Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host Roberta. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into. And by the end of this episode, please remember to subscribe, give a rating and a review. Now today we have the privilege of welcoming back one of our very own previous guests. His name is Jim Frawley. He's the CEO of Bellwether. who has so much more wisdom since last time to share with us today. Last time we spoke mostly on ROI for executive leadership coaching, but today Jim has so much more personal coaching in addition to corporate. And before we go any further, please help me welcome Jim to the show. Welcome back. Thank you so much for having me. I don't know if it's wisdom, but I could do my best. I could talk about what I've learned. Based on the book, I'm sure that even the listeners are going to conclude that it is wisdom. So yes, how have things been since you were last on the show? Everything's been great. Thank you for asking. Business is good. Life is good. Although everything is changing, you know, almost like I predicted in the book, things are changing faster than we can adapt. So it's this constant kind of reevaluation of everything that's going on and how do you constantly improve. And as long as you remember that it's supposed to be fun, then life is good. Fun and change or uncertainty. I'm not sure if it goes in the same sense. Well, a lot of us at least. You know what? Some people like rollercoasters. Some people don't. My daughter loves rollercoasters. But I tell people at the beginning of every coaching engagement, because some people are uncertain about engaging a coach and they don't want people to think that they need help. And you get to focus on yourself. And when change happens, as much as it does, it requires us to focus on ourselves. And that should be a really fun exercise. It could be scary at first, but when you start to think about what it is you wanna do and where you wanna go, it's a lot of fun. Wouldn't you say that it's a contrast to, you know, how these motivational speakers, they would say, you say it focused on yourself so that you adapt to change. Wouldn't they say, oh, go with the flow with the energy of a life is taking you and see where it leads? Yeah, a lot of people say that, but you know what? You could. right? Depending on what it is that you want to do, right? It's kind of, you know, don't sweat the small stuff type of deal and identifying what's important. But with the amount of possibility that's coming with all of this change, I don't think people can really afford to just be passive. I think we have to be incredibly intentional in terms of what it is that we want to do and we have to identify what it is that we want to do. And once we take that risk and it can be a comfortable risk, that's what gets when people talk about purpose, when people talk about meaning, when people talk about all this stuff that we're supposed to give them, That's what they're talking about, but we have to take the emotional risk in order to do that. And it could be jarring at first, but it is a lot of fun. It sounded like it was for you, especially on your journey. We're going to talk about the book. So you wrote the book recently released, adapting in motion, dealing with the changes that we're going through. First, let's talk about, like you said, focusing on yourself. Does that mean being a narcissist or doing the inner work? It's a good question. You know what? I'll call it a healthy selfishness. You know, ethical philosophy. I grew up in a time where, you know, you always defer to others, right? You're always told to be humble. You're always told to not get ahead of your skis. And I wrote a chapter called be humble. And I ended up throwing it in the garbage and rewriting it. Cause I didn't believe any of that. I think we have a big misinterpretation of humility. The true definition of humility is to defer and that's not going to help you in the new economy. When I say healthy selfishness. Ethical philosophy states that when you help other people, you can help yourself. And we should be really influential on other people and think about other people and help those around us. And I would agree with that, but it leaves out the first step of in order to properly help other people, you have to help yourself. So anything you do has to begin with you. And it doesn't mean to be greedy or selfish or anything else, but you do have to identify what it is that's important to you. What do you believe? What does self love look like to you? What does self care look like to you? What are you doing from a physical, mental, social standpoint in order to make yourself the best possible version of yourself? In order to help other people and to get that benefit of ethical philosophy or anything else, you have to be fundamentally secure with yourself. And that's a lot of the work that we do with executives from a coaching perspective. It's not just focused on the business, it's focused on individuals and what they're bringing to the table. That's right. Especially a lot of us are generation, I'm 46. A lot of us, you know, we grew up with religion and be humble and humble yourself before the Lord and tell him constantly that you are not enough. That was the opposite, right? Right. You are nothing. You are nothing in the grand scheme of things, which is true, right? It's almost cathartic to think about that. That's fine. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't be proud of what you accomplish. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't go after what you want. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't have these big hopes and dreams and actually take the risk to do them. When we sit and wait for somebody else to recognize what it is that we want them to recognize, it's going to be too late. I went on a hike fairly recently and I was almost like a ghost came and talked to me. His name was Jim. He was 70 years old. He was really weird and he just started rapping to me about all this stuff that was just very relevant at the time. But he said, if you wait for anybody else to do what you want to do, you're going to be dead in the box and it's not going to happen. And it's true, right? If you wait for other people to notice your greatness, to notice your brilliance, to notice what you're capable of. Nobody's going to do it because they're worried about themselves. And so we have to not brag about ourselves, but we have to be proud of what it is that we want to accomplish. Which we will talk later about your personal manifesto, but first let's talk about your journey, your 30th birthday. What happened? Yeah. People ask me about that and they think I'm being hyperbolic, but it was a straight up epiphany and it sounds cheesy, right? Epiphany is a big word to use. But personally, I had been going through a whole bunch of stuff. I hated my job. I hated everything. And, you know, I was living by myself and I woke up that morning. My entire apartment smelled like my grandmother's beach house, which was weird. She had died like years before, but everything just kind of clicked and made sense where I didn't need to go do the things that I thought I was supposed to do. I didn't need to go sign up for the things that I thought I was supposed to do. I could say I wanted to do X, Y, and Z. And it took me a while to actually do it. But that realization clicked almost like a light switch for me where. Suddenly I knew that I was ultimately accountable and responsible for the bed that I was laying in. And if it was not the bed that I liked, I had to change it. I couldn't wait for anybody else to do that. And it was just this weird sense of calm and I was stressed out and I was drinking too much and all that, and it just kind of worked. I pinpoint that day as putting me on, I mean, that was 15 years ago. I put that on the trajectory of where I am today was the fundamental first step to getting to where I am today. If anybody listens to that and they think, I don't like my job. I don't like where I am in my life. They're wondering, so when I wake up from this bed, where do I go next? Other than the kitchen and the fridge to get a picture. Right. Go make some eggs. Right. And think about it. I would say my big epiphany wasn't because I hated my job. I think my big epiphany was, you know, we could talk about it as some kind of other being. We could talk about it, whatever we want. I think it was just this conglomeration of all my frustrations from the previous decade almost. my failures, my non-attempts, my terrible relationships, like all of the things that were ultimately my own doing, right? Maybe it was almost an accountability switch where, you know, I actually need to change this if I want to. I'm not going to go for another 40 years doing the things that I'm actually doing. And it takes a lot of reflective work. So just because I had that epiphany, it didn't change overnight. I ended up not leaving corporate until... probably 38, 37. So it took me about seven or eight years of exploring what it was that I wanted to do. I started asking myself different types of questions. I went to a coach to say, look, I don't like corporate. What can I do? I put together business plans. I was thinking about all these different things. I was less pressure on myself for relationships. I was kinder. I was changing the types of relationships I had, the people I was surrounding myself with, and all of those incremental decisions, we change as an individual. You make one little change. And fundamentally, you're a different person making different types of decisions. So it was this evolutionary process over time that's continuing today. So for that person laying in bed who hates their job, what's the first question that you really need to ask yourself? And is it, why don't I like my job or what am I not doing? Or what can I actually change today about what it is, you know, with my frustrating situation and no matter what the answer is, you don't have to tell anybody the answer, it could be extreme. It could not be extreme, but that's a basis point from where you start. to have more discussion with yourself, an inner dialogue on what's important to you, what do you believe, where do you actually wanna go? You know, we have three personas. We have who we are today, who we wish to be, and then who we ought to be. And this ought to be person generally overtakes who we want to be because it's inflicted upon us from other people, it's inflicted on us by our community, by our culture, you know, this is what you're supposed to be, this is how you're supposed to act. You talked about your religion, you're supposed to be humble, you're supposed to do all these things. And when we're told what we're supposed to be from an external source, we don't always interpret it in the meaning that it's supposed to be meant. And we have to interpret it in a way that's actually meaningful for us, that benefits us in the context of a larger picture. You covered that in the book where you talk about how here's how I see my personality, but here's how other people experience my personality. Or I think I'm confident, but other people see me differently. Is that the ought to be versus who you think you are? No, well, so personality is two different definitions. If you ask someone what personality is, some people would say personality is who you are, and that's internal. It's your motivations, it's your values, it's what you find important. Some people are motivated by money, some people are motivated by altruism, some people are motivated by wearing Nike on their jackets, you know, whatever it is. But then personality is also what other people see. And there's a big disconnect. You may think that you're the smartest person in the room, other people may disagree. Or you may think that you shouldn't be at the table, but other people are looking to you for guidance. It goes both ways. So personality goes in two different ways. When we talk about behavioral change, there's a theory, it's called intentional behavioral change theory, I think is what it's called. There's a professor out of Case Western University who talks about, you know, if I want to change my situation, I can write out who I am today. I am an executive, I am a business owner, I am kind, I am whatever. In the next batch, you say, well, this is who I want to be. I want to be. I want to be impactful. I want to be all of these things. How do I take those steps to be there? But somewhere on the side as well is, well, you want to be cultured, but you also have to be this because we're telling you have to be this. You want to be a triathlete, but you also have to be a parent and take your kids to school so you don't have time to train. So how does all of what you're supposed to be impact what you want to be? And when you lay it all out... and take a look at, well, this is what I want to be. This is impacting my ability to do that. I'm not saying don't be apparent anymore, but you can say, how do I do this? How do I make this work into, this is my vision of who it is that I wanna be. Before we started recording, we talked about how 2023 is a big thing for identity. My word for this change is identity. When we look at change and it's being thrust upon us, whether it's from AI, whether it's from the workplace, whether it's hybrid workforce, whether it's businesses closing, layoffs. It's thrust upon us. The number one thing people are going to have to focus on in 2023 is identity. And who do you wish to be? If you want to be 50 pounds lighter, you have to identify as a skinny person so that when difficult decisions come up, it's very easy for you to make that decision. If you want to identify as a triathlete, you have to make decisions that a triathlete is making. And so when you know who you wish to be, that's how you start to make your change decisions in the moment to get you to that end result. I hear you and I agree, but 2023 has just started. And I should have just told my boyfriend that deleted TikTok because it's driving me crazy. And here's why. Everybody's an expert. That's right. In relationships, everybody's an expert in finance. Everybody's a fitness expert. Everybody's a nutrition expert. And they're all saying different things. Okay, let's say I wanna lose 50 pounds, right? This information overload is driving everybody crazy. So in order to start crafting this new identity with so much on my face, Which one do I choose and which one do I say, this one doesn't apply to me? None of them. And here's why. Part of my epiphany was that I had a realization it wasn't necessarily where to focus, but a lot of what I had to do was know what to ignore. And there is a lot of noise, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook. Everyone is an expert because everyone's trying to market themselves as such. Everybody wants to be a guru. Everybody's desperate for relevance. Everybody's trying to do that. in these 30 second snippets, but it's all just noise. If you wanna lose 50 pounds, you know what you have to do to lose 50 pounds. You have to eat right, you have to go to the gym, and you have to get your sleep, that's it. And we know what we're supposed to be eating, right? So if I were to sit there and say, you know, what's my diet supposed to be? Should I do paleo? Should I do vegan? Should I do this? Should I do that? You know that you're not supposed to eat a sleeve of Oreos if you wanna identify as a skinny person. You know you're supposed to eat balanced food. You know what food is, and there's like food-like substances. And so, We know what we have to do, but you're ultimately accountable for doing it. And so you could look for all this noise. You know, we're looking for shortcuts. It's not a short game, right? This is not a short game for any behavioral change. When we look at who we want to be and who we wish to identify as, there are no shortcuts and we have to make these small incremental changes. But in conjunction with that, there is this kind of, and I talk about the book in terms of your mental wellness, in terms of self-love, you have to embrace who you are as an individual, right? You're not going to be an Adonis. You're not going to be this jacked kind of super fit. And that's okay. Do you need to be? Why do you need to be? It's because of our own insecurities. And we have to go inside of our mental framework to say, am I comfortable being the person that I am? You should be. But if you're not, what are the discussion points that make you uncomfortable? These are the uncomfortable conversations we have to have with ourselves. Again, back to identity that will help you make the right eating decisions. When you're sitting there at 10 o'clock at night and you want a snack before you go to bed, maybe you pick a piece of fruit, right? Or maybe you have a glass of water because a skinny person wouldn't be eating a big, huge bowl of pasta. Like I did last night. Let's start with identity. As I mentioned earlier, you'd have a manifesto that you wrote to yourself. Let's talk about that and see if anybody listening can think to yourself, wait a minute, maybe this is where I can start. Think about it. and then start to take actions towards that. Yeah. So CBS found a manifesto that Michael Jackson had written to himself in the 80s. And I put it in the book. It's I will no longer be the kid from Jackson five. I will be magic. He wrote all this stuff. I will work harder than anybody else. And whether you like Michael Jackson or not, it's kind of irrelevant. He did it. He became it. Like it was this one page manifesto. This is who I'm going to be. And he went there. And so I wrote one for myself. All the things that i wish to be when we all think of who's the impactful person that we want to emulate whether it's a leader that we wish to emulate or a person who just seems to have their stuff together person comfortable in their own skin we all know these people who just do things really well. We take some of those attributes characteristics and say i want some of that how do i do that what's preventing me from doing that so my manifesto. At the time i've since rewritten it because i've gotten to that point written a new manifesto and all that is. I will be an example for others. I'm no longer a smoker or a drinker. I used to be a big drinker, a big smoker. Was not helping me in any type of way. I was asking myself the question, if I'm coaching people and they're paying me for my time, I have to give them the best version of myself in order to help them in the best way that I can. People are using hard earned money to work with me. Some people pay out of pocket, it's not their business. I have an obligation to them to give them my absolute best. And so my manifesto was, this is who I'm going to be. from day one, I want people to recognize in me that they're capable of doing whatever it is that they're capable as well. And I use that as my guide. Every morning I read it and I say, yep, that's why I'm doing what I'm doing. And it helps me make my decisions. Does it fall into who I wish to actually be? Quick question, which some people struggle with, whether it's a manifesto or goal setting, whatever the deadlines and the thing, I should be doing this by this age and whatnot. Do you feel like sometimes if you write a money poster like that and some of the stuff doesn't come true or you haven't displayed the capability of achieving that, how does that make you feel? Because some people just give up altogether and think, oh, you know, this is paralyzing. I'm not doing it at all. Let me just be who I've always been. It's hard, right? Making big change is hard. And when you write your manifesto, know that it's a living document. You can either share it or not. You're the only one who knows. But you know, the reason we have mental health challenges and the reason we're so insecure and the reason people deal with imposter syndrome and all of these types of things is we know all the things that we wish to be or wish to do. And we failed. Nobody else knows that, but that's why we have our own insecurities. We know what risks we didn't take yet. We wish we did. We know the mistakes that we made, but nobody else knows. We know, you know, Gabriel Garcia Marquez once wrote, we have three lives. We have public, we have private, and we have secret. We're the only ones who know our secret lives. And so when we create a manifesto, part of that is an ongoing conversation with ourselves. We have to be really honest with ourselves in terms of, are we capable of doing it? If there's some fundamental change that you need to make that you can't do on your own, there are always people who are going to help you. When we think about our social networks and our support systems, do you have the one person that you could say, look, I want you to keep me honest on this. This is something I'm looking at, I'm trying to do. I need you to challenge me. But we also make mistakes. We have to be forgiving of ourselves. We're not perfect. I make mistakes all the time. So it's an ongoing guide of who it is you wish to be. And if you fall off the horse, you got to jump back on it and forgive yourself for it and keep trying. But it's meant to help you articulate who it is that you actually wish to work towards. Right. Because I think that's the key is that when you feel like I let myself down, especially in the things that are secret that nobody knows about, but then you feel, oh, you know. Right. Right? Where you know, you have cookies at breakfast and you say, well, I guess the day's all shot. So I'm not going to go to the gym. Right. And so let's just kind of order pizza for lunch and do everything else. Yeah. But you do talk about being the advice and the compassion that we show to our close friends is sometimes what we don't give ourselves. Yeah. There's a lot of talk in terms of mental health, in terms of self love and self care. And when we think about self love, most people have someone in their lives that they would throw down their life for them. Like I have two kids, I love my kids, I'll do anything for them, I love my wife, do anything for her. There are people that you would do anything for, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, anybody. But yet, we're always externally facing, would you lay down your life for someone like you, for you? And when you have that love for other people and that acceptance for other people, the way you do anything for any of these people, would you make the same sacrifices for yourself? And oftentimes we don't think that way, we don't think about ourselves because we kinda... Box off our internal emotions. We like to look externally because we can kind of take the pressure off a little bit. Oh, I'm doing this for other people and I'm serving other people. But we have an accountability to ourselves. And when we talk about self love and embracing who we are doing and giving ourselves what it is that we need and giving that kind of love to ourselves and embracing ourselves and forgiving ourselves, we've all made mistakes. Nobody's got their stuff together. Everybody's dealing with the exact same things that you're dealing or somebody has dealt with the exact same things that you're dealing with. So. how do we forgive ourselves and love ourselves in the right kind of way? I came from finance, the word love was just not uttered. And going through the coaching program and understanding coaching and all of that, the word love really took on new meaning for me, where we have love for other people. And as the world changes, that love, however you wanna do it, however you wanna define it, has to be reflected in ourselves. Because if we wanna get reflected love back from anybody else, nobody's gonna love someone who doesn't love themselves. And we have to figure it out ourselves. Ultimately, we're the only people who can do that, right? People will tell you they want to spend time with you, but I don't believe you. Well, you don't believe it because you don't believe it yourself. How do you focus on you? And just a point on self-care. Self-care, you know, do your pedicure once a week and have a Birkenbeck every other month. The external stuff is nice, okay, Miral, I love going to a spa as well, but the inner work. which is what you sort of realize the most challenging, you know, it's hard to look inward and reflect and be by yourself. That's why a lot of people are afraid to be by themselves. Yeah, yeah, we saw that with the pandemic. People lost their social interaction and they were forced to have conversations in their head that they weren't ready to have. And it was a mental health crisis. People didn't like what they saw. They didn't know how to handle the conversations in their head, whether it was frustrations from work, whether it was frustrations with themselves, frustrations at home, the word accountability, we like to throw it around and use it. But what it means in terms of being accountable to ourselves, we don't necessarily like to think about it that way. And we are accountable to ourselves to change our mindset and change our practices and, and change the way that we think about ourselves and love ourselves. And it takes work. It's a lot of work to do that. And we have to start this inner dialogue, almost interviewing yourself. That's what I do on my runs is it's almost like an interview with myself. Why are you thinking this? What's your big challenge right now? So my big self care is a 10 mile run. But at the end of it, I will fix any problem I've got because I figured out a way, my kind of thought process and interview, I have a full conversation in my head. Some would say I'm crazy, but that's okay. Like if you see me run a buy and I'm just talking out loud to myself, people will look at you, they're this crazy Jim. But that's my way to do it. And that's my way to articulate what my challenges are and challenge myself to say, these are the decisions you need to make in the short term to respond to whatever challenge that is. During your smoking and drinking era, Was that a self-love issue? Is that why you stopped afterwards when you had the epiphany? Yeah, yeah, I think so. When you're a drinker, a drinker like I was a drinker, you drink and you are the smartest person in the room because you've got all the answers. And anybody who's a drinker knows, like you have a couple pops, you could solve all the world's problems. If only everybody would listen to me. But then you wake up in the morning and nothing changed, right, because you were the expert, but you didn't write them down, you don't remember it. You actually have to take action after whatever it is that you think. I had a realization and this happened over time. It didn't happen on my 30th. It happened probably closer to my 40th where I woke up in the morning and I said, what the hell am I doing? Right. I'm drinking, I'm going out with people. I'm doing all this stuff. It's not benefiting me in any particular type of way. I had this really good capability to get people to do what they don't think they can do. I can get you to do what you didn't think was possible. And that's troublesome when everybody's drinking because we could do some crazy stuff. And it was, it's kind of fun. I've got some great stories, but I remember talking to my wife. I said, look, I could use this for good or for evil. And when I'm out drinking with people and people would wake up hungover, like I can't drink with you anymore, you know, whatever. I'm like, why am I doing this to people? And I wasn't intentionally, you know, getting it, but it was just fun. And we were doing it. It wasn't additive to anything and it wasn't part of who I wanted to be. And it wasn't anything that was productive. And once I quit drinking, I had a realization later that the reason I wanted to drink, was not because I liked drinking, but because I really liked smoking. And when you drink, it takes the smoke taste out of your mouth so you could smoke more. And so I got rid of the cigarettes and everything. So the drinking and the smoking and everything was all kind of packaged up, neither of which made me a better person. It wasn't who I wanted to be. But that was in terms of self-love, it was an excuse to not have to do work almost, right? Like, oh, sorry, you know, I'm hungover today. I could push this off to tomorrow. Oh, this happened, you know, whatever. I got to go out with these people. It was an excuse to not focus on what it was that I actually had to work on. When you eliminate that and you're stuck with your time and you're stuck with you and you need an outlet for me, the outlet was writing the book for me. The outlet was I did an Iron Man for me. The outlet was all of these things that I wanted to do. I was finally doing, but I had so much frustration with myself that I wasn't doing it. And most of it was because I was a drinker and a smoker and lazy and coming up with excuses. Mm. Talk to us about the book. acronym in your book? Yeah, I learned a lot about VUCA. So my corporate career was primarily in finance. I did a lot of training, but then it was strategic planning, executive communications. And I was doing executive communications for the banks during the financial crisis, which was like the worst. But everyone talked to 2007 about it being a VUCA environment. And what that means is it's volatile, it's uncertain, it's complex, and it's ambiguous. And we're kind of in another VUCA environment. Now it just kind of goes on. I don't remember who I think it was first written about back in the 80s. But when we talk about a VUCA environment where there's so much uncertainty, what's going to happen with my job, so much complexity, there's so many things to do in order to respond. So much ambiguity. I don't know what the end picture is going to look like. So much volatility. Everything is changing. How do you respond to that type of environment as an individual? Because ultimately we're all human beings. So as you sit at work, looking at all of this change, it's being thrust upon you, whether it's layoffs at work, the stock market's crashing, war is going on, communities changing, all kinds of stuff. It's all a distraction. Now you have to respond to it, but the only way to respond to it is focus on the individual because you are the one constant through all of that. You are the one constant to respond to volatility. And so macro change requires that focus on you, micro individual, so that you are prepared for whatever is thrown your way. You know what the next steps are going to be because you're comfortable with the decisions that you're making. If you think of the workplace and how all these micro people. upbringing all those frustrations and mental health issues with all that's going on. It looks like a total volcano basically. Yeah, it is. One of the things that I work on a lot, I've rewritten executive development. You know, I've got the bellwether program, which is completely redoing what learning and development looks like in an organization and companies are really paying attention and they're doing it where I'm working with people on what is your belief system? And. There is a roundabout way where that shows real tangible ROI to the business when everyone can articulate what they believe, when everyone can articulate their identity, when everyone can articulate and communicate to other people the way they like to receive information. One of the big exercises we do or parts of our workshops is how to have difficult conversations. Most of us don't like difficult conversations. We don't know how to ask for help. And we also don't know how to offer help. Most people try to thrust help on people, you know, I'm trying to help, and I'm just trying to help, but You can't help anybody. You wonder why they're rejecting you and it's very frustrating. You're like, I'm trying to help you. Why aren't you accepting it? Well, you know what? In order to help someone, they have to want to be helped. There's a great book called, Helping by a guy named Edgar Schein. You wrote an academic book on how to help people. A helper is up here. A person being helped is down here. You have to bring them up to the same level. And so a person has to be at your level for you to help them. And they have to be open to the help and they have to ask for help. Forcing help on someone is almost like, unsolicited advice. It's almost like revenge and people resent that. People resent being helped when they're not open to being helped. And so if somebody needs help, we have to lay the foundation that they know they can come to you for help. And you have to follow that up with when they do ask for help to actually help them in the way that you can. You talked in your book about it makes it full superior, but it's actually your insecurity is kicking in and thinking I'm better than this person. Yeah, yeah, we do feel like, you know, we're insecure with ourselves. Everybody knows the person in the meeting where somebody says, can this be done? And they look at you and you say, no, it can't be done. The first answer is no. They don't ask how it could be done. But by putting down an idea or telling someone they're wrong, we naturally try to appear superior to other people. But what that is, it's an insecure response. We're insecure with ourselves and people are recognizing it as an insecure response. In order to be helpful, in order to be seen as a leader, we should be asking rather really good questions where we don't know the answer to say, well, what would it take for something like that? My initial thought seems like it would be a challenge and we don't have the resources. But could we try this potentially this way and becoming more of a partner by initially putting things down or forcing help on other people. We're trying to elevate ourselves and feel superior, but the person being helped or being put down recognizes that they're being put down and they're going to resent whatever help you're trying to give. That's tricky though, if you're a leader, because at the end of the day, presumably you know more than sometimes one of my juniors needs help and you go and impose, so to speak. at the cubicle and say, Hey, wait a minute, Jim, don't you think you could do this better this way? Is that muddy waters or that's what leaders are supposed to do anyway? It's what leaders are supposed to do in the right way. So when I think about what the definition of leadership is, you know, we're talking about leaders and managers are two separate things. Managing people to get productive work done in the right type of way, you can crack the whip and you can say do it this way and everything else. You know, when I work in a consulting capacity with human resources and executives, one of the things we like to talk about is how are we thinking about employees, right? What's the point of your employee and what's the point of their development? When you're paying someone 50 grand, 100 grand, 250 grand a year, are we giving them the capacity and ability to provide us with $300,000 with the value in their particular way? And so we like to see things a certain way, we like to do things a certain way, just because we could do something well doesn't mean someone else can't do it well as well. And so we have to give them the ability and freedom to execute on a vision. A leader is supposed to articulate a vision for what that end state's going to be. You hire the best people to execute on that vision in their particular way. So micromanaging a person to say, you have to do it this way. And you know, you could say this isn't moving fast enough. Can we come up with new ideas, but being told what to do, we reject 99% of the advice we're given because it's not our own idea. We need to have someone make it their idea in order for it to stick. If you're looking to change behavior in someone else's world and you want them to do something differently, it has to be their idea and they have to see the benefit. So it's this roundabout coaching way to get them to where you want them to be. You can't just tell them what to do. It reminds me of my mom. I hope I'm not getting you in trouble with your wife by revealing this, but my mom used to say, the best way to get my dad to agree to something is to say to him it was his idea. That's right. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. She knows that she does it all the time. Yeah, I get it. So talk to us about the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Yeah, it's very relevant now. Well, we just talked about, everyone on TikTok is an expert, right? And we could take little bits of knowledge, little facts, and we try to communicate them as if we know these facts and we have all this wisdom. But knowledge is not wisdom. And the analogy in the book, which I'm sure other people have heard is knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad. And the challenge we have with TikTok, with Instagram, with all of these things, we have this added level of information. Normally we could read something and interpret it. But in TikTok and social media and all of these others, people are now saying it to you with this different type of conviction in their voice. So now we're using two little angles in which we're receiving information where we start to believe things and a lot of the information is wrong. because without context around your knowledge, around the fact, you aren't actually making good decisions. And we're seeing this a lot about, you know, people take things in terms of what neuroscientists are finding and psychologists are finding. They take this little tidbit of information and say it as a fact and expect you to change behavior based on it, but it's incredibly misleading because it doesn't have the context around it. And so wisdom comes from interpreting a fact that you hear or knowledge that you learn, testing it. and seeing what actually works. And so that's why a lot of people are turning off TikTok and Instagram and everything else is because the knowledge that's being spit isn't real, isn't factual, isn't actually factual. It's a fact that's not factual. It's just information. And when we think about, there's a pyramid, there's data which gives us information. From information, we can then filter out and say, well, this is what I know now. But wisdom is one step beyond that. Why do I know it? This knowledge changes with context. Facts change with context. When we think about beliefs and what we believe, beliefs are not truths. So we can believe something, but it doesn't necessarily make it true. And just because you read a fact and you believe something doesn't necessarily make it true. Wisdom makes it true as you're informing your decision and you can make it true, but it all depends on the context within which you're making that type of decision. Beliefs. And in the book, you talked about, you know, the political debates we have, the religious debates. Yep. If you see the turmoil between two people when they have opposing views, especially on those topics, it's amazing how when you genuinely believe something to you are not open to another's opposing view. And you talk about how learning means you are open to the fact that your beliefs could be wrong. And tomorrow you might come across new information and say, Hey, wait a minute. I was wrong about that yesterday. Today I discovered new information on it. Why do we struggle with that? Because that's why there's so much debate and turmoil. And. Yeah, we have all been raised to be right. Everything we've been taught in our lives is to be right. Every schooling that you went through was to learn facts and be right. And so whenever someone challenges a belief, we feel like we're being told we're wrong and we have to defend ourselves. I would argue you don't have a belief system in place if you're not open to other ideas and other beliefs, you can't have a belief system in place. until you've looked at every possibility of why someone else can believe something different. Right? So take the big one is do you believe in God? That's a big one. Whether it's yes or no is relevant. It's irrelevant. But the question of do you believe in God, you could say yes, because you believe that there is a God, but you can't believe that there is a God until you understand why someone could believe that there is no and you can believe that this is the best political decision we have to make. But you don't really believe it until you understand why somebody thinks the other political decision would be a good one. You may think or believe that Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player of all time, but someone else might believe it's Kobe Bryant, and that's okay because they're looking at different numbers and stats and everything else and whatever. It's irrelevant what people think. There are very few truths in this world. So when we understand that just because we believe something doesn't make it a truth and we become curious about, let me understand your perspective, I recognize that I believe that there might be a God or that this is the best way to parent a child or discipline a child or whatever it is, right? The topics are endless. This is what I believe. You can't believe that until you've fully understood the other side, because if you understand another side or a different angle, then that might actually change your belief system. Now it's uncomfortable to change your belief system. It's uncomfortable to say, you know what, I don't actually believe what I thought I believed. You know, this rocks you to your core, your identity of who you are. But when you have a dynamic, recognize that your belief system is dynamic and recognize that... there are other perspectives. You're now suddenly curious about why other people believe what they believe. And then you're interested in them as a human being where you can say, Oh, you don't believe in God or you do believe in it. Tell me more about that. Why? What, what did you use to make that? Oh, that's interesting. Okay. And it's not about proving it goes back to, you know, the stoic discussions where they would have debates, right? But there was never a solution. It was more about learning from other people and asking really good questions with no judgment, no assumptions, no, let me wait until I could tell you why you're wrong. We don't have to be right. That's when we talk about vulnerability. People talk about vulnerability in the workplace. It's not about sharing your problems over the weekend. It's about being open to the fact that someone may have a better idea than you, or that you might be wrong, or that your belief is wrong, and that's okay, and it will change. And you know what? Someone would love to hear you say, wow, you've actually changed my thinking on that. That's pretty cool. Now you've got a friend for life. But beliefs are not truths, and you don't have a belief system until you could be curious about everybody else's beliefs. I think it's the ego or the insecure part of us that doesn't want to be challenged into recognize that, hey, when I was actually wrong about this, my identity, if I identified, let me give an example. I don't have kids. And way back in my 20s, I had a friend of mine who said, when we talk about children, that's the part where you shut up because you have no idea what you're talking about. I respect that. And it's true. What do I know? But it's funny how when people are so stuck in their belief systems. even when they haven't experienced what they are challenging the other person on, they really come with it almost as fact. Right. Their beliefs are facts. They're ready to spout them. They're ready to throw every fact at you, but it doesn't take into account your individual motivations, your values, your needs. And everybody comes at it from a different angle. We were just talking this weekend. We had friends in town. Would you have kids if you could go back? Right. And some people said, no, some people said, yes, you know, I kind of wish I had the freedom. But it was pure, you know, what's your perspective today? I would keep my kids, I would keep my kids. Um. If they're listening, I'm sure they're happy about that. No, the reason I clutch my invisible pearls is because that's a very sensitive topic I have found when I listen, obviously, because I don't have an opinion. People are afraid to admit that, based on what you said earlier, which is society expects you to be a certain way, what you ought to be. If you have kids, you ought to love them, lay down your life for them. But you can never take a moment to say, wait a minute, there have been one or two times where I thought, you know what, it would have been nice if they'd not been here. You can never say that. You can't just pack up this weekend and go somewhere, right? You know, going back to belief systems, a lot of times, and one of the words I have eliminated from my vocabulary is should. You should never say that you should do something. You should never tell someone that they should do something, right? Outside of you should not murder someone, right? But you should never tell them you should do this because that's coming from your perspective. Right? Their perspective and their world and their influence and what they're going through is completely irrelevant to you. So what you would or wouldn't do is fine, but you shouldn't tell someone else what they should do. I just had this conversation this morning. We've got who we are as an individual and where we want to go. Right? Who we are, where we want to be and who we ought to be, who we should be, what society says we should be impacts who we actually want to be. And so do we follow the path of what we should do? like a good citizen, like a good person, like what the people in the community tell us, or do we follow our own path? And some of it will overlap and that's okay. But where do you go from today to tomorrow versus that should button? What you ought to be is a big reflective exercise in terms of what you want. Okay, Jim, if anybody's listening and they say, I've had the three years to reflect and then they force me to be stuck in my apartment. Lots that has been going on with my inner dialogue. So tell me starting today, what are two or three things I need to do in order to chart a course that's gonna change the trajectory of my life going forward? I'm saying to everyone who will listen, the three words for 2023, I call them the three I's. Identity, intentionality, and intellectual inquisitiveness. I just threw that in because I needed another I. But identity is who are you? identifying as an individual. We have to do that work as an individual. Who do you wish to be? You could talk about in terms of New Year's resolutions, you could talk about in terms of business, where do you wanna be at the end of the year? Who am I and who do I want other people to see? Do I wanna be the triathlete? Do I wanna be a healthy person? Do I wanna be smarter? Do I wanna learn more? Do I wanna whatever, right? Figure out that identity. That's a deep, very long question that will evolve. Two is intentionality. Without intentionality, you are just spinning wheels. We have to be make it a priority to do whatever it is that we want to do that will make us a better person and be very intentional in doing that. So once we've identified the identity that we wish to adopt, we then have to be intentional in making it happen. And then when we hit the challenges, we need this intellectual inquisitiveness. We need to know how to ask questions of ourselves. And a question, it's a request for information where you legitimately do not know the answer. We've got 40 some years of experience behind us that's influencing our decision. We have assumptions that are influencing our questions and decisions. eliminate the assumptions. We have to eliminate the expectations and we have to ask ourselves true, honest, hard questions and answer them honestly. We may not like the answer. We don't have to share the answer, but we have to be aware of what it is that we're really dealing with in order to change whatever it is that we wish to change. That's right. So identify who you want to be. Be intentional. Take the necessary actions and be intellectually. inquisitive, basically. Be curious. Because like we said in the book, we've lost that since we're children. We are no longer curious. We just think we either know or I'm too busy. Well, everything we need is just given to us. We don't have to ask questions, right? Your phone's listening to you. If you talk about, you know, I want to take the trip to Ireland, you don't have your phone, you don't even have to ask questions. It'll give you the flights right there. And so we don't have to ask anything anymore. But once we see the technology changing and artificial intelligence that can do the fact work, the busy work for us, now what makes us uniquely human is to ask really good questions so that we can direct and give parameters to things like technology to get us the information we want and to challenge the way that we're thinking. And we're at that almost inflection point where we have to change the way that we think and we have to ask really, really good questions. Right, ask really good questions. In order to deal with how uncomfortable it is, the uncertainty of the pandemic, and we don't even know what's gonna happen going forward. If there's gonna be another one someday, we don't know. What's the one last... piece of wisdom you can share with us on how to deal with those uncomfortable, uncertain situations. My favorite quote is a Jean-Jacques Rousseau quote. He wrote in Confessions, How can anyone be satisfied in life if they aren't satisfied with the one person they can never be separated from? Everybody has something that they don't like about themselves, and you just have to embrace it. It sounds too simplistic, but no matter what it is, whether it's your body type, the way you think, you know, whatever. We have to embrace ourselves and be proud of ourselves and recognize that we're capable of doing incredible things. When the pandemic first started, there was talk about how this could be like a 10 year challenge and people kind of poo-pooed it, but we're in the fourth year of a pandemic. It's still here and it's fundamentally changed the way that we work and operate and everything else. And it will continue. So we have a new world and we have a new way to operate. We have to be comfortable with ourselves and we have to embrace ourselves and challenge ourselves in the right type of way. so that we're comfortable with whatever change is coming around the pike. Words of wisdom from Jim Frawley, the CEO of Bellwether on how to deal with uncertainty and all the rapid changes happening today. Thank you so much, Jim, for being again on this show today. We welcome you back. Thank you so much. I love talking to you. Always. The book is Adapting in Motion by Jim Frawley. Don't forget to order the book from Amazon. Is it from your website too? Yeah, yeah, you can get on the website too. From the website as well. And after you read the book, it's amazing. Give a review on Amazon. Thank you so much, Jim. And you wanna list your website and social media handles or should I just copy from the last show? You just copy from the last one. Jim Frawley and why on all the handles, jimfrohley.com, bellwetherhub.com, it's all there. Excellent. Thank you very much for being here again today. Love talking to you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Don't forget to subscribe, give a rating and a review and we will be with you next time.