Adapting Business Leadership in the AI Era with Bardeep Panesar

Adapting business leadership for the AI era. In this episode of Biz Bites, I welcome Bardeep, an accomplished business and leadership coach to share his inspirational journey and insights on redefining business culture and leadership. He’s had incredible journey across multiple contents, including a personal life changing battle.

And we discussed the importance of self leadership, purposeful living and adaptability in the workplace, especially in an era, increasingly influenced by artificial intelligence. Biz Bites. Don’t miss the bonus content. And the details in the links in the show notes where we explore the future implications of AI on human purpose and identity.

You really don’t want to miss that one. Stay listening now of course for an enlightening conversation filled with personal anecdotes, expert advice, lots of ideas for you, forward thinking they are, and leadership and business. Concepts that are really going to make a difference to your business. So all that on Biz Bites, the destination for professional services, business leaders to learn about those 1% ers that will transform your business.

Please don’t forget to subscribe and you, so you never miss an episode of Biz Bites. Brought to you by podcast done for you.com au, where you become the voice of brilliance. Now for Biz Bites, let’s get started on changing the world one person at a time.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites, and we have a fascinating guest who has a great journey to tell us about that he’s been on, but also more importantly, to give you some fantastic insights into. Things that will change the way you think about your business and mindset in particularly.

I’m looking forward to this discussion. Let me welcome Bardeep to the program. Welcome. Thanks, Anthony. It’s great to be here. Wonderful having this little chat beforehand and now getting into it. Looking forward to this discussion. We’ve had a bit of fun off air before we’ve even got started.

So we’ll have to recapture that as we get into the program. We had to cut it short, didn’t we? We had to cut it short. We did. We did. We’ll still be talking otherwise and not recording. So let’s bring the listeners into the into some of the discussion. But firstly, why don’t you give a little bit of an introduction as to who you are and what you’re about?

Absolutely. Great. Great. So I’m, I’m really terrible at speaking about myself. I’m a business and leadership coach, a purpose coach, and I help my clients define their purpose, get really great in their businesses, get really great at leadership. And it’s been a journey for me to get here. My name is Bardeep, which we were just laughing about because it’s two English words, bar and deep.

And I am a recovered alcoholic. So it was prophetic when I was named that I think my parents knew what was going to happen in my future. So I’ve been sober for more than 10 years now. This is where you applaud. We’re applauding. We’re putting in the, we’re putting in the fake applause. So I was born in in Africa, in Kenya, East Africa.

I went to university in England. After that, I moved to Australia. I had a stint about seven years doing IT in Australia. Then I moved back to Kenya and founded a furniture company there, furniture design and manufacture. And then seven, not about seven and a half years ago, I moved back to Australia because I really wanted to.

And this time I moved with my family. And when I got back here, I went, I really want to now follow my own purpose. So when I was studying engineering in university in England I found myself in the library reading about metaphysics. rather than mechatronics. I’ve always been really interested in the human mind and what our purpose is and why we are here.

What it’s all about. And I was obsessive about that, but growing up in an Indian Kenyan family, you’re either going to be a lawyer, a doctor, or an engineer pick one. If you fail, you can become an accountant. So I went. So no disrespect to any accountants who are listening. But I went and became an engineer and a very poor accountant because I did an accountancy major, which I just scraped through, accountancy minor.

But yeah, so my interest was always in humans. So when I got back to Australia seven and a half years ago, I went, okay, now I’m going to give myself to what my purpose is to help my fellow human beings uncover their purpose. and live better lives in however they want to express that. Is that a good enough summary for you, mate?

That is a great summary and I want to delve into the into the idea of purpose and leadership, but I’m fascinated firstly to ask you about that incredible journey that you skipped through rather quickly and and where life started and You’re part of family that had already moved countries before.

Is that right? So that’s correct. And so that whole that’s not something that many people experienced in terms of moving country to country and doing it with intention as well. But I’m interested in how that sort of initial upbringing and that idea of moving countries and even trialing it and living in different places.

What does, how easy is that to work out and what to do and how do you. Pin the point on the map to where you’re going like that difficult things to try and get your head around. I admire people who do it. I think you admire my granddad then. So my granddad lived in a little village in the north of India and Punjab and under British rule when they got independence, just about when they were getting independence in India.

There was a big, a lot of demand in Africa, where the British still had protractorates like Kenya. They still had colonies, and they wanted skilled, a skilled workforce to come in. And my granddad was an engineer. Family trade, right? And he went over to test it out to try the waters, to test out what it was like.

So in those days you had to take a three day journey by train to get from Punjab to Bombay or Mumbai. And then I think it was a couple of weeks on a, in a boat to get over to Mombasa in Kenya and then further really tortuous journey to get to Nairobi. So he did that and he came to Kenya and he saw, there was a bunch of them a community had formed there.

And they started to they started to get into enterprise and business. And then he went back and brought his entire family with him. But here’s the interesting story. There was a point at which my grandfather was a bit of a hothead. So when he went back to India to bring his family over, he had an argument with his wife who was resisting and didn’t want to go.

And he said in that case, I’m going back on my own. And he took off and he went back to Mumbai, three days on the train, went back to Mumbai. Had a change of mind and then came back to Punjab. Otherwise I wouldn’t be sitting here.

And so here’s another little part of that story. One of his brothers, so my granddad from Kenya, sent mail called one of his brothers and said, come over. It’s really great here. We can do great. Great. We’ll do wonderfully here. And so his brother traveled from Punjab to Mumbai, same thing, three days on the train, got to Mumbai, got on the wrong ship, ended up in Malaysia.

So I’ve got cousins that I recently met who are in Malaysia Isn’t that it’s like the store. It’s like the stories of people who buy a ticket from somewhere overseas to sydney Yeah, and don’t check that. It’s sydney australia and end up end up in the other Sydney in the other part of the world.

Yeah. There’s a London in Ontario as well, isn’t there? There is. Yes, you can, yes it’s it’s not as easy as when, these days, even you, when you punch your destination into Waze and it tells you here, and suddenly you realize, hey, I’m going in the wrong direction. Why is this taking three hours when it should only be taking 20 minutes to get there?

Yeah totally. Yeah. So anyway, so he’s, he’s the man who brought us into Kenya and then living and growing up in Kenya. It’s very interesting. We hope you’re enjoying listening to the biz by its podcast. Have you ever thought about having your own podcast, one for your business, where your brilliance is exposed to the rest of the world?

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So come talk to us, podcast done for you. com. au details in the show notes below. Now back to biz bites. Living and growing up in Kenya. It’s very interesting being Indian. Living and growing up in Kenya. I was a minority. We were minorities, right? So we grew up as a minority there now going back to visit India.

I’d never lived in India going back to visit I feel like a foreigner in India. So I don’t feel like I belong there either. It’s very foreign to me I speak the same language, but in a different way. I don’t have quite the vocabulary I’m seen as a foreigner when I’m in India It’s easy to spot me to go that guy’s not from here.

And so I feel foreign there So growing up a minority in Kenya, I feel like a minority in India. I started in England where I felt I was a minority. I live in Australia now. So I’ve always had that thing of kind of being, I’ve got to craft my own identity because my roots, where they’re from, I’m not from there.

It’s like my roots have been planted, but they’ve never really grown. In that sense. Yes. Yes. They have an, they clearly have an influence on who you are and what you’re about. A hundred percent. But but you’re right. It’s, um, and particularly in Australia where minorities are the majority in, in many respects.

So it’s there are so many people that are first and second generation in Australia. They have similar experiences. Totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. It’s totally about, redefining who you are culturally. That’s one of the, some of the work I do with my clients is in their company culture, in their business culture.

And I totally love that because I have a, because I’ve had to move around and adapt to different cultures. I have this knack of being able to smell culture, to be able to walk into somewhere and go, what is this about? What does this place feel like? What’s working? What’s not working?

And being able to get, get a sense of that very quickly. So that luckily has set me up for that kind of work, that kind of success has given me a little bit if you like of a superpower there, which I really love, I love using that. Yeah. Culture in a business is becoming more and more important, isn’t it?

Then, and particularly, I think with the it, That whole idea of how a business looks physically now is so different because people aren’t usually all together in one place all the time. Totally. There are a percentage of people that are working from home. There’s people that are working in different destinations altogether.

Overseas, et cetera. I remember doing some work. Maybe 10 years ago, a bit more with a business who didn’t have any employee in the same city and they came together like once a year to to be, and that was so unusual for a small business now that’s becoming more and more the norm that people are everywhere because having a physical destination that everyone has to be in isn’t always needed.

Yeah totally. And it’s a massive challenge, right? Because culture used to be the stuff that formed around the water cooler or the coffee machine. And now we don’t have that experience anymore. It was just work together. And I think what the interesting thing here is for, for employers, for for corporates and stuff, for instance, Amazon have recently mandated that everyone goes back to the office, you got to be in the office five days a week.

I believe com bank have really recently done that here as well. I heard about that. I haven’t verified it yet, but I heard about that and to me, I think that’s a massive going to be a massive problem for them because, the younger people are going to go I don’t want to work like this and the top performance who have options are going to go I don’t want to work like this.

So henceforth, there’s going to be this pool of people who are left, who just going to accept it because they don’t have another option. It’s going to be really interesting. Now, in terms of setting up culture for a remote workforce, what’s really interesting is what are the basic formation blocks of culture?

And I totally love looking at that because in my opinion, culture is about the joint beliefs you hold. What is it you believe to be true as a group? What is the purpose of you coming together and what are the cultural stories and myths you pass around each other in order to form that culture?

So in a sense, it’s very much about the campfire stories that form the culture and as employers understanding that you can actually seed those campfire stories. If you know the right beliefs, That you need your workplace, your company to be about. Unfortunately, culture is not really understood that well.

People think it’s very airy fairy. I’ve recently actually written an article in matters magazine here on the Sunshine Coast about family culture in business, how to develop that. And it’s really about seeding that taking those joint beliefs and turning them into culture. Now, a lot of people think culture is about values and I disagree with that.

I think values form a part of it. But beliefs are much more important because the beliefs are really the formation of what we believe to be true or what we believe we’re here for and why we’re doing what we’re doing. So beliefs and purpose are, in my opinion, the founding the foundation of culture.

Yeah, I can absolutely see that. And I think people. Don’t pay enough attention to culture and and where that where that has an impact on things. When you do come from different places, it’s hard to find that middle ground sometimes and to develop what is the work culture. And I think the idea of what culture was in workplaces not that long ago, but certainly 10 years or more ago.

Was very different to what it is now, because particularly around the whole idea of bringing, of leaving your personal stuff at the door, which is what was the big sort of go to that businesses would say to you, I don’t care what happens, in your personal life, you leave that at the door. You come in here and you focus on work and that’s, you can’t do that.

And you can’t do that anymore. And you shouldn’t even try. Absolutely. You shouldn’t. And that’s, and I think that’s one of the challenges if the that’s come about through the work from home thing is that whole idea of I can go and pick the kids up from school because me going and taking a 20 minute break at, three o’clock in the afternoon is not a big problem.

When I’m working from home, when you’re in the office, it’s not it’s actually leaving the office at three o’clock in the afternoon or probably two 30 in the afternoon. And the chances that you’re going to come back at a meaningful time, but it’s too hard to manage. And so do you throw out That family idea that people have become accustomed to over the last three, four years.

I don’t think that’s that easy to do. I think you’re absolutely spot on. Like in the 80s, early 90s as well, the whole focus was on management. There was management consultants there, and there was most of the conversation in boardrooms was around management, and that’s now shifted because our conversations nowadays in terms culturally in businesses are about leadership and self leadership and the difference between management and leadership is management was about tasks and leadership is about people.

So when we shift to a leadership focus, it’s like what Branson Richard Branson used to say. You look after your people and they look after your customers. And if you don’t do that, you’re not going to have customers and every business, this is one of the things I argue with some of my clients is that they see themselves as the center of their business and then their team, and then their customers out there.

And I tell them, we’ve got that completely wrong because the model of your business that you should be living by and preaching and dedicated to is that your customer is the center. Then your team wraps around that your team, your services, your products, and then you have somewhere on the periphery, but everything points inwards.

Everything that you do has to have a purpose to deliver a benefit to your clients, to your customer at the end of the day. And that’s the thing. If we don’t focus on our people and essentially when we’re telling them, you can’t have this anymore, you get back into the office and you stay here five days with the message we’re giving them is we don’t care about you.

We don’t care about you. You’re just a function. Get in there and do your effing job. What do people do when they’re told what to do? They rebel. Not a lot. So we’re going to see a lot of quiet quitting. We’re going to see a degradation of culture. We’re going to see all this fun stuff come about.

And it’s very interesting. And I was thinking about this the other day. I was actually talking to someone about this and going, Could this be, could this move, these moves happen because the businesses, the companies think they’re going to replace people with AI functions anyway. And henceforth, let’s start making this transition now.

Get a workforce who’s happy to be here, because we don’t need our top performers. We’re going to replace them, mostly, and we don’t need the people who are doing repetitive tasks. We’re going to replace them. I don’t know. It was just a thought that came to me. I thought because I don’t see how that strategy comes about.

Anyway, it’s interesting. Yes. Look, we’re going to delve a little bit more into the AI discussion. Oh, nice bonus content at the end, because what’s going to be the future with AI and is this whole idea of humans and purpose being replaced by AI. We’re going to have that in the bonus content.

So people will have to click on the link below in the show notes to be able to access that. So we’ll come back to that later on. But I do want to talk to you a bit more about leadership and this whole concept of it, because it is a term that gets thrown around a lot. And and we’ve tacked on this idea of thought leadership.

I’ve and then potentially there’s another level above thought leaders, which are the idea creators that are sitting above that as well. Where do, Defining those different levels, I think, is one thing. But before we even go into that, what, to put it bluntly, what gives you the right to be talking about leadership in that way?

How do you get into a situation where we talked a little bit about your journey, but we skip more around the countries and the basics and things. What’s got you into a position of leadership? What have you done to be able to speak about leadership? Sure. Okay, happy to answer that. I believe. All leadership starts with self leadership and self leadership is about taking 100 percent responsibility for the outcomes that you’re seeing in life.

So I find people tend to operate in two ways. One is that they take full responsibility or they sit in a position where they’re able to blame things and blaming circumstances or blaming a system or blaming the weather for poor performance. Or not getting what you want out of life is essentially moving responsibility away because we say responsibility lies with that circumstance, not with me.

But when we become at cause, which is what I say, self leadership is, we take a hundred percent responsibility for the outcomes, the impact we’re having and for our entire journey in life. So the reason I’m sitting here with you today and being, we’re able to have this conversation is because of millions of things that have happened in the past for both of us.

That have come together this network of things has happened and we’re here today And we are responsible for that entire network of things to come here to get to this point So like I was saying for instance, I spent Quite a few years of my life being a practicing alcoholic and that practicing alcoholic is Essentially a way to blame something else for my problems And saying, I’ve got these problems is because of that, here I am.

I’m going to numb myself with it. And the shift that had to happen. And that’s the reason why I’m here today, that I’m actually alive today. It was because I had a moment where I knew I had to make a choice either to change or to die. That’s where I was at. And I was with my kids, my young little kids at the time, who were like 7 and 10 at that time.

This is actually a little hard to talk about. But I was looking at them and looking at family pictures on the wall in a projector in my office in Kenya. And I just had another massive argument with my wife. This is another great thing. Practicing alcoholics like myself are very good at doing is causing arguments and circumstances and then going I’m going to go and drink now because you’ve stressed me out blame, not taking responsibility.

So there I’m with my kids drinking, looking at this and I looked over at them and I had a moment of realization and that was that I didn’t have very long before they were going to be orphans. As in they were going to be fatherless and that, um, the way I was heading, if I didn’t take responsibility for myself and the outcomes in my life, that I wouldn’t be able to give them the life that they actually deserved.

And that was the moment that changed. That was 10 years, one month ago, pretty much. Today was 28th September is my day. The day I count as my non belly button birthday. So everything, the move back to Australia and all of that happened as a result of that. So going back to what you say about leadership, like I said, I’ve always been interested in humans, always been interested in culture.

I’ve studied with the best of the best in, in, in training myself up after I moved back to Australia and somewhat before in coaching, in NLP and hypnosis and in leadership. to make sure that I’ve got the skills, the capabilities to deliver what I talk about with people. So in Kenya, I had, I built up a fairly large business where 65 people at one time and very well recognized furniture business that came, it was myself and one carpenter who started it.

And in, by the, at its peak, I was recognized as one of the best designers in Kenya. I’m sorry, in Africa. And I, I was being flown around to New York to go to galleries and this, that and the other and starting to exhibit internationally. And then the drinking brought me down from my high horse where I was so great and I ended up that hangout.

I was just a broken gutter drunk, covering up my insecurities with it. So the climb back from there is what my leadership journey is about. It’s not about, it is about what I did before, but not. quite to the extent of climbing out of that and rebuilding myself. Like I said, I trained with the Mind Academy here in Australia for NLP and hypnosis, which is one of the best NLP courses.

It’s the Mind Academy run by a very great friend of mine, Alistair Horscroft. He’s one of the world leading trainers in that. And NLP is what helps me reframe my mind and helps me very quickly reframe the minds of other people that I’m working with. That gave me almost like superpowers to be able to help people and to be able to change beliefs on a single and cultural collective basis.

So that was the starting point of my practice, my coaching practice. And I also did some life coaching with the Life Coaching Academy certification with them. Then I discovered a couple of giants in the leadership world. One is John Matone. John Mattones considered the world’s best executive coach, and he was Steve Jobs old coach.

And the reason I went to him is because we talked the same language in terms of purpose. The work he did with Steve Jobs was very much about purpose. Let me tell you a little, this is a great story that John told me. I just, I totally love this story. He says when he started working with Steve Jobs found him because of a book that John Matone had written.

And when he first started working with John Matone, they started doing the purpose work, yeah digging in to find out what purpose was. And he says there was this one time when he was sitting with Steve and Steve was looking out of the window, with a far away look in his eyes.

And he turned to him. Steve turned to him, Steve used to call him Matone apparently, and he said, Matone, you know what? This is the work I wish I had done at the start of my life rather than towards the end of it. Cause at that point he knew what he was facing. And when I heard that story, it gave me goosebumps as and that’s my leadership practice is about the very first thing you’ve got to work on is your purpose.

You don’t have your purpose. You don’t know which direction you’re heading in. You don’t know what you’re here for. You don’t know what you’re alive for. And I’ve taken what John Matone built and I’ve put my own kind of purpose methodology on top of that to deliver what I think is probably one of the best purpose and guidance tools not just for executives, for anyone right now to be able to discover what it is that they’re here for.

And it, it borrows on the Ikigai methodology, but expands on that. And it takes what the word John Matone did. So I discovered John, and I became certified in his intelligent leadership methodology. He’s a very good friend of mine. We’re looking at perhaps doing some stuff together in the future.

And he calls me, what was he? He’s giving me this presentation. Title it’s master certified, intelligent leadership coach, executive coach, something like that. It’s just a mouthful. Everything John Matone does is a mouthful. It’s brilliant. Just love the guy, and he’s Italian. So when he told me now you’ve, you’ve graduated.

Now you’re part of the family. And this Italian guy with a New York accent said that to me, I popped myself, so it’s I’m going to get whacked as soon as I’m in the family.

It’s a whole different connotation, doesn’t it? When you think of it that way. Yeah. I didn’t tell him that just in case it upset him. Anyway, then, the second leadership giant that I work with is John Maxwell who’s considered the world’s foremost leadership expert. So there’s John Matone, the number one executive coach and John Maxwell, who’s the, number one leadership authority who’s written, I don’t know, I don’t know how many books over 20 something books.

He’s got 50, 000 people in his organization that he trains. I’m a speaker, a coach, a trainer within John Maxwell system. off leadership as well. So those are the tools to help humans discover how to become really great at what they want to accomplish in life. And when we talk about purpose, Life purpose and our purpose at work has to be synergistic.

In the old days when you had, we used to have to go into the mines and we were just told go in there and just dig for 12 hours. That’s your shift and then come out. And we didn’t have a choice about it. Things have changed. Like we’ve been talking about. So getting our purpose aligned personally and with the work we want to do is really critically important.

So right now, having done all this work and being able to be a vessel for my clients with this work, I’m completely on purpose. To me, this is what I was born to do, and my entire journey has brought me to this point where I can sit here and quite proudly say that.

You’ve achieved an enormous amount with all of, the accreditations, the moving and everything. But there’s one specific thing that I think makes you stand out is that as well, is that ability for introspection, because that moment when you made the decision that I think to stop drinking that moment when you were thinking about where you were heading and what, and where your own purpose was, and perhaps you didn’t, equate it in terms of purpose at that point in time.

But that’s, takes an enormous amount to be able to do that and to then run with that and say, okay, I’ve pulled myself out of this, but now I can do more and I can give people more as a result of that. I think that puts you in a pretty unique position to talk about to talk about leadership. No, thanks.

So I’m kudos to you for achieving all of that. Oh, Thank you very much. I’ll just make one brief point there. That moment, that one moment of clarity, what we call, it’s the BFO, the blinding flash of the obvious, that happened. I do. It was like one moment of clarity in an entire fog.

Like lightning came down and struck me in this fog that I was living in. And to this day I can remember it so clearly, like it’s happening right in front of me. And that is what I think would be so serendipitous that I’d call it grace. It’s a moment of grace in my life. With whatever was meant to be, that’s what set me up on my path to say, Hey, Enough of this BS mate, get on with it.

What I, what I’ve been lucky enough to record lots of these episodes of Biz Bites. And I’ve had a handful of people that have had those kinds of moments in their life. And it really, it what, Amazes me is how many great things they’ve gone on to do as a result of it, that they’ve made it count.

And I think that’s what the difference is too, because at that point you have a choice to make. And part of that choice is also Helping others achieve their own greatness as a result of it, making it mean something to other people as well as yourself. So all that being said, let’s come back to this concept of leadership.

And, it’s, as I said before, it’s a term that gets thrown around a lot. Just because you’re in charge, does it make you a leader? Yes. Does it make you a great leader? No. Does it make you a thought leader? No. Does it make you, does it make you at the next level where you’re the one generating the ideas in the first place?

No. And I think trying to, how important is it to differentiate between those different levels and how do you actually. Drag people along find where they should where they should sit, find where they should sit. Perhaps drag is the wrong thing, but allowing themselves to make a decision and fight, find their own purpose in terms of where they sit in leadership and what that ultimately looks like.

Absolutely. Okay. So I’ll give you, I’ll give you a couple of quotes here. The first one is John Maxwell. John Maxwell says leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less. And the second one, I don’t know who said this, I can’t remember the name, but it’s That you don’t need a position to be a leader So leadership is like when I started the you know talking about leadership.

I talk about self leadership. It doesn’t matter where you’re at You are there. That’s where you’re starting from and leadership is about how do you Become the greatest version of you that you can be. How do you maximize your potential whatever your position is? Doesn’t matter. So when, whether I’m working with a CEO or I’m working with the janitor, it doesn’t matter.

It does not matter because it’s about that human and all humans have their challenges, have their blockages and all those challenges and blockages are self generated. Normally, it’s about the perception of what something is. Not really what the thing is. I was having a conversation just before I was actually where I was coaching someone who had who he the this guy had convinced himself That in order to be able to give and be of service that he needed to sacrifice himself He’s a lovely man.

He’s you know had a heart transplant a while ago he’s so genuine and caring one of the most generous souls I’ve ever met and yet You He had framed his life in such a way that he was going to sacrifice himself in order to be able to give. So the obvious question was when you sacrifice yourself, you end, right?

And then you got nothing to give. And we talked about Martin Luther King, life cut short, wasn’t able to give. Gandhi achieved a lot life cut short, though he was still, killed had a lot to give Mandela lived out a full life. But these are the, leadership icons that I love to look at.

So when you’re on purpose and you’re giving, it’s not really about that. It’s not about sacrifice is, the reframe. So he got a lot out of that conversation. Um, coming back to what you’re saying, how do you drag someone along? So I, I like to think of it as a four part process.

When I work with anyone and if I’m working within the context of leadership. So the first thing is inspiration. They have to have something that comes from within that inspires them. Yeah. So inspiration is the first thing that, and then that inspiration leads to insight. Insight is what creates a vision that this is what I want to be in the future.

If we’re not inspired, we can’t have the right kind of insight because we’re still looking from the same state. As not being inspired, so creating inspiration leads to this insight, which creates this vision from that insight, then we start to create proper leadership influence the ability to go to get there to that vision together with others to have things happen towards this joint vision.

That’s very inspiring and the last part of it is, of course, impact because as we become leaders and we do more and we’re able to have more impact in the world. very much. So at the end of the day, the inspiration leads to insight, leads to influence, leads to impact, and impact is what all leaders want to create in the world.

They want to make some sort of positive difference. So that’s the journey I take people on, and it doesn’t matter who they are with. See, in leadership development, we have a whole bunch of tools that we use. So we do a lot of assessments. That’s, self assessments. I use a lot of tools like I use John Matone’s proprietary tools.

called the Matone Leadership Enneagram Inventory. I told you that everything was a mouthful with Matone stuff. That’s called the MLEI. I use the DISC methodology. We use some Myers Briggs, use strengths profiles, but we get someone’s assessment of who they are on the inside. That’s them answering questions about themselves.

And then we do a whole bunch of assessments from the outside, where we look at the person from the point of view of others, and we get them to fill in 360 feedback, et cetera, about them. About what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are, what, where their blind spots are. So we build this massive, beautiful picture of who this person is.

Because one of the things John Matone says is, prescription without diagnosis is malpractice. So first, we must get the diagnosis right. Then we take them on the journey where we start to, we have an agreed coaching plan. These are the changes we need to make. Here’s all the assessments. This is what they’ve led to.

These are the insights we gain. This is the changes that need to happen. So we put that together in a very a really beautiful thing called a leadership development plan. Then we go on a coaching journey where we are measuring against that. We take them on this journey three, three months, six months a year, whatever it is.

And we remeasure at the end, we assess again, and we go, okay, have we hit our goals? What’s left? What’s not left? And we go back to the start. We do look at the assessments again. What’s changed? What hasn’t changed? And do we need to go through the process again? So it’s actually, there’s the internal inspiration, insight influence and impact.

And then there’s the external journey that’s going on at the same time. And we can do the same with individuals, teams, cultures, got all the tools. To do all of that to actually make scientific level kind of measured impacts on humans and on teams and on cultures. I want to ask a couple more questions before we have to finish up the main episode.

But just a reminder to everyone, we’re going to have a further discussion about AI and and purpose and humans and where that’s going into the future. And that’s going to be fascinating. So that’s in the bonus content with the link in the show notes below. But let me just wrap up the main part of the conversation with asking you about.

what people can do to decide to have that introspective nature. To examine where they are in terms of leadership and purpose. What is it that they what are some tips and things for people that are listening in to say, how do they take that initial step to start going down that path?

Totally got you. That’s, and that’s a great, I think that’s a great question. So there’s a few things. And I think the first thing is people need to work out why they’re here, why they’re alive. What are you here for? And. I think people have succumbed and given their agency away to some extent by saying that their purpose is actually to fulfill a corporate or commercial purpose in the world.

As we come, we’re trained, educated to go and fulfill a job role. And then we end up going doing that. And then we get to the end where, we’ve got this promise that retirement’s gonna be great. And by the time we get there, we’re old and decrepit and the best days are behind us. We enjoy ourselves, sacrifice our health to get here, our families, our relationships to get there.

And there’s no promise at the end of it. So I really encourage people to ask very deep questions and I love as a coach to hold the space where they can’t escape from that question. They have to go really deep. I love doing identity level questions like, who are you? What are you really about?

And people will come up with this is my name. No, that’s a label. That’s a label. That’s all you are. Who are you? And getting them to really dig inside until they get really uncomfortable. And it’s the discomfort that leads to a breakthrough. So the first thing I’d recommend is, get some real, ask yourself the deep questions and see if you can work out what your purpose is, what your identity is.

And what your beliefs are about what life is about, why you’re here. You can, if you can start to tackle those three things, that that’s a great big start. I love going away on meditation retreats. I went to Vipassana, that’s a couple of years ago. Vipassana is 10 days. You’re meditating 10 hours a day and you don’t talk to anyone.

Oh my God. For the first three days, my mind went insane. It’s like I had, I had someone in a padded cell in a straitjacket in my head, just running around. Because my head, my, my thoughts were so intense. So I love meditation for that reason. Because the realization is my thoughts are all going on all the time.

I’m not really thinking them. And my thoughts are all based on this external stuff. They’re going into the past, the present, I’m sorry, the past or the future. And they’re, this is good or this is bad. And they’re just circling around that. But where am I in all of this? What agency do I have about what I’m thinking about?

So that helps people come out of the conditioning self. The second thing I’d recommend is get some feedback. We can’t read the label from inside the jar. We’re like inside the jar, we’ve got this label. So asking people questions like what are my best qualities? What do you think my gifts are?

What about me annoys you? What don’t you like? You know getting this external feedback from people you trust who are close to you can be really helpful I did that with some people and I you know I ran this leadership group and I got them all to do it and I did it myself and I got some really good feedback And that made me realize that actually the central tenet Of where I sit and what I provide people is wisdom And I hadn’t quite caught on to that.

And that, that, that said, Oh yeah, of course it made sense to me that for me, everything falls within the umbrella of wisdom. So that can be very beneficial because inside, when we go into our minds, we are a bit crazy. I’m about 80 percent crazy and going in there to find truth with that noise going on is very difficult So that’s why coaching really helps is because when you’re in coaching and someone asks you the right question That right question can get into your depths like you wouldn’t believe and you can’t escape it When you’re coaching when you’re sitting on your own you distract yourself when you’re in coaching.

It’s amazing. Sorry You want to say something so powerful to be able to do that. And I’ve been lucky enough to be part of doing that with a few people as well. And it’s when you see the results and they have those moments yeah. And that’s the, that’s what I was, that’s the last question I wanted to ask you in the, in this main part of the podcast is what is the aha moment that people have when they’re working with you that you wish more people knew that we’re going to have.

Yeah. That’s great. I love that question. That’s a beautiful question. It’s a great question to end on actually. So when I talk about, conditioning and people not knowing purpose, it’s almost like they have a compass inside them that’s just going round and round and then they run in one direction following that, then it’ll change and they run in another direction.

So doing this internal work gives you your true north. You know where it is when it’s almost like that needle settles. And you go, Ah, that’s what it’s about. That’s what I’m about. That’s why I’m here. And that’s who I am. And to be able to accept that fully, it’s almost like you feel it from, the top of your head to the depths, the core of your being.

And that alignment it’s like a laser focus. A laser is like 50 watts. It’s like the bulb I have ahead of me, above me. But if that’s focused to a single point, it can cut through steel, it can cut through anything. It becomes, you become laser focused then. Because all the stuff that’s, the shiny objects and all the stuff that’s distracting us goes away.

We know what we’re about and we’re able to do that. And then we’re able to have the impact in the world that we want to. What a fantastic way to end the main part of the podcast. And just as we were about to say, thank you, reminding everyone, bonus content, humans and and AI the future. Let’s talk about that.

But for now as the main part of this podcast, thank you so much for being not only so generous with your time, but so open with your journey. And I think people will have appreciated listening to that. I know I certainly did. Oh, thanks Anthony. I really appreciate the opportunity. I’m here to serve.

That’s what my life is about, and I’m so glad that we’ve had the opportunity to have this conversation and, your own generosity in providing a platform for us to do, so I really appreciate that. I’m very humbled. Thank you, and to everyone listening in. Hit the button so you can hear the bonus content.

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