Text us. Share your thoughts. Ask Questions. We would love to hear from you.
Are you ready to unravel the ties between leadership, communication, patience, and trust? Then buckle up! Have you ever wondered how trust plays out in a high-stakes environment? We examine the intricate bonds of trust, communication, and patience.
We'll also dive into a riveting narrative that underscores the debilitating repercussions of poor communication. As we live in a world increasingly starved for patience, we'll delve into how this societal shift impacts our teams and organizations. Equipped with practical tools like Myers-Briggs and insights into personal triggers, we'll guide you through the labyrinth of leading in a world short on tolerance. We'll also touch on the importance of recognizing and harnessing your triggers, advocating for 'pause journaling,' and mastering the calm in the face of adversity. To wrap things up, we'll underscore the often-underestimated value of leadership homework, offering a fresh perspective on its role in personal growth and leadership.
Text us. Share your thoughts. Ask Questions. We would love to hear from you.
Are you ready to unravel the ties between leadership, communication, patience, and trust? Then buckle up! Have you ever wondered how trust plays out in a high-stakes environment? We examine the intricate bonds of trust, communication, and patience.
We'll also dive into a riveting narrative that underscores the debilitating repercussions of poor communication. As we live in a world increasingly starved for patience, we'll delve into how this societal shift impacts our teams and organizations. Equipped with practical tools like Myers-Briggs and insights into personal triggers, we'll guide you through the labyrinth of leading in a world short on tolerance. We'll also touch on the importance of recognizing and harnessing your triggers, advocating for 'pause journaling,' and mastering the calm in the face of adversity. To wrap things up, we'll underscore the often-underestimated value of leadership homework, offering a fresh perspective on its role in personal growth and leadership.
First lead you is established to help those in leadership positions, or those who aspire to be in leadership positions, lead themselves well, so they can lead their teams well.
Speaker 2:Welcome to First Lead you, a podcast dedicated to building leaders, expanding their capacity, improving their self-awareness through emotional intelligence and developing deeper understanding of selfless leadership.
Speaker 1:Hello American, welcome to First Lead you where we believe selfless leadership is essential. America is suffering a leadership crisis. Self-awareness and emotional intelligence is the key to developing selfless leaders.
Speaker 2:Now here is personal growth coach John Ballinger.
Speaker 1:Mr Ford, mr Ballinger.
Speaker 3:How are you?
Speaker 1:today.
Speaker 3:I'm doing great.
Speaker 1:How are you Good, I love this setting.
Speaker 3:We're in a different setting today, although no one can tell that if we didn't tell them.
Speaker 1:Technology is wonderful, isn't it? They do not know. We're sitting in a hotel room in Nashville, tennessee, music City, where my good friend and partner, business partner, received a diploma today. They don't know that, but I'm springing this on because he didn't know I was doing this, so he congratulated me when I got some diplomas or recognition certificates recently, so I'm going to do that to him. Back to him, mr Ford received his Associates in Captive Insurance. Congratulations, thank you. It was presented today at a captive conference and I will not bore our audience with the details of what all that means. However, in season two they're going to get some more information about why in the world Mr Ford did that, what's the benefit to it and all those things. But congratulations on doing that.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you. Yes, I'm sure they're wondering what does insurance at all have to do with leadership? And firstly, do you?
Speaker 1:Man, we are going to tie that bow together in season two. So, as we were winding down season one and I believe we've got one, two, two episodes left, two episodes left Trying to think how do we start putting bows around what we've done over this past year when it comes to leadership and development and things like that. So I want to do a reminder. First, league U is established to help those in leadership positions, or those who aspire to be in leadership positions, lead themselves well so they can lead their teams well.
Speaker 3:Yes, absolutely. That's the main idea behind, firstly G. It's the main idea behind the name and everything that we do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I remember when we were trying to come up with a name, how many domains.
Speaker 3:Did we buy 10 or 12, probably, or more or maybe?
Speaker 1:more Because we were trying to like what's the one thing that's missing in leadership development in the marketplace? Because we were looking at all these websites and all these, I was like who's teaching the leader to lead themselves well first so they can lead their teams? And there are difficult things. I think that's one of the things the speaker said today that leadership is tough, not for the faint of heart. We've said that Exactly the keynote speaker, which I will talk about just a minute, but we talk about in this particular podcast the name of communication, and patience equals trust, communications and patience equals trust. Now, how difficult are those three things when it comes to leadership?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that well, I think they're the three essential things that you have to have to have good leadership, because without communication, nobody trusts you. Without patience, you're not giving people time to develop and grow into the leaders that they need to be. But you also have to have patience with yourself, because, as we've talked about multiple times throughout this podcast is you know, you can make a decision like I'm going to be a better leader, I'm going to start doing these things to grow myself. But it's like anything else that is worth doing. It doesn't just automatically happen. It takes time and investment on the part of the individual to start intentionally doing things that will help them grow their capacity as a leader, trust themselves to make good decisions when it comes to leadership and then to have other people see those things take effect so that they start trusting.
Speaker 1:So is this a? Is this a? Could be an accurate statement without building trust with your team? There is no trust with your team.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I think, depending on circumstances, a certain amount of trust can be given, but you have to earn that trust every day because it can be quickly eroded with a few poor decisions that display that maybe you don't trust your team and maybe you don't even trust yourself. And so, even if you are granted some leniency of trust, if you don't maintain that trust by building the reputation with your team that shows that they can trust you, then you're going to lose it rather quickly.
Speaker 1:Right, right. So this is episode 29.
Speaker 3:Yes, number 29. And actually it almost got away from us.
Speaker 1:It did In turn three yeah.
Speaker 1:We need to put a round of wedge in this thing so we get some grip. So number 29 is retiring this year. Actually, the person that drove the car the longest, number 29, kevin Harvick, is retiring this year and he had a stellar career. Ask her hall of fame knocking at his door. Kevin Harvick drove the 29 car for years and got into the car after Dale Earnhardt was killed down in Daytona and they changed the name because it changed the number, because they were not going to let anybody drive.
Speaker 3:So number three is retired.
Speaker 1:Well, it actually came back, richard Childress. So the team owner owns the numbers, and so they. But he's like I can't just put anybody in that car. And so there, the number three has been back out, but it's just not the same. But Harvick had the 29. That was the car that he raced for, richard Childress, racing after Earnhardt passed away, but, yeah, number 29. So let's going back to communication, and patience equals trust. I'm going to do here again. We're trying to get Webster's dictionary to sponsor us, so I'm going to do some definition.
Speaker 3:If anybody knows anybody with Webster's, please have them call me.
Speaker 1:Communication definition the processor act of exchanging, expressing or conveying information and ideas through writing, speaking and gesturing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, let's go, let's do that one more time.
Speaker 1:The processor act of exchanging, expressing or conveying information and ideas through writing, speaking and gesturing. I thought that last word was pretty unique to be in the definition gesturing.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:So now you've got patience, and this is as we say down south is as strong as green onions. The capacity, or my favorite words, to accept or tolerate underline let's straight out of it to talk. They underline delay, trouble or suffering without getting angry or upset.
Speaker 3:I think those last couple of words are the key to that, without getting angry or upset.
Speaker 1:True. Now you've got trust, firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability or strength of someone or something. So if the leader communicates using the process that we've read with patience, as the team doesn't get it right or doesn't understand because, mr Ford, you know that happens all the time the person that the leader spoke to didn't clearly understand. Therefore, the project, the process or whatever did not get finished on time on budget, the way the leader wanted it to, so that could cause the leader to possibly get angry or upset. And the person that did the project Thought and we've had this happen with us, with our client thought what they heard and what was needed they understood.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that brings back when I was a kid. My mom used to make me repeat back to her what she had just told me to do, not because she didn't trust me, because she knew that I would guess ADHD at the time, or reliant hyperactive. I was probably not listening fully when she said it, and so if I repeated it back to her, then she knew that I understood what she wanted me to do and that I was going to be able to at least attempt to get that done. Yeah, so that makes me think it's like when you give instructions you should have people lay that back to you, because maybe you didn't explain it well.
Speaker 1:Well, and we talk about that, I do it to you. You like you and some of the people I say did you all understand what I just said? Because I know sometimes I don't say things that are taken appropriately the way that someone hears them, and I think this is important. This is an important statement by Johann Wolfgang. A person hears only what they understand.
Speaker 3:That's true. Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1:And as a leader, we have to know our teams and our people in order to communicate effectively with them. And if we've got a team of five, there's a strong likelihood that that team of five may hear things three different ways because of the difference in that team. And as leaders, we have to learn to communicate or, at a minimum, after we've communicated, say now, what did you all hear me say? And talk through that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I know I mean. A great example of this is classroom teachers. I mean they teach them to teach a lesson, to share information in multiple ways, because I mean, if you're looking at a classroom of 20 to 30 kids, and sometimes more, you're right, like everybody's learning different, hearing different, got different things going on, you know, in their life, and so they're not necessarily tuned in at that moment. So you have to give it to them multiple ways so that it connects with that particular student or that particular person in a way that they're best going to receive it.
Speaker 1:And you can't stop that after you get out of school.
Speaker 3:I mean the leader has to do that, oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Here's a quote that I was reading through. You know, just, patience Is not the ability to wait, but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, I think. Well, that goes back to the original definition that you read right, it does anger and the word anger and tolerant tolerant.
Speaker 1:You got to be tolerant. Trust happens when you learn how to communicate effectively with your team through being patient as you learn them and they learn you. Listen, folks, communicate. Learn how to do that. That means that there are times you need to self assess how you communicate your team. Learn your team. Learn how to have patience. As you do that, as you do both of those watch. Trust start getting built between you and your team and you'll start trusting yourself more in your decision making as a leader.
Speaker 1:So we're in Nashville, we're at this conference, and key note is a former Navy seal, john Pussell, who spoke about some of the items we're talking about today and I thought so here. Here we are in Nashville, we're at this conference, but you know, we've got firstly Jew and we're teaching development and leadership and things like that. And here's Fussell up there who's saying things that we're saying written books, and it made me, as I'm preparing for this, pull out my Army values card and he said something down there in the conference. He said you know military loves, acronyms, which we all know. There's a matter of fact, there's a whole book you can go out in order and it teaches you all the acronyms of all the branches and all that.
Speaker 3:So the acronym book, kevin.
Speaker 1:Acronym is the title of the back in your book and acronym but the Army values card has an acronym, that's LDR, which is the abbreviation for leader, and then ship, ship. So LDR, ship and the and the letters stand for loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity and personal courage. And when I pulled that card out, which I got back in the 80s and it's crumpled and wrinkled and all that I thought you know what if we just used that and leadership in America, where would we be at Just that? Because they hand you that card said here's what you're going to learn. So when we come back for the break we're going to talk through. How do you improve on communication and patience to gain trust with yourself and your team? Welcome back.
Speaker 3:Today we're talking about trust, patience and communication and how that impacts you as a leader personally and also impacts your interactions with your team and how you conduct those things. Communicate well builds trust and you need patience in both of those areas so that you can have a well functioning team. And John was going to share with us. Before we went to the break he said come back and we're going to talk about some of the things that we heard today during a keynote speech at a conference that we're attending.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So let me tell you about a communication story gone wrong. This actually happened in basic training. We're sitting around out the field and this guy says man, I really missed my buddy that was supposed to come into military with me. We were going to come in on the buddy program. So what happened? Well, he was from Iowa or Kansas, somewhere in the Midwest, and as a high school students they worked on the farm on the weekends and week after school and they cleaned grain elevators.
Speaker 3:Grain elevators.
Speaker 1:Grain elevators.
Speaker 3:Is that what fills up the silos, big silos, right yeah?
Speaker 1:And so the owner, evidently jokingly, told them, when they get to the top of the grain elevator, if they fail to screen, push the button and this big inflatable would come out at the bottom of it catch them. Well, his buddy didn't know that the farmer was joking. And so he gets to the top and he jumps and my buddy in the military says all I heard was somebody screaming push the button.
Speaker 3:That's not a real story. It's a real, it is a true story.
Speaker 1:It's a true story. Look his arms, his legs. Just I mean I obviously can't get the basic training, but that has stuck with me because this farmer didn't tell them. Hey, I'm just joking. And the kid took him serious and then jumped.
Speaker 3:He thought he was going to give him a nice little trampoline experience at the bottom, exactly.
Speaker 1:So be careful how and when you communicate and who you're communicating to, because some people don't have the sense of humor to know that that was just a joke or not, and that particular kid took it extremely serious.
Speaker 3:Yes, I would say that was a failure and communication which there's a popular line in a movie, right, that's the same as the bandit yeah. That's the movie Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let me tell you about patients. All right, you know, recently the family and I went on a vacation with 5,000 of our friends and now it's almost 3,500 people who were on vacation. That's a incredible amount of money. I'll give you us how much money we could get out of that vacation. Yeah, going through airports and we happened to fly out of an airport to get to the destination where we're going to get on the cruise ship. Here's the humor in patience Drove to the airport, stood in the lines to do all the things you do like go on to Disney World, get to the gate, get on the aircraft. Aircraft pulls back, lightning's going on, have to sit on the tarmac, wait. It took us 12 hours to fly. 56 minutes From the time we got up that morning to get to the airport to do all the things we needed to do to get to our destination had been 12 and a half hours to fly a 56 minute flight.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you could have drove down there, buddy.
Speaker 1:How many times did we say that?
Speaker 3:It's only like a nine and a half hour drive, exactly.
Speaker 1:But what I saw in the airports and on that cruise ship was such a lack of patience. I mean, where are you going to go? Everybody's going to a gate to get on an airplane. It's herding cats going through the lines. But I mean, how many people Good Patience, they were moaning at ground.
Speaker 3:How was your?
Speaker 1:patience. My patience was tested because of the lack of patience I saw in people when the workers were absolutely doing everything that they could do.
Speaker 3:So you have no patience for people who have no.
Speaker 1:I have. I have little patience for people because here here society has we've created people have no patience for anything and I'm like are they? Could they even imagine what they look like acting like they do? I like I want to take videos and say here, let me show you what you look like. Patience is critical. Your team is looking at you. They may be videotaping you saying would you look at how that leader is acting? Work on your patience.
Speaker 3:So all right, so what? What are some things that people can do?
Speaker 1:to help them get ready to go into that. Honestly, before I go into what what you can do is, lack of trust is born out of poor communications. Communication, no patience, creates low profits, large turnover, poor culture, broken promises, broken commitment. If you're a leader in a company and you don't communicate properly and you do not have patience with your team, what's those things start happening in your company, cause they're going to happen.
Speaker 3:Yeah, read that again.
Speaker 1:Poor communication, lack of patience creates low profits, large turnovers, poor culture, broken promises and broken commitment in a company. So how do you lead your team in today's environment and establish great communication and patience while building trust? We've said this and I'm going to reiterate it. The communication we use an assessment called Myers-Briggs. It lets us, it lets you know your team, how they think and what their strengths and weaknesses are. Patience is built and matured with hard work. Knowing your personal triggers, like what sets me off, you should also communicate to your team on what sets you off. We had a president tell us the other day I don't like surprises. I'm betting that's a trigger for him. What do you think?
Speaker 3:Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1:So the person, the leader, must know their own triggers and even communicate to their team. Hey, this is this is what gets me sideways. I've told my team, like one of the things that really trips a trigger for me that I have very little patience for is a leader belittling one of their team members, like when I see that happening, somebody better grab me because I'm getting ready to go do something, because I can't stand that, absolutely can't stand. Knowing your triggers, triggers, journaling your pauses, learning to remain calm in difficult situations. This is the process on how to learn to first lead you. I'm going to repeat that Knowing your triggers, journaling your pauses, learning to remain calm and you and I talked about this before we got on.
Speaker 1:It's not normal in the civilian population for a leader to go up to another leader and say push my button so I learn to remain, so I learned patient. We just we just don't do that. The military forces you through someone pushing you to learn to remain calm and have patience. I would challenge the leader listening to this podcast to learn as best as you can. Find you a mentor, a partner or someone in the company that can work with you to help you learn, because you're not going to do it yourself. You need someone to help you learn to how, how to have patience, because it's difficult to do it yourself.
Speaker 3:Are there a couple of steps that people can take that can help them develop patients? I mean just said, find somebody to help you, but if I'm standing there, so all right, great, I'm going to start working on my patients. What's a couple proactive things I can do to start building patients?
Speaker 1:You know this is going to seem trivial, but I started just doing the count 10. Like when I was, when I felt myself losing patience, I would just start counting the 10 because taking your mind off of what's causing you to be impatient or lose your temper. Another thing it's very simple, I gave it out at a conference that I spoke at is a red rubber band I talked. I talk about the red rubber band because it's a visual that you wear on your wrist and when you start losing patience or losing your temper, flip that rubber band on your wrist and watch it break the cycle of thought. Those are two simple things that you can do as a leader to start learning how to slow down when you feel that well, start welling up in you and then you can start with the red rubber band or count the 10.
Speaker 3:Well, and that also talks about self awareness. So you, you have to be able to recognize that I'm starting to get elevated, my blood pressure is going up, whatever it is, my heart rate is going up. You've got to be able to recognize that in yourself, to understand that, yes, maybe you're not exhibiting patients at the moment or there's something else going on that's causing you To get upset. It's knowing those triggers, recognizing those triggers, thinking intentionally about them, which can come through some of the things we've talked about, which is journaling, which is reflecting on the day, which is having someone else say after the fact hey, did you see what just happened there? So when so said this and all of a sudden, your, your temperature changed 10 degrees.
Speaker 1:Well, and we also have that where something can trigger a leader and his team's looking at him, thinking that big a deal.
Speaker 1:They don't know what had been building up or what had happened, maybe before they walked in the room and that one little thing was the trigger that they exploded on. The team thinks it was that little miniscule thing they don't know it was a preponderance of things that we're building up on that causes the explosion. But that one thing that was said or did that they saw, they think gosh, they lost their temper over something that in a skill, but that's all they're left with. So they don't know any different trust. So we've talked about communication.
Speaker 1:Myers, briggs, know your, know yourself, know your team, patients, journal triggers, learning to rank calm, get a mentor, learn how to lead yourself. When you do that, you can trust yourself so much so that you understand that failure of yourself and your team is not an option. It doesn't even come to the equation when things start going south, which are going to. In today's society, with leadership as challenging as it is in all aspect, things are not going to go smooth. Relying on yourself and your team through communication and patients, excuse me will give you a much better opportunity for success. Not doing it, it's going to give you a huge opportunity for failure of yourself and your team.
Speaker 3:But you're not saying that everything that you undertake is going to be successful.
Speaker 1:Absolutely not.
Speaker 1:You're saying instead it gives you a greater opportunity for success by having these items that you're strong at with your communication and your patience, so that the team trusts you. Because when you do fail because you're going to and the team will fail you're not going to finger point, you're not going to beat each other up, it's not going to take a long time to overcome from that failure because you're going to come back and, as the seal said today, you're going to do a hot wash that's what we call them. That means everybody's going to get in the room and say what just happened and where was the failure at. And then how do we fix it? And it's a pretty quick hot wash. You don't belabor it, you just talk about it, write it down and say all right, you go fix that, you go fix that and you go fix that.
Speaker 3:Well, it reminds me of a quote from Jalen Hertz. Quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles played in the Super Bowl. They lost. Somebody asked him what he thought about that and he had a great response. He said either. When were you learned?
Speaker 1:That was pretty strong. That is strong. I like that Either. When are you learn? Which brings us, as we're closing out, episode 29. I want to give a shout out to a manager at a company that we're working with and I can't tell you who his name is and I can't tell you who the company is or anything like that, but I think the story by itself is worthy of a shout out and I hope when he listens he will get some comfort in knowing that is the leadership development is working for himself and his team. But this, this person, started out as a company two days out of high school and he went through a series of positions in the company and at about the 10 year mark in the company he started going into a leadership position where he had people actually working for him. Over the next 15 years he went from leading himself to two people to over 150 people.
Speaker 1:That's a big transition with listen to this, with no formal leadership development training.
Speaker 3:Is he naturally gifted in leadership?
Speaker 1:No, so much so that he carried the burden of leadership so heavy on his shoulders that he questioned himself. His teammates question him and I mean he was literally, when I say he was giving it all he's got, I mean he was captain Kirk telling Mr Scott, he give it all, you got. Mr Scott, he's saying I'm giving it all I got. He was giving it all he got, but like he was missing that piece that I saw in him when I started meeting with him. It was locked inside of him and we started unlocking it.
Speaker 1:My point is that I've spent and you know this is the truth, so the audience can't tell me this is a fish story I've spent maybe 10 hours one on one with him and the development I've seen out of him from hour one to hour 10 is tremendously different. It doesn't take a lot once you make the commitment that I want to be a better leader than what I am and I want to address my challenges, that I have my weaknesses, my triggers. I want to, I want to address all those things so that I can better lead myself and lead my thing and I hope at some point when able to bring this young man on to talk about is six meeting journey that I took with him that uncovered where his roadblocks are at, and then how to uncover that and then recover from it and then move him. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think you mentioned a couple of things. There's a pretty point pretty important to reiterate. First of all, it was his commitment, like he decided he wanted to do this. It wasn't something that was forced on him and he came into it with an attitude of I want to do this. So attitude is key. The other thing is that took the time to do the work that we've talked about. The self-examination, the reflection, the self-awareness, all those things are things that he took on himself and you really just acted as the guide in that process. He had to do the work, like you could have had those same six meetings and he could have been just as just the same six meetings later.
Speaker 1:I remember telling you he's doing his homework. You have to do your homework. You must do your homework. I mean it's critical to do your homework. You didn't get through school not doing your homework. Homework was part of your grade. Do the homework. Put in the time, put in the effort that it takes to first lead you.
Speaker 3:And really the time between a meeting and the homework that's done is really what shows the growth and helps you prepare for the next meeting. To grow, to grow, to grow to grow.
Speaker 1:Exactly, mr Ford. Again congratulations on your diploma.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 1:I look forward to season two, where we can talk a little bit more about it. Episode 29 in the books. So we'll see you soon.