Speaker 1: Come to Mindful Leadership transforming lives with your hosts saying,
Speaker 1: this is where leadership meets purpose, presence, and passion. In
Speaker 1: today's fast paced, high pressure world, we face a leadership crisis.
Speaker 1: Too often, teams are led by managers who lack empathy, clarity,
Speaker 1: and vision, leaving individuals uninspired, disconnected, and underwelue. But it
Speaker 1: doesn't have to be this way. Great leadership isn't born,
Speaker 1: it's bill the endgame. Empower your leadership, inspire the world.
Speaker 1: Every week, join me, you're host saying, as we tackle
Speaker 1: the gaps in leadership and life coaching head on learning
Speaker 1: how mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and compassion can redefine success. This
Speaker 1: isn't just another podcast. It's a mission to fill the
Speaker 1: void left by in effective leadership. And it's not just
Speaker 1: about leadership and business. Life coaching for leaders and new
Speaker 1: executives is at heart of this journey. Ready to rise
Speaker 1: above the noise and lead with clarity, purpose, and impact.
Speaker 1: Join a global movement dedicated to reshaping the future of leadership,
Speaker 1: one my full moment at a time, Let's begin. Welcome
Speaker 1: back to another episode of Mindful Leadership podcast on the
Speaker 1: Transformation Network. The podcast where we turn your stress into strategy,
Speaker 1: overthinking into clarity, and over into momentum. I'm your host, Singh,
Speaker 1: the leadership coach who has watched a generation of brilliant
Speaker 1: people get quietly defeated, not by their competition, but by
Speaker 1: their notification. Put the phone face down where you can't
Speaker 1: see it. Light up right now, and that's part of
Speaker 1: today's listen, and let's spend next twenty eight minutes together.
Speaker 1: So let's begin today. I want to open with a
Speaker 1: picture I want you to tell I want you to
Speaker 1: tell me whether you have lived inside this particular picture.
Speaker 1: A leader I worked with, Elena, starts her day at
Speaker 1: seven forty in the morning, before the second sip of coffee.
Speaker 1: One thing happens. Our project slips a day, small thing,
Speaker 1: normal thing, but there is. Elena finds out through an email,
Speaker 1: then a Slack message about the same slip in two
Speaker 1: different channels, then our comment on ticket and GIRA. Then
Speaker 1: someone tags her on a dock in Confluence, asking if
Speaker 1: she saw the Slack did you see my message? One event,
Speaker 1: six notification, and Elena, being a conscious leader, responds to
Speaker 1: all six of them. She acknowledges the email thumbs up
Speaker 1: on Slack twice. She replies on the ticket, she answers
Speaker 1: the dog, she texts back, and by nine am she
Speaker 1: has processed the same eight words update six separate times,
Speaker 1: in six separate places, and she is already tired. This
Speaker 1: is not communication, my friends, This is denial of service,
Speaker 1: attack on a human nervous system. And nobody planned, no
Speaker 1: villain designed Elena's morning. It's just what happens when you
Speaker 1: board eleven tools together and let every one of them
Speaker 1: have your attention on demand, for free forever. Now Here
Speaker 1: is what I have come to believe, after a couple
Speaker 1: of years of watching leaders drown at their desks. You
Speaker 1: don't have an information problem. You have a same information
Speaker 1: six times problem. See twenty years ago, the scarce resource
Speaker 1: was information. Whoever could get it had the edge. Today, well,
Speaker 1: information is a fire hose bolted to your face. And
Speaker 1: the thing that's actually scarce, the thing every one of
Speaker 1: your tools is quietly chip mining is your attention, your
Speaker 1: capacity to hold on one thing in the mind long
Speaker 1: enough to think about. And friends, that attention does not
Speaker 1: just get spent, It gets fatigued. Every duplicate ping in
Speaker 1: a tiny packs on the finite account, and by mid afternoon,
Speaker 1: the account is overdrawn. That's why you can end a
Speaker 1: day in which you did nothing hard, nothing creative, nothing
Speaker 1: that matter, and still feel like you win ten rounds.
Speaker 1: You don't run out of time, you ran out of attention.
Speaker 1: There's a difference. Almost nobody budgets for it. And here
Speaker 1: is the cruel part, the part that makes this so
Speaker 1: hard to see. Each individual notification is very tiny. It's harmless.
Speaker 1: A single burst costs you almost nothing, which is exactly
Speaker 1: why you never fight it. Who declares who declares the
Speaker 1: war on a single bus? Right, But you don't get
Speaker 1: a single bus. You get two hundred, three hundred thousand
Speaker 1: a day, and the cost is not in any one
Speaker 1: of them. It is in the switching. Every time your
Speaker 1: attention is yanked from one thing to another, there is
Speaker 1: a tax to get paid. A few seconds wait where
Speaker 1: I was, and that tax paid two hundred times in
Speaker 1: most of a day. See death by negotiation. Death by
Speaker 1: notification is not one dramatic blow. It is a thousand
Speaker 1: tiny cuts. You get too busy to feel and sit
Speaker 1: on this, sit on this attention. Attention is the scariest
Speaker 1: leadership asset you own, and you're giving it away one
Speaker 1: notification at a time. So last week we opened the
Speaker 1: series The Conscious Operator with a framework called human and
Speaker 1: very first letter was to heart, a deliberate gap you
Speaker 1: put between the impulse and the tool. Well, this week
Speaker 1: we go straight at the hardest thing in the world
Speaker 1: to heart, not a tool, the noise or the shouting.
Speaker 1: It is the eleven apps convinced that what they have
Speaker 1: to say is most important thing you will hear today.
Speaker 1: Because here's the trap. Right when everything is shouting, the
Speaker 1: instinct is to listen harder, to scan faster, to check
Speaker 1: more often so you don't miss anything. And that instring,
Speaker 1: my friends, is exactly backwards. You cannot out listen a
Speaker 1: fire hose. What you need is not more listening, it
Speaker 1: is better filtering. You need a way to find one
Speaker 1: signal underneath all that duplicated noise. So today we are
Speaker 1: going to talk about another model that very easy to adopt.
Speaker 1: It is called sonar s O NAR silence observed name
Speaker 1: automatric claim. So sonat does not work by making more noise.
Speaker 1: It works by going quite sending out one clean pulse
Speaker 1: and listening what actually returns. That's the whole art of leading.
Speaker 1: In a loud word, so let me take you through it. Now,
Speaker 1: before the first letter, let me name the thing underneath
Speaker 1: all of this. There are two ways to sit inside
Speaker 1: the noise. The first is a flooded operator. The flooded
Speaker 1: operator treats everything, everything as a signal. Every red batch
Speaker 1: is an emergency, every tag is a summon. They are
Speaker 1: in their own minds being responsive, but what they are
Speaker 1: actually doing is letting eleven different tools take turns deciding
Speaker 1: what they think about next. My attention is not theirs anymore.
Speaker 1: It belongs to who a ping blast? That was Elena?
Speaker 1: That was Elena now. The second is the tuned operator,
Speaker 1: same eleven tools, same fire hose, but the tuned operator
Speaker 1: has a filter between the noise and the nervous system.
Speaker 1: They decide what deserves attention instead of letting the loudest
Speaker 1: batch decide for them. Now miss the fake emergencies and
Speaker 1: catch the real ones, because they can finally tell the difference.
Speaker 1: The difference between them is not discipline, It is not
Speaker 1: will power. It is five moves, and let me walk
Speaker 1: you through them. And by the way, before I do that,
Speaker 1: let me answer the fear I can already hear, because
Speaker 1: it is the thing that keeps most of flooded. And
Speaker 1: the question is saying, if I turn this off, I
Speaker 1: will miss something, and worse, people will think I'm slow, unresponsive,
Speaker 1: not on the top of it. Friends, I hear, I hear,
Speaker 1: and I want to be honest about the trade because
Speaker 1: it is real. So here is the truth underneath that fear.
Speaker 1: Responsiveness has quietly become performance, a way of providing care
Speaker 1: by answering fast from everywhere, at all hours. But answering
Speaker 1: fast is not the same as leading well. A leader
Speaker 1: who replies to everything in ninety seconds is not more
Speaker 1: valuable than a leader who relies to write things with
Speaker 1: her whole mind. They just look busier when over a
Speaker 1: quarter always on leader makes worse decisions, has thinner relationship
Speaker 1: burnt out faster while congluting themselves the whole way down
Speaker 1: to being so available. See, you're not choosing between responsiveness
Speaker 1: and absent. You're choosing between reactive to everything and present
Speaker 1: for what matters. Only one of those is leaders. So
Speaker 1: the first letter is silence and sonar, and it is
Speaker 1: the move that makes every other move possible. Because you
Speaker 1: cannot filter a signal, you are still flinching at. So
Speaker 1: every notification you have ever allowed is a standing invitation
Speaker 1: for a piece of software to interrupt your one human
Speaker 1: mind on its schedule, not yours. And most of us
Speaker 1: said yes to all of them once years ago, but
Speaker 1: they never revisited it. Your phone is running a decade
Speaker 1: of permissions you don't remember granting. Now. To silence the
Speaker 1: pings is to take back the one that matters most,
Speaker 1: who gets to interrupt you? And when not all of it,
Speaker 1: you don't go off grit. You just stopped letting a
Speaker 1: food delivery app and a project management tool have the
Speaker 1: same access to your attention as your children. I worked
Speaker 1: with an executive, Tom, head of operations, always strazzles, always
Speaker 1: a half bit behind in every meeting because his mind
Speaker 1: was on the phone, buzzing in his pocket. So I
Speaker 1: asked him how many apps could send him notification. He
Speaker 1: getsed well, so he said, okay, let's count, and we counted.
Speaker 1: It was fifty six. Fifty six different pieces of software
Speaker 1: had a standing key to his focus. We turned off
Speaker 1: forty of them in about nine minutes. Next week, he
Speaker 1: told me, in his own words, like somebody finally turned
Speaker 1: on a noise I did not know us on, and
Speaker 1: I want to precise about what Silence is not Silence
Speaker 1: is not disconnection. You're not becoming a hermit. You're not
Speaker 1: abandoning your team. You're simply moving from a world where
Speaker 1: everything can interrupt to a world where you decide what can.
Speaker 1: The information is all still there, waiting in the app
Speaker 1: whenever you choose to get to it. The only thing
Speaker 1: you're removing is the power of these applications to reach
Speaker 1: into your skull uninvited and reset your train of thought.
Speaker 1: That is not going dark, That is taking back to
Speaker 1: the door the practice of sys this today, open your
Speaker 1: notification settings, turn off every app that is not human
Speaker 1: being who might actually need you not later today, you
Speaker 1: will not miss what you think you will miss. The
Speaker 1: important things have a way of finding you. The noise
Speaker 1: is the only thing that needs us side. So silence
Speaker 1: the pings because you cannot hear the signal while fifty
Speaker 1: six apps are all clearing thoughts. The second level letter
Speaker 1: of sonar is observed, and this is a letter that
Speaker 1: names specific villain in Elena's morning. Not the volume of information,
Speaker 1: but the duplication of it now here is what almost
Speaker 1: nobody notices because it happens too fast. The same message
Speaker 1: reaches you through five doors, the email, the slack, the ticket,
Speaker 1: the dog, the text, keep going on, all carrying identical
Speaker 1: eight words, and our brain, blessed, does not go Ah,
Speaker 1: I've seen this. Your brain teaches every arrival as a
Speaker 1: fresh demand. Think about it. Your brain is treating every
Speaker 1: arrival as a fresh demand. You pay the attention tax
Speaker 1: five times, six times, seven times, depending on their apps,
Speaker 1: for one piece of news. So to observe the overlap
Speaker 1: is to start seeing the duplication as duplication. To notice
Speaker 1: that you're busy is not five problems. It is one
Speaker 1: problem wearing five costumes. And once you can see that,
Speaker 1: you can stop responding to costumes. I'll talk about an
Speaker 1: elder leader. Sophia swaid to me that she was drowning
Speaker 1: in decisions. We did an exercise for three days and
Speaker 1: locked every notification and where it comes from. When we
Speaker 1: sorter the lock, the truth was almost funny. She was
Speaker 1: not facing hundreds of things. She was facing about twenty things,
Speaker 1: each of which had an average ping of five times
Speaker 1: twenty real items one hundred notifications. She had been experiencing
Speaker 1: the echo as the event. So the practice for observing oh,
Speaker 1: is this the next time you feel buried? Take one
Speaker 1: hour of your inbox and channels and ask us single
Speaker 1: question of each time, is this a new thing or
Speaker 1: an echo of a thing is already handled? Pass out
Speaker 1: the echo. What's left? That's short, honest list in your
Speaker 1: actual day. The rest just noise, just noise, closing an
Speaker 1: impression of work, because a busy day is usually not
Speaker 1: five fires, it's one fire and four echoes. Onto the
Speaker 1: next letter of sonar and name the signal. This is
Speaker 1: the letter that turns filtering from a vague intention to
Speaker 1: actual decision. It is not in to silence and noise
Speaker 1: and spot the echoes. At some point you have to say,
Speaker 1: you have to say it out loud and in advance,
Speaker 1: what a real signal is for you, because if you
Speaker 1: don't define the signal, the loudest thing automatically become the signal,
Speaker 1: and loud and important are almost never the same thing.
Speaker 1: The genuinely urgent really shouts. It's trivial that arise in
Speaker 1: all caps. So to name the signal is to draw
Speaker 1: ahead of time the shortlist of things that actually deserve
Speaker 1: to reach you in the moment as it is happening,
Speaker 1: and to route everything else to a place you visit
Speaker 1: on your schedule, not application schedule. So I give leaders
Speaker 1: a simple version of this, the three channel rule. Big
Speaker 1: three channels through which a real now level signal is
Speaker 1: allowed to reach you life. Everything else become something you
Speaker 1: check at times, the male in a mailbox, not a
Speaker 1: stranger banging on the door. So I worked with Raj.
Speaker 1: He ran his whole life on the assumption that everything
Speaker 1: is urgent, so everything got like access. Now when we
Speaker 1: name his actual signals, the list was almost embarrassing. This
Speaker 1: shot a direct message from three specific people, one system
Speaker 1: download and his family. That was it. Everything else, every dashboard,
Speaker 1: every you know, FYI, every thoughts could wait for a
Speaker 1: scheduled window. So his anxiety, he told me, dropped by
Speaker 1: half a week, just in a week, not because there
Speaker 1: was less to do, because he finally knew what he
Speaker 1: was actually listening for. And notice what Rus discovered, because
Speaker 1: it is the thing nobody expects. When you name your
Speaker 1: rear signals and rout everything else into a scheduled window,
Speaker 1: you don't become less informed. You become more informed because
Speaker 1: now you actually read the fyiyes when you open them,
Speaker 1: instead of half swept fiping then away between the meetings,
Speaker 1: right scheduled attention is deep attention, but inter driven attention
Speaker 1: is very shallow. Every single time you are never really
Speaker 1: absorbing the firehouse, the fires anyway, You're just getting wet.
Speaker 1: So the practice for N is right, the three channels,
Speaker 1: only three through which something is allowed to interrupt you
Speaker 1: in real time. Everything else goes in a box you
Speaker 1: open on purpose. If you can't get to three, I
Speaker 1: promise you you haven't named your signal yet. You've just
Speaker 1: been calling everything urgent, So don't have to choose. You're
Speaker 1: phasing to choose, because if you don't decide what deserves
Speaker 1: your attention, the loudest notification will decide that for you. Metal.
Speaker 1: Now we get to the next letter A, that is
Speaker 1: automate the aggregation. And this is where machine finally earns
Speaker 1: its key, because this is one part of the whole problem.
Speaker 1: AI is genuinely spective, spectacularly very very very good at this.
Speaker 1: So remember last week the conscious operator gives the machine
Speaker 1: the machine's work. Well, this is the machine's work, shifting
Speaker 1: a fire hose, collapsing duplicates, summarizing forty messages into four lines,
Speaker 1: watching six tools at once, and handling you the one
Speaker 1: thing that actually needs a human. A machine will do
Speaker 1: that tirelessly at three in the morning, without getting tired
Speaker 1: or reasonful. You should not be the human duplication engine
Speaker 1: for your own tool stack. That is a job for Silicon.
Speaker 1: I'll be honest with you about my own setup because
Speaker 1: I practice this. I built. I have built automations that
Speaker 1: sit quietly across my tools, my chat, my tickets, my dogs,
Speaker 1: and every hour they aggregate everything that came in, ship
Speaker 1: out the duplicates and hand me one clean digest one.
Speaker 1: Instead of me visiting fifteen apps and paying their attention
Speaker 1: tax fifteen times, now the machine visits the fifteen apps
Speaker 1: and pays nothing, and I get to read just one page.
Speaker 1: The tools still shower. I just don't hear them anymore.
Speaker 1: I hear the summary, And if you want to get
Speaker 1: more information about it, you can go to www. Dot
Speaker 1: the Seamless method dot com and then think about what
Speaker 1: inwards the default and invent. The one you I like
Speaker 1: living in right now is that you serve your tools.
Speaker 1: You go to them, you check them, you tend them
Speaker 1: all day like a shift worker minding eleven machines that
Speaker 1: each ring a bell when they want. But the automation,
Speaker 1: the automating the aggregation flips it. Now the tools serve you.
Speaker 1: They report to a machine. The machine reports to you
Speaker 1: once an hour, and you have gone from being the
Speaker 1: operator on the floor to being the person the floor
Speaker 1: reports up to. That is not protectivity hat. That is
Speaker 1: a change in who works for home, and it is
Speaker 1: available to you this week without tretting a line of code,
Speaker 1: just by putting a summarizer between you and the loudest
Speaker 1: channel in your life. I worked with a solop in
Speaker 1: your recently, Nadyea. I did a simple version with no
Speaker 1: injuring at all, just a habit. Instead of living inside
Speaker 1: her channel all day, she had the machine summarize each
Speaker 1: thread before she opened it. So we walked into every
Speaker 1: conversation already doing the signal same information. A tenth of
Speaker 1: attention spent getting it getting to it, and all that
Speaker 1: reclaimed attention went where it blocks into the actual thinking
Speaker 1: you should be doing. So the practice for a is
Speaker 1: take one channel that floods you worst this week. Put
Speaker 1: a machine between you and your attention. So put a
Speaker 1: machine between the tooth and your attention. Now, even just
Speaker 1: giving and having an AI summarize the thread before you
Speaker 1: dive in, let the machine. Wade into the noise so
Speaker 1: you can walk into the signal, because being the human
Speaker 1: filter for your own fire hose is not diligence. It
Speaker 1: is machines job. It's a machine job that you have
Speaker 1: already subscribed. Okay. So then the fifth letter and the
Speaker 1: last one is to reclaim the room. And this is
Speaker 1: one that turns a productivity tactic into act of leadership
Speaker 1: because here is the point of all of this. You
Speaker 1: do not silence the noise. You do not silence the
Speaker 1: noise so you can cram in motis. You silence the
Speaker 1: noise so you can be fully present, fully present for
Speaker 1: the few things that actually require a human being. See,
Speaker 1: the reclaimed attention is not meant to be respent on
Speaker 1: more inputs. It is meant to be poured into room
Speaker 1: you actually in. Think about what the noise steals. Not
Speaker 1: just your focus, it steals your presence. The leader who
Speaker 1: is half checking a phone in a one on one
Speaker 1: is not saving time. They're quietly telling the person across
Speaker 1: from them that a notification might matter more than they do.
Speaker 1: And believe me, people feel that. They always feel it.
Speaker 1: You think you are being subtle glancing down, they know
Speaker 1: exactly where your attention went, and a little bit of
Speaker 1: their trust goes with it. Every time you do it,
Speaker 1: you're drowning their trust. So the attention you protect from
Speaker 1: your apps is exact attention you get to give to
Speaker 1: your people. That trade is the whole game talking about
Speaker 1: bring her back that I started with the show. She
Speaker 1: silenced the pings, observed the overlap, named the three signals,
Speaker 1: and automated the aggregation. And the thing that she told
Speaker 1: me at end of the month had nothing to do
Speaker 1: with productive. She said, sing the first time in two years,
Speaker 1: I was fully in my daughter's recite. Not happened all
Speaker 1: the way because for once, nothing in your pocket was
Speaker 1: allowed to shout. So practice for our the practice for
Speaker 1: our is take the attention you reclaim this week, Spend
Speaker 1: it deliberately on one thing that deserves your whole self,
Speaker 1: one conversation, one decision, one person, with every device silenced,
Speaker 1: protect the room, then be all the way in. Because
Speaker 1: attention you refuse to give your apps exact, exact attention
Speaker 1: you get to give to the people who actually matter. Right,
Speaker 1: So here's the reframe I want to live you with.
Speaker 1: In a world engineered to shout at you come is
Speaker 1: not personality trade. It is leadership skill and it is
Speaker 1: a build thing. You don't find focus lying around you
Speaker 1: construct it on purpose by deciding what gets to reach
Speaker 1: you and what does not see. The question was never
Speaker 1: how do I keep up with all of it? It's
Speaker 1: a fire hose. It was designed to be keep up
Speaker 1: with able. That's a new word. The real question is
Speaker 1: what am I actually listening for? And how do I
Speaker 1: quite everything that isn't there? That's the world silence, observe, name, automate,
Speaker 1: and declaim five moves between you and the noise. So
Speaker 1: now here's the deeper thing. Silencing the noise is only
Speaker 1: half the world. The other half is knowing what you
Speaker 1: are training to hear in the first place. Because most
Speaker 1: readers don't just have a noise problem, they have a
Speaker 1: signal problem. They are never precisely named. That matters most
Speaker 1: of them. So everything sounds equally loved. That's why I
Speaker 1: want you to take the Purpose factor Assessment. It is
Speaker 1: a free twenty five minute science back diagnostics that reveals
Speaker 1: what truly drives you, what consistently drains you, and blind
Speaker 1: spots your team feels but you don't see. Once you have,
Speaker 1: once you know your own signal that kind of precision,
Speaker 1: the noise gets easy to cut because you finally know
Speaker 1: exactly what you're listening for. Thank you for spending this
Speaker 1: quiet with me. Keep breathing, keep protecting your attention and
Speaker 1: like it's the leadership asset is it is actually in,
Speaker 1: I'm saying, and you're watching Mindful Leadership Transforming Lives on
Speaker 1: the Transformation Network. I'll see you in the next episode.
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 explode the transformative power
Speaker 1: of mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and authentic leadership. Tune in every
Speaker 1: week on transformationtop radio dot com at noon Pacific on Tuesdays,
Speaker 1: where we will continue to explore how mindful leadership can
Speaker 1: create a ripple effect of positive changes in your life
Speaker 1: and lives of those who influence. This show is dedicated
Speaker 1: to helping you lead the purpose, presence, and passion, whether
Speaker 1: you're navigating the complexities of business, building strong connection with
Speaker 1: your team, or striving to make a meaningful impact in
Speaker 1: the world around you. To learn more about the show,
Speaker 1: access additional resources, or live deepot visit saying powerupcoach dot com. Remember,
Speaker 1: leadership isn't just about what you do, It's about who
Speaker 1: you are. Let's continue to transform lives together, one mindful
Speaker 1: moment at a time. See you next week.