High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 626: How to Build Teams, Accelerate Growth and Banish Burnout with Annie Hyman Pratt, Executive Consultant, Founder & Author

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Annie Hyman Pratt, Founder and CEO of Leading Edge Teams, is an integrative business expert with decades of distinctive experience. She has dedicated her career to providing, trusted, high-level executive consulting and training. Annie develops and leads change regarding a company’s business strategies, leadership, teams, and operations. She is a sought after C-Suite consultant for CEOs, CFOs, and COOs. Annie is the author of “The People Part: Seven Agreements Entrepreneurs and Leaders Make to Build Teams, Accelerate Growth, and Banish Burnout for Good.”  In this episode, Annie and Cindra talk about: Her 7 Agreements  The CCORE Empowered Process How to Build High-Trust Relationships Why it is important to “Recognize, Regulate, and Resolve” The ACE Agreement-Making Process And, new strategies for your Leadership Toolbox   LEARN MORE ABOUT DR. CINDRA LEARN MORE ABOUT ANNIE FOLLOW SIGN UP FOR THE FREE MENTAL BREAKTHROUGH CALL WITH CINDRA’S TEAM TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE MENTALLY STRONG INSTITUTE Love the show? Rate and review the show to help us reach more and more people. We appreciate you!  

Welcome to episode 626. This is your host, Dr. Sindhara Kampoff, and thank you so much for joining me today for the episode where I interview Annie Hyman Pratt, who's the author of The People Part, Seven Agreements Entrepreneurs and Leaders Make to Build Teams, Accelerate Growth, and Banish Burnout for Good. Annie is also the founder and CEO of Leading Edge Teams, and she is an integrative business expert with decades of experience. She develops and leads change regarding a company's business strategies, leadership, teams, and operations, and she's a sought-after C-suite consultant for CEOs, CFOs, and COOs. In this episode, Annie and I talk about her seven agreements that you can use to build teams, accelerate growth, and banish burnout for good. We also talk about her core

empowered process, how you can build high trust relationships, why it's important to recognize, regulate, and resolve. We also talk about the ACE agreement-making process, and we provide new strategies that you can use in your leadership toolkit. If you enjoyed today's episode, I'd love for you to leave us a rating and review. It just takes a second, and if you're on your phone, for example,

you can just scroll down, and there's a place to leave a rating and some comments. I'd love to read those this week. Without further ado, let's bring on Annie Hyman Pratt. Let's welcome Annie Hyman Pratt. Thank you so much for joining us today on the High Performance Mindset. I'm so excited that you're here today with us. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Annie, I recently read your book, The People Part, and what I'd love for you to do is just to get started and tell us what you mean by The People Part and why is that important for us to understand? Yeah. So I've been working with business owners and leaders for a long time now, many decades. And what I find is that a typical entrepreneur or business leader, it's like, you know, they get into business and they love what

they do. They, you know, they are really great at either selling something or they're super creative and they've invented something. They get into business and they're like, you know what? I'm really good at this, really good at like almost all the parts, but I'm terrible at the people part. It turns out that when people get into business, you know, especially entrepreneurs who kind of, you know, start something, they're thinking, I want to get my expertise out into the world. I want to create something new. They're not thinking, I'd like to have a large team and a big payroll to meet. That's not what they're thinking. But it just turns out that if you want to grow a business, if you want to have a larger impact, you can't do it all by yourself. You need a team to actually

do a lot of things that you shouldn't be doing as a business owner or as a super senior leader. What I love about your book is several things. I love the seven agreements that you have. And I felt like it was just so easy to read and understand. And so you talk about seven agreements for entrepreneurs and leaders, how to make and build teams and accelerate growth and banish burnout for good. Okay. And I agree that I just was talking to an entrepreneur today and, you know, he said, hey, I really like doing the tasks of my job, but I'm not really good at the people part. Right. Right. Yeah. And people are difficult because we it's because we have kind of I think of it as we have two systems always going at the same time, two kind of internal operating systems. Okay. And one

operating system is the system where we, where we get to think very consciously, where we are, where we're super creative, where we can, you know, think critically and, and, and do problem solving and, you know, all the kinds of stuff that, that humans can do that, you know, all the kind of stuff that humans can do that, you know, no other animal on the planet can really do. I mean, we can do extraordinary things. And that all comes from this frontal lobe part of our brain that can do really complex thinking. Okay. It's just, it's fabulous. Okay.

That's the one system that we have going. But the second system that we have going, which is actually much stronger than the first system, is this automatic nervous system, this automatic part that is first and foremost concerned with survival. And it is constantly looking for threats, constantly looking for how we might be in danger or where we need to be on our toes and promote ourselves in case, you know, so that we, you know, we don't get this part of us. It's our emotional system, our emotional system. And, and it's a part we cannot turn off. So I think of it as we've got this amygdala. It's the part that processes emotion or kind of, you know, how would I say it fires off emotions, takes in all of our senses, and it goes to the amygdala. And the amygdala, without us having to think about it, automatically detects, is this a threat or not a threat? And this system is so old, so hardwired, and it's not very useful for how humans live today. But we still are stuck with it. It's like humans,

we've evolved to a place where, you know, luckily for anybody, at least in a first world country, you're not worried about starving. You're not, you know, you're not in fear for your life today. wife today, all your worries are long-term. But what we have is this hard wiring that is constantly looking for threats in things like, oh, did that person just roll their eyes at me? Yeah. Is this, you know, I'm sitting in a meeting and it's like, I just got talked over. Does that mean that my boss doesn't really care about what I'm thinking? Um, it's, you know, it's like, uh, if I am, uh, literally maybe I'm in school and I'm, you know, walking by a group of friends and nobody says hi to me. I mean, that's one of the worst things that can happen to a teenager, right? So we have this system that is automatically constantly detecting threats and sending

us into emotional reactive behavior. Yeah, absolutely. And that's the problem because once we're in emotionally reactive behavior, we actually no longer have access to our frontal lobe. We don't, we don't even, we, we, we've lost our best capability when we are thinking about or behaving in ways that are about ourselves. Yeah, absolutely. And that's where fear lies. You know, I think about this idea of like your amygdala being hijacked when we react with heightened stress or emotion or we lash out at someone. And that's really helpful, Annie, to just continue to recognize that that's your automatic response.

And that's not doesn't always serve you. And you can choose a different response. And you have in your book, the seven agreements, I'll just read them for people. And then I'd love for you to start with the first one. So your first one is self-leadership. And we, and I love the words here. We constantly show up in self-leadership rather than self-protection. Your second is defined outcomes. Third, role clarity. Fourth, secure relationships. Fifth, conscious agreements. Sixth, recognize change and renegotiate. And then seven, culture that drives excellence. So we could spend like several hours talking about these.

But let's just start with like, what is self-leadership? And then how does it connect so far with what you've talked about? You know, these two systems? Yeah. Yeah. So self-leadership is our ability to stay in that conscious, clear thinking system, right? To stay in our deliberate decision-making that we can focus on an outcome and not worry about ourselves so that we can really, you know, focus on what we want to achieve. Okay, so that's the aim. The thing is, is it's, it's easy to say it's not easy to do. Because again, because of this hard wiring. And so what we need to learn to do to be in self-leadership, and again, I think about the opposite of self-leadership is self-protection because where it comes from, because of where it comes from. And so when we feel ourselves or see

ourselves or recognize, we need to recognize when we're in self-protection. And that's when we are having thoughts or behaviors that are things like blame, denial, defensiveness, rationalization. A personal favorite of mine is hiding. You know, it could be manipulation. It could be overwhelm. There's just so many of these kinds of thoughts and behaviors that are all about us feeling bad about us in this situation. And it doesn't work. It doesn't help.

You know, I'm trying to think if there's ever been a time that I have blamed somebody and it worked out better. That's true. There just isn't a time. Yeah. And to be able to really recognize for yourself, what are my, you know, go to thoughts and behaviors where I know I'm in self-protection and I'm going to have to recognize it and learn to get myself out, learn to get myself back to good. You know, I know right before this, we were talking about a process that you have for letting go of mistakes. That's awesome. Because what's happening during a mistake is we're turning inward and kind of blaming ourselves right yeah we are in a place where now we are consumed with this internal

um you know dissonance instead of being able to focus on what we're doing at hand and it's totally detrimental and so so we want to start recognizing what is that inner dialogue? What are those thoughts and behaviors that start happening when I'm not in a good place? For myself, one of the things that happens right away is I am an avoider. I want to avoid things when it gets stressful. So I know that when I'm in a stressful situation and I'm asking for more time, that's an indication that like, I'm not in a good place. You know, when I have the urge to cancel a meeting, I know I'm not in a good place. Right. Yeah. For like my husband and my COO on our team, they have some opposite behaviors. So their sense of

urgency goes crazy. They want to decide things right this second, right? And I want to not even confront it or decide at all. So, but then they need to know that when they're in a place of like, we have to decide this right now, or it's all going to fall apart, then they know to recognize, oh gosh, I'm not in a good place. And now I need to pause before I take the next action, before I start talking about what should be happening next. I know that I need to pause there and get myself back to a good place. This is not the place. Self-protection is not the place to be making decisions from because you can't even see a situation clearly. You literally have tunnel vision. And you can let fear and overwhelm and frustration get in your way. Yeah. And it makes me think about, I wrote shame, blame, guilt.

And there's so much that can come from a mistake. And what's interesting is I recently looked up the definition of failure in the dictionary. And it said, anytime we don't meet an objective. And then it said, the opposite of success. And I thought, what are we doing here? Like failure, mistakes are not the opposite of success. So no wonder we go into self-protection mode because we're feeling shame and guilt. So my tool, Annie, is called Learn, Burn, Return. And it means we ask ourselves, what did we learn?

And we ask, what would I do differently next time? And then the burn is let it go with an action or a phrase. And then we want to return with confidence. Yes. And you know, you're right. It helps people get back to the present. And so do you think like self-leadership is, would you define it as like acting in the way that you want to?

Would you say like being in tune with your emotions emotions sort of like you need self-awareness to be able to lead yourself more effectively you do i think of self-leadership as um thinking and behaving with intention with positive intentions behind you right so it's like if you're in a you know in a um in a game, like you want to do great teamwork, your intention is great teamwork and to make some points and win the game. That's your positive intention. Right? If I come into that same basketball game, and I'm coming from a place of like, oh my god, I just don't want to mess up. That's, you know, that's, that's a, that's a self, you know, a self protective way of looking at it. I don't want to mess up. I don't want to get embarrassed. I don't, you know, that's, again,

all about me and is actually not a positive intention. So we want to be able to act and think from a place of, you know, our best selves. Yes, absolutely. On the podcast, I had a while ago, a guy named BJ Hellyer, who's the managing director at Northwestern Mutual, and maybe you've heard of that. And he said, you're the hardest person to lead, which is yourself, right? And I think that's exactly what you're saying. Like it's, it's easier to lead other people than sometimes it is to lead our own emotions and our thoughts and our actions. It is. We, you know, we, we tend to kind of believe the emotional reactivity because it's so strong. It's so, you know, it's like, it's so convincing to us because it comes with such energy behind it. So we tend to believe it. And we have to keep remembering, this is not the truth. This emotion is happening because my hardwiring thinks I'm in real danger,

thinks I'm about to get kicked out of the tribe, thinks I'm going to get eaten by a lion, thinks I might starve tomorrow. And it's not true. It's just not even close to true. And unfortunately, we don't have a way of turning it off. It's like we have to learn to work with it. I think of it like you can't not smell smoke. Yeah, that's true. You can't turn it off. You're going to smell smoke.

So the minute you smell smoke, then you need to determine, am I sitting in a theater and this is a fire going on and I need to start running? Or am I at a backyard barbecue on a nice sunny day and we're making burgers? And the truth is, is that for most of the things that we react over, we're in the backyard making burgers. And maybe the smoke is a good thing because it leads to great burgers. Exactly. Exactly. So it's, you know, so it really is getting first that self-awareness and then second, your ability to get yourself out to, I don't know how you described it, but I would describe it a couple ways to, you know, kind of reframe how you're seeing a particular situation. To, you know, look at how am I judging myself? How am I judging others and let that go? So when I'm thinking, you know, I really

messed that up big time, and I'm really stupid for doing that. It's like looking at that and thinking, well, wait a minute. How would my best friend look at this situation? Would she think that I just totally screwed this up for no good reason at all or would she think I actually did my best with all the information that I had and this is just the way it went and would she be upset if I'm blaming myself because then I can't even take the learnings from it then I can't even show up as my best from here. So we've got to learn to treat ourselves that way. Come to a place of knowing this self-protection is not good for me and I can get myself out of it. One of the things I really like about your book is it's practical

and you have these great models. And one of the things that you said in your book is it's practical and you know you have these great models and one of the things that you said in your book around the process of self-leadership you were talking about resolve with the core empowered process and I thought okay people who are listening will really appreciate like a process we can go through to understand self-leadership and grow in it. So tell us about that process. I will. I will. Okay. Yeah. So it's called the core, core, core empowerment process, and it's core spelled with two C's. That's what's different about it. Okay. So the first C is to clarify the situation. Okay. And that is meant to help us get back to the facts. So, so, so let's say, you know, I have a, I don't know, I just put out a new product and my launch didn't go well.

Let's say I'm in that situation. Okay. So the first thing that I'm going to do is just clarify the facts, meaning like I've decided it didn't go well, but instead, let me just say how it did go. Put this new product out there. I did this digital launch and I sold a hundred thousand dollars worth. Okay. So do you know what a hundred units or something? I don't know. Okay. So those are the facts. Those are the facts of what happened. Okay. Then the second part I'm going to go to is choose my impact, which is all about choose intentionally how I want this to go. How do I want to look back at myself and think, you know, I handled that well. I handled it the way I wanted to. And so for me, I might be thinking with a, you know, with a launch that did not go according to plan, I might be thinking, you know what,

I want to show up in a way that gives my team some hope for the future, because we're all disappointed. So that's where I may start with my choose my impact. The third step is the O and it's all about observing my thoughts and feelings. Observing. This is the part where we get to get outside of ourselves from and I think of it as like, you know, Annie looking at Annie. It's like, oh, there goes Annie. She's so disappointed. Well, see, just to observe it, to say, oh my gosh, Annie, you know, really prepared and her whole team took a, you know, worked their butts off to do this launch and it didn't go according to plan. And gosh, that's hard. That is hard. Just to observe it. Okay. Without a lot of judgment, just to observe it. And then the next part is to release your any kind of judgment and, and let the compassion come in. So I think of it as release judgment to compassion. Okay. The judgment part is that having a launch that did $100,000 is bad. Right? Judgments are all about good, bad, right, wrong. It's wrong to have a launch that did 100 grand instead of 300 grand. Let's say that was our target. Somehow that's bad or wrong.

And I need to let that go. So this is where I can, A, step into the learnings. Like, you know what? Something we learned from this launch is that the way we did ads needs to change completely. Yeah. You know, that's a great learning. And I'm glad we learned it when we had a launch that was going to do 300 grand, not $3 million. Yeah. It'd be painful to be even worse

if we learned it late, right? So that can be a great way of letting it go. Looking at the idea of, I don't, you know, having a launch that did 100,000, it may prepare us, may help us really have a better future than if we had done it perfectly. Because maybe some of the things we're learning are going to be way more important for us to be successful in the future. I don't know. I actually don't have a crystal ball to say that doing this amount of volume is definitely bad. Might end up being, we might look back and think, oh, thank God that didn't go well. Because we got to change things up that were more important.

So we just, you know, we want to get to that place of releasing any kind of judgment of bad wrong um you know we should have done it differently all those shoulds and let it go and the thing that i um uh am so um uh clear on is when we are able to let it go, what comes in is compassion. Like, man, it is disappointing when you don't meet your target. It is. Even if at the end of the day, it is going to be a good thing. Even if, but it's like, it's okay. Then we get ourselves to a place where we're okay with our suffering and we can move on, you know, to what you were speaking about. We can move on. And that leads to the E, and the E is engage your secure self. And the E is not even a step. It's like just the result of the first four steps. The E is once you let go

of those judgments and you have compassion for yourself and everybody in the situation, then you are secure. You're no longer in a place of like, I'm bad or wrong, or we're doing it bad, or this is all awful. You're not in that place. You're in a place of like, I'm okay. I might still be disappointed, but I'm actually okay. And now we can move forward. I love that process because you know what I appreciate about it is that it gives people some steps. And as I was listening, I was thinking, this is really hard work because, because of what you said is the self-protection and think about how much we judge ourselves in a situation. And we don't, you know, we're upset about our own exit, not meeting our

own expectations and thinking about how this is really hard to do for kids, you know, like it's not easy, right? And if you have a process, again, clarify the situation. And I appreciate what you said about just being objective about that. What's the facts? Because we don't, we go to like these extremes in our emotional reaction, choose your impact, observe your thoughts and your feelings, and then release the judgment to compassion. And that helps you engage your secure self. If people are having a hard time releasing the judgment, like, is there any advice that you'd give people on that part? Because, you know, if you're anything like me Annie the people I work with are high achievers

in business and entrepreneurs and athletes and they have very high standards for themselves and so their judgment can be so strong yes yes it can be super strong and I think there's also kind of a an underlying or an unconscious belief that I need to be hard on myself to be sufficiently motivated to achieve yes and I and that's a lie it is it's a lie I learned that the hard way yeah it's a big lie for sure for sure but but again like you know our own dialogue is pretty convincing like we we can believe that for a long time. Okay. So I think of the way, the easiest way that I found to resolve that is to really think

about not yourself, but to be, for me, I'll use the example of I'll think about one of my kids. So maybe I'll be thinking about my daughter. Okay. So I think if my daughter were in this situation, would I want her beating herself up? Would I want her berating herself? Would I want her to see it the way I'm seeing it for myself? And it's kind of like, are you kidding me? I would, you know, it's like I would go in and try to choke that voice in her head if she were telling herself what I'm telling myself right now.

And to be able to see it that way is to be able to see, wait a minute, I need to treat myself that way too. Because it won't, you know, it won't get a good result. It's like we know for a person we love that can't ever get a great result. Yeah. And so we, you know, for me, that's been the simplest way to let that stuff go. I really like that, Annie, because you have a different emotional response when you think about your child versus like your best friend. I think about my son. I have two sons and I think about when I see them beat themselves up, man, it just like breaks my heart. And like I can tolerate that in myself, but I can't tolerate watching them do it, right? So if that was my daughter or my son, what would I want them to tell themselves. Hi, this is Cinder Campoff and thanks for listening to the High

Performance Mindset. Did you know that the ideas we share in the show are things we actually specialize in implementing? If you want to become mentally stronger, lead your team more effectively and get to your goals quicker. Visit freementalbreakthroughcall.com to sign up for your free mental breakthrough call with one of our certified coaches. Again, that's free mental breakthrough call.com to sign up for your free call. Talk to you soon. I was reading this book by Kristen Neff, and she's a leading researcher on compassion. I love her work. Amazing. I got to see her speak many years ago now, maybe about six years ago. She's amazing. Amazing.

And she, in her Mindfulness Self-Compassion Workbook, which I would recommend anybody get, and the People Part book, you know, but get both of them. And she has this statement that says, when we're self-critical, we're both the attacker and the attacked. And so meaning we're attacking ourselves and, right, we're being the attacker and the attacked. And so meaning we're attacking ourselves and we're being attacked. Yes. We're the perpetrator and the victim.

It's the worst. And that's one of the reasons if we could not allow our child to do that, we would. If we could just make them stop, we would, because we know how damaging it is. And by the way, it's terrible being the perpetrator or the victim. It's not, neither of those are good. Absolutely. Yeah. That hit home with me, in my heart, when you said the perpetrator and the victim, you know, and so this is why we want to we are stuck in self-pity, when we're

struggling with a disappointment? Like what are all the ways that we should pull this process out? Yes. Yeah. So I think of it as you are working to create a habit. So kind of a, you know, a thinking habit. And to create habits, you have to first start with pretty deliberate steps, meaning that yes, I might be in, you know, having a day where I'm pretty overwhelmed or highly emotional about something. And I might actually write the core process letters down on paper and answer them, right? So that I start, you know, having a framework that I'm following to get myself to a good place. Okay. Once I do that for a while, I'll start to find that I am starting to think about it earlier. It's like I'm catching myself earlier and I'm already looking for what are the facts here, right? Like I don't have to even remind myself. It's like I'm catching myself earlier and I'm already looking for what are the facts

here, right? Like I don't have to even remind myself. It's like once I've done this, I don't know, a dozen, two dozen times probably, then I, you know, I get a piece of disappointing news and I'm like, okay, wait, wait, wait. What are the facts? Like I'll just start there. Like before I tell myself this is awful, I'm going to just look at the facts. I start to think about what are my intentions here.

You know, I get to choose those. I get to choose those. I start, you know, having some compassion right away for how I'm feeling or how other people are feeling in this situation. And so I think that you start with a very deliberate process and kind of slowing things down, dealing with big items, slowing it down, writing it down on paper. And as you do that more and more or in your journal, as you do that more and more, you'll get to a place where you actually can do it pretty good on the fly. Excellent. So start using it, writing it

down. It helps you also see what's, you know, whenever I write something down and I write down like what I'm stressed about and then sometimes I like underline what actually the truth is. And then I say, do I really know that to be true? And most of what I'm stressed about isn't actually true. But when you write it down, you start realizing, gosh, what am I, what am I really thinking here? And I appreciate just like the idea of like writing down the core empowerment process. You have so many other great things. So I want to make sure we get to some of the other ideas in your book. And one of the things that you shared with us to practice self-leadership is, I'll call it the three R's. I don't know if you call it the three R's, but recognize, regulate, resolve. When would that be helpful for us to recognize, regulate, and resolve? Yes. So again, anytime you notice yourself in a not good place, okay? Anytime you notice yourself, again, having maybe the internal dialogue or the external

dialogue, you know, blame, judgment, criticism, defensiveness, avoidance, any of those things. When we start to notice that, that's where we need that first R of like recognize, label it. It's like, you know, it isn't self-protection. Here it is. This is what it looks like. Okay. Then regulate is all about regulating our state, getting out of that emotional state. Because that emotional state is just going to drive our thoughts and behaviors. And so regulating is almost always about getting out of your mind and into your body. Almost always. You can't talk yourself out, you know, especially you can't talk yourself, especially out of kind of a strong emotional state.

It just doesn't work. So to regulate your emotions, you want to have a, you want to change your state. You want to walk around the block. You want to play, maybe fetch with your dog. You want to do, you know, maybe go to aerobics class or dance, you know, dance a little or jump around. Really anything to change your state so that you get back into your body and you bring those emotions down. The thing about emotions is that they are super strong, but they move. It's actually very hard for emotions to last a super long time. Okay, now certainly if you have

a super terrible trauma or a tragedy or something, those are not the ones I'm talking about. But what I am talking about are kind of the day-to-day, you know, fears and disappointments and hurts that, you know, where we're in a place of like, you know what? I don't like how that meeting went. I'm feeling like I didn't show up that well, or I'm feeling like I got blamed for something that wasn't my fault or whatever it is. And I find myself starting to slip into, you know, thinking about maybe how can I get back at that person or what could be anything, you know, and to recognize it right then of like, wait a minute, I'm in self-protection. I need to change my state. I need to get, regulate my emotions, get them to not be the most powerful thing going on.

And then the resolve is about that core empowerment process. So the resolve is all about once I'm not being run by my emotions, how can I reframe this so that I don't keep repeating this line of thinking to myself? Because it's not, you know, because it's not true. It's so easy to get stuck in the cycle of like believing all the lies that you're saying to yourself, right? It is. And yeah, so recognize, regulate, resolve. And I appreciate what you're saying about getting out of your mind into your body. Go for a walk, take a break. And sometimes it's easy for us to, like what you said earlier, hide. I just want to go lay in bed and hide in my house or my room instead of, you know, getting out and seeing the world and just getting out of your head into your into why sometimes I say like into your heart, right? Yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah, some people become I think of it as like keyboard warriors, right? They're like, I'm gonna write this reply right now. So it's like, no, no,

stop. Not always helpful. Well, hey, that's our amygdala and reaction instead of our response. It is. Yeah. Yeah. So there's one thing that you were sharing in the book about psychological safety. And I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that. And I'm going to quote you here, Annie. You said, the more psychological safety you generate, the more you can request people to perform outside their comfort zones. And I thought, isn't that so true um and so tell us

just kind of like why is it really important when we're building trust you know high trust relationships in our business in our life and our family um maybe just define what psychological safety means to you and then what are ways that we can keep doing that to help again we're talking about the people part right to lead people and to be the most effective that you can be. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Okay. So psychological safety is all about me. I'll just use me as an example. Me being able to say what I'm thinking, you know, give my opinions, ideas, thoughts out loud without worrying about being judged, embarrassed, blamed, you know, excluded or whatnot from the group, from the other person or from the group. That I can trust that I can, you know, I can make a mistake. I can say the wrong thing.

I can, I can repair because the other person will hold their positive regard for me. Yeah. And that is so important because if we don't have that, then I won't share about the mistake I made. If I think I'm going to be judged badly, I won't share about a mistake I made. I'll try to fix it all by myself for a long time until it becomes an absolute crisis. And if instead we generate an environment with a lot of psychological safety, then people are bringing to the table all of their ideas, concerns, problems, etc. early. And we get a chance to actually change the future instead of things turning into a crisis. And when we don't have enough psychological safety, the end result is going to be that relationships completely break down. Completely. Because we, you know, first we become, how would I say, you know, first we become very conscious of not saying anything where we think we're going to be perceived badly.

Okay, that's our first step. Our second step, if it doesn't get better from there, our second step is that we start to withhold information. We start to literally withhold information. The third step is we start to obscure the truth. It's kind of like you think of it as like, you know, kind of lying, lying without an overt lie, but just, you know, kind of, you know, obscure the truth. And then the fourth step is because that is, we cannot stay in that place inside ourselves. The fourth step is we go to disrespect. We actually go to a place of like, this place is so terrible, or this person is so terrible. I don't have any respect for them anymore. They don't have any respect for me. And because I can't stay in a place of actively hiding the truth from these people.

Yeah, absolutely. So it's just so important to have an environment where people can show up as human and still be perceived positively. You're still believed in. And one of the things I say often is for people to think about, you know, if you've had a decent amount of work experience out there, Most everybody has worked for a boss who didn't think well of them. It's like, how easy was it to work for them? It was very difficult. Yeah. And you don't feel motivated. You don't feel appreciated. The quality of your work decreases. It's terrible. Yeah. It's terrible. So that's why we really do need the psychological safety. And, you know, and I think the thing that often kind of breaks it down is because we

don't learn the habit of how to give feedback without it being perceived as criticism. And it is a skill. You do need to learn to give feedback in a way that it's all about the outcome, but you still perceive people very positively. Yeah. And, you know, it's not easy, but it's worth learning. Yeah, absolutely. And Annie, if people are wondering, like, why is psychological safety really important? You know, there is a study done.

I know you're I'm sure you're familiar with this with Google and they looked at like their highest performing teams. And if people want to Google it, you can just Google project Aristotle. And what they found was that the highest performing teams had psychological safety, right. Where they could openly talk about their mistakes. And I appreciate what you said is about, you know, with openly talk about mistakes without feeling like, what did you say? What was the word you used? Like, or you're perceived, you're being perceived poorly. So what are ways like, because I know as people are listening, they're like, yeah, I'm probably not so great at giving feedback about the outcome and still keeping it positive. So what advice would you give us to do that and to give feedback where we're still building somebody up?

Because there's so many people who avoid conflict and they don't say anything because they don't know what to say. And then, right, as a business owner or a leader, like that behavior just continues. So what advice would you give us on giving feedback that is also building psychological safety? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you're going to really focus feedback, not on what the person did, but you're going to focus the feedback on what was the impact of it. Okay. So let's say that somebody delivers me a project late. Say they get it to me a little bit late. Okay. So instead of me saying, hey, you know what? You were late on this. You said you would bring it to me yesterday and you're bringing it to me today. What happened? Okay. That immediately has the other person on a super defensive. Okay. And now they're, now they don't even know if it was a problem for me or not.

Right. I haven't even said that. I've just said you're out of integrity. And now they're in a place of where they have to really work hard to defend themselves because they don't they don't even they don't even have good context. But now they are going to to really get triggered very quickly into a place of like, oh, my gosh, you know, now I better be super defensive or I better, you know, avoid this and get out of here fast. Or maybe I'll counterattack you and say, you know, well, I got it to you late because you got me this other thing late on Monday. And then, then we're in this, in this conversation that is going nowhere, only getting worse. So instead of what we want to talk about is instead of me saying like, look, you brought it late, you promised to get it to me a day earlier. Instead, I would say, hey, I got the project today. And, and I, I turned around and, and talked to the, you know, the leader that has to take it on next. And they have now kind of missed a window where they would have

enough time to review it, where they would have enough time to, you know, to work with it. So, so now I have a problem that we need to resolve. So the first thing you're going to do is you're just going to work to resolve the problem that it is, the problem that the mistake has made, the, the, the impact on the outcome, right? Okay. So first we're going to resolve that. And we want this other person to participate in it. And then after that, we can talk about, okay, so let's talk about how do we get here? Like, tell me what was going on for you. What were you thinking?

What else were you working with? Is there anything you think you could have done differently or that you might do differently next time? Yeah, next time. I like it. And that way we get the person in a place of like, look, I still think well of you. You're helping me solve the current problem. We're going to work through this. And I, you know, and I believe in you for the next time. So, so we want to get them engaged from a place of what could we learn? What, you know, how are you thinking about this? What, how can I support you? What, you know, what, how might you think of it differently next time or do it differently next time? All those kinds of things that are much more future focused really are so important to

keep this productive because everything else trying to go back and figure out exactly why people did it exactly the way they did it. It never helps. It only hurts. It only hurts because we don't know the millions of things that they had going on. You don't really know. Yeah, that's true. And usually people are trying their best, right? And so when we are attacking and say you, you know, then the other person, right, the energy we give is the energy you receive. It's also like they're going to feel threatened and attacked.

And I appreciate the language that you're using. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, one of the things I find in the best leaders is their team members can depend on them not having emotional reactions at them. They don't have to worry about taking care of their leader emotionally. They can trust that the leader will do that for themselves. And then they can show up in a plenty vulnerable place so you can actually get the growth. Because people do need to say early, I think I made a mistake. I don't think this is really going to

work. I'm starting to work through it. And I don't think it's going to turn out like we planned. I, you know, I can see this part here that is that I don't think we've all understood correctly. You know, there's, there's so many things that we need them to bring forward. Otherwise, we just have people who all we have are their hands. If we don't have people who can express their thoughts and what they're thinking about and why

and to be vulnerable, then all we have are people who will do what we say. And we better say it perfect because that's all they're going to do. Absolutely. So helpful and so practical. So thank you so much for giving us those words to use. And then kind of think of the words to lose are like you were and really attacking. Annie, I got one more question before we close. And I liked at the end how you gave this really cool like leadership toolkit that was a good summary of all the things you had in your book, right? It's sort of like, hey, you can, it was a great summary, first of all, but also like this idea of like, here's your toolkit to help you practice self-leadership and then, you know,

the people part. And in that you were talking about the first stage of business is business growth. It's all about you. The second stage is, you know, having a strong right hand person that takes on responsibilities. The third is having a clear functional areas and with leaders who cross function. And then the last part is like, for putting your executive leadership team in place. How are those four things? Tell us about how those four stages are really important when we're thinking about people and just like being there for our people. Oh, yeah, it's super important. So the thing is, is stage one, it's like, you don't have to worry about communication all that much because you're going to be doing pretty much everything. So like you're communicating to yourself mostly.

Yeah. And as you start to add team members, it's like you're going to have to do less and lead more. So we think of it as, you know, usually you get first kind of a right hand person to take the things off your plate that you shouldn't be doing that are, you know, not the highest value for you, that you really can have somebody else start to really take care of that you don't have to get involved in. So that's, that's the kind of the first right hand person. Okay. But what they can't do is everything in your business. Like they can't, you know, it's very rare to have a right hand person who can write a proposal and, and, you know, deliver to your clients and do all the customer service

and all your accounting and your IT and whatever. Like, you know, it just doesn't happen that way. So you want to be thinking about as you start to get right-hand people and probably usually some contractors, right, to take things like IT or maybe HR, payroll or whatever. And you start to get some contractors in place. Then the next thing you really want to be thinking about is I have to start dividing my business into functions. Dividing is maybe not the best word

because it sounds like you divide it away from your business, but that's not it. What I mean is you start to organize your business into functions. So you start to think about, oh, all of this is finance related. Oh, all of this is content related. All of this is delivery related. And then as you're growing, you're looking for leaders to start to emerge from these functions to actually take over the responsibility of the function so you don't have to be in it anymore. Because ultimately, we want you to be creating a team that you start to get into the functions only that you love or have your highest value. So maybe you're an excellent marketer. That's probably the last function that you give up being a bit more in the weeds. But one of the first functions you give up being in the weeds

is probably IT, maybe something like that. And so as you're going along, it's like you want to be thinking about what am I developing and what am I going for in the next stage? Because as you're hiring people in these functions, you want to be hiring people that have some potential. Absolutely. That aren't just the lowest level task doersers super entry level because it's like wait a minute i am going to need somebody to grow into taking over this function so that's that's that's how i think of it you want to start thinking of it that way and as you're working you also need to start to be thinking about i i need to communicate all of this out more. I can't keep it all inside me. I can't, you know, I can't tell you how many entrepreneurs are pretty good at planning in their

head and do not want to do plans for a team. And it's like, you know, that is something that like, it just won't work. Like they can't see in your head. Well, I appreciate what you're saying, because I think it actually is really hard sometimes for business owners and entrepreneurs to let go, to let go of some of these responsibilities, right? But you have to, to be able to build what you want. And I like the way that you've outlined those stages. So Annie, tell us how we can get your book, The People Part, Seven Agreements Entrepreneurs

and Leaders Make to Build Teams, Accelerate Growth and Banish Burnout for Good. And then tell us how we can find more information about what you do and the services you provide. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Well, you can find the book at any big retailer, right? You can find it on Amazon. You can get the audio book, which I recorded. So it's my voice.

If you want to hear me read it. Cool. And you can always find us at leadingedgeteams, teams with an S,.com. That's the easiest way to find us. And we have a very cool quiz on the website too that I think is fun for people to take. It kind of helps identify your superpowers

and also kind of your natural defense styles. So you start to get some self-awareness. Thank you so much. Well, Annie, you gave us so much great tools and ideas to consider. Today, we talked about the difference between self-leadership and self-protection. And you defined that leadership or self-leadership is about thinking and acting with a positive intention. And then you shared with us like your core empowerment process that you thought is really helpful to get out of judgment and shame and blame, right? And then we talked about the three R's, recognize, regulate, and resolve and how that might help. We discussed psychological safety. And at the end, you know, the leadership toolkit to help you think about if you are an entrepreneur, just the business that

you're growing. So is there any final thoughts or advice you give to people as we close? Yeah. I, you know, I think it really is the, the self-leadership part. It's like, you know, I want, I want leaders to recognize we need the best of you so that everybody else can show up well. And it's also kind of an appeal for entrepreneurs to learn to take care of themselves. Because if we don't have you in self-leadership, we don't have a chance at getting the goals. Right? So that to me is where to start. Absolutely. Thank you so much much annie for being on and i i wish everyone the best in their own journey to self-leadership over self-protection

and i would say it's a daily practice to get to self-leadership and not just in our your default of self-protection so thank you so much for on. It was a joy to connect with you today. Thank you. Way to go for finishing another episode of the High Performance Mindset. I'm giving you a virtual fist pump. Holy cow, did that go by way too fast for anyone else? If you want more, remember to subscribe and you can head over to Dr. Sindra for show notes and to join my exclusive community for high performers where you get access to videos about mindset each week. So again, you can head over to Dr. Sindhra.

That's D-R-C-I-N-D-R-A dot com. See you next week.