite the awareness and the desire. So he spoke about awareness being a key part of, um, change. He also spoke about motivational desire. So for Paul, he had awareness and he had desire and motivation, but he still found it really difficult to actually change his habits and behaviours.
and that is a challenge for a lot of people is big a gap between knowing what you should do and actually doing it. It's the know and doing gap. And so, for Paul, one of his strategies was to learn to slow [00:12:00] down and pause and be more deliberate. For example, with Paul, When he saw some things in the business going downhill or struggling, he would become very frustrated with various things that were going on.
That frustration would come through, in meetings in his own leadership behaviour. He became aware of that, certainly though he was aware of that, the 360 degree feedback helped him become more aware of that. He wanted to change that. But he struggled to do so in the moment. And so one strategy was before going into key meetings, where he realized he might become frustrated, he would pause, slow down and breathe and decide how he wanted to be in that meeting.
And that was a very powerful strategy to go from knowing to doing differently every day. Something that built on that, he wanted to influence key stakeholders. He recognised that his [00:13:00] emotional behaviour was not helping. So what he did was, he wrote down a plan that he would follow to influence key stakeholders and he would review that just before important meetings where those stakeholders were involved. Um, he learnt a A tool and a framework, uh, that we often utilise, called the Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument which is based around whole brain thinking. So the HPDI is a tool, but the concept is whole brain thinking.
He learnt about left brain and right brain, he learnt about the limbic system, the emotional part of the brain, he learnt about the prefrontal cortex and where the rational thinking happens. And he learnt to slow down and think, hmm, what is my style? What is their style? How do I need to influence? How do I need to behave in order to be more effective rather than totally emotional?
Now, as part of that, one of the things that Paul learnt is that if you [00:14:00] just go about your days on automatic pilot, you're not learning, growing, developing or changing anything. So you have to actually be deliberate and be okay with being a bit uncomfortable to drive change. And certainly Paul was able to go through that, and change himself, albeit there were challenges in doing so.
So a couple of key kind of practical lessons for you if you're a leader in this space is make sure you're very open to increasing your knowledge and awareness of yourself and a 360 degree feedback tool can be very helpful, but also you need to make sure that you have a really good coach or psychologist that's helping you to understand that feedback, and stay curious and separate out your understanding of what it's actually saying from evaluation of what it's saying and what you're going to do about that. ensure that, uh, when you're trying to make some changes that you pause, slow down, and deliberately think about what you're doing and [00:15:00] maybe do something different based upon those, those thoughts.
And it's good to plan before really important meetings, how you want to be. In order to be more effective. The final thing that I spoke to Paul about, or we spoke about was, What has he learnt around leadership and business performance versus wellbeing? So on the leadership and business performance side of things, Paul had learnt, he had two kind of key lessons.
One is, get yourself some, some help. reach out and get a coach. Uh, get someone. to be there for you. You don't have to do it alone. You can get support from whether it's a coach or, or other experienced person, to help you. So that was a key message for him. And the second one was to make sure that you build a really good support network around you, including build a cohesive, high performing leadership team around you.
And again, that's easier said than done, but he said that needs to be one of your top focuses and get yourself a coach to be the [00:16:00] best leader you can be. The second era asked him to reflect on what has he learned about well being and he said a couple of things probably two main things One is it's the little things that matter is one of the key things It's the small daily habits Whether it's going for a walking meeting or just taking care of yourself every day that really matters and building good Habits for little things and secondly he talked about making sure you surround yourself by the right support networks by the right people.
Um, because you don't have to do it alone. And if your support networks are strong then you can cope with anything and hopefully get through challenges and go beyond that to thriving and flourishing. So look, they were the key messages that I've taken away from my conversation with Paul. And hopefully there's some key lessons and maybe even some practical tips for yourself in that.
So, to finish, I just want to make sure I thank Paul Lacey again for being so, human and real and, honest with us, uh, I loved his, [00:17:00] his honesty and also what he shared and some of the key lessons I think are going to be helpful for you. If you enjoyed that session, continue to stay involved, I want to encourage you to subscribe and leave some reviews.
and share the podcast with other people who you think may also find it interesting. Thank you.
