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Speaker 2: Welcome back to another episode of the Mindful Leadership podcast
Speaker 2: on the Transformation Network. The podcast where we turn stress
Speaker 2: into strategy, overthinking into clarity, and overwhelm into momentum. I'm
Speaker 2: your host, sing the leadership coach who has learned the
Speaker 2: hard way that the fastest decision and the best decisions
Speaker 2: are almost never the same decision. So pour something warm,
Speaker 2: put your phone face down someway you can't see it
Speaker 2: light up, and let's spend the next twenty five minutes
Speaker 2: on one feeling I think costs good leaders mostly than
Speaker 2: anything else in their life. Let's begin. I want to
Speaker 2: open with a picture, and I want you to tell
Speaker 2: me whether you have lived inside it. It is Friday afternoon,
Speaker 2: four forty seven pm, you're living in thirteen minutes, your
Speaker 2: phone buzzes. It's your second in command and the message reads,
Speaker 2: need a call, quick decision before Monday. You step into
Speaker 2: an empty conference room, jacket already on, take the call,
Speaker 2: listen for about ninety seconds, and then, because you are
Speaker 2: a competent leader who makes decisions and does not flinch,
Speaker 2: and has built fifteen years of reputation on moving fast,
Speaker 2: you make the call right there on the phone, with
Speaker 2: your hand on the door. And then it is Sunday
Speaker 2: night and you cannot stop thinking about it. Not because
Speaker 2: the decision was reckless. It probably was not. Your instincts
Speaker 2: are good. They have earned their keep for fifteen years.
Speaker 2: But somewhere between the buzz of that phone and the
Speaker 2: click of the lock on the conference room door, you
Speaker 2: skipped something. You don't know what. You just know that
Speaker 2: the thing you've decided in ninety seconds is now going
Speaker 2: to ripple through the lives of seven people, three teams,
Speaker 2: and one customer, and you are not entirely sure how
Speaker 2: you would make the same call with one more cup
Speaker 2: of coffee and one more hour. That feeling, that quite
Speaker 2: undertow feeling at nine point forty seven on a Sunday night,
Speaker 2: is what this whole episode is about today. Because here
Speaker 2: is what I have come to believe, after sitting in
Speaker 2: rooms with several hundred leaders across a couple of decades.
Speaker 2: The decisions that hurt you are not almost never the
Speaker 2: once you got wrong on the merits. The decisions that
Speaker 2: hit you are the once you made on the wrong path,
Speaker 2: The once you sprinted you sprinted through when the momentum
Speaker 2: called for a walk, the once where speed of the
Speaker 2: answer mattered more to you than the integrity of the
Speaker 2: road you took to reach it. Speed is a value,
Speaker 2: so is care, and almost every leader under pressure defaults
Speaker 2: to one and forgets the other exists. Today, I want
Speaker 2: to give you a way to remember both four letters,
Speaker 2: a framework I call path, and a promise that doubles
Speaker 2: as tigline. Stay on the path to mindful and ethical decisions. Now,
Speaker 2: before I walk you through the letters, I want to
Speaker 2: bring three people into the room with us, because I
Speaker 2: don't want you to think this is you problem, or
Speaker 2: this is one industry problem. It is a leadership problem,
Speaker 2: and it wears different costumes in every building. The first
Speaker 2: let's call her Aisha, CEO of a mid size health
Speaker 2: tech company, board driven, growing fast under constant deal pressure.
Speaker 2: She came to me and said, almost as a confession,
Speaker 2: seeing I have to not I have not made a
Speaker 2: single decision in six months that I actually got to
Speaker 2: think about reactive sy every day. We'll come back to
Speaker 2: what she did about it. The second leader, let's call
Speaker 2: him Thomas, head of engineering at a fintech form, Brilliant, decisive,
Speaker 2: the kind of leader whose decisions are usually right and
Speaker 2: usually fast. He was about to make a hire that
Speaker 2: looked completely obvious, and it nearly cost him his best
Speaker 2: engineer and we'll get to that one too. And third,
Speaker 2: let's call her Anika, head of operations at a manufacturing company.
Speaker 2: She had made one of the hardest calls as a
Speaker 2: leader ever, a layoff, and she made it well, ethically, clearly,
Speaker 2: And three months later she was sitting across from me
Speaker 2: in a state of quiet moral distress, saying a sentence
Speaker 2: I will never forget, and we'll get there too. Three leaders,
Speaker 2: a CEO and engineer and operator, three different worlds, the
Speaker 2: exact same folk running underneath all of them, the folk
Speaker 2: between the decision that is fast and the decision you
Speaker 2: still stay behind on Monday morning. So let's get back
Speaker 2: to the four letter's part stay on, part too mindful
Speaker 2: ethical decisions. Four letters, four pauses a walking pace, not
Speaker 2: a sprint, and not a stall by any chance. And
Speaker 2: let me take you through it now before the first letter,
Speaker 2: I need to name the thing underneath all of this,
Speaker 2: because if you miss it, the framework will not work. Now,
Speaker 2: there are two speechs of leadership, and the trap is
Speaker 2: believing only one of them counts. The first is reactive
Speaker 2: speed phone rings, email lands. Someone walks into your office,
Speaker 2: you answer the in email, really you speed in non
Speaker 2: negotiation right. If you cannot operate here, you cannot lead
Speaker 2: in the modern economy. Reactive speed is what makes you
Speaker 2: useful in crisis. Now the second. The second is reflective speed.
Speaker 2: Same phone, same emails, same person in your doorway. But
Speaker 2: now you have given yourself thirty seconds or three minutes
Speaker 2: or three hours sized to the weight of the call.
Speaker 2: You're not delaying. You are recalibrating because you respond. Reflective
Speaker 2: speed is what makes you useful in a strategy. Now,
Speaker 2: the leaders I watched burnout, the ones whose Monday regret
Speaker 2: spile up into Friday resentment, live almost entirely in the
Speaker 2: first gear, and they forget the second one exists, or
Speaker 2: rather they remember it on Sunday night alone, when the
Speaker 2: gearshift is twelve hours too late. That was Asha exactly.
Speaker 2: She was not a bad decision maker. She was a
Speaker 2: leader who had never once been allowed to use her
Speaker 2: second gear. Every call arrived hot and let fast, and
Speaker 2: she experienced her own competence as a kind of trap.
Speaker 2: The path is how you make the shift to reflective
Speaker 2: speed small enough to actually do in the middle of
Speaker 2: a loud week. Four letters, four small pauses, a walking
Speaker 2: pace you can keep even when the building is on fire.
Speaker 2: So let me take you through the buzzing phone buzzing,
Speaker 2: and jacket is already on right. So the first one
Speaker 2: is pause for clarity, pat eight pass pause for clarity.
Speaker 2: And I want to start by saying what pause is not.
Speaker 2: Pause is not procrastination, Pause is not paralysis. Pause is
Speaker 2: not three more days of meeting before you decide. Pause
Speaker 2: is framework. It is a deliberate creation of a small gap,
Speaker 2: sometimes ninety seconds, sometimes ninety minutes between the moment a
Speaker 2: situation arrives and the moment you respond to it. See
Speaker 2: in that gap, three things happen, whether you orchestrate them
Speaker 2: or not. Your nervous system settles, your prefrontal cotex catches
Speaker 2: up to your limbic system, and your sense of actual
Speaker 2: question you're asking comes into focus. Because here is what
Speaker 2: I have learned watching bad decisions as at senior levels.
Speaker 2: They are almost never bad analysis. They're good analysis of
Speaker 2: the wrong question. The team walks in asking should we
Speaker 2: do A or B? And the real decision in front
Speaker 2: of the leader is are we even trying to do
Speaker 2: the right thing that A and B were both built
Speaker 2: to serve. See, the pause is what gives you the
Speaker 2: chance to notice you're about to brilliantly answer the question
Speaker 2: you were handed instead of the one that actually matters. Now,
Speaker 2: the mindfulness practice here is almost embarrassingly small. Three breadths
Speaker 2: that's it, before you answer the email, before you say
Speaker 2: yes in the meeting, before you walked into the conversation.
Speaker 2: Three breadth in through the nose, out through your mouth,
Speaker 2: and one quite question to yourself, what am I actually
Speaker 2: being asked to decide? This is where I share started.
Speaker 2: We ran on experiment and it was almost insult insultingly
Speaker 2: very simple right For thirty days before she answered any
Speaker 2: decision great email, she wrote a single line at top
Speaker 2: of her own draft, a line she would later delete
Speaker 2: that no one else would ever see. And the line was,
Speaker 2: what is this actually about? That was the entire intervention
Speaker 2: thirty days, One sentence she wrote to herself, and it raised.
Speaker 2: By week two, she had quietly killed three projects that
Speaker 2: had been draining her organization for a year. Projects she
Speaker 2: had kept alive purely because every conversation about them had
Speaker 2: happen and at a reactive speed, and no one ever
Speaker 2: paused long enough to ask whether they still mattered. By
Speaker 2: week four, she had renegotiated two board commitments that had
Speaker 2: been pushed onto her in moments of fast jacket on
Speaker 2: decision making. She didn't slow down, She just stopped sprinting
Speaker 2: in the dark. Now the practice for the letter P
Speaker 2: is this for the next real decision. Before you respond,
Speaker 2: create one deliberate gap three breadth. Then question what am
Speaker 2: I actually being asked to decide? Here? Not the surface quession,
Speaker 2: the real one underneath it. So pause for clarity, because
Speaker 2: the most expensive mistake a leader makes is not wrong answer.
Speaker 2: It is the flawless answer to a question that was
Speaker 2: never the point. Now the second letter address bias, and
Speaker 2: I wanted to hear the verb because it is doing
Speaker 2: real work. We are not acknowledging bias a polite nod
Speaker 2: at a diversity workshop. We are addressing it. We are
Speaker 2: turning toward it and putting our hand on it. And
Speaker 2: here's the rule I keep coming back to, Bias does
Speaker 2: not announce itself. Bias now shows up wearing a name.
Speaker 2: Bias arrives wearing the costume of common sense. It is
Speaker 2: the data point you didn't even register as a choice, because,
Speaker 2: of course we had hired from the top schools. Of
Speaker 2: course we got promoted the high performers. Of course, we
Speaker 2: have killed that experiment. Of course, the senior person is right,
Speaker 2: of course, the loudest wars in the room is the
Speaker 2: best informed one. Of course. Of course, of course, and
Speaker 2: every of course is a bias wearing uniform. To address
Speaker 2: bias is to take that decision in front of you
Speaker 2: and ask deliberately, what am it treating as obvious? Here
Speaker 2: that might not be? You had one assumption up to
Speaker 2: the light, just one. You don't have to dismantle the
Speaker 2: whole decision. No, you just have to test the one
Speaker 2: beam you think you've been leaning on the hardest. Now,
Speaker 2: this is where Thomas lived. Remember, a head of engineering
Speaker 2: fintech form the decisive one. So he had an open
Speaker 2: VPI role and a candidate he was about to recommend
Speaker 2: an internal high performer. Well like technically excellent. The decision
Speaker 2: looked obvious, of course, and it practically made sense. And
Speaker 2: I asked him one question, what this obvious thing about
Speaker 2: this hire that you haven't actually examined. He sat with
Speaker 2: it for a couple of days, and then he quietly said,
Speaker 2: I'm assuming this person wants the role. That was it?
Speaker 2: He had never asked her. He had assumed because she
Speaker 2: was a high performer and the role was a promotion,
Speaker 2: So in his mind, a promotion is something every high
Speaker 2: performer wants. He had a one on one with her
Speaker 2: next morning, and it turned out she did not want
Speaker 2: the VP job at all. She wanted to go deeper
Speaker 2: on technical architecture, not broader on people management. You see,
Speaker 2: Thomas was about to promote his best engineer into a
Speaker 2: role she did not want, lose her insight twelve months
Speaker 2: and then explain it to her himself as a culture
Speaker 2: problem or a compensation problem, anything but the truth, which
Speaker 2: was that he had never run the most basic check
Speaker 2: on his own assumption. Bias was not malicious. It was
Speaker 2: load bearing. See the whole decision was resting on it,
Speaker 2: and he only found out because he addressed it. So
Speaker 2: the practice for a is this. The next time a
Speaker 2: decision feels obvious, write down three things you are treating
Speaker 2: as given. Then circle one the one year would be
Speaker 2: most uncomfortable to discover you're wrong about, and ask yourself,
Speaker 2: with a straight face, what if I'm wrong about this
Speaker 2: one assumption. See that single question will catch more back
Speaker 2: decisions than any dashboard you have ever built. Address the bias,
Speaker 2: especially the one wearing common sense clothing, standing exactly where
Speaker 2: you have stopped looking. And especially in today's AI world,
Speaker 2: the bias gets introduced the first time the first sentence
Speaker 2: of a code of an application was written. Bias gets
Speaker 2: introduced the first time somebody pulled up chargipity, accraud and
Speaker 2: write that first question. Because we are limited to the
Speaker 2: knowledge that we have, the experience that we have. And
Speaker 2: that's where addressing the bias becomes important, and it ties
Speaker 2: to the values. That's the third letter ties to the value.
Speaker 2: And this one, more than any of others, is the
Speaker 2: letter that decides whether your Monday's self respects you fride yourself.
Speaker 2: And here's what I mean. Every meaningful decision, underneath everything
Speaker 2: is a value decision. We pretend otherwise. We dress it
Speaker 2: up in a financial language, strategic language, operational language because
Speaker 2: values language feels soft in a boardroom. But peel back
Speaker 2: the layers and almost every hard call comes down to
Speaker 2: one question, which are the things we say we care about?
Speaker 2: Are we actually willing to choose right now when we
Speaker 2: cannot have both speed or quality, growth or sustainability, loyalty
Speaker 2: or merit the customer or the employee, the short term
Speaker 2: or the long term, the family or the company. Now,
Speaker 2: these are not abstract debates for a leadership offsite. These
Speaker 2: are actual folks in actual road on a Friday afternoon
Speaker 2: when the actual phone rings. Now, to tie to values
Speaker 2: is to make the values choice visible to yourself before
Speaker 2: you make it. You name it in a single sentence.
Speaker 2: Is this decision? Is this decision I'm choosing. I'm choosing
Speaker 2: this value over that one because of this outlawed on
Speaker 2: a paper or to a t trusted person. In this decision,
Speaker 2: I am choosing this value over that one because of this.
Speaker 2: And the reason this matters has almost nothing to do
Speaker 2: with ethics, theater, and everything to do with regrid prevention believing,
Speaker 2: which brings me to Anika. Remember the head of operations
Speaker 2: in the manufacturing company. She had to lay off about
Speaker 2: eighty percent of her staff. She did it well, carefully, humanly,
Speaker 2: but every external measure it was clean, defensible, well handed
Speaker 2: decision by any measure. And three months later she was
Speaker 2: in front of me and she said the sentence I
Speaker 2: totally never forget. She said, I don't think I did
Speaker 2: the wrong thing, but I feel like I did. So
Speaker 2: we pulled the decision apart slowly and What we found
Speaker 2: was this, she had made the call quickly, well ethically,
Speaker 2: and she had never, in any single moment, named to
Speaker 2: herself which value she was choosing. She had chosen the
Speaker 2: long term health of the company over short term security
Speaker 2: of the team. It was defensible choice, maybe the right one,
Speaker 2: but because she had never spoken it not allowed, not
Speaker 2: even to her own reflection. Her conscience had quietly filled
Speaker 2: the layoff under something that happened to be instead of
Speaker 2: something I choose. See layoff under something that happened to
Speaker 2: me instead of something I chose. And a thing that
Speaker 2: happens to you that you cannot account for sits in
Speaker 2: the body like a splinter. We did not under the decision.
Speaker 2: We could not, and we should not have. We just
Speaker 2: named it outlaw together. I chose the long term viability
Speaker 2: of the organization over immediate stability of those eight percent.
Speaker 2: I believe that was a right call, and I am
Speaker 2: responsible for it. See the distress lifted within the week,
Speaker 2: not because decision changed, it did not, but because she
Speaker 2: finally owned it instead of being haunted by it. And
Speaker 2: that is the secret of TEA. The decision that leaders.
Speaker 2: There's not rest at night right. It gives people up
Speaker 2: at night, always the ones where the value teed of
Speaker 2: was real but went unnamed. See the leader chose growth
Speaker 2: over people, or speed over quality, or loyalty over merit,
Speaker 2: and choose it in the dark, so when consequences show
Speaker 2: up two months later, they experience it as a betrayal,
Speaker 2: as a betrayal of who they thought they were. And
Speaker 2: when in fact they made the choice, they just never
Speaker 2: said it out loud, so it never felt like theirs. Now,
Speaker 2: the practice for t is this. On your next weighted decision,
Speaker 2: finish one sentence before you add I am choosing this
Speaker 2: over that. And the reason is this, Say to a person,
Speaker 2: write it on a page, or yourself on a mirror,
Speaker 2: and make the invisible trade visible. Try to values because
Speaker 2: a trade off you name is a decision you can
Speaker 2: live with, and a trade off you hide is a
Speaker 2: splinter you're going to carry. Now that brings me to
Speaker 2: the fourth letter, to harness insights, and the verbe is
Speaker 2: doing the work again, Not gather insights, not collect them,
Speaker 2: harness them, put them in service of call without letting
Speaker 2: them take the wheel. Because here's the thing. By the
Speaker 2: time you reach the h you usually have plenty of insights,
Speaker 2: data reports, custo feedback, your team, guard your own scar tissues.
Speaker 2: The problem is almost never a shortage of insight. The
Speaker 2: problem is what you do with it in the final stretch.
Speaker 2: And they are two failure modes icee, and they're perfect
Speaker 2: mirror images of each other. Failure mode one. The leader
Speaker 2: treats that data as decisive. They hand the decision to
Speaker 2: a spread spreadsheet. The numbers say, they announce, and they
Speaker 2: let the numbers carry the morale weight that was supposed
Speaker 2: to be theirs. But the data is never decisive. The
Speaker 2: data is decision great input, you are still the one
Speaker 2: making the call. A number cannot be brave for right
Speaker 2: And failure number two failure more two. The leaders treat
Speaker 2: data as decorative. They decide on instant on relationship, on gut,
Speaker 2: and then go fishing for data dashboard slides that confirm
Speaker 2: what they were always going to do. See, the data
Speaker 2: is not validating them, it is being used by them.
Speaker 2: And here is the part they forget. Their team can
Speaker 2: smell the difference across the building. So harnessing insight mindfully
Speaker 2: is the part between those two. You bring the data
Speaker 2: to the decision before you side, you let it actually
Speaker 2: challenge you, you wage it against your values out loud,
Speaker 2: and then you make the final call as a human
Speaker 2: who held both, not as a calculator, not at a
Speaker 2: magician pulling a prea chosen answer out of hand. So
Speaker 2: let me bring these three leaders back for this one briefly,
Speaker 2: because H is where you can see the difference most clearly.
Speaker 2: The leader who only ever runs H is ayesha on
Speaker 2: a bad day, differing to board deck, letting the numbers
Speaker 2: decide so she doesn't have to. The leader who skips
Speaker 2: H and fakes it is the one who builds slide
Speaker 2: to justify the gut call. But the leader who on
Speaker 2: his picture Thomas the morning after his one on one,
Speaker 2: he now had data on his side. His engineer wants depth,
Speaker 2: not breadth. He had a value on the other side
Speaker 2: to genuinely want to grow her career, and instead of
Speaker 2: letting either one decide, he reshipped the whole decision. He
Speaker 2: didn't promote her into management. He built her a principal
Speaker 2: architect track and that hadn't existed the day before. The
Speaker 2: data informed it, the value shaped it. He made the
Speaker 2: call as a leader, not as a chart, not as
Speaker 2: a hunch. So that is how you harness inside, not
Speaker 2: a verdict, not a costume, as a companion to the
Speaker 2: call and the practice of which is this. On your
Speaker 2: next big decision, write the data on one side of
Speaker 2: the page and the values on the other side, and
Speaker 2: then at the bottom, by hand, finish the sentence. As
Speaker 2: the leader, I'm choosing this because of this, Writing it
Speaker 2: out by hand will surface ninety percent of mindfulness in
Speaker 2: your thinking before you take a single action. Harness insights
Speaker 2: make them work for decisions, never in place of it.
Speaker 2: The data is decision great input, but you are the
Speaker 2: one who has to be brave to be able to
Speaker 2: do that. Now, there are two common pitfalls treating pause
Speaker 2: as permission to stop possible. Clarity is not I will
Speaker 2: think about it for two weeks. It is deliberate finite
Speaker 2: gap if the catch. If you catch your subfusing path
Speaker 2: as a way to avoid the decision rather than improve it,
Speaker 2: you have wandered off the path. The pause has a
Speaker 2: beginning and an end. The decision still gets made, it's
Speaker 2: just made better. And pitfall number two, skipping the tea
Speaker 2: because it feels too soft. This is the most conistic
Speaker 2: leaders make with this framework, and I want to name
Speaker 2: it plainly. The pause feels productive, the bias checks feel rigorously,
Speaker 2: The inside harnesses feels analytically. So leaders run three of
Speaker 2: four letters and quietly drop the values one because naming
Speaker 2: a value out loud feels exposed in a way that
Speaker 2: running un numbered does not. So don't. The tea is
Speaker 2: the load bearing letter. It is the entire difference between
Speaker 2: a competent decision and decision. You can sleep next to
Speaker 2: so and if you're listening to this and realize that
Speaker 2: the decision you are walking through path are revealing something deeper,
Speaker 2: something about what you are actually pointed at as a leader,
Speaker 2: that is exactly the terrain the purpose factor assessment was
Speaker 2: built to make. Because notice what was underneath all three
Speaker 2: of our leaders tonight right. Aisha couldn't pause because she
Speaker 2: had lost the thread of what she was even deciding
Speaker 2: towards Thomas Miss's assumptions because he hasn't asked what his
Speaker 2: engineer was for. And Anika, distressed wasn't about layoff. It
Speaker 2: was a value she held but had never made conscious.
Speaker 2: In every case, the path got clearer the moment the
Speaker 2: purpose underneath got clear. So DM me the word mindful
Speaker 2: path on the Linkeodlin and I'll send you a link
Speaker 2: to this. So part is how you remember the second
Speaker 2: year when the whole world is pushing you to live
Speaker 2: in the first For clarity, address the bias, tie to values, hardness,
Speaker 2: the insights, four letters, one walking pace, Monday self that
Speaker 2: reflects Friday choices. I'll see you next week. Thanks for
Speaker 2: listening Mindful Leadership Transforming Lives on the Transformation Network. I
Speaker 2: am your host, saying and lead mindfully.
Speaker 1: Thank you for watching Mindful Leadership Transforming Lives with me,
Speaker 1: Your host is saying, we are honored to have you
Speaker 1: join us on this journey to explore the transformative power
Speaker 1: of mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and authentic leadership. Tune in every
Speaker 1: week on Transformation Took Radio dot com at noon Pacific
Speaker 1: on Tuesdays, where we will continue to explore how mindful
Speaker 1: leadership can create a ripple effect of positive changes in
Speaker 1: your life and lives of those who influence. This show
Speaker 1: is dedicated to helping you lead purpose, presence, and passion,
Speaker 1: whether you're navigating the complexities of business, building stronger connection
Speaker 1: with your team, or striving to make a meaningful impact
Speaker 1: in the world around you. To learn more about the
Speaker 1: show access additional resources or live deepot visit saying powerupoach
Speaker 1: dot com. Remember leadership isn't just about what you do,
Speaker 1: It's about who you are. Let's continue to transform lives together,
Speaker 1: one mindful moment at a time.
Speaker 2: See you next week.