Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] SA welcome to Pivotal Change, everyone. We have a very practical episode tonight. Pivotal Change is a show that's all about leadership and growing your influence and being able to expand and really get yourself out there as the best version of a leader you can be. It works with business executives and owners, entrepreneurs, people that just want to climb the ladder to success.
[00:00:52] So tonight's episode is going to cover a lot of different topics that are specifically relevant. They're hot topics today with leaders and people struggling in their businesses. So we've taken the time tonight to go ahead and address a lot of these issues. I'm your host, Ryan Kahn from CS Business Consulting, and we're going to do four parts tonight and work in order in order to get you to probably make gains in somewhere that is hurting you just like it's hurting other people. So, Buckland, we're going to have some fun tonight and we're going to be able to really rock and roll and just have a good time. So the first thing I want to talk about is I want to talk about how leaders are just feeling stuck these days. There's so many leaders that feel like they're stuck and they can't really just branch out, increase their bandwidth because they're effectively in survival mode all the time.
[00:01:42] So what I want to do is I want to talk about one of the first things that puts us into survival mode.
[00:01:48] You've probably heard me talk about this before if you follow this show or you've read any of my content. But I'm really big into addressing a really easy mind shift that in your thinking you can get away from reaction and get you into action.
[00:02:03] So reaction versus action? Well, we kind of can guess and play and maybe 50, 50 you might say. Well, you can react pretty quick because maybe it's instinct and you have to think about acting. But when you boil down the science, action is always faster and more powerful than reaction. And this is demonstrated through a lot of fun little games. There's sports people that can really explain this to you. In Tactical World, you really need to know that action is faster and better than reaction. Here's a little example. If you've ever sat with a kid or just done one of these games where, you know, you put your palms upside down and the other person puts their palms on top, then you try to flip your hands over and slap hands, and the person that moves on the bottom can almost always flip and hit the person on top until they really get dialed in. And after several tries, they can probably get their fingers out of the way, and then it's their turn to be on bottom and play the reaction game. Well, that just by itself, in a very small example, shows you that the person who is acting, even though they have to come out and around of the opponent's hands, is still able to make contact and slap them because action is faster than reaction. This isn't just true in sports or in little fun games with kids.
[00:03:17] This is true in business. If you are able to make it a priority where you're able to sit down, give complex thought to your vision, work on the bigger things, put goals in order, and then go act and tackle those goals, your business will be better, healthier, and more powerful.
[00:03:35] So the problem is we get stuck in reaction mode, and what happens is we stop leading our business or leading our lives, and we get stuck putting out fires all day, just going from urgency to urgency and sometimes even emergencies. And what happens is one of these root causes is that we get stuck in that place because crisis kind of becomes a habit at that point. And your brain always wants to adapt and maintain stability and homeostasis. So it begins to calibrate. It calibrates the urgencies until that becomes normal and even what it craves subconsciously. So then it begins to seek for what urgencies can I go handle and put out? You can develop yourself into micromanager. You can run people off. You can never get your genuine, most important priority tasks done, because now you're calibrated to look for urgency and you're running all over the place.
[00:04:24] The reason we do this is because we don't take time to create margins, to create buffers, where we just literally have time to think, decompress and strategize or discuss with another person, maybe one of our mentors, of how should I make the next move in my business? What should I do to create a bigger, better version of me and my people and my company?
[00:04:47] And then another thing that gets us in, this constant reaction wrote, is really these unclear, undefined roles or a lack of good boundaries. Everything ends up becoming your job. Or maybe you've got one or two rock stars and it all becomes their job. And those two or three people are doing 80% of the work, and the other 10 people are doing 20% of the work. There's this imbalance. So clearly defined roles, clear boundaries of what you will and won't do as a company or as a division or as a team really is important.
[00:05:18] But the leader sometimes forgets to delegate very clearly empower people into their roles that are clearly Defined and then everything ultimately becomes your job. It trickles on down to you and you even become the easy button to your employees. Can you answer this question? Hey, I don't know how to do this. And you just say, oh, let me correct it real quick. It's faster if I just correct it instead of teaching you. So that's another one. And that creates over commitment. Just you must be available to your people as a leader. But sometimes you over commit that I can be available no matter what, even if I've shut my door and I need to black out for an hour or two and really strategize or get some priorities done. They can knock on the door, interrupt that thought process and you've got to reset the entire chain of events to get yourself back on focus.
[00:05:59] So definitely be available to your people, but you can't over commit to being available 100% of the time. And then you can set in some of those boundaries like the 5 to 15 minute rule and getting them ready to handle the situation. Learn, explore, research, rely on each other instead of you all the time. So here's one of the things that it does. It ends up eroding your agency. And by agency, I don't mean like life insurance agency, I mean your agency as a person. And you may ask me, what, what is agency? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to explain to you this is what agency is. And here's probably one of the best ways somebody has told me how to think of agency. So imagine yourself, you have been trapped in like some third world country and the bad guys have you in this nasty dirty cell. It's miserable conditions. But you get slid in this, you get slid underneath the j sell the secret cell phone, right? Secret cell phone. You get to make one call and you're going to call the person that you believe is going to be able to rescue you and get you out of that situation. Okay? That person that you process and you think about that says if I had to call one person to get myself out of that type of emergency, I'm calling this guy or this girl. Well, guess what? That person probably has really high agency as a person. They're able to think outside the box and incredibly motivated and high initiative. They're going to do whatever it takes to rescue you. Probably pretty close to you in your life. And they probably have the ability to execute various skills, resources, talking to people. They're going to make things happen.
[00:07:33] So you as a leader have to have, you have to demonstrate high agency you have to be able to adapt, to be able to make things happen, to drive your business forward and to really be the person that can always be relied on in those emergencies.
[00:07:47] If you're a leader, that's over committed, has no boundaries, everything's your responsibility. You haven't created buffers and margin. You have the bad habits of being calibrated. Always hunt down urgencies and stay busy. You have eroded your agency as a leader. So that's pretty important. Then you got to be creative. You got to kind of be that visionary style person. And if you're going to be creative with new technology that comes out, new resources, new relationships that you can partner up with and build your future, your creativity is getting crowded and eventually drowned out.
[00:08:17] Your strategic thinking turns into more of a luxury than an actually regularly scheduled every part of your day type of thing. So you need to preserve those things and you need to diagnose yourself. What you need to do is you need to diagnose your life, your relationships, the things that are pulling you away. Whether it's someone on your team or something in your life. What are you responding to the most?
[00:08:44] Right, you're responding to it more than you're going out and initiating, hey, I need the team to accomplish this job and you can empower them.
[00:08:51] Another way to do it, to diagnose if maybe my articulation isn't just hitting you just right, let me ask this question. Do you feel pretty well drained before the day is over? Are you smoked by 3:00pm or even sooner? You know, 1, 2, 3:00 clock comes out, you're getting that afternoon crash. Well, the afternoon crash is not always just directly related to caffeine intake. It's often related to the way your brain processes. You're in this reaction active mode. It's not quite fight, flight or freeze, but it's a high level of stimulus. And so your body doesn't have an adrenal dump. So you're not getting to actual fight, flight or freeze, but your body is in this overly stimulated mode. So you're fatigued by the time mid afternoon rolls around. That is a potential sign that you're in this stuck area.
[00:09:37] So it's really important that you identify that you diagnose yourself and you find ways out. Here's a couple of the ways out. It doesn't matter how much it hurts, but you've got to start off with at least one hour a week of nobody bothers me. Anybody knocks on that door, the building better be on fire or better be the police. With a warrant. Otherwise nobody comes in that door, right? And you block out and you set three priorities for yourself, boom, boom, boom. And you concentrate on those priorities. You logistically figure out how they're going to get resolved, you delegate if necessary and you hammer them out. Those are the three guaranteed things you will get done today and this week. So that's the best thing I like to do is a daily three, a weekly three, a monthly three, and then a quarterly three. So I like to work in threes and fives and you just heard a bunch of threes so you can really dig yourself on it. Then you have to give yourself one hour a week for training. This is either you learning a new skill. Like in the tax world, we're constantly getting tax law changes, updates, clarity, new forms are coming out on how to file this on a different schedule. And it's ultimately an ever changing landscape nowadays. So we dedicate as a firm two hours to training, one hour of individual training and one hour of team training. That's where you want to get two hours of blockout time as a leader to work on the 50,000 foot view of your business and two hours for training. One is you training yourself and the other is you training your team. And if you want to get clever, yeah, you can do two hours this week and two hours next week, but that's what you want to go for. You still got 36 hours left in the week on the standard Western world work week. So you can make this happen. Do it today, show up in the morning, don't open your email and immediately enter the unknown fog of what's in my email. Have to stumble around for urgency. Sit down immediately after you get your cup of coffee, you say hi to your friends and you sit down. You write down, these are the three things that I am absolutely going to get done today. And here the. For example, it's not for, but I just wrote down my list of three today, right? And I'm going to get those three things done today no matter what. And so it's really important that you also set a weekly three that often involves your team because you're probably gonna need some partnership in that one. Your monthly three is the big stuff. And those are like the KPI type things. These are the metrics of how you're learning, that you're making progress. And then your quarterly three is the real big goal setting and there might be even bonuses or rewards involved around that. Then as the owners, you should really be doing a one, three and five year plan. And that's that's kind of the big boy planning. You need an entire planning session. So we'll take a week or a long week, go away and finish planning that kind of stuff for us.
[00:12:15] And that's probably the best way I can think that you can start to move forward towards your goals instead of constantly having your head on a SW for where's the next Fire? And being a fireman all the time. We had a guy that we worked with that did this exact thing. He lived a back to back emergencies. We sat him down, we broke him out, we forced him to in the beginning take a one hour thinking block and everything started to shift. We also had him come forward with his team and do an accountability meeting. Now that he has delegated the authority, everybody understands and agrees he gave permission for his staff, all the subordinates to say, hey, hold on boss, you told us I'm supposed to handle this and it's supposed to go this way.
[00:12:56] We're getting that category whereby I very nice and professionally have to tell you to back off because we got this and you can keep yourself free of being a fireman at this time. So we're going to stick the pin in it right now. We're going to come back and we're going to talk more about the vision and how you get going on your vision and really building up some momentum. So start with those things, do your sets of threes and we're going to come back with more vision. Picking up velocity on Pivotal Change right after this commercial break.
[00:13:56] Welcome back from the break. We're ready for more Pivotal Change. And if you really like Pivotal Change, in fact, I hope you're loving it because you don't ever have to miss a moment. You can get all of your favorite NOW Media TV shows like Pivotal Change live on demand, anytime, anywhere. All you have to do is Download the free Now Media TV app. You can get that on Roku iOS and you can get instant access anywhere that you have data or Internet. You get them in bilingual English and Spanish. And if you prefer to listen on the go, which is something I actually like to do, like there's a podcast version where you can just hear the shows and you can listen maybe as you drive or something like that. We have everything from business and breaking news to lifestyle, culture and leadership. And now media TV is always streaming 247 and we're ready wherever you are. So keep that in mind as you continue to learn about leadership and stuff like we're talking about on today's show. We just talked about Leadership and how leaders feel stuck. And we gave some examples of how you can get unstuck and you can do your threes, your sets of threes. Now, the other thing that I want to talk to you about is that your vision is a really important part of getting yourself unstuck. You got to come back to the vision. And once you start blocking out time, you start getting your daily goals, your, your sets of threes and all that stuff, you can really start to focus back on your vision. That is something that you should be focusing on constantly. Your mission and your vision really are like cornerstones to your business. And you should say, is this action that I'm conducting helping me achieve the mission and further the vision? If the answer is yes to both of those, that's. That's a green light. That's something you should be doing more of.
[00:15:34] So let me ask you this question. If you really want to build momentum, you have to do stuff daily.
[00:15:41] Everybody's probably told you since you've been a kid, but you need to dream big. You should have big dreams and small action plans, right? These little daily goals. And I always like to use the metaphor of stacking up dominoes, okay? That domino, those grandiose things you've probably seen on Instagram and tick tock where people met, do these massive towers, they were literally laid one domino at a time. So that's a big dream for a big impact, one domino at a time. So here's the thing. A lot of leaders, when thinking about their vision, they usually almost always have it in their head and they don't even know how to articulate it very consistently to a lot of people. So step number one to get that inspiring vision statement is to articulate it and write it down, put it into like a small paragraph, and you have to make it understandable to an 8th grader or even a 5th grader, where if somebody in grade school would read that and be like, man, that sounds pretty cool, and they would understand your vision statement. It doesn't need to be all convoluted with giant words. You know, this 10 cent words and the jargon from the industry. Just make it a simple vision statement so everyone can have the best opportunity to rally around that, rally around that and align themselves with your vision statement. But here's the problem. Leaders might even get to the point where they've drafted this very inspiring vision statement, but then their life and their business just returns to chaos. Okay? So what we have in wrestling is it doesn't matter what the score is. You're going to do the next score, you're going to score the next point, you're going to do the next right move in order to get ahead. So whether you're down by 10 or you're getting ready to completely technically superiority this guy by 15 plus points, you're going to make the next right move, you're going to score the next point. So in doing that, you have time to think in business, much more so than you do in a sport.
[00:17:28] So what is the one action this week that is the next right move? What can you do to move the business forward this week? Hopefully it shows up in your sets of three. And then what is like a little micro milestone that you can do in the next two or three days? What is like an easy victory where I can sit here and say, look, we've been pushing this off. If we just spend a little bit of time in the next day, two or three, we can get this done. Check the box. And now you're building momentum. Momentum is truly built by habits. So you have to build systems that promote habits and you have to build habits that promote your system. And those all need to be anchored to your vision. Okay, so think about that. You want to do things like having tools and tactics, and you've heard me talk about the difference between logistics and strategy and tactics. Tactics are the daily interactions of how we're going to get this done. So one is like add your vision to your weekly planner and have it literally come up in the discussions when you're having your staff meetings, your team meetings, your planning meetings. Here's our vision. It's written on the wall. It's written on the top of the piece of paper which we're taking our notes in our minutes. Do, like weekly reviews that say, are we moving our plan forward? Hey, everybody, move the plan forward this week. And those can be really simple. It can even be a group email saying, hey, everybody, report back how you move the plan forward this week. The cool part is when people start answering and everybody sees that. Like, I'm not the only one working. There's 12, 1500 other people all working and putting their. Their one major thing they did to move the plan forward, that rallies people, that builds morale. Super cool. To watch. And then align all of your tasks to the why? Why are we doing this? Does it support the mission? Does it support the vision? If it doesn't support the mission and the vision? And it's not maybe a default like here's a legal compliance we must do right. If it doesn't answer that why Question you probably should.
[00:19:20] It doesn't fit. Same with the customer. If this customer is asking us to do something, to tweak our product, to tweak our service, to do something outside the realm of normal, what we need to reject that and we need to stay focused on our niche, we need to stay focused on the actual services or products we provide, then you want to continue to fuel that momentum. So going back to first segment, you got your sets of three. If you to 30 day mark and everybody checked it, you should be passing out gold stars, you should be buying people launch. You should should celebrate these small wins as proof of the ability to knock over dominoes. Right? Share the problems publicly. There's no problem with shooting out on your website, your LinkedIn page, whatever social medias he has saying, hey, this week all our all Star team accomplish 100% of their objectives. Yay. Public may not know what that means other than okay, these guys are knocking it out of the park internally. So the product must be good, the service must be good. It and then you need to reflect and adjust because you're not always going to hit 100.
[00:20:18] But if you get into something where you're like, this is a great plan, this is a great idea, the action plan looks good, you get down the road, you're like, this isn't so feasible after all. Make your adjustments, adapt, overcome, make those course corrections and move forward.
[00:20:33] So I want you to do like I say pretty much every week on the show is get your pen and paper out and I want you to have some practical application right now.
[00:20:42] What is your one task this week? That would be your evidence. If I were to ask you to show me your evidence that your vision is in motion, your vision is being accomplished. What is your one task this week? Write it down and you can even go on to YouTube or the website and you can put it in the comments.
[00:20:59] What is your one task this week? To prove to me that your vision is in motion and you're making progress. So that's something you need to ask yourself every week, week, every week. Probably in one of those one or two hour blocks of time when you're doing your vision casting and stuff like that. And so if you really want to start building velocity, the speed that increases over time, you got to create more space. Just like we talked about. You're going to be needing to find opportunities to lead. So you're going to find opportunities where you're like, oh, I've got this whole team right here. But Johnny, he's kind of new. So he's lacking. Assign a mentor to Johnny, assign a role to Johnny. Get something going so that you can go over there and Johnny can be brought up. Johnny can feel empowered now, take on more responsibility. And if you get teammates to train teammates, the 5M's program that I have, the mentorship goes into this. The final stage of mentorship is recycle, which means you empower your mentee, the person you just worked on, and you've got them mentored up to where they need to be. Now you're like, my expectation is you go do this with other people, right? So let's say over time, you mentor 10 people. Let's say in a year or two.
[00:22:07] Those 10 people should then be able to mentor 10 people.
[00:22:11] Think about the exponential explosion. Your company, your industry, just the bandwidth, your bottom line. Moving the arrow up to the right is going to experience. If you can do that, that is building velocity. It's paying it forward to your people and having them pay it forward to your future people. And, man, you can really, really blow things out of the water doing that.
[00:22:32] So you have.
[00:22:34] Your existent existence right now exists in a world of disruption. I'm certain, I guarantee we're halfway through this episode, that people at some point has grabbed their phone, scrolled through their device, looked at a notification, maybe even just been listening while scrolling through a social media app. They've been disrupted through somebody walking into the office. They've been disrupted by saying, daddy, can I have a spac? Whatever it is, you live in a world of disruption and you need to create space, blackout time, and the ability to focus. It has never been harder in human history to focus and stay on task than it is now. There's more shining lights, more loud noises, more people, and more ways to get into your brain, brain waves than there has ever been before. You must be aware of it and assertively defending that. So again, go back there and start fueling your momentum. Start getting on the path that it takes to build this velocity.
[00:23:33] Start small, do your three steps. Find one person to mentor and tell them that I'm mentoring you because I want you to be a mentor in the future and watch that grow. And then you're going to get better every time you mentor someone else. And you can literally pay that forward and make huge changes to not only your abilities, but the abilities of those around you. Stay tuned. We'll be coming back here in just a moment. We're actually going to talk about some AI stuff, something that I'm pretty interesting in interested in and something that has a lot of awesome potential and a lot of hazard potential. So stay tuned. We'll be right back. You're only halfway through on this awesome episode of Pivotal Change.
[00:24:42] You've made it past the halfway point on this episode of Pivotal Change, and we are still building momentum and having a great conversation on very relevant topics. Some of the top struggles of leaders. We talked about being stuck and how to get yourself out of the feeling of stuck. We talked about your vision and how you can build momentum behind your vision and avoid a lot of these pitfalls. And we've taken really practical steps and I even challenge you to write some things down. But we're going to move into another area that is very popular and you're not going to get over having to hear it and it's going to be put in your face all the time. Time. But it's AI, okay, Artificial intelligence. So I want to talk specifically about leading in the age of AI in disruption. You heard me really emphasize disruption just a moment ago. So how do we stay human and keep in real good touch with our human side amid all of this change to technology and AI is advancing quickly, just as we knew it would, and it is also really replacing a lot of what people do do now. We're going to hit a lot of key points on this. I'm going to give you some examples and some demonstrations, maybe even some suggestions.
[00:25:51] But to keep things in, in context, I want everyone to understand and embrace the mindset that AI and the technology changes. It's no longer a future thing. It is now. It is in the present. Our world that you're seeing right there is not the same as it was five years ago. It's not the same as it was was three years ago, two years ago, or even six months ago. AI is now. So here's the trap. The trap is this. If you were trying to over engineer or you're trying to outpace these changes without grounding yourself along the way, coming back to the basics, making sure your mission, your vision, making sure that the customer service side of things is at a very high level, you're going to over engineer and you're going to feel unauthentic. You are going to feel fake. You're going to feel like AI and people can still sense it. Even though some of the technology is so amazing. You can't really have a hard time discerning between real and fake videos anymore. You get into any prolonged relationship like a email change, text bot, you get auto calls and things like that people can figure out, oh, this is a robot. This change, I'm not getting real people, I'm not getting actual customer service. I'm just getting really fancy algorithms. Okay? And there's a balance to that. So you want to avoid that trap of over engineering AI to replace all human systems. And something that we always needed and always will need is human connection at some point, to look another human in the eye, to receive a smile, to actually have some type of physical touch, whether it's a handshake or a pat on the shoulder, that is something that can't be replaced entirely, or even just a sympathetic ear to say, I understand you're frustrated, let me help you through this. This, okay? AI can replicate and simulate that, but it actually can't replace it. So here's what you should do with your balance. As a leader looking to embrace, hopefully AI in your industry, you should offload repetitive tasks, anything that is just redundant and done over and over and over again. You should really research and try to get AI to take that over. So a little bit of prompting, a little bit of training the AI, it will probably take that over pretty well and free up a lot of time.
[00:28:04] The other thing you should do is you should be using data and insights to inform yourself and make better decisions, but still relying on your wisdom and discernment and not just letting it dictate your actions. Go do this. This is what statistics say is the best option. And you shouldn't just be dictating to it, which is basically using whatever versions of AI as Google searches, glorified Google searches or Bing searches or something like that. You should be discussing and having conversations and developing the actual idea. Prompting is absolutely going to be in your future. And here's what I want to tell you. A good leader will recognize if you have an employee, AI take AI out of it. Let's go back 10 years, right? If you have an employee that's struggling with something, they've got a really high skill in this area, but they've just got a gap over here. Maybe they've got got some family issues going on. So they ask, hey, can I adjust my schedule just a little bit so I can get my kid to school in the morning because there's an issue on the bus and whatever, and you make these adjustments, AI can't do that. AI just absolutely cannot do it. AI can often be cold with a couple of boundary sets to attempt to be sympathetic. But you need to go deal with that employee. You need to schedule mentoring time to get those tasks Up. You need to put boundaries in place for like, yeah, we can adapt for a while until you get the bus situation worked out with your kid. And then boom, boom, boom. You can move forward. AI can't replace that. Okay.
[00:29:29] And the other thing that you need to do is you can use AI to give you insights. It's like, hey, I got this employee struggling with X, Y, and Z. What are some options? And then it will tell you some options. You say, well, that doesn't really like me. And that's not really how I would respond. What about these two? And it will go, and it will help you. You. But if you walk in there and you say, hey, I need to talk to you, and you just print off a script that AI built for you and you read a script, zero personality, zero care. And one of the number one things that employees need from their leaders is to know that they care and genuinely care. AI still can't do that. I have a really big struggle to know if it ever will.
[00:30:07] But that's something else. Then what? AI also help discover patterns, like surface level patterns with like, your judgment and your analysis analyst. I'm human just like everyone else. But hey, I can plug a gap. If I don't have an advisor readily available, I can say, hey, what do you think about this plan? And it'll be like, hey, this looks like a good plan. I can tell you thought this out, blah, blah, blah, blah. But have you considered boom? And it will identify a gap in my thinking? AI can be pretty powerful that way. And then I can fill that gap and have a better plan. Okay, so let it do those surface pattern things. Let it help you with budgeting. Let it help you do stuff.
[00:30:41] Use it for things like, I mean, we use it for, for tax research, but we, we really know exactly what tax research we're doing, and we can have arguments with AI about the legality of what it recommends. That's actually a funny one, real quick tangent, because I own an accounting firm, but AI has already taken all the exams of professional licenses, insurance, medical exams, legal exams, all kinds of things, because get your broker's license, license to get your fiduciary license, things like that. All those different licenses has passed every single exam that it has taken with the exception of the CPA exam. So that's kind of interesting and scary at the same time that our tax code is so complex that AIs can't, can't figure it out. But what will happen is AI. One of the traps is AI will give you an answer, but Then it will not explain implementation, will not explain how to go carry that out with your team members. It will not explain the legality. It just says this is an option for businesses. But it doesn't tell you they have to have file forms, you have to declare it the year prior, you have to give follow up work. They have to, you know, so it doesn't always do those things unless you get really good at prompting. So you have to prompt your people to get them healthy out of a rut. You have to prompt your people to get them back into motivated in growth mode. You have to prompt people that we got to prompt AI to give you exactly what you need. It's not Google.
[00:32:00] Another thing is it's pretty imperative to maintain empathy and human connection and values. You have your core values.
[00:32:08] So here's one thing I'm going to really tell you guys to do. If you are not already involving yourself in the Eye and Elite, at least testing and exploring and reaching out there and trying some things with AI, you probably need to start and you can actually ask whatever AI system you're using, hey, what are five or ten questions you need to know about me to really get to know me and understand me better so that you can give me better feedback back, right? And you can also take documents and drop documents in there, say, analyze this document. This document was created by me and tells about me. So I fed into AI, my leadership philosophy, my core values, my mission, my vision, my two websites, a little bit of my ebooks, my content. I said this is Ryan Khan. Want you to understand me now give me a 500 word summary of who I am. Let me tell you, after I've loaded all that stuff, they're talking about 30, 45 minutes minutes to load all those documents in there that I've created over time as a leader as well as answering the questions, probably took me another 15 minutes, 20 minutes to really articulate them out. It knew me pretty darn well. Okay, it got good. And so now I can say answer this is Ryan Connor. Give me the feedback related to me and man is it sharper and better. So use it. But I can never replace Ryan Khan. I can promise that AI can't, can't do those things, can't replace you, can't replace anyone else. But it can absolutely substitute or take over mundane things that humans probably really don't get joy out of doing anyway. So use that, create an AI environment, link it to emails, link it to, you know, budgeting systems and stuff like that. Put controls in place. But don't forget it's your job as a leader to have the real emotional intelligence to connect with your people, to be authentic, to make sure that there's psychological safety for your people. The forums wrote a nice, nice episode about psychological safety and authenticity with AI and how things need to be non negotiable. Right? So you as a leader may have to do more of a different type of skill set than just the skillful execution of your job.
[00:34:12] So here's a good one as well. So if you have a lot of interactions with your team and there's communications going on, you have an AI model, your AI can actually red flag or orange flag and say, hey, based on this performance, based on this language, based on these patterns, you may have an overstressed staff member and you can go talk to that person, say, hey, I'm just checking in with you, what's going on? And you can personally intervene when they're like, I feel like I'm drowning, I just can't do anymore. I don't even want to come to work anymore. And AI can help you flag that and then you can go deconflict that issue. That's pretty awesome.
[00:34:47] Can you get a team that can like really get automated logistics? You throw in a plan in there, you say, tell me that. Give me two different ways that you think are best for us to resolve this and say plan A, plan B, and you can even tweak it into plan C. So it's pretty, pretty awesome that you can use these things. You can get provocative questions out there to have them say, hey, what would you change in my operations? What would you do this? So here's a question for you. If I were to say that you could empower AI to run your operations, like 80% of your operations, the behind the scenes administrative, all that kind of stuff, okay, what would you then the leader, what part of leadership would you say, man, I just saved 12 hours a week. I'm gonna double down on this category of leadership, this topic of leadership. What would that answer be? I want you to think about that. I want you to go ahead and write it down as we cut to commercial break. If AI could run your operations and free up a ton of your time, what part of leadership would you double down on? So think about that. We're going to hit a break. We're going to come back for our final segment of pivotal change right after this.
[00:36:26] Tonight's episode is in the final stretch, and if you've missed any part of the episode, that's okay, you can Always play it back. In fact, fact, all of pivotal change and all of the Now Media Network is available 24. 7 on live streaming. All you have to do is go to Now Media TV or you can download the Now Media TV app. You get Roku, you get iOS, you get English and Spanish, full bilingual network. You even get things that are full episodes of, you know, business and leadership and lifestyle and culture. And you can download it as a podcast. That's actually kind of probably my favorite thing. If you can't watch an episode because it's not safe, you're not in the environment for it, you still can listen to the episode on a podcast version. So this is a really fantastic thing and the developments are going to continue to come. So get nowmediatv.com get the Now Media TV app and enjoy every part of this Now Media TV network and the entire team to enrich your life. And speaking of enriching your life, there's something that I want to talk about because we just talked about how to possibly enrich your life and business using AI and avoiding some of the balance issues and the pitfall issues over reliance or, or even under reliance. And one of the things that's dangerous is that you lose your emotional intelligence. You use your authenticity.
[00:37:37] We don't want to do that. We want authenticity over approval. So there's a couple of ways to actually lose your authenticity. One is replacing yourself with automated tasks over and above what is really appropriate with AI, and you become a disconnected or inhuman to your team members, to your client or target audience.
[00:37:58] Or you can have this same problem happen. One of the things that's really important is that humans constantly seek approval. And that's not always a bad thing, but it's been exaggerated. Just think about the vast majority of people using social media. Social media is pretty much all about getting the likes, getting the views, getting the comments, and trying to go viral or have a really smash video. Just getting a lot of popularity. And some of it's innocent enough, like you've got a message, you want to get your message out to the world. Nick has it can, you know, validate where somebody's at in life. It can encourage people, it can share some wisdom to make somebody's life better. And some of it's like, hey, look at my lunch, look at my vacation, and everybody like me. That seeking of approval is dangerous because as soon as we start seeking approval, we really start changing ourselves. We make edits to our life, we make edits to our business, and that's very difficult. We lose Authenticity, we get cognitive dissonance, which means my thought process and who I believe I am versus my actions, what I actually live out are, or it's a musical term, or dissonance, the wavelengths don't match up and you start to get depression, anxiety, all types of stress, maybe even shame and guilt for some of the stuff that's going on. So here's some of the costs of seeking approval is that you begin to make choices based on what others expect or whatever others say that you should do. Not based on your core values, not based on what you believe.
[00:39:20] You actually begin to lose your voice, your conviction and your clarity and your joy in life starts to diminish. That's not okay.
[00:39:29] You do not want to let your clients or society run your business. And you're always reacting to their perceived expectations or even their demands. And here's the funny thing about expectations, right? Most the time when we act because we believe this is expected of us, us, those expectations actually probably aren't even true and we've made them up in our head. We put a pressure on ourselves and now we're going out to change ourselves and edit our lives based on a false expectation where somebody is like, no, I didn't expect you to do that. I don't think you had to do that, but in your head to kind of created this scenario where you felt like you had to pivot in a negative way.
[00:40:07] So authentic leadership does this. You stay focused on you, your ability to lead and grow and impact people's lives and be a servant.
[00:40:15] Lead from who you are. You will attract alignment. If you are authentic, that's just period. And it's not just compliance, right? People are going to line up behind you and want to follow you. They're going to line up at your door and watch your product and services. It also gives you permission. I'm really good big about permissions. If you've read my seven pillars of leadership, to say, no, that doesn't jive with our vision or our values and that doesn't support our mission. So we're just going to say no, we're going to pass on this. And eventually, actually, not eventually, really quickly, that builds stronger trust and it lets you get followers naturally. Okay, so let me ask you a little bit of a diagnostic question here, okay? If no one told me I was good or bad at what I was doing, I just had no feedback. Somebody said, you're good at this, or hey, you're terrible. If I just didn't know if I was good or bad, would I still be doing exactly what I'm about talking, doing.
[00:41:11] There's a little bit of a passion statement that's a little bit of a talent statement, a purpose statement.
[00:41:16] So whether I'm supporting a charity or whether I'm going out and I'm cleaning up oil spills and saving animals, or whether I'm traveling across the country coaching and consulting businesses, if I didn't know I was good or bad at what I did, would I still be doing this? That's an alignment issue. Okay, now here's another one.
[00:41:33] Let's examine relationship.
[00:41:36] Okay, if you want to be your authentic self, which relationships in my life are driving me away from who I truly want to be, and which ones are driving me forward on the path of who I want to be, of who I envision myself. So this is a big, big, big one. This is all over social media about, you know, the. If you're the four people of bad habits and you hang around them, you'll be the fifth. If you're with four drunks, you'll be the fifth. If you'Re with four womanizers, you'll be the fifth. If you're with four gossipers, you'll be the fifth. Well, guess what? If you're around four fit people, you'll be the fifth. IF you're around four millionaires, you'll be the fifth. Those relationships are really important. As you surround yourself with that, you get people that you can strategize with, you can talk plans with, you can talk life with, and their relationships drive you towards who you want to be. Now, again, you gotta examine the moral and ethical things, but we're talking about the core values, ways in a healthy version of yourself. Okay? So if you're not doing that, you probably have to make that hard decision of reducing the time or even cutting off those relationships that are pulling you away. I tell this to my kids when they were younger, that these are the candle blower outers. Yeah, I know that's a funny sentence. But if anytime something good happens to you, if anytime you start getting skill or accolades or something and your light starts growing brighter and you have this bestie in your life and they go, oh, yeah, well, I did this, this, and they want up you. Or they go, well, that's not that cool because so and so said this. Or if you're just having a good day and they go, hey, did you hear what Johnny or Sally said about you? And they stir up drama. Those are candleblower outers and they do not have your best Interest in mind. And they are not actually good friends. Well, guess what? Adults and business owners, you've got the same thing. You've got people in your office that are your partners, that are your subordinates, that are your managers that are like, oh, and they're toxic and they're blowing up out your candle. You got to knit those relationships with Bud and you got to have people that are sitting here and you're having a bad day. Like, man, I don't know if I should just keep carrying on. But they go, hold on a second. And they take the lighter and they light your candle and they make you brighter. So you got this. You're just in a down moment. Kick your chin up, grind a little harder. You've got this. You're right around the corner from a break for you. Come on. I believe in you even if you don't believe in yourself.
[00:43:44] What if you surround yourself with those people?
[00:43:46] Same thing as this.
[00:43:49] If you go and you have an entrepreneur, right?
[00:43:53] And you've got this young person or this person that says, I want to get out of my job and I want to start my own business. That person is going to go talk to two people. They're going to talk to their co worker or the person that they've known since high school. They say, hey, I'm thinking about changing my whole life and I want to go start my own construction business. I want to go start my own fishing tour business or my lawnmowing company. They're going to laugh at you, Johnny. You can't do that. There's too much risk. And your family and this and that, and it's so hard and that's such a waste of time, right? And then that person goes and asks an entrepreneur millionaire. They will never laugh or scoff at that idea. In fact, they're going to encourage that person, right? So which person are you? Are you a candle blower outer? Are you being your authentic self? Are you doing that to your people and your subordinates when they need you? Do you have the wrong relationships in your life? What are you doing?
[00:44:37] So what are you doing? Begs me to bring up. Let's make some first moves, right?
[00:44:42] Speak one truth that you've been holding back. Okay? So you know you have this voice in the back of your head, and this voice knows that you've been failing to make this maneuver. You've neglected to take this risk. You've neglected to talk to this person or address this issue. Write down one truth that you've been holding back. It's okay. There's nobody listening or in the room with you. Write it down and speak or write that one truth. Yeah, I've been holding back. I've been needing to do this. Boom. Okay, now I have a core values test, but let's at least take a moment of your time to name your non negotiable. These are your values. I'm literally saying, if somebody said, ryan, you can no longer do this for the rest of your life, you would fight them to the death because you have to do this. It's part of who you are. Now, these non negotiables are ultimately for your team. We have to be working towards this goal. We have to be building the vision this way. We have to do this in the business. And if somebody to tries to take that away from us, well, by golly, we would quit our jobs or we'd fight tooth and nail to make sure that we got to keep this. That's really powerful as a team exercise too.
[00:45:50] And then you actually need to model vulnerability. Consistency, boundaries, accountability.
[00:45:57] There's a difference between vulnerability and weakness, okay? Vulnerability just means like, hey, I'm vulnerable in this moment because I realized I made an error where I realized that I have a lack and skill in this area and I need to build my skill up right where weakness is just like, oh, I can't do. It's more of an emotional thing. Oh, I can't do this because I don't want to. I quit. Blah, blah, that's weakness, okay? Vulnerability is not necessarily weakness, okay?
[00:46:21] The most powerful people in the world or powerful animals in the world may have a soft underbelly where they're vulnerable, but they're not weak, right? Like an elephant's not weak, but it's got a soft underbelly, okay?
[00:46:33] So you look at these things and you build consistency. You put boundaries in place and you hold those boundaries. I say there's always exceptions to rules, okay? But they have to be exceptions. They have to be like crazy rare, well articulated. And if you make the exception, everybody has to know why it's an exception. So stop going out and making exceptions all the time or that is the culture that is the new rule, okay? So do that. Speak that truth. Name your non negotiables as your team, and you gotta model the accountability. Consistency, boundaries, and vulnerability. So we're gonna wrap up here. What I want to charge everyone with is go out there and choose authenticity this week. Choose, if you're a power user of AI to go add some human time, some facetime with your clients, your staff, whoever see how your energy and your relationships are gonna change. Go out there and set your action plans in place. Challenge yourself. Answer those questions that I asked you. And if you need help with this, if you want help with this, I'm more than happy to let you guys get a hold of me. That I have csbizcom.com that's my main website, where I can help people like this, like you with issues like this, with leadership, mentorship, workflow, operational planning, motivating leaders, self reflection, core values, the business, foundations. It's a great place to start. Even if your company's been around for 30 years, going back to the basics and rebuilding the foundation is never a bad thing. Thing. So go look at this stuff. You can get a hold of me on LinkedIn. You can call the office at 270-442-6688. But we're here to help. So my final challenge is this. Take all this information, go out into the world and see the change and be the change. We'll catch you here next time on Pivotal Change.
