Thanks for Coming Back
Welcome to "Thanks for Coming Back," where every episode feels like a heart-to-heart in your favorite coffee spot. Hosted by Dr. Latasha Nelson, this podcast strips back the layers of leadership to reveal the real, relatable side of guiding and growing, whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out.
Settle in with your brew of choice as Latasha shares her world of insights and experiences, blending wisdom with warmth in conversations that matter. It’s not just her stories, though; guests from all walks of life join in to share their own tales of triumph and challenge, adding flavors of diversity and depth to the mix.
"Thanks for Coming Back" is more than just a podcast—it's a community where we all learn and grow together. It's about tackling our challenges, getting better at what we do, and embracing the leader within. So come join the conversation, and let’s make leadership a part of our daily lives.
Thanks for Coming Back
Simple Steps to Reclaim Your Power in Leadership
Ready to reclaim the personal power you've given away while connecting with your true purpose? Tune into our latest episode, "Simple Steps to Reclaim Your Power in Leadership," where Dr. Latasha Nelson talks with Tom Dardick about taking back control of your personal power. They explore how your actions and attitudes shape your success and how understanding these can help you lead with greater impact.
Discover the four key areas of personal growth that guide you to unlock your unique gifts, and learn practical strategies to overcome fear, pain, and confusion that can drain your power. Tom also shares how building strong relationships and aligning your habits with your values are essential for lasting change and self-improvement.
Join us for an episode filled with actionable insights to help you lead more effectively and live a more empowered, purposeful life. Don’t forget to subscribe for more inspiring conversations!
I would love it if you would start by telling us about your career journey, about your life journey and what inspired you to create the Eye of Power system.
Speaker 2:I'll try to keep that as brief as I can. I'm going to be 63 in October, so six decades is a lot I could choose from to tell stories. But basically what I say is I'm a lifelong student of the human condition. What I say is I'm a lifelong student of the human condition.
Speaker 2:When I was very young even before I was probably 10 or 12, I started reading all of the Greek and Roman myths. I was really into that Norse myths, any of the mythologies, and at the time I couldn't tell you why I loved them. But in retrospect I know that they're the lessons of what's true and what's not. And it's true of all the wisdom traditions. I think the highest level of wisdom is collected in the works of the Bible. But any wisdom tradition, it's there for a reason, it lasts for a reason right, it's based on foundational truth and it's those things that gives us the fundamental orientation in life. And somehow I got a sense of that right from the get-go. And so through my teen years and in my school years I was into philosophy, psychology, all the questions of why are we the way we are and how could it be better? And if there's suffering, how do we alleviate it. If there's something that you want to make happen, how do you make it happen? Another passion of mine had always really been music as well, so I sort of had those two pedals of the bike going and both of those things tended to shape my career. I owned businesses, I worked in different fields, but over the past 25 years I've really been in the professional development and people strategy for organization space as a consultant. I had a partner. We had a company called the Communication Gym where we learned and taught about the basic fundamentals of how you're effective in communication in various settings. I kind of learned in that journey that the how to do things the techniques is not nearly as important as the why to do things. So in 2011, I started my own consulting business dedicated to one mission connecting people to purpose, and so that's something that has been the connective tissue since that time.
Speaker 2:I was actually ghostwriting a book with somebody a few years ago and in the process she had this insane story with all kinds of drama and things throughout her life and I was trying to make sense of it. She wanted to do a business book. So I'm saying, okay, how does all this drama and other connective tissues? And I noticed a pattern, and it was a collaborative thing. We talked back and forth. She's a leadership development professional too, so she had a lot of insights, but we came up with a model for her and it got me thinking in a direction that ultimately led to me creating the Eye of Power as a model.
Speaker 2:And what I noticed is there's a magic to the number four. If you notice a lot of psychometrics, a lot of models that we use to navigate the world, whether it be a map like east, west, north and south is actually a grid where you take two spectrums, map them against each other and you can sort of see the dynamics that emerge as you compare those things with each other. And that was the basis for the eye of power model. So in the eye of power model, what we're looking at is okay.
Speaker 2:What can we do in this world?
Speaker 2:What do we have control over? What is the playing space for our personal power? And best I could tell, we can really control two things and we can barely control those. But if we're controlling them at all, we control these two things. We can influence or control our actions and we can influence and control our attitudes or our thoughts, kind of it's a spectrum, because our actions affect our attitudes, our attitudes affect our actions. So that's our vertical axis.
Speaker 2:In the I have power model, those actions and attitudes are going to be either directed about ourselves, inward, about what we want, what we think about ourselves, the things that we want to manifest, or it's how they serve and interact with other people, the people we care about, people we love and all people that we tend to throw our circle of concern around. So that's the horizontal axis, self versus others. And that's not too dissimilar to, if people are familiar with the EQ model, the emotional quotient, to try to understand our emotions. There's a similarity there about that underlying. I call it the power grid, but from there I noticed okay, so this creates these four quadrants actions towards ourself or others, attitudes towards ourself or others. Basically, I came up with four quadrants and four layers to those quadrants. So it's a four by four kind of a grid that allows us to pay attention to 16 elements, half of which hold us back, half of which move us forward, as it relates to manifesting our personal power in this world to make things that we think are good happen.
Speaker 1:So you mentioned reflection of self and then reflection of others and how that fits into this model. I'm curious how does the model apply to people who may not fall into that space of concern, like people you have concern for?
Speaker 2:One of the quadrants, the action we take towards other people, which is sort of what you're asking about there. I call that the purpose quadrant. And if you start looking at the anatomy of purpose, how do you nourish a sense of meaning and like your life's about something and you're motivated and you can't wait to take on the day. What's that about really? And best I can tell, it's really a process of self-discovery where you become aware of the things that make you a unique individual. You might not be the fastest, you might not be the smartest, you might not be the most charismatic, you might not be the best looking, you might not be the tallest. You might not be the most skilled in this area. You might not be the smartest, you might not be the most charismatic, you might not be the best looking. You might not be the tallest, you might not be the most skilled in this area, you might not be the most experienced. We can go down every single metric we can possibly think of, but there is a pattern of things that you are gifted with that you and only you have. That makes you a unique, irreplaceable gift to the world, and so purpose comes from when we see those gifts, nurture them and put them to use to a purpose that serves other people. We're social creatures. By ourselves, we don't really have much value. What's the worst punishment you can do to people? Well, we can imprison them, but what can you do to them in prison? You put them in solitary confinement because we need each other. That's the fact of it. So when we live our lives in accordance with how our unique gifts serve other people, our sails fill with wind, we get motion and we feel like we matter, that we're going somewhere. And when you got it in full force, you don't even see obstacles. You see okay, that's an opportunity here. Okay, cool, what are we going to do with that? A challenge to get better, or something like that? But when it's not filled, when we're starting to gain momentum, it helps us get through those obstacles and build that speed. So that process is baked into the cake of the IAPower model and it's part and parcel of what precisely we do.
Speaker 2:So the driver is really more alignment with your purpose, not necessarily whether or not you know and or have attachment to particular people, but that growth as you have walked your path through life. Nobody knows precisely what your experience is, so in that way we're sort of like islands, right. We're isolated. Nobody knows what your pain is, what your suffering is, what your attitudes are, what your fears are. That's a personal and until we have real ESP or can actually connect each other's brains and maybe that's going to come within our lifetimes but until we have that ESP or can actually connect each other's brains and maybe that's going to come within our lifetimes but until we have that, we are really sort of alone in our own conscious minds.
Speaker 2:But like islands, if you take away the water, what happens?
Speaker 2:An island is actually just a mountain and those mountains are part of a range, right, and the range is part of the land and the land is part of the same structure. You know the geographic realities and it's sort of analogous to how we are with people, right, we're actually connected, we're actually made out of the same stuff, we actually all want the same things. We're actually way more alike than we are different, but that part that we're seeing just seems so different. But all of this is actually good, because that difference does matter, because the world is way more complicated than what we can possibly take in with our limited perceptive powers that we're gifted with. So we need other people and we know that deep down, and so for that reason, we feel really good when we are serving, when we are bolstering, when we're supporting, when we're loving other people. It feels good to them, feels good to us, and so we really need to connect to that and keep that top of mind to live the best life, the most powerful life.
Speaker 1:And I love that analogy because you take the water away and you're really exposing what's under the surface, which is really the part that we don't explore as much as we probably should. And so I want to transition a little bit and just ask you what are some of the most common ways you see individuals unknowingly give away their personal power, and what strategies can they use to reclaim that?
Speaker 2:In the I Am Power model Latasha, we call them the four corrosions. So each quadrant has its own corrosion and we all fall prey to them in some manner, in some way, at some time or another. There's no getting around it. So to minimize their effect, we have to sort of do that conscious work to get away from them. I'll give you the overall master and we can dig wherever you'd like. Work to get away from them. I'll give you the overall master and we can dig wherever you'd like. But in the pain quadrant, which is the actions we take towards ourselves, it's really our relationship to a type of fear. Pain and fear. Really, because they don't feel good, we have a natural sort of knee jerk reaction against them. And so anything that makes us uncomfortable, anything that feels new, anything that feels weird, anything that may have some risk, then Our knee-jerk reaction is to push it away, hold off, stop right, and that attenuates the action that we might take. So that's probably the first and biggest In the next quadrant. So we're still talking about ourself, but now we're talking about our attitude, the corrosion in the attitudes towards ourself. I call that the talking about our attitude, the corrosion in the attitudes towards ourself. I call that the perception quadrant is confusion. In other words, we're not seeing things clearly. The way our brains work is we actually think in narrative form. Our very thoughts are little mini stories and those are sort of the building blocks of all of our perceptions. Everything is a narrative, so it has a beginning, middle and end. And since the beginning and the end are different, we read some sort of significance into that story or that narrative. Right, we're saying, okay, the beginning is here, the end is here, they're different. And the point we're taking away is this and any same story can have tons of different points, and it might have lots of points that are arguing in one direction and the same thing in another direction. So it becomes very subjective. And through all that subjectiveness becomes a lot of murkiness, right, because different people have different perspectives. And so the corrosion in the perception quadrant is something I call confusion and it's not seen clearly through that murkiness, and so we have all these things that control us, that we have no idea that's controlling us and we're losing power that way. Moving over from there, we stay in the perception phase, but we move from ourselves to other people. That quadrant is called the people quadrant and the corrosion.
Speaker 2:There is condemnation and what that is. We tend to use the words judgment and condemnation interchangeably and I think there's a little bit of a problem with that, because judgment is something that we have to do. If you have values, you have to judge. Judgment is not a bad thing. It's part of having standards, having values, having any sort of moral compass. So judging is not the enemy, condemnation is the corrosion force. Because what's condemnation? Condemnation is making a determination and then saying you are out, I'm rejecting it, I'm not listening. It might be a person, you're out of my tribe, it might be a thought. I'm not going to consider that it's condemnation in that way. That's the corrosion. So we block ourselves off to thoughts and people for whatever reasons.
Speaker 2:And the final corrosion out of these four is in the purpose quadrant, which is actions we take towards others. We talked a little bit about that and that is I call it carelessness, because the others began with C but it's an apathy. It's the opposite of when we're talking about our sales filling up and we feel energized and motivated to put our gifts to use. When we don't see those things, we think, well, I'm just a nobody, I don't have anything special, I'm replaceable. Nobody really sees me or cares what I think Nobody really would be that sad if I were just to die. These are the despondent thoughts that are the opposite of purpose, right, and so it's those kinds of places. Carelessness, just not being connected to yourself and others is where the corrosion is, and we all have those despondent thoughts. It's not like it's a character flaw, it's part of the human experience and it's one of the major things. So those four buckets, natasha, are where we really sap our power the most.
Speaker 1:Perfect. Now that we've got the framework in mind, we understand the four quadrants. What strategies do you often recommend for people, and I'm thinking especially about people who might be aspiring leaders or who just want to have more of a positive influence in the spaces that they serve in? What type of strategies can they adopt in order to reclaim the power that they might be inadvertently giving away?
Speaker 2:Sure, well, the I have power model has two layers that are sort of the limiting forces and two layers that are the empowering forces. So there's two actual layers of the model. So we're talking about eight different things now that we can pay attention to. Systematically work on that answers that very question, latasha. So the first way that we move, let's just say we're caught by one or more of those corrosions that we just went through. The next layer of the model is what I call the four quests, and the quests are the master questions that we explore, that move us along the path. So let's just take the purpose quadrant. We sort of start talking about the purpose quadrant. That's where we feel like okay, these are my unique gifts. I'm going to school, I'm developing them, I'm working every day, I'm making them better and better, and now I'm qualified, really uniquely, to provide this to this specific type of person, because you're not going to be all things to all people. No matter how talented you are and how hard you work, you're going to have your slice of people that you serve best, and so once you have that really dialed in and in focus, then you answer the question who, for you, know what are the gifts and how do I make that happen and why does it matter? And once you start getting that clarity, you you start making those connections and gaining momentum in that way. So that's an example of one of the quests, the one that most people.
Speaker 2:If you feel stuck right now, if you feel like there's something you've been wanting to change in your life, that you have struggled and struggled and struggled, you just can't do it, odds are very good that you're actually stuck in the pain quadrant. The pain quadrant is the action towards ourselves and that's the type of fear that holds us in place, that we say, well, if I do this, then I'm going to lose all these things or somebody might not approve of me in this way and therefore I'm just going to hold back or I'll come up with another way, or it slows me down, I'm not going to do it. And I always ask people have you ever made a new year's resolution and not kept it? Most people can relate, right, absolutely yeah, kept it. Most people can relate, right, absolutely yeah. And the question is why?
Speaker 1:Why can't we just make a New Year's resolution and go ahead with it, right? Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of, I guess, two things the scarcity mindset. I don't want to lose what I have. So if that means that I have to move forward and I put these things that I have at risk, I would rather just stay safe and secure with the things that I know and that I've already secured, which is an extension in my mind to help most people make buying decisions. There's a status quo there and unless there is a trigger that is bad enough for me to say, okay, I've got to make a change. I am no longer negotiating my happiness in this equation. Then I'll put up with a lot.
Speaker 1:Most people put up with a lot of things and unfortunately, one of the most common New Year's resolutions being, you know, fitness and getting healthy. You've become adjusted to the unhealthy state that you're in. Become adjusted to the unhealthy state that you're in, perhaps that fear and that pain you don't really even acknowledge. I remember fasting during our corporate fast at church and every time I would go back and try to eat things I had removed from my diet. It was only then, when I tried to go back, that I would go. Oh no, that was causing that problem that I had before and I had no clue.
Speaker 1:So those are the two things that come to mind. Based on what you're describing, is that scarcity mindset. I am scared to lose what I have and that status quo that we get comfortable in. We may not even realize we're living in and I don't have a reason to change until something dramatic happens. And now I have to change.
Speaker 2:Yep, and I think you're dead on the money. With both those things, I mean fear, and I call it the pain quadrant, because our relationship with pain and fear are sort of the limiting factors there If you're going to make a change of any kind. Again, we were talking about the fact that we have trade-offs, right, you don't have more than 24 hours. That's all you have in the day, right? So if you choose one thing, there's going to be a whole bunch of things you're not choosing. And if you like all those things, there's a pain of sacrifice. There. There's a fear of missing out. It's always there. There's no getting around it. There's a fear of missing out. It's always there, there's no getting around it. It's not like you're a scaredy cat.
Speaker 2:We're not talking about a character flaw here. It's part of the psychology of being a human being. So get away from self-recrimination, get away from oh, I'm a terrible person or I'm weak or any of that. Those are mind games. They sap your power, your energy, distract you. They're ultimately lies. Your energy distract you. They're ultimately lies. So if you want to gain more of your power, be loving towards yourself in terms of understanding what's really going on, and then be focused. What I always say is and you said it, natasha it's really the power of habit. Habit is a wonderful servant and a tyrannical, wicked master, and so when we get it working for us, awesome. When it's working against us, we're almost like we're in a slave state, and so that discipline that helps us get on top of habit is one of the keys to becoming the fullest version of yourself. Getting your habits in a line with your values. That process is, let's call it, the yellow brick road.
Speaker 1:I love that. What does that look like? I imagine there's probably a few steps that you can offer the audience for aligning values with the steps and the habits that they establish.
Speaker 2:Well, I'll start with the universals of any positive change you want to make. So we can't change that to which we're unaware. So, the very first thing it starts with awareness. Now let's just take the example that we were talking about New Year's resolution and I'd say a vast majority of people can relate to the fitness and the loss of weight goal. So there's not a lack of awareness, and also it's not that they don't know how you might move in the direction of being healthier, right or looking better or whatever the value that that is your currency, you know. It's not that you don't know how. So so awareness isn't everything, but it is the starting point, because it used to be back way, way back before modern medicine that being overweight was seen as a sign of being wealthy was, you know, only the rich people could actually get enough food to get fat. So fat people were looked at as the top of society back in the day, right, and some of that actually and it's still in our psychology it's not like it's completely gone and also, being fat is an a hundred percent corresponding with being unhealthy. So it isn't a clear picture. If you feel happy and you're 40 pounds overweight and you're basically healthy. Who's to say that that's not the right thing for you? So this idea of awareness is it's different for different people. So there's objective components to it, but there's also a subjective. So the process becomes being clear of what's important to you and what the trade-offs are.
Speaker 2:So once you're aware, then you say, okay, look, I'm here, I'm at point A, point B is going to be better. Now you have to set an intent. I don't want to be at point A anymore and you sort of set it right. The problem with point A is you start getting used to the norm, right. All of our metrics sort of reverberate. Another way our minds work is we filter out those things that become familiar. They no longer hit our radar screen. So even in bad situations, if it's familiar, it no longer really causes you that much stress and pain like it did when it first started, even if it's a negative thing. Our brains react to the novel, to the new, different thing. That's where our attention goes. So you're at point A and you want to go to point B. Now you have to set an intent right. So you say I am going to go to point B, be and now? The universe, the world, the people around you, all the external forces ask you a question how bad do you want it Right? So, in other words, now you go from intent to commitment. What's your commitment? What are you willing to do? So, awareness, intent, commitment and then, finally, at that point, how do you do that? Because people, what they'll do is like, oh, I'll starve myself or I'll go to the gym and I'll work out and I'll do it for a week and I'll just kill my like.
Speaker 2:No, that's not how it works. Habits didn't get there overnight and they don't come overnight. It's little things over time. I call them in the I have power model. We call them sustained incremental actions SIAs model. We call them sustained incremental actions, sias. So that's the path that unfortunately there isn't. These, you know, we like in the stories and the movies of instant transformations and magic pills and, oh, okay, this guru is going to give me the secret, or if I buy this product, this is my chance, or this methodology is going to unlock my profit. No, it's sustained incremental actions over time. That's the yellow brick road. That's the path. I don't know of any other one. I'd love to find it out someday, but unfortunately that's the best, that's the state of the art Best I can tell.
Speaker 1:I love where we're going with this, because it makes me wonder where discipline so the SICs? Did I get that right, sias?
Speaker 2:Sustained mental action. Well, that's what I call it. Yes, call it whatever you want.
Speaker 1:No, but I love it because motivation will get us started. So we may make the commitment based on our motivation at the moment. But the sustainment part is the kicker, because you may have had all the good intentions in the world and you may have made the commitment. The SIAs, though that to me sounds like the discipline part that oftentimes we might fall off with right.
Speaker 2:You got it right. You got it right. So in the I have power protocol that we use, the very first thing is you don't do it by yourself. Very, very difficult to make sustained change by yourself, and even if you can, it's not as fun, it doesn't go as fast and you lose out on the opportunity to really have a nice bond with another person that helps you and you feel attached to them. Because these are parts of what make beautiful relationships when we love and support each other.
Speaker 2:And by thinking that you're just going to go it on your own or hold it back from the people around you, you're actually robbing them of your love and you're robbing them of the chance to love you. And so if you want your relationships to thrive and I'm talking about personal and professional, no matter where you go, there you are, so you might as well have great relationships. See the whole person that you're with relationship. See the whole person that you're with right and have it be real and deep. And this is how you do it. You actually open up and be vulnerable and say hey, listen, I'm trying to do this. Would you help me be accountable with this? And the person functions as your growth partner in the eye power. We have a system that allows them to really do that in a very pointed way, where we're working along psychologically healthy lines, systematically across the model and with actual like ways that they can provide feedback and get support and all the rest of it. So it's a real powerful way to move a whole team of people fast. But anyway, back to the idea of how we move the discipline is really something. The idea of how we move the discipline is really something, because here's the thing, here's the biggest thing with Tasha we are not moved by rationality and intellect. You know it's better to do this thing and still you eat because I want the candy, I want the chocolate, I want the donut, I don't want to go to the gym, I don't want to cut the lawn, I want to watch TV, I don't want to read the book, whatever it is right. I want to play the game, even though I got to work to do it.
Speaker 2:Doesn't matter what, the area, where, if you actually thought about it, you decide something different. That's because we are creatures of emotion. We are not creatures of rationality in terms of how we behave, and that's why we need each other, because ultimately we're social creatures. We care about how we're seen and how we contribute to other people. That's really the universal currency. When you boil it all away, that's the thing that matters. And so when we recognize and live our lives along that recognition, then we start saying, okay, I see the preciousness of this relationship, I see the fact that this person actually, against all odds, actually wants the best for me, really wants me to live the best life I can. That's a treasure, that's a gift, that's magic. That's where all the value of the world is and what stops us. Well, we talk about that in the rest of the model, but, in a nutshell, that's the place to be, right, at that spot where you're able to be vulnerable, able to look in the mirror with an honest see.
Speaker 2:They say honesty and courage are the two indispensable traits if you're going to build virtue and the best. I can tell that's absolutely true, because what's honesty? Honesty is just making sure that what you see is what you report. Courage is indispensable, because courage is being afraid and doing the right thing. Anyway, you need both of those pedals of the bike to go, and so, as a matter of fact, in the model of the bike to go, and so, as a matter of fact, in the model, courage is one of the four capacities, the outer layer. That really are the things that we all need to gain our full power. But that's really the answer is honesty and courage in all things. That's the superpower ingredient that we all need.
Speaker 1:What I think I heard you say if I translate that over to our audience is coaching and mentoring. Those types of relationships can be really helpful when you're trying to transition from commitment to discipline, because you're going to have that person there really helping to drive you along. You're establishing a relationship prayerfully, one where maybe you can get a sponsor out of the situation, but ultimately you're not doing it alone. If you use the imagery of climbing the side of the mountain and you've got someone in front and undoubtedly you've got someone tethered behind you as well, you might be the person in the middle, but you've got someone who's helping you get up the side of that mountain and you're also helping someone else. But I know that many people struggle with making lasting changes. So even if I get started, especially personally and professionally, I may have a hard time sustaining it. What advice do you have for someone who's stuck in that start stock cycle for making significant changes?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I often think of like an investment in the stock market, right? So if you buy a stock, let's say, do you expect it to just go up every day from now till forever?
Speaker 1:I personally know the stock market well enough to know that that is not what happens.
Speaker 2:It never happens actually.
Speaker 1:Right, but I do know, life doesn't happen. Yes, but we've had some and I think back to 2008, where people had a huge decision to make. If you were negatively affected by it, you probably made a couple of decisions especially if you were investing that you wish you could take back today Because ultimately, the market rebounds. You have ebbs and flows. I personally take the approach of not watching. I just set it and forget it.
Speaker 2:Exactly With the faith that, collectively working together, everyone's out there working every day creating something that didn't exist yesterday and overall you're hoping that the slope of the curve is northward and over a long period of time, hopefully it goes up and we can get into all the vagaries of how that plays out, because there's all these little currents and things and things that are changing and you can lose a fortune and all that stuff. But I only mention it because progress never looks like linear. It's never just one way, it's always good days, bad days. Learn a thing, oh man, this is you could be set back. You feel like you're back before you began. Even so, it's a up and down thing and part of it is understanding the nature of what change really is.
Speaker 2:The other thing that you reminded me to I didn't want to forget to say, latosha is we all have blind spots. The reason we have blind spots is because we are beings of limited perceptive powers and, remember, our perception is really built from narratives and those narratives have stories to them that include some things and rule out other things. Those things that are ruled out become blind spots. We can't see them and that's why we need other people. So I talk about the mirrors. When I'm talking about professional and personal growth, I'm talking about the mirrors that we need to see, and actually you mentioned one mirror which is like a coach, a professional, somebody who's skilled at being able to help you see blind spots, help you make commitments to the things, at being able to help you see blind spots, help you make commitments to the things that are going to change your course. Look, no coach, no counselor, no psychologist, no teacher, no mentor can do the work for you. They can't move your feet. All they can do is say, hey, don't step in that mud puddle. Hey, there's a solid stone, you can step there. If you step there, you're going to lose your balance and all that does is shorten your path and speed your progress. That's really all anybody else can do for you, but with the other thing, saying that it feels better to have somebody with you, that you know they care, you know they have your back, and that just makes it easier to take the next step and move forward. So that's the nature of the professional relationship.
Speaker 2:But the people who love us, they're really good on the support side, maybe Not all the time, because maybe sometimes they think they're supporting and they're really holding us back. They might tell you to step on this thing over here, but they're not trained, they don't know that there's a better answer. So none of these are perfect, they're all good, and so I say use them all. And then there's psychometric tools that help us see things inside more clearly than we otherwise see. And then there's just the physical mirror right or journaling, or things that help us just see ourselves. So it's those four things that can help us marshal the discipline to keep moving.
Speaker 2:And I'll say this if you feel stuck, you just cut up the problem into smaller pieces. So if you feel stuck, it might be because the next step is just a little bit beyond what you're ready for. And what you do is you say, okay, what's the path to get into that next step? Let's cut that up. And let me take the baby step in between, rather than that big leap, I was trying to jump to the next rock in the stream, so that's one way to get unstuck Now.
Speaker 1:I'm going to throw another variable into the equation for us. So let's factor in how quickly things change. So you've got the commitment, you've got the support structures, you've got the relationships. You're willing to chunk things out as needed. What do you recommend when things change a lot very quickly around you? How can leaders effectively navigate rapid changes with sustained, meaningful change?
Speaker 2:Nothing like a simple little question to try and tackle, but no, I do have thoughts along those lines. It's obviously a complicated matter and I'll just share a couple of basic principles that I think leaders would do well to remember. No-transcript you have to connect their personal purpose, what matters most to them Remember we talked about that purpose of using your unique talents and marshalling them and cultivating, nourish, develop, add skills, figure out new ways to put them to use. All those things as it relates to the shared mission, as it relates to the shared collective purpose that we're all serving together. That's really the main job of the leader and unfortunately, what happens is most leaders are the term I like to use with clients a lot. We call player coaches, right? So, yes, you're a leader, you are in charge of a department, a division, a team, whatever it is, but you have a whole bunch on your to-do list as well. You've got all these things that are deliverables on a daily basis and you have to do the leading, and what tends to be is that number one thing tends to be on a back burner thing, and time goes by and we are no longer tethering and what happens is weeds grow in the garden because of the change that you're pointing to. Right, and when change happens fast, the weeds grow faster and more numerous. So it's incumbent upon leaders to be tethered to the things that are the most universal and the least likely to change, the things that are going to be the connective tissue today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, maybe even a decade from now.
Speaker 2:So I heard it said recently two great quotes that are very pertinent here about the nature of wisdom. One is that the currency of the coming century is no longer money but wisdom. That one has been really sticking with me because as we get more automation, as we get AI doing more and more things that humans used to do, what are the things that are going to matter? It's going to be those things that machines can't really grasp or care about, or they're not really looking there. And what is that? It's the things that are the universal, foundational aspects of the human experience, and so that's the other thing which is intelligence is knowledge about that which changes. So artificial intelligence is all the new things, all the little components to understand a process, or take a billion things into account, to look at into this one thing. That's intelligence. Wisdom is knowledge about that which doesn't change. And I add one more thing to that and having the behavior match that knowledge. So that's the currency of the future. I think that's a really good way for leaders to orient themselves to manage through times of real fast change, because the intelligence is going crazy. You're getting all this input. We're doing new things, lots of disruptive technologies.
Speaker 2:I heard it said last year that we're going to soon have a billion dollar company with three employees and you know it's a crazy notion, but you know that's what you're going to be up against in the world. And so what is the meaning of work? It's going to shift right. It's going to shift towards. It's not just transactional. Like you have these skills, I pay you for those skills. Those skills are worth this much. That's your paycheck.
Speaker 2:That'll continue for quite some time, but it's going to move aside as another emergent factor comes, related to what I was talking about with wisdom, which is what's a better life. Why do I want to spend my time doing this? Why do I want to work with these people? Why do I want to be tethered to these people? Who do I serve? How do I tether the things that I'm good at to make the biggest difference in the world, to affect more profoundly more people. It's those questions that are going to start shoving away those transactional things and get more into the humanistic, experiential, emotion, spiritual, the way we live our lives and what really makes us feel fulfilled. I use the word fulfillment. The corporate symbol for the eye of power is what I call a fulfillment symbol, because I think fulfillment is really the new treasure. It's always been, but we're starting to grow to the point where we're recognizing what the real treasures are.
Speaker 1:And I personally think that with the technological advancements, with AI and automation, that we have a unique opportunity to find and invest more time in those things that are more fulfilling. And I'll give you an example I recently presented at a conference. It was amazing. It was hey for everyone in my industry. I want to just show you how you might be able to use things like ChatGPT and Copilot to streamline your regular tasks so that you can free yourself up to do the things that do require more of a human touch, to really do more of the things that you probably always wanted to do and just never had the time to do, because those things that usually take up a lot of our time, they're still necessary evils that's what I call them. It may not be the thing that you want to spend all your time on, but it's probably the thing that's held you back from traveling more. Or, in my case, I still have aspirations to start my own charter school with my own curriculum. Yes, I believe in creating advocates.
Speaker 1:I want our kids to grow up understanding and fully capable of advocating on their own behalf.
Speaker 2:So I've been playing oh, we gotta talk more about that.
Speaker 1:Absolutely absolutely, and so I've been playing in AI.
Speaker 1:We got to talk more about that Absolutely absolutely, and so I've been playing in AI for well over a year now, and when I tell you, I don't want us to use it to gain more time to do more work. That's what concerns me more than anything is that people will say, oh, you've got more capacity because you knocked that one thing out that would normally have taken you a week to do in just a few days, so here's more work for you. I don't think that's the idea. I think the idea is, if we can embrace it in a way that allows us to create capacity for ourselves so we can go do the more fulfilling things, the things that, like you said, ai and all of this technology is never going to replace it can't, possibly because of how unique we are Then I think that we'll be in a much better space and see way more advancements and maybe even this might sound a little quirky, but through this technology, be able to have, like you said, less transactional interactions and more meaningful human interactions with one another.
Speaker 2:That's what I think is happening. I'm confident or let me say optimistic that the vision that you just laid out there, latasha, is going to be the thing. Why? Because that's going to be more joyful for people and they'll gravitate in that direction. That's why, you know, we worked super hard in the past, because we had to.
Speaker 2:You know it isn't that long ago that that almost the entire world was basically subsistence living, and in the past 30 years a billion people have gone from subsistence to non-subsistence. Now they might not be wealthy by the standards of a Western society, professional, but being subsistence means you don't know where your next meal is coming from. Or if you have a storm and it takes out your crop, you might be malnourished and maybe die. Been one of really just scratching to survive. And we're entering in a phase where that will hopefully become something that's obsolete. You don't really see it anywhere in the world and I'm confident that that's something that we'll see, if not in our lifetimes, not too long in the future. And once we check off that lower box of just survival, then what's the next level? And you can turn to Maslow's hierarchy of needs as sort of a beginning roadmap to say what matters and what doesn't Hit the top of the pyramid there, of course, is self-actualization.
Speaker 2:What does that mean? I say it's the fullest version of yourself, and I say it's the fullest version of your power. So, whatever that means, whatever your gifts are, whatever the things that you are talented at are realized and put to service to make the biggest impact. That's sort of the thing that we're all going towards, and then, when we have these automated tools that give us more reach and more power, that picture just shifts and grows and becomes something that is untethered by. Where's my next meal coming from? I got to have a paycheck, so I can't do that. So hopefully, there's more artistry, more creativeness, more experiential type of things where we're together because we want to be and we are willing to invest our attention, time, energy towards, and our lives will be way better as a result.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so. As we're wrapping up here, I would love for you to share any advice, any final thoughts you have that our audience should have either taken away or even just maybe is something we haven't touched on yet, but I feel like you laid out a lot of really cool drivers for people to take into consideration when they think about the impact they want to make in the spaces in which they serve. I'd love for you to share more.
Speaker 2:Sure. So the area that I'd like to shine a little bit of light on we touched briefly, but we were mainly focused on the person in the chair. The person's listening to us talk right now, and I think that's appropriate and good. That's where it all starts, but then, as it translates into impacting organizations, so if you're a leader in an organization, or you want to be a leader organization, or you start your own thing and you find people following you or you're hiring people, it's very difficult to sustain unless you have systems in place.
Speaker 2:You have to have something in place, a disciplined system that continually keeps this top of mind. Why? Because the things that are most urgent are going to always vie for your attention, whether they're important or not. The urgent things are like the baby birds in the nest, right, and if you're the mother Robin and you got to go get the worms, the baby birds do not care. They only know whether they're getting the worm. Anything else doesn't matter, and so this is a trap we can easily fall in, and so you need a system.
Speaker 2:You need something that allows you to continually nourish all those things we were just talking about, and so that's something that I would want to emphasize, the IA power protocol is such a system. It's the only one I know of that's like what it is, and so leaders have to continually nourish the best in their people, the things that are going to keep them moving in a psychologically healthy direction, in a way that's going to make them feel more and more fulfilled, more and more connected to the shared purpose, and that's how you get a culture of trust, a culture that can be based on merit, not transactions and political fightings and all the surface BS. We can get to the real true. I see you, I see who you really are and I see the beauty there and I appreciate you. No one is you and I see it, and I'm here as an ally to help you give that gift to the world in as powerful a way as possible, when that's the basic framework of our interactions.
Speaker 1:Now we are onto something and I love that you touched on meritocracy I've had some very interesting conversations recently still operates in the spirit of meritocracy and really amplifying the gifts the natural gifts that everyone brings in a way that allows them to be successful right. So, yes, you may have set the vision for where we're going, you might have even set the course, but trusting your team enough and that doesn't mean your direct reports. I need to emphasize that because I personally found that indirect leadership is probably one of the hardest but most rewarding, because that means you really have strength and relationships enough to influence people, enough to plant seeds for the vision, and that they bought in and they're willing to help move the needle where it needs to go. So I really need our audience to understand you have so much more opportunity than just having a title in your space If you are really building, investing in relationships that are going to help you and everyone else around you be elevated.
Speaker 2:And what you pointed to, latasha, I think is super important where you're a leader. If you're sitting in your chair and you have any sort of agency to do things, you're actually a leader because people are looking and so you can lead by example. You don't have to have authority, you can just go first and you can be loving towards people. I'm not talking about loving the emotion, I'm talking loving the action. What I mean by that is you're congruent with what is best for them and so you want the best outcome for the people around you and you're willing to take action and be honest and open and go first and be courageous to do those things that are going to help them in that way. That's the kind of leadership I think you were pointing to and I think we need more of it. Number one and those that do it are going to outdistance those that don't.
Speaker 1:Tom, thank you so much for spending time with us today. I think that this was an amazing conversation. Please tell everyone how they can get connected with you and the awesome work that you're doing.
Speaker 2:Sure, so Tom Dardick is my name and you can find me on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and those sorts of places. But the eye of power is you just go to eyeofpowercom. I built the model over the past few years but it's just being born into the world now as a solution for organizations and leaders to employ to systematically move their organizational culture to a place of greater mutual respect with a whole human approach. I think it's the way of the future. So I think for people that are forward thinking and want to build the organization of the 21st century, I think it's an indispensable tool to help speed their steps in that direction.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Thank you so much for joining us today. You're welcome.
