Lead Smarter Podcast

welcome to Lead Smarter

the podcast where you'll hear powerful

no nonsense conversations about leadership

with today's top experts

and real world leaders like yourself

get the inside strategies

insights and secrets

they've Learned on the journey to lead smarter

let's dive in

this is a conversation

I've been really looking forward to

today I'm joined by Michael de Lisser

Michael is a leadership coach

who has spent years working with leaders

at every level

including senior levels inside Fortune 100 companies

his work focuses on helping leaders

better understand what's driving performance

communication and behavior

both on their teams and in themselves

in this episode

we talk about why leadership challenges often persist

even when people are capable and well intentioned

we explore self awareness

communication and focus

and how those elements show up in everyday leadership

we also spend time on something I found

especially compelling

how a leader's ability to manage their energy

and attention directly impacts their effectiveness

Michael is exceptionally well read

and throughout the conversation

he shares books frameworks and resources he's used on

in his own work and with his clients

it's a thoughtful conversation

with a lot of depth and practical insight

let's get into it

hey Michael

thank you for joining me on the podcast

I really enjoyed getting to know you

and giving that introduction conversation

and learning a little bit more about the perspective

you have on leadership

what you do as a coach and things that I think would

be really valuable for guests to hear

especially as they're on their own leadership journey

and trying to develop themselves

as I was going through some of the questions

I'd love to talk to you about

we started talking about diagnosing

the real leadership problem

that people have beyond just training um

and one of the questions

I'd love to talk to you about is

I mean you often say that training

alone doesn't fix leadership issues

what are the deeper problems you typically uncover

first

well you know

the interesting thing is

I would say at least 80% of the time

when someone reaches out to me and says

I need you to develop a training right

the solution is not training by itself right

and so sometimes it's because they haven't

they know they have an issue that they have to address

but they haven't had time to really

think through to the root cause and

and get to the bottom of it

but a lot of times uh

when they say I want training

and then I start asking about the specific outcomes

they want to achieve

it turns out the training by itself will not solve them

so some of the issues might be

you know

performance is at not at the level they needed to be

or it might be that the team has a makeup

that is very dominant in one or two personality types

and makes them very task oriented

but they're not

managing the people side of the organization well

or they're not getting

people on board with their changes

or vice versa very people oriented

but not focused enough on outcomes

so it can be about kind of a team self awareness

and not recognizing the things that are contributing

a lot of times there's a Silo mentality

so instead of working as one team

they're focused on their individual goals

and not really thinking how does

what my team does impact the other departments

and how can we work better to get better outcomes

so you really have to take a look at the full picture

and understand not only

what are the outcomes they're trying to achieve

but what are the things they're seeing

that LED to those outcomes

or that they think LED to those outcomes

and once you get into it

then you can start to realize yeah

training may not be the solution

or may be part of a bigger solution

and look most training will have limited impact

if you don't have a clear follow through plan

and accountability

for making sure people are doing what they need to do

to apply that training and get the full results

and that makes sense

and for for the leaders that are listening and I

I think you've

I kind of identified some of this as you were um

describing how to navigate that

but for leaders that are listening

what would you say is a simple

way for them to start diagnosing

what the real issue is behind

like performance challenges for example

well

there there's a couple things that come to mind one is

you know taking a systems thinking approach

and that is an understanding that

any change to one part of the organization

is going to have

a ripple effect on the rest of the organization right

so you have to look beyond the immediate

what are we seeing and look to see

what are the potential

things that are contributing to that

that are broader than what we're looking at right

so that's one thing is really thinking system wide

what are all the possible

things that could be contributing to the issue

the other the other thing that I

I always recommend people doing

there's a great book by Robert Mayer

who he he calls it the

the 6 pack but the

one of the books in the 6 pack is called Permits

Analyzing Performance Problems

and he has a chart in the back of it

and that chart you can find online if you

you do a search for Robert Mayer

and analyzing performance problems chart

but it walks you through the

the clear steps you can take to understand

the things that could be contributing to a performance

issue right

so it starts with are the expectations clear

then it gets into uh you know

does the people have the right training

to do what is expected

do they have clear visibility to their own performance

are they getting feedback

that tells them whether or not they're meeting the need

and then it goes down this whole line

of things

that really allow you to weed out every possible issue

along the way things like

sometimes a performance issue could be caused

because the wrong incentives are in place

and those incentives are causing

behaviors that are counter

to what people need to have happen

sometimes

it could be that the behaviors are actually rewarding

like if you don't do what you're supposed to do

and no one holds you accountable

you're kind of rewarded for doing less work right

or it could be punishing if you get things done

and you do it at a better rate than everyone else

you just get piled on with more work right

so there's all sorts of things

but having

having a checklist of going through and checking

off all these different things

that could be contributing to it

and then you can figure out

is it the person themselves

is it you know some expectations gap

is it a we need to train the person

or maybe they don't use the skill

often enough to be able to deliver on it

and and and the same thing applies for teams as well

but but you really have to

kind of

dig deeper and deeper to get to the root causes

and a lot of times that's asking a lot of why questions

and getting into

the underlying things that could be contributing

instead of treating a symptom

finding out the root cause

and then treating the root cause

so that I mean

what you just described sounds really comprehensive

and there it may be that there are no trends

but it's it's during my own curiosity

is that a tool one

is that a tool that you use with your own

your own clients from that book you were describing

something that you have them do

or

is it something you walk them through in conversation

um I have a I have a series of questions that I ask

you know and I have my own coaching model that

that's similar to that but but basically I

I always start with a lot of

what are we trying to achieve right

and so the the

the most important thing is having a clear

if you resolved everything that's going on

what would be different

and then how would you know it's different

what would you measure you know to determine that

and so when you get a clear picture up front of them

painting the picture of this is what's going on

and if we were successful

this would what it would be

and you get that the before and after

then you have a much clearer picture of okay

to get to that outcome what's gonna get us there

and what's preventing us from getting there

so I think it's it's I

I do use a lot of his questions or I

I use that mentality as I approach it

but I have my own kind of

set of structured questions that I go through

that help me help the client think through the issue

because more often than not

I don't have the answers to solving the issue

but I can ask the right questions that help them

find the answers to solving

whatever it is they're working on

that makes sense yeah

I was

I was curious that I guess part 2 of that question is

when going through a process like that

and it's as it sounds

very analytical and comprehensive

to dive into the problems

maybe even structurally

do you see any trends to the outcome of that

let's just say recently

do you if you're doing this with clients

do you see anything that seems to be like ah

lots of these problems tend to have this end of

end result or is it so custom

because obviously

you're diving into unique problems for everybody

that it really is individual

um I

I think it I think there is a

some patterns that are pretty consistent that I see

more often than not it might be tied to

you know a team as a whole

not having high self

awareness of how they're performing right

and so they're not taking

enough time to do the after action reviews

and find out what went well

what didn't and why you know

why did that not go well

so when you raise a team self awareness

or an individual leader self awareness

you are starting at a place where

you're increasing their knowledge of the possible

contributors to the issues

and you're also opening their

eyes to possible ways to address it

you know sometimes just me asking the right questions

gets them to have an aha moment

and then they say I know exactly what I need to do

I don't even need you anymore right

thank you for helping me get there

but uh

so but the common issues are more often

a lack of self awareness or a lack of coordination

between different departments

I'll give you a great example

I had one client that

there was a grocery warehousing operation

and they were throwing out lots and lots of

of food that was perishable in particular meat right

and they had these big coolers full of meat

and they were throwing it out

because it was going past the expiration date right

and I asked

does anybody know how much meat you're throwing away

and they're like no

not really so we started tracking it

and it turned out that they were

pretty much throwing away

100,000 pound $100,000 worth of meat per month

that's how much meat was going back

as soon as we put that in front of the executive team

they were like whoa

this is completely unacceptable

and then they started talking

and what they realized was

the person making the purchases

was not telling the person in the grocery stores

that we have all this extra stuff

and you should put it on sale

wow and so

there was just a lack of department communication

and that's that whole Silo thing that happens

where if the left arm isn't talking to the right arm

they don't even know they're supposed to be pushing a

a particular product or

or working on a particular issue

so if if you bring the people to the table

and they take the time to analyze what's happening

often enough they can usually find

you know the root causes

but more often than not it's

it's a lack of team awareness

or a lack of self awareness

in terms of what's really going on in the big picture

alright that's interesting

cause what you were describing

obviously awareness would be coming from

some form of communication

and one of the things I wanted to uh

talk to you about is I know that you've seen

Fortune 100 executives lose their job

due to poor communication

what makes this such a skill

a critical skill gap that you're saying

yeah I think the

the biggest challenge is what got them there

is not what's going to help them be

successful as a leader so when you think about it

more often than not if there's 10 people in a role

and they get promoted to a leadership role

they end up promoting the person who's technically

best at the work they were doing right

they stand out as better than the others

so they take him away from that work

and they put him into a role that's

you know

instead of being critiqued on your technical expertise

you're being critiqued on how well you're managing

and getting results through others

completely different set of criteria

and so what I see consistently happening is

executives keep getting promoted

to the point that their communication skills

or lack thereof catches up with them right

so what happens is

all that technical expertise that got them noticed

is no longer important to their success

or less important

because they have people on their team doing it

and so what they fail to do is invest in themselves

or the companies fail to invest

in helping them improve

what I call the leadership Core 4

which is really if you're a leader

and you're trying to get things done through others

there's there's almost always four means

that you're going to use to get there

which is presentation skills

or your ability to persuade through presentations

one on one coaching skills or one on one interactions

and interpersonal skills

meeting management and and business writing

and so if you're not working on developing your skill

in all four of those things

any one of those four

could cause you to have a failure in your career

and end up derailing your career and

and with AI and with technological advances it's

it's shifting the need for executives

and leaders

to be even more effective in their communication

because they can't rely on their technical skills

as much

because many of those things are being replaced by AI

or or just technical advances

you've basically described what sounds to me

and in my own experience when I'm talking to leaders

the leaders I talk to

they're maybe earlier and smaller businesses

things like that

and it seems to me from my experience that leaders um

only start to develop those skills for managing people

almost feels like an afterthought right

you've basically risen to your level of

of your people skills or your communication skills

and then then you've got to start working on it

is it is that your experience that it become or

or are you just seeing people not developing enough

fast enough in the beginning

you know when someone steps into that leadership role

their success is going to be strongly tied to

what are their natural abilities

to get results through others and and

and and

and throughout our lives you know

we have we have role models

we have things like that that all contribute to that

we have personality preferences that contribute

to our natural ability to motivate

and get results through others

I think of the uh

the office where Michael Scott becomes the leader

because he was great at sales

and then you can just see

he's not great at leading people

and it's just kind of falling apart around him

yeah and that's kind of the experience I

I don't wanna say that that's super common

but you kind of describe that

people basically rise to the level of

I don't wanna call it their incompetence

but like

maybe the limits of their ability in leadership

and then that

those people skills that are really required

maybe they are really effective at their job

they be put in leadership

but the people skills

of leading wasn't there to begin with

and in my first experience

it feels like that's almost like an afterthought

um like

oh now you're there

I've got to you know

catch up and it's like

maybe it's cause everybody thinks oh

it's just interacting with people

everybody does that

but it's obviously a critical skill in that role and

but for some reason it feels like an afterthought

this is the part that I was trying to remember

the afterthought part so to your point

yeah um

essentially companies see

helping them develop their leadership skills

as an afterthought in general right

because they're all they all have tighter

tighter margins

they're all trying to run really efficiently

companies are more flatter than they used to be

so what you have is more and more people needing

more of those skills but a lot of organizations

see those skills as an afterthought

and they don't really do it until they see an issue

then they bring in a coach or whatever right

you know in the older days

when companies had a lot more budget to play with they

they invested more in that

but as soon as times get tight

people cut back on their training resources

and the ultimate outcome is

they're not investing in their leader's success

by not giving them the training

to be successful in communication

and as a result of that they

they end up just setting their people up for failure

and in many ways not intentionally

and and if you don't invest in yourself

or you count on your organization to do that

and you're not working on your communication skills

it will eventually catch up with you

and the point you made about

about being promoted to their highest level of

incompetence I mean

that is the Peter principle right

it's the whole idea that we do as a culture

promote people to their highest level of incompetence

because we move them away from what originally

was the excellence area that got them promoted

and then the further they get away from it

the more incompetent they become

if they don't develop those communication skills

that makes sense and and actually

I was gonna ask how do you coach somebody to replace

maybe the skills or the uh

habits they had before they became into leadership

with better more effective leadership habits

so the the general thing I

there's there's kind of like a three step

process that I take people for

step one is always raising self awareness

right and a lot of people right

there's a difference between self

perception and self awareness

you know self perception is what we think

we know about ourselves

and what we believe about ourselves

self awareness

is achieved when you get other people to confirm

that your thoughts about yourself are accurate right

and so

helping them achieve self awareness is really key

and I'll spend a lot of times

helping them

start to recognize what habits they're doing

and when they're using them

and I have self assessments I use

I get them to ask people they work with

but

I spent a lot of time on helping them raise their self

awareness once they're aware of that

we apply the 80 20 rule and say okay

if you could only work on one or two things

that would have the biggest

overall positive impact on your success

and your ability to get results from your team

you know what would be those one or two things

and so then we help them figure out okay

if those are the one or two things

how do I catch myself

in the act of doing the thing that's

hurting my effectiveness or how do I preemptively

prevent myself from doing that

so step one is raising self awareness

step 2 is getting good at catching yourself

or preventing yourself and step 3 is

if you do catch yourself

having an alternative behavior

that you can use to replace the ineffective habit

so

let's say my habit is constantly interrupting people

and I catch myself wanting to interrupt

I can replace that with saying OK

for the rest of this conversation

I'm gonna wait two seconds

until after someone finishes

I'm gonna count to two in my head

and then I'm gonna respond that way

I won't interrupt anymore right

or something like that

or I'm gonna double down on my listening skills or

and pretend that I have to repeat back what they say

so there's a number of different ways that I help them

you know come up with the alternative behaviors

but no matter what you do

even if you do those three steps

the only way you overcome and replace a habit

is if you work on it daily

because you've developed these communication

habits over your entire life

many of them were from childhood

and you just kept doing it

so right habits do not go away overnight

unless you have daily focus

even if it's one conversation a day

working on not doing that one habit

you need to have daily focus

or you're gonna see very limited impact

and a lot of times I you know

my follow through plan is around daily focus

at least one conversation a day on

on working on whatever it is

that's that's super helpful to know one

obviously I'm trying to develop my own habits

I was literally thinking about that this week

I'm I'm thinking about 2026

putting together

what are the habits I wanna develop into next year

I'm sure most people have New Year's resolutions

I don't know why I feel more energized this year

and nor do I even know why I'm bringing it up

other than you mentioned it

but I am excited and I I have more for some reason

hope that I'll be more effective this year

and I think that has to do with a little bit of having

spent so much time developing foundational habits

that I see progress in um

I've actually had a conversation with a friend of mine

whose wife is struggling with managing her own energy

and her own habits and trying to get out of

let's just call it uh

depression and people in leadership and

that are managing

people would experience things like this

and he's a leader himself

but you don't lead your wife the same way

you would lead a uh

an employee for example

so just trying to be supportive

but recognized a lot of the

the tools are very similar and just being

just being in the act of even if you fail

even if you're

you don't achieve that habit within the first week

or whatever the

the act of actually doing the activity

helps develop the confidence

even if you're not achieving it in the time

and sometimes just the fear of failing

keeps you from developing that confidence

so anyways I'm bringing it up because it's top of mind

and I appreciated the perspective

you were coming in on that conversation

but but the story you just told

illustrates a really important point

which is you know

there is a whole mental aspect of not

you can't use catching yourself

doing a habit as an opportunity to beat yourself up

you have to catch yourself

knowing that that's a good thing

because now you've caught yourself

one more time than you used to right

and so every time you catch yourself

that's a positive thing where

because before

you didn't even know you were doing the habit probably

right how often you were

so and and so you have to be patient with yourself

and you have to understand that

you're trying to undo years of programming

you know

and your brain is programmed to do things a certain way

and you'll never get perfect at not doing the habit

the goal is to get it reduced enough

so it doesn't impact your overall effectiveness

but not trying to be perfect

well and I speaking of uh

of your focus and managing more effective habits

I wanted to talk to you about um

focus

energy and and basically the myth of multitasking

you've said

multitasking can actually do damage to the brain

what does the research reveal about this long term

impact

yeah it

it definitely damages the brain and

and really when I say that

it's about reducing your ability to stay focused

in the long run that's the biggest

you know most obvious thing

so if you think about it if people are multitasking

and they're bouncing between one task and another

and every time their phone pops up and does an alert

they look at their phone you actually are training

your brain to be focused for shorter

and shorter periods of time

and other the other challenge with that is

is not only are you you're training your brain that

but you are

you're making it so that your memory is

is being reduced

and I'll just rattle through a few things I

I always keep this out

because I think it's so important to re reinforce

here's some of the research

so heavy

multitaskers are worse at multi

tasking than people who do not multitask

they think they're better

but they're actually worse

because they have a harder time

filtering out distractions

and they're slower at switching between tasks

even though they think it's helping them

uh they also have a weaker memory

they have a harder time recalling things

when they've been multitasking

they're slower and less accurate in getting things done

so in other words when you

when you flip focus to something

let's say you're doing focus work

and you flip over and look at your phone

the brain can take up to 20 minutes

to get back to a state of deep focus

so every time you look away

it can hurt you right

and right

some of the most disturbing research I saw was

I think it was university of Sussex

they said that when they when they analyze the brains

of people that do a lot of multitasking

the part of the brain that

that shows empathy actually shows less activity

and they say the damage could be permanent

so you're actually your ability to

to be able to empathize goes down

the more you multitask too

there's there's all this researching and look

if anyone's questioning this

they could go out and do a search on any uh

on an engine that says

and just look for brain damage and multitasking

and you will be alarmed at how many articles

are out there that reinforce it so um

there's there's tons of research that backs it up

and so

what I try to do is just get people to realize that

every time you're doing that

you're hurting your own ability to stay focused

in the long run you're becoming less and less able

to stay focused over time

and you have control over a lot of those things

some people say well

my job requires me to multitask

but but

your job doesn't require you to have alerts

popping up on your phone usually

you know weather alerts

sports alerts news alerts

you know you can control a lot of these things

it's it's interesting I I have uh

colleagues are got um friends that run businesses

in similar positions that I am

when I run a company and I've Learned over time

more of my network in similar positions as myself

running a business have ADHD or add

or have been diagnosed with it

then I realized then I would have expected I

I have grown up with it I've

I've been diagnosed more than once

and what was been that was when I was younger

I haven't been I intentionally avoided taking Adderall

after I realized how effective it was

so that I could try to manage myself

in a way that was a lot more healthy

and doing that it just as the pen

I had to swing the pendulum as hard as possible

in the opposite direction

so I could try to land somewhere in the middle

and it just made it to where I

I

I spent a lot

I had historically spent a lot of my time um

focusing on focus

and figuring out how to manage that myself by

you know eating right sleeping right

exercise and knowing

that the combination of all the healthiest things

I can possibly do would be

like 70% as effective as like the

the medical designed drug can do so

but I'm still happy I will take 70% all the time

but it was interesting to me to learn

as I opened up about that

with a colleague then later

how many people entrepreneurs

leading businesses had similar experiences

and they didn't talk about it either

it's a it's a mental health situation

in a position of leadership

you typically don't expose where you're weak

when you're trying to get people's confidence

in your leadership so um

as you're talking about this and

and you're talking about the um

it's not surprising to me that

that's the result of multi focus

and fracturing your ability to focus over time

and it also makes me think of wow

it's it sounds like

that's exactly what social media is designed to do

like Swiss cheese your brain until you are and

and it sounds honestly

some of that research is news to me

I wouldn't know it

unless I researched or heard you say that to me

but it's also not really surprising

that it affects your empathy

um yeah

I I'm actually deeply interested in that research

I'd love to know do you

do you have some recommendations on where to go

to see that research in particular that you've

you've studied OK

it's in the news right now

it's a big a big deal

but the you know what

in Australia they recently passed this um

social media ban for kids 16

yes

so I read an article that talked about

how that came to be was the

I think it was the spouse of the Prime Minister

read the book The Anxious Generation

OK and that book is I'm I

I just bought it and I'm like

just in the beginning parts of it

but that book is incredibly concerning

if you are a parent and you're kidding

spending a lot of time on social media

you will want to go read that book

I mean it's

it's a little bit scientific and heavy

but it dives into um

all the research that that strongly backs up

the long term damage to your kids

of having too much screen time

and too much focus on social media and

and so it basically talks about the change since 2010

kids raised up since then have been

their life their childhoods are different

they're not out playing with other kids

they're sitting there in front of their devices

and that impacts them socially

it impacts their ability to

to show empathy

and it also impacts their ability for their brains

I mean that's why I think I

I'm not a doctor but I

I think

that could be contributing to this whole ADHD thing is

is at a very young age

kids brains are being trained to not be right

the other thing you raised too

which is another recommended book that I love

it's a classic one it's been around for a long time

it's called the power of full engagement

and so you mentioned

you're doing multiple things to work on your focus

it's not just you know

you're looking at your sleeping habits

and your eating habits and all those things

so The Powerful Engagement

is a book that helps you come up with daily rituals

to help you be able to focus

more effective and and

and really access all of your energy and

and be able to stay more focused on the job

and the the tagline is

for the most part you know your

your um

your effectiveness is not as much tied

to your time management

it's tied to your energy management

and it talks about four

different areas of energy management

and it gives you step by step

ways to improve in those four areas

that allow you to show up

and be focused and have more energy on the job

so it's that's interesting what you describe

I'm super interested in that book

and I would actually love to read it

it's also it reminds me of as I was in a

I was in a networking group and we were talking

I was talking about delegation and managing people

and one of the things I had mentioned is

the one thing I can't delegate

that I really wish I could

is my energy management

I wish somebody else could manage my energy

to make sure so I

I didn't have to pay attention to it

it's just always somebody's top responsibility

but I it has to be my top responsibility

along with my other top responsibilities

it's like man

that's the one thing I can't delegate

that I sure wish I could

one of the tips in that book is

taking scheduled breaks of 5 minutes

every two hours or so during the day

and the the argument is

is that your brain your effectiveness of anyone's brain

starts to drop off right around the two hour Mark

and it continues to go down

and if you step away for 5 minutes

listen to your favorite song

do whatever and then come back

you'll have more energy at the end of the day

you'll be more productive

and your brain will be sharper

because you're giving yourself

a break in the focus every hour or two

and then

but then they use that with professional athletes

you know

and then that was one of the training methods they use

Pete Sampras is a tennis great

used to always put a towel over his head

in between sets he was doing

like five minutes of meditation

before he went back out there

and he always came out more charged up and ready to go

okay well

and I was gonna ask you in the framework of

as it relates to like executives leaders

how do you help executives retrain their focus

after years of uh

constant distraction yeah

I the first thing I do is help them become aware of

what are their biggest multitasking behaviors

and enlisting them all but then prioritizing the

the extent to which each one is

the one they use the most

and how much time they use it

and how much time it causes them

so again that starts with the self awareness piece

making them aware of it and then we start to talk about

you know

the alternate behaviors you can do and what you can do

so for example

instead of having multiple things open on your screens

just having one screen open

and shutting down all of your alerts

every time you open a browser

there's widgets all over it

the whole design of these widgets is to distract you

one on weather one on news

one on sports whatever it might be

you can shut down all those widgets

so when a browser opens up

you don't see anything but work related things right

right changing push alerts to pull alerts

so making a specific time of the day

where I'm going to go look at the news

or I'm going to go look at these other things

instead of letting your phone decide when to ping you

because that's another big one is every time anyone

you see someone in an iPhone

and you're in a conversation with them right

sorry an iwatch

you know and you'll see right

just kind of go like this

and it's like they're with you

they're not they're with you

they're not or they

you know and

and people do that and so

you can control that by turning off all those alerts

when you're trying to do focused work

let's see turning off non urgent notifications

protecting your working focus time

saying to yourself for this one hour

I'm shutting everything else

and nobody can interrupt me for any reason right

and then being in there for the whole hour

there's a technique called the Pomodoro technique

where you can go on right that up

where you set a timer

and for the time that that is clicking

whether it's 20 minutes at first

and you can raise it to 30 minutes to 40 minutes

you're not allowed to let anything

interfere with what you're focused on

and you have to shut down your alerts

and put your phone in a different room

and the right

Atomic Habits also has some tips in there on how to

if you haven't already read that one

that one it has lots of tips on

he calls it the the laws of behavior change

things you can do to make the bad habit less appealing

and things you could do to make the positive

habit more appealing that's I mean

you've one of the questions I was gonna ask you

towards the end of this podcast

was gonna be

what are some of the books you've read been reading

and and to be fair like throughout this whole episode

you've been listing books to read

and some of them atomic habits

I only read part of I've reread it a couple of times

read it with my wife Learned some things

that were really valuable to me habit stacking

um

things like that that we kind of when we would read it

we would then try to implement it in our lives

one of the things that I've had

I think it it came I don't wanna say it came naturally

I've been working remote for so long

that one of the things that

lots of people have a difficulty with

when they're trying to manage their focus

has to do with their environment

people that are working from home

super distracting to work from home

I developed lots of habits that were good at

in the beginning to do this

to try to manage it but it

there's some things that it's just better

if I can manage my environment

by being in a different space to

to be a

focused on my work versus being in my living room

sometimes I'll still choose to be in my living room

because it's 5 degrees outside

and I don't want to walk to the office

or something like that but for the most part

absolutely in my experience

it helps to be able to manage your environment

what are some ways that you you would recommend

let's say hypothetically

you're talking to an executive run

or a founder of a business

they're running a business

and they work from their home

what would be some ways that you would recommend

to them to help better manage their environment

so that they can be more effective

in their focus and their execution

so I think it's really clear to set boundaries

around working time and non working time

and I know a lot of people with really young kids

it's hard to do that but you know

can you right

set up something that allows or keeps them distracted

while you're doing your working hours

and your focus time the work setup is key

what are you doing right now

to make yourself as isolated as possible

to eliminate as many distractions as possible

and then again

if we go back to even the concepts from the you know

the book I mentioned earlier

the the powerful engagement

if you can set break times where you're gonna go

if you have children or something or

or pets or whatever set break times where you go spend

you know 5 minutes with them or whatever

and then come back and focus time

and set break times and focus time

getting regimented about that

but it takes much more discipline at home

then it does it work which by the way

I've been I've been promoting a lot of books

but I'd be remiss if I didn't promote my own as well

yeah please

the whole purpose of the book I wrote

and it does have a whole chapter on multitasking

and things you can do to reduce

you know your overall use of it

but the

the purpose of the book was to help people understand

the three things that I see

help leaders make the jump from good to great

and how they improve their communication with others

and so the

the title of the book is Leadership Accelerators

and the three things that I focus on are

you know improving your emotional intelligence

in particular

I focus on how do you increase your self awareness

and how do you increase your self control

and this is all related to the habit you know

how do you control your habits things like that right

then I get into helping them identify

what are the habits that might be holding them back

and or what habits should they be doing more of

but but more often than not

those habits that we developed early in life

might be what's holding us back

and so I have a section that talks about

identifying the most common habits that leaders have

that hurt them

and their effectiveness in developing relationships

and getting results and then

the third area is

understanding how your personality preferences

impact your effectiveness in your job

and your relationships with others

and so it starts with a clear hey

to to be effective in any of these three things

you have to improve your focus

and throughout almost every chapter

I have a self assessment saying

what are your multitasking habits

and you can give it to other people

and they can help you you know

uh figure out what are the ones they see you doing

what are your ineffective communication habits

you can check it out yourself

you can give it to other people

and so I for all these different sections

I have self assessments that people can take

that first raises their self awareness

and then I give them ideas for how they can improve

and ways to replace those behaviors

uh so that it's

it's kind of like a self coaching book

that you should be able to pick up

and cause almost immediate improvement

if you go through it and and follow what

what's identified

well I

I 1

I appreciate the wealth of knowledge and

and resources you've provided up to this point

that I'm deeply interested in going and look at

but also

that you've created resources that could be valuable

for me to be able to do a self assessment

I didn't realize your book has in it um

which is great because I like to listen to audio books

but being able to actually

directly apply what I'm listening to

and learning and reflect on myself

not something that I get from all these

all the other books that you're talking about

so I love that

that comes with

material to actually apply the lessons directly

so thank you for that and I wanted to before we

before we wrapped up one of the things I wanted to do

as I mentioned I wanted to ask you about books

but because you've mentioned so many books now

I kind of want to change my final question with you

before we go and that is

you've obviously

put together a lot of lessons

that you've Learned over the years

inside material

if you only had 60 seconds to tell yourself something

in the past

that was one 1 minute worth of valuable advice

you only had one opportunity

let's let's say you're 25 years old

what would be the one thing that you would feel

was most important to tell yourself about

whatever you think

would be the most valuable thing to know

before you grew up and reach the age you are now

what would be this unfair advantage you gave yourself

it would I would

the first thing that comes to mind is learning early on

to control your ego right

and so what I discovered over time is that like

when I think about the training I develop

even the book that I wrote the

the the coaching that I do one on one

nothing I have developed on my own

has ever been as good as when I develop something

and run it by people that think differently than me

and so for example

when I wrote the book I am a very people person

and I'm an information driven person

but I'm not as results focused

and I'm not as structured

so what I did is

I found reviewers for the book

that were very structured

and very you know

results driven and my book became much better

because I was able to see beyond my own blind spots

right and so

you know in your lifetime

any solution you come up with we

we have a tendency to say oh

it's my idea and I need to protect it

no what you probably should do is

deliberately

run your idea by people that think differently

from you so that you can make that idea better

by getting perspectives

of people that will bring something to the table

that you can't see because of your own perspective

so for me that's the single greatest thing

is constantly

looking for input

from people that think differently from you

and whatever you're doing will get better

as a result of doing that

as long as you let go of thinking

my idea is the best or my solution is the best

and knowing that collectively

I will always produce a better outcome

if I get input from others

I love that approach it's how

I don't know if I unfortunately

maybe swing in the opposite direction too much

and sometimes I have too much self doubt

and then don't move things across the finish line

until I get that perspective

but it is a little bit validating to know that there's

obviously more value

if you can get the collective support of others

in the areas that you're weak

I I love that perspective

Michael thank you so much

for your time on the podcast today

for all the information that you've shared

I'm excited to share this with listeners

and I really appreciate the time we've had to chat

thanks for having me on

I'm doing everything I can to help others

improve their relationships and results

and doing podcasts like this allows me to do that

so thank you thanks

hey

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