1st Lead U - Leadership Development

Defragging Your Brain - Revisited from Season 1 - EP 318

• John Ballinger

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Building mental capacity as a leader requires understanding how our brains process information and identifying the challenges that fragment our thinking and slow down our decision-making processes. 

• Our brains are like computers that can become fragmented with information, causing slower processing and reactions 
• Leadership feels like dodging bullets in The Matrix – constant challenges come at you while you must maintain composure
• Days can "blow up" with unexpected issues, yet leaders must continue functioning without showing vulnerability
• The speed of information in today's world has conditioned our brains to expect immediate results
• Self-awareness is the conscious knowledge of your character, feelings, motives, and desires
• Healing leadership wounds requires recognizing areas where you're damaged and working through them
• Journaling your "pauses" – moments when you're uncertain or your blood pressure rises – reveals patterns
• Common leadership blockers include fear of making unpopular decisions, constant apologizing, and viewing criticism as attacks
• Finding a mentor who can help guide you through leadership challenges is essential for growth
• You are not an accident – finding your purpose should be a lifelong mission

Visit our website at firstleadu.com for more leadership resources and to download the full list of the top 10 things that negatively impact leadership.


Douglas Ford:

Hello leaders, thank you for joining us for this episode of First Lead you. Today, we are going to provide you with an encore presentation of one of our most popular episodes, which is episode 17 from season one, and it's titled Building your Capacity by Defragging your Brain. We hope you enjoy this encore presentation and we look forward to joining you again next week when we'll be bringing you new content related to our leadership chart. A cross-stick that you can find on our website at firstleaducom, that's 1-S-T-L-E-A-D, the letter U dot com. Firstleaducom. We hope you have a great week and remember, in order to lead your team well, you must learn to First Lead View.

Announcer:

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.

John Ballinger:

and developing deeper understanding of selfless leadership. Hello America, and welcome to First Lead U, 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. Now here is personal growth coach John Ballinger. Mr Ford. Mr Ballinger, have I asked are you related to the Ford family, like the automobile?

Douglas Ford:

Just the ones in my household. No, no relation to the Ford family that creates automobiles.

John Ballinger:

Much to my dismay. Speaking of automobiles, number 17. Who, 17? That would be old dw.

Douglas Ford:

You know who that is, uh no, daryl waltrip, daryl waltrip I think we had his brother number 15, yeah, a couple weeks ago.

John Ballinger:

Yeah, michael waltrip.

Douglas Ford:

So yeah, dw and he drove the mountain dew car right he did.

John Ballinger:

Douglas had to give me a little lesson before we got on today about the Mountain Dew car, because he did drive it for two years before he swapped over to the Tide car. So, yeah, I did get schooled today on NASCAR history. So I've got some. Nascar facts in my background Look out. So probably one of the top three questions that we get asked when we're doing leadership development, leadership training is how do I increase my capacity?

Douglas Ford:

yeah, absolutely it is. How do I fit it all in? How do I do everything I'm supposed to do and focus on leadership, development and leading myself?

John Ballinger:

Yeah, and my blood pressure not get out of balance, I not blow up at my staff, I don't take it home to my family. I mean, that's a big topic that we deal with and I think there's a psychology to being a leader. I tell business owners and executives when I go in I said do you know? There's a psychology to business. And they literally cringe, like when they hear psychology in business. They just cringe. But there is so today's topic capacity. How do we create mental capacity to deal with the challenges that come at us as leaders?

Douglas Ford:

Like come at us. That's an interesting concept.

John Ballinger:

And if I could do a visual for those that have ever watched the movie Matrix, when Neo's on the roof and the helicopter comes down and a guy gets out and he's shooting bullets at him and Neo is doing the slow motion Wave Contortion yeah, trying to move away from the bullets.

John Ballinger:

That feels like what being a leader is every day. It's just the bullets are coming at you. Sometimes you get hit, you take a bullet, but it really can drain a leader all those bullets coming at them every day. They can have their full day prepared and say this is what I'm going to get done, and they can look up at noon after having been there five or six hours and say I've not got one thing on my list done.

Douglas Ford:

All right, and you never know what you're walking into. I mean, it's like you know, maybe you do have a day prepared, but you walk in and something happens and you've got to be able to adjust to that. Your whole day blows up and you've got a major emergency that you need to take care of and you just have to accept the fact that not anything on your calendar that you plan today is going to get done.

John Ballinger:

Yeah, and here's the other side of that is that those that you work with don't know the day's gotten blown up, that those that you work with don't know the day's gotten blown up. You can't really let them know your day's gotten blown up because you've still got to lead and manage and train and all the things that you've got to do. So you're kind of alone in that. When it blew up, and how you react and handle it, like nobody even knows. It did blow up. Now that's the difficult part, that's the capacity part that we're going to be talking about. It did blow up. Now that's the difficult part, that's the capacity part that we're going to be talking about. And as we were preparing for this, I talked about the AOL screech.

Douglas Ford:

AOL America Online yeah.

John Ballinger:

You may have heard that when we opened up. But that screech started and we're going to do a little memory lane, but it went public in 1992.

Douglas Ford:

Really. Yeah, which is not that long ago. No, it's not that long ago. I would have thought it was actually later than that. Yeah. Because I feel like I guess the internet was about the time I was getting out of college, was about the time the internet was really starting to come into the public view. So, yeah, that would have been AOL's. Was that the internet was really starting to come into the public view? So, yeah, that would have been AOLs. Was that the internet or internets? Let's not get into that discussion.

John Ballinger:

Then they started shipping CDs. Are you ready for this? They shipped CDs.

Douglas Ford:

Shipping CDs. Does anybody even know what CDs are anymore? I mean, I'd still have a collection of CDs with music on them. But yeah, they shipped them in 1993. Or you could pick them up at your convenience store like they were everywhere, yeah they were in the like in between.

John Ballinger:

Like you're checking out at the grocery store and there's a you know there's, just pick up the lcd right, it was free. But what if you think that's not that long ago, right? And one of the things I will talk to leaders about is that you could literally start the screech like that's I'm we're connecting to the internet and go start supper yeah, the days of dial-up yeah, and you could go, start supper and come back and the screen may be halfway loaded and you hear this noise throughout the house the scree screech.

Douglas Ford:

And you pray. Nobody calls you while you're trying to get that going. It's going to blow it all up. You're going to start all over, exactly.

John Ballinger:

But we were patient enough, waiting on that because it was new. We were getting ready to go somewhere we hadn't been before Today. If it took that long to get connected to the internet, half of the world would melt down, oh yeah, and the IT departments would. Phones would be ringing off the hook. Because today, if, if we don't get a download immediately first, the thing happens is everybody just starts click, click, click, click, click, click, right? I mean, they're just cause clicking is going to make it work, right?

Douglas Ford:

Absolutely. It's like pushing the elevator button It'll make it come faster.

John Ballinger:

So we do that and I'm like how did we go from 1992 being patient to wait to go somewhere we've never gone to today, if it doesn't happen immediately, we're calling the IT department and we're getting a new machine because this thing is slow and it's a piece of crap Conditioning it is. So our brains are like that, douglas. Our brains start out completely clean, there's nothing in it, and then we start feeding it right, and anybody that's listened to our podcast. We start feeding it as zero to five and it starts getting a memory to it and we talk about like, what's your earliest memories? Well, that's your brain getting fed with memory and it continues to get fed and occurrences happen and your hard drive starts getting filled up and then, lo and behold, it could start taking longer to process information or react to situations because your hard drive is full or fragmented or fragmented could be.

John Ballinger:

Fragmented could be pregnant. So our brains are like computers in that way, and it's, it's. Uh, if you think about the definition, how does a computer get fragmented? Do you mind sharing that with us?

Douglas Ford:

well, lucky for you. I have a succinct definition here of how you get a uh hard drive that's fragmented. So for those who are technically inclined you're probably going to not appreciate this as much, but it so. When you save a file to your computer, it starts looking for the first open memory block to start putting the information in. And so if you've deleted stuff previously or you know you've done some work and moved files around, well it may find an open block, but it's not big enough to hold all the information for this particular file. So it'll put some of the information there and then it'll put the rest of the information somewhere else and it'll put some other information somewhere else, and so it strings it all together.

Douglas Ford:

But it's not continuous, it's just kind of bits and pieces of information. And then when you look at a hard drive, a lot of times if you try to defrag a hard drive, you'll see all these different colors scattered across the hard drive. That represents all the files, and you see they're all chopped up. And then when you defrag it it goes through the process of trying to put all those files back together. So they're continuous files and so it doesn't have to work as fast to go find all the parts of the file. It's kind of similar to blockchain now. I mean, that's kind of similar how blockchain works. It just scatters your file all over the internet and it happens to know where it all is. So when you ask for it, it can pull it all back together.

John Ballinger:

It does it pretty quick too, doesn't it? It does On the blockchain side Most of the time. Yeah, our brains don't do that. Our brains start slowing down and we will put information, we'll store it and something will trigger it. I use songs as an example. We cannot hear a song for 20 years and all of a sudden, we hear a song and it takes us back to exactly where we were. What was going on good, bad or indifferent and we'll start saying the words to it, even though we've not heard it in 20 years. That's the way our brain can work.

John Ballinger:

So, in the world that we're living in now, the speed with which our brains are processing information, because of the speed of that information being pushed to us, is probably greater than it's ever been. I mean, it's coming at us fast. Twitter 40 characters. We get aggravated if a video we watch is more than two minutes. I mean we've got to go, got to go, got to go, and so our brains are becoming lodged and full of information, are becoming lodged and full of information, and that's tough.

John Ballinger:

It's tough on a leader, because that leader is dealing not only with their own fragmented brain or brain that needs to be kind of processed and defragged. But look at all the people that they're dealing with that have those challenges too. And when it's coming at that leader, those bullets are flying at them. They're trying to figure out, like, how do I react to this situation with this person, given the brain capacity that they have, with the brain capacity I've got? Now this is not sexy conversation but this is reality.

John Ballinger:

And when you're talking to a business owner or an executive in a company, it's one of their biggest challenges. And I talked to one recently who had been a president for 25 of his 41 years at a company and he said when he was leaving, I said what was the most difficult thing of being a president in this organization? And he said the ability to process information, especially difficult information. Have the difficult conversations, the ability to process information, especially difficult information? Have the difficult conversations come to a resolution and a move forward plan? Just constantly, all day long? He said that was the most difficult part and it's getting faster and faster and faster.

Douglas Ford:

I was talking the other night with my wife and we were talking about the speed at which things come at us now, and we were thinking about us as kids, like if you didn't get invited to a party, you didn't know about it till Monday, maybe Tuesday, after the party happened. And now, if you don't get invited to the party, you know as soon as people start showing up that you weren't invited to the party because it's on your you know Facebook or on your Instagram or TikTok or you know whatever it is the social media that you're using and all your friends are on. And so now you're all of a sudden dealing with a you know an issue that you weren't even expecting to deal with, and so things are coming much faster today than they ever have. And so things are coming much faster today than they ever have, and we weren't really designed to deal with a lot of those things at the speed in which they're coming at us.

John Ballinger:

No, we're not. And when you talk about what it causes, so the speed of that and what it causes causes a lot of anxiety. So if you read statistics in America about how many people are dealing with anxiety, how many people are on anxiety medication, especially AC remember what AC is After COVID. After COVID, Yep, you're doing good man. It is incredible the amount of people dealing with anxiety issues or on anxiety medication.

John Ballinger:

And if you think about the anxiety, what's caused that Woundedness? Some of it's self-inflicted, Some of it is inflicted on you, Some of it is people place labels on you, you know. And so now you're thinking someone's they call it somebody's renting space in your head for free, Because now you're like negative talk. Am I really that bad, you know? And social media and the internet has just made that, just get completely out of control. And then people start believing what they are being told by other people, that sometimes it becomes their identity.

John Ballinger:

And this isn't just the worker. Let me be clear. This isn't just a worker in America. This is people in leadership positions in America being told you're no good at that, you stink, you, you know all these negative things you're not capable of. And all of a sudden they start believing that and they and they don't know where to turn to, because now they're in that leadership position where they have to have every answer, and every answer has to be right and it has to be on point and on time. And if they're not getting the right information, with the right answer to the right person at the right time, then they're going to be looked at like what's your problem? Why can't you get that done?

Douglas Ford:

no-transcript and used to. You didn't have that ability to impact people that way because you had to see them, to insult them and to cause harm, basically. But now you can just do it from afar, like you can remote in and destroy somebody's life.

John Ballinger:

Yeah, and that is tough too. When you can just get on social media without having to look somebody in the eye and just blast them, that's a big challenge. Social media has its place, but I'm telling you what it's done to the self-awareness, self-consciousness of people, their lack of confidence in themselves. It's incredible what it's done to society and, by the way, the leaders, who have their own challenges, are dealing with all those people that are the byproducts of all that, because they're bringing that to work every day.

Douglas Ford:

Absolutely.

John Ballinger:

So we know that opening up that capacity, one of the ways to do that. We're going to be talking about that after the break. We talk about this a lot and it's almost like the point where I say, how do I beg people to be self-aware, because that's such a big issue that people won't face? And you do that through self-assessment and getting yourself to sit down and just write down like who am I, what's going on with me, what causes me to blow up at these things? Just assessing yourself is so important to start the defragging process. But after the break we're going to be talking about this.

Douglas Ford:

But after the break we're going to be talking about this. Hello First League Youth listeners, douglas Ford here. I want to take just a few seconds during this break to say thank you for spending a few moments with us as we discuss the challenges and opportunities of being a leader. We hope that in every episode you find some bit of information that will help you on your own personal leadership journey.

Douglas Ford:

In order to reach more people and to improve our positioning on all the podcasting and social media platforms, it's important that you subscribe to our podcast on your favorite podcasting platform, like Apple, spotify or any other platform where you listen to First Lead you. We would really appreciate you clicking on the subscribe button to help us reach more people and expand the message of First Lead you, and please take time to visit the First Lead you website. That's the number one S-T, the word lead and the letter U dot com. First Lead you dot com. Number one S-T, the word lead and the letter Ucom. I hope you have a great day as you continue to learn to first lead you. Welcome back. We were talking before the break about self-assessment, self-reflection and just this whole idea of self-awareness, like how do we actually start to achieve self-awareness, and what is it?

John Ballinger:

Yeah, you mind if I read the definition of that. Oh, go right ahead. Yeah, so the conscious knowledge, and this is extremely important audience. So, the first word, conscious. What's the opposite of conscious?

Douglas Ford:

Unconscious Right or subconscious.

John Ballinger:

Well, unconscious, what's unconscious? If you're unconscious, you have no idea what's going on Exactly. So I want you to rest on that word the conscious knowledge of your own actions, character, motives and desires which leads to your ability to focus on yourself and how those actions, thoughts or emotions do or don't align with your internal standards.

Douglas Ford:

That's pretty good. Let's get that again. Can I do that one more time? Do it one more time.

John Ballinger:

Yeah, the conscious knowledge of your own character, feelings, motives and desires, and how they give you the ability to focus on yourself and your actions, thoughts and emotions, and how they do or don't align with your internal standards.

Douglas Ford:

Wow, that's a mouthful.

John Ballinger:

That is a mouthful, but the reality is, and it starts out with you being conscious of yourself, your motives, why you're making the decisions that you're making. We're born selfish by nature, and so leaders, if not fine-tuned properly and coached well, will make decisions based on selfishness instead of unselfishness decisions based on selfishness instead of unselfishness. We'll be protecting ourselves when we make decisions instead of protecting our team, and our team will pick up on that. They'll know if their leader is a selfish leader or an unselfish leader. The decisions they're making are self-centered to the leader or are they thinking or looking at the team? And believe me, in this audience, whoever's listening, you have had leaders that you knew it was all about them, it wasn't about their team. You were, they were just you were. You may have been a stepping stone for them to try and get where they wanted in that leadership role. So when you think about what we just said when it comes to self-awareness, being able to increase your capacity, that's a huge part of defragging what's going on in your head that doesn't allow you to be the leader that you need to be.

John Ballinger:

I want to say this and Douglas doesn't know, because I wrote this down during the break but the leaders and the audience need to know this. You are not an accident. You are here on earth at this place at this time for a reason and a purpose. Finding out what that purpose and that reasoning is is something that should be your life. It should be a mission Like why am I here, what am I needed to do and how do I accomplish the mission that I'm put here on earth to do? Because you're not an accident and a lot of people that we talk to feel like that because they're not reaching their full potential. That it's my life's not worth it. I don't even know why I'm here. I equate that to my vote doesn't count. If the preponderance of people start having the attitude that my vote doesn't count, guess what happens.

Douglas Ford:

Their vote doesn't count, because they don't even show up to do anything. They don't even show up to do anything.

John Ballinger:

As leaders, we've got to show up, put up, shut up and move forward. I mean we've got to get busy fixing ourselves and defragging our brains so that we can deal with what's going on in society, understanding who you are. Remember that conscious they said you got to know who you are. Remember that conscious said you got to know who you are.

Douglas Ford:

Accept it man, that's tough, that is tough. That's that's probably the biggest challenge in this whole self-awareness thing, in my opinion, is like accepting, like who you really are, so that you can start moving forward. I mean, we talked about this last week at the Hill conference. It was like those moments of realization and those moments of acceptance almost to the person was the key moment that they can point to of like. Then I started moving forward, but we're so afraid to do that.

John Ballinger:

Yeah, and you heard people say I finally got comfortable with who I am. Absolutely. They weren't letting somebody else dictate it, or social media or their family man, our family can wear us out about things. You know I didn't live up to. My dad wanted me to be an attorney, that's. You know. He wore me out Like you need to be. If you're not going to, if you're not going to do that, I don't even know if you're going to. Even. What are you even here for? And I mean I? That got in my head, you know, like crap. I don't guess anything I do is not going to be good enough if I'm not an attorney. So it can be put in our head early on by some of the people that say they love us to death and I'm not saying that they don't, don't get me wrong but, man, they can. People can root around your head and rent space for free.

John Ballinger:

Have you recognized the areas, the area or areas in your life where you're wounded? Man, that's a big one. When you're self-assessing and you're thinking through like why do I act like I do? Why is my temperament like it is? Why, when I get confronted, why do I go on a hole somewhere and just want to just hibernate and I've got the other person wanting to talk about it while I'm just sitting there like I'd rather be unconscious right now is what you're thinking? I wish I was unconscious so I didn't have to deal with that.

John Ballinger:

You could have emotional woundedness, physical woundedness, mental woundedness, spiritual woundedness. Those things can actually clog up your memory and they can have you not have confidence, be self-conscious about things and, as a leader, if there are things like you talked about with the different colors that come up so the information flow doesn't happen, we talk about speed bumps in your brain so it'll come at you and you're like, oh no, I don't want to deal with that, so let me just sweep that under the rug. I've said to companies for years going into a company there's so much under rugs that have been swept under because the leader says let's sweep it under there and hope it goes away. When you start taking those rugs up and it all comes out, it's ugly, yeah.

Douglas Ford:

I was writing something the other day and I wrote avoidance is not a long-term solution to risk management. It's like you can't just avoid things because it doesn't go away.

John Ballinger:

No, I call them fires. We say that fires, fires that never get put out. They start smoldering and so pretty soon you've got smoldering fires all over the company and someone, just the least little thing or gasoline on one of them, boom, they're up again because we just we don't put them out.

Douglas Ford:

Yeah.

John Ballinger:

Hope they go away.

Douglas Ford:

Fire department causes those flare-ups. Right, they're just waiting to get a little more oxygen to them so they can flare up again.

John Ballinger:

So how do you heal? Another thing that has to happen is once you become self-aware and you think about, like all right, here's where I think, based on my self-awareness and self-assessment, that I am damaged at, then how do you start healing? So we're going to talk through what's the process to start healing. We've talked about this in the past. I always encourage someone. Find you a great mentor. Put your list together of this is what I want out of a mentor and go look for them, because they will help you and if you need some help with that.

Douglas Ford:

Just a little pitch back to a previous episode, the episode with TW Franciscan. Like he talks about, like what he did to put together a list of like. Here's what I want in a mentor. It's a great episode about how to go prepare to find a mentor, right.

John Ballinger:

Right, we talk about this journaling your pauses.

Douglas Ford:

Oh yeah, I've heard you mention that several times with leaders and different people.

John Ballinger:

Yeah, so the bullets are coming at you and you'll find that you're comfortable with these bullets. But these bullets are the ones that hit you because you pause long enough to where that bullet hits you and you have no idea what to say. And so I tell leaders get a book out when it happens, when you are uncertain, unsure, it could be something that when the bullet's coming at you because you do not know how to handle it or that person that you're dealing with, how's your blood pressure to rise? You can feel it internally. Go back to your desk, write down the occurrence when it happened and we'll unpack what was going on at that time, because it's normally a wound inside you that caused you to have that pause.

Douglas Ford:

Yeah, so I was just like that pause you're talking about is like when you're faced with a decision and maybe it's a momentary thing or maybe it's like, well, I just need to go think about that a while. I mean, that's, that's the pause right, like where I'm having trouble processing the information I just received for some particular reason.

John Ballinger:

Right, right, right. What does it mean to journal? Like when I say journaling your pauses, get a book and that book is for nothing but your pauses and have it in your back pocket. If you type notes on your phone, you use notes, type it down, but start you a journal. So when those pauses take place, or those anxiety things take place or your blood pressure goes up, journal those things so that you can reflect on them and work with your mentor or coach on them. Because I can promise you anybody that's a good coach that's doing this has had occurrences in the past themselves that they've had to overcome and they're working with other business owners that have the same situations that happen to you. It's happened to them and they've helped them through that. So if you can't find a good mentor, find a good coach that can help you through some of these challenges.

Douglas Ford:

How often should that be occurring, like the journaling process? How often would you recommend that?

John Ballinger:

Initially, I tell and we're going to talk about one of the things that came out of journaling with one of the guests that we had on on episodes 10 through 12, but I had him do it for four weeks, four weeks straight journal your pauses Every day, every day, every it. For four weeks, four weeks straight, journal your pauses.

Douglas Ford:

Every day, every day.

John Ballinger:

Every day for four weeks, and it's amazing what you can find when somebody brings you the book back each week, that you're meeting with them and you're unpacking that, and I've got stories rolling around in my head where I've had leaders journal their pauses and I would look at them like, and that really stumbled you journal their pauses and I would look at them like, and that really stumbled you. Now, for me, I was looking at it like that. I wouldn't even blinked at that. For them it literally shut them down and so their wound or their fragmented brain, because of things that had happened in the past, literally was stopping them on some of the simplest things, I thought, but for them it was paralyzing. So journaling is really important because after you take those roadblocks out or those speed bumps out, and then they can deal with it because of things that you've uncovered, that's causing the speed bumps or road bumps, and life's a lot better for them and their team by the way, yes, no-transcript, their teams, by the way.

John Ballinger:

So, speaking of that, um, on episode 10 through 12, we had Shagun Hayabusa and he, after he journaled, he wrote down 10 things that negatively impacted leadership, and it wasn't these actually came from him because of unpacking, but then he started using them and found out there's a tenor to these. When I'm talking to different people, that fit into their issues as well. These can be found on our First Lead you website. You can download this. I encourage people to put it by their desk or put it in a drawer. Read these, but you know, when you look at these, I think we can all identify with some or all of these top 10 list.

Douglas Ford:

Oh yeah, I think. I think they're pretty universal.

John Ballinger:

So when you, when you think about that and so you're journaling your pauses, you're looking at this list like worrying people will not love you when you have to make a hard decision man man, how many people have had that happen in their life? Like I'm getting ready to have to make a tough decision? Wonder what this is going to do when I actually have to do this? There's going to be because guess what? You can't make everyone happy, especially as a leader.

Douglas Ford:

That's impossible. It's like being a football official or baseball umpire. Half the people are always mad at you.

John Ballinger:

Yeah Well, I think there was a meme that was going around in the LinkedIn community is if you want to make everybody happy, go sell ice cream. You know so, as a leader, you're never going to make everyone happy, are you constantly?

Douglas Ford:

apologizing. Oh, that's big. I know a lot of people that do that. They'll start out with saying that I'm sorry bud, they walk in the room, so I'm sorry.

John Ballinger:

Yeah, we talked about this today eye contact. If somebody can't have a discussion with you without looking down constantly, there's some wounds somewhere, there's some challenges going on, envying success. Performance dictates your worth. Holding things in pressure cooker, you've got two types of people. You've got the pressure cooker person or you got the person that's just constantly just blowing it off all the time, blowing off steam constantly, and then you've got the build up, build up, blow up person. Terrified. What if I make a bad decision? Everybody's looking at me because they did. I made the decision, everybody moved forward and it didn't work.

Douglas Ford:

Yeah, If you're, if you're afraid to make decisions, that's going to paralyze not only you but your whole organization.

John Ballinger:

Yeah, rehearsing a strong speech, I like this one and then when it's delivered, you just almost like whisper, yeah, very soft, like I hope this doesn't hurt anybody's feelings when I say this Viewing constructive criticism as an attack man, that's a big one. We'll think somebody's attacking us. Could be somebody saying you know what, I think you need to hear this and then having a hard time saying no, because you're worried about what. The other side of that no is that person lashing out at you Frustration and anxiety. So look at that list, print that list off. Start learning how to defrag your brain. Listen to this podcast twice. Start a self-awareness program which will lead you to journaling. We'd like comments. Send us comments or suggestions or questions on our website. We've got LinkedIn, facebook, happy to respond to those. How do you get started? Or when you get started and you say, hey, this just happened.

Douglas Ford:

But yeah, send us requests and we'll respond to them as timely as we can. Well, thanks for leading us through this discussion today, John.

John Ballinger:

Yeah, let's all try to be more self-aware as leaders and remember we're doing this for those that we are in charge of leading. We'll see right back. We'll see you next time you.

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John Ballinger

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Douglas Ford

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