Not Your Father’s Data Center - Leadership in an Evolving Workplace

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

Host Raymond Hawkins discovered that despite lacking formal leadership training, Cy Wakeman, President & Founder of Reality Based Leadership, has written a plethora of books in the leadership genre. As a former counselor in human psychology, Wakeman revamped traditional leadership views. She explained, “I saw the world from a viewpoint of shared accountability at the time that most people were seeing the world as the leader was really responsible for the wellbeing of their employees.” According to Wakeman, an individual can experience the same organization differently depending on their accountability. When “high accountables” are in pain, they question their role and how to address deficits. After addressing their role, what remains falls on the organization. “Low-accountables,” on the other hand, hold more of a victim mindset and first point to the organization as the source of their pain. Wakeman began implementing these ideas through reality-based leadership training to healthcare businesses that were losing money. Soon, other organizations began to request training. Wakeman has since built upon her training philosophy with many other essential concepts. For example, she emphasized that “A lot of people believe their circumstances are the reason they can’t succeed. Your circumstances are the realty in which you must succeed.” Thinking inside of the box given the restraints to achieve a goal is a must. Leaders are key to this; they help move the ‘why we can’t’ to ‘how we could.’” Perhaps Wakeman’s most important point is this: “True resilience is not about being the smartest or how much perseverance you have, it lies in the collective genius—have the best network of positive relationships, ask for help, and be vulnerable.” These concepts only touch the tip of the iceburg. For more details, you can reference Wakeman’s books, visit realtybasedleadership.com, sign up for her newsletter, or follow @cywakeham.

Welcome to Not Your Father's Data Center podcast, brought to you by Compass Data Centers. We build for what's next. Now here's your host, Raymond Hawkins. Let's get going. All right, all right. Well, thank you for listening. Thank you for joining me, Raymond Hawkins, your host of another edition of Not Your Father's Data Center. I am recording with a dear friend of mine and the awesome New York Times

bestselling author, Cy Wakeman. Cy, how are you today? I am spectacular. How are you doing? I'm doing so good. Thank you, Cy. So not only are you a New York Times bestseller, you're recording from New York today. I am. Coincidence? Yes. If you see something scrolling across the screen while we do the podcast, I mean, it's just some high-tech stuff we've got here on, you know, it'll happen occasionally during the show. If you happen to want to buy, you know, a book from somebody that might be on the show today, you can just, you know, go to amazon.com. It's awesome. No, Cy's the best. Cy, how many books have you written? I've written four.

So you showed reality-based leadership and reality-based rules. I've written No Ego, How to End Entitlement. Give me a second. Give me a second. Oh, he might have that one. You've written what? Wait, hold on. Oh, wait.

I grabbed that one. Oh, that's Extreme Ownership. That's a great book too, though. Everybody should read that hold on i got it there's no ego that's my book and then in march and it's available for pre-order right now i have a new book coming out called life's messy live happy and it's all about living well in an imperfect world so this is the last one i read i highly recommend it We're doing as many gratuitous plugs as we can. Love it. Love it. Love it. Okay, Sai. So A, thank you for joining me. I know you have far more, I mean, you know, the Today Show or Not Your Father's Data Center. I mean, we kind of

run neck and neck for booking people. It's very close. It's very, very close. I'll have to check the ratings tonight, but yeah, it's very close. I'm super grateful. So, Cy, yeah, Cy was gracious enough to do some work with us here at Compass, and that's how Cy and I met and love her and think the world of her and wanted to have her on. So, Cy, will you back up and just give us a little background on you, how you got into writing books, how you got into coaching organizations about leadership, where BMW came from, just to sneak in some stuff from the book. But will you take us back to a little about you from when you started working and how you're doing what you're doing as the grand poobah of Cy Wakeman, Inc. I know I'm not using the right name, but... No, you are fine. You are fine. So I started out in a leadership position with zero leadership training.

The training I had was in human behavior and psychology. So I started out as a counselor. And then in healthcare, we promote some of our best doers to leaders. Many times that means we lose out twice, right? We lose a great individual contributor and we promote someone who's not that skilled in leadership. It wasn't that I wasn't skilled in leadership. I was not a traditional leader because so much of what they were teaching at the time was this traditional leadership philosophy, which really was all about enabling your employees and bending reality, protecting them, coddling them, over-rotating on engagement.

So when I got promoted from a counseling background, I looked at much of what we were teaching in leadership, and I just said, that's not going to work. I can't be more responsible for your motivation than you are. I can't be more responsible. I need to create an environment of psychological safety, but you need to skill yourself up so that you can wander freely and skillfully in the world. And so I saw the world from a viewpoint of shared accountability at the time that most people were seeing the world as that the leader was really responsible for the well-being of their employees. I went to traditional

leadership kind of boot camp, and I saw that discrepancy. I was in charge of very big turnarounds. We had very little time. We needed to meet deadlines. These were areas in healthcare losing money with poor quality, you know, not giving patients what they needed. So I was sent in to stand up and turn around units. So I started doing kind of a Monday morning, forget what you learned, you know, in leadership training. And if you're going to work on my team, come to my training. And I started teaching them some pretty counterintuitive approaches to leadership. We called it reality-based leadership. Like that would work great in a whole different world, what they're teaching you.

But this is kind of the storm we're in. And we got great results. So people started to invite me and ask me how you're getting these great results. And that's where things just kind of went viral, they went organic, I didn't think about writing a book. But I got invited to speak to more and more places about the actual results we were getting. And then in healthcare in the 90s, there was kind of a big migration out of healthcare to other industries like high tech. So a lot of the people I had worked for and delivered such good results, they would call me up and then say, hey, if you have a couple of weeks vacation, can you come help me with my team? We need these principles instilled. And then finally, I got an offer to write a book. And it's really just been a viral effort, I think people really started to realize that while engagement's important, if you over-rotate on engagement, you'll find that engagement without accountability creates entitlement, and it's not sustainable during disruption.

It's just not scalable. Over-relying on leadership for people's emotional well-being and all the other things we test leadership with is absolutely unscalable. We need people self-sufficient in their own accountability levels that they bring to the table. So, Cy, there's so much in there. I want you to keep just digging with me. Will you give us another click on when you say engagement, right? I think in the social media world, we think of engagement means somebody liked my post, and that's not what you're talking about, right? So, will you give us a little more on what you mean by engagement?

So a trend that happened in the last 20 years is organizations wanted to pay attention to whether their employees were engaged in the organization. They started measuring engagement levels. And traditionally, what engagement levels measure is, I intend to stay, so I'm not looking for a job. I would recommend this place to others. And I'm willing to go over and be up and beyond just what's minimally required. And I'm willing to give more of myself to the organization. And that's a great thing to measure. What people miss is depending on my own accountability level, I will experience the organization differently. The same organization will not create engagement from people in different states of accountability level. So if I'm low in accountability and I'm in any pain,

I will automatically outsource that emotional well-being and say, I'm in pain. My leaders are not treating me well. I'm in pain. The organization isn't giving me what I need or I'm stressed. That means that they aren't doing what I need. It really attributes any pain and suffering I have to external circumstances. And right now we're seeing

that in the pandemic where people are taking feelings and really intellectualizing them into grievances. Like I'm feeling unsure and anxious. Oh, and it's because my leaders don't give me enough communication. High accountables also look at what is the organization's responsibility, but before they do that, they look at what is their responsibility. So when high accountables are in pain, they say things like, huh, what's my part in this? Have I had the conversations I've needed? Have I, if I'm not clear, have I gone looking for the emails I've been sent? Am I connecting with the people I need to connect with? And then what's left over is attributed to the organization. So it's basically a high accountable sense. Here's what I can do to improve this situation in the near term. And here is a suggestion I can make to the organization in the long term. So when you ask for engagement experiences, the high accountables answer is far more credible because it takes out the distortion of data that comes from low accountables victim mindset. And so we've even gone so far as to take traditional engagement surveys,

introduce an accountability metric, and filter the results of the surveys on the metric so that people can get better information about what to fix next. So really accountability being a more effective view of how is this person interacting with my business rather than just, hey, I've shown up and I'm going to do my job today. But more, hey, how do you view yourself as responsible for the results, accountable to the business, and how are you showing up? And Cy, I'm stealing one of your phrases, right?

How do you show up, right? I'd love for you to talk about that because being responsible for how I show up, and I just want to share with everybody that listens, one of the things Cy taught us in our business is, hey, we're pretty emphatic about our culture inside Compass. And we use the phrase calling somebody out, and you completely transformed that. Now we use the phrase calling somebody up. Hey, calling somebody up is, hey, I want to encourage you.

How do you show up to the meeting? How do you show up to the task? How do you show up to the challenge? How do you show up to the task? How do you show up to the challenge? So will you talk, will you do that a little bit? Talk about how accountability, that engagement really filtered through the accountability metric is about how you show up. Will you talk about that some? Absolutely. And my work with Compass was phenomenal because they talk about pride out, humility in, and really taking care of working your own program, how you show up. And what I do a lot as a leader is I have to teach people how their mind works and how the world works. So I have to teach them how their mind works so they quit getting played

by their ego. They need to stop believing everything they think because the ego helps them justify anything. And I need to teach them how the world works because we spend a ton of time arguing with reality, which is the argument we'll lose, but only like 100% of the time. And the way I teach people about how their mind works is I say, imagine that you have a toggle switch on your forehead, like a light switch, invisible. And when it's toggled down, you're seeing the world through the lens of ego. Your information is distorted. You get an email that says, can you arrange some time with me? I want to talk with you. And you add the story to it. I'm about to be fired or I'm in trouble. The ego always takes facts and adds story. And the stress you feel

comes from your story, not the facts most of the time. So the ego distorts your information. It sees you as the victim, somebody else as the villain. And when you're an ego, you're using the most primitive part of your intelligence. So you see your only options is fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and disengage. And when we disengage, it doesn't feel good. So we do what I call BMW driving, which is belly aching, moaning, and whining, because we vent, and venting serves a purpose. It's the ego's way of avoiding self-reflection. Now that same toggle switch goes up, same person toggled up, sees the world using all of their intelligence,

is naturally accountable, collaborative. It's like your best self. So hold on, I got to stop you. Hold on. I got to stop you. There is so much in there. You said a gazillion things that are so important, right? How you see the world based on where your toggle switch is up. There's so much in that, right? If you're in fight or flight mode, you can't see the world accurately. When you're an ego, when you or flight mode, you can't see the world accurately. When you're in ego, you're letting your ego drive. You see the world. I love Brene Brown.

I'm not sure which one of you I love more, you or Brene. You're both amazing. I'm glad to tie with Brene. Yeah. The story I'm telling – I've read more yearbooks than Brene. So right now I think you're in the lead. But I mean the story I'm telling myself, right? That's a Brene phrase. I mean you nailed it, right?

What do I say about it? Well, if I'm in ego mode, I'm building, I'm crafting a story about what's going on. And most of it's not true. Most of it's not real. I'm BMW. I love your phrase that right. While I'm crafting a story, I'm bitching, moaning, and whining. I'm doing something that's impacting our org.

So it's all stuff that comes out of you so fast, but I just wanted to highlight all those and get you to go down to each one of those trails for a little bit because each one of them is huge, right? The story you're telling yourself, that's so big. Why you bitch and moan and whine because of the story you're telling yourself and which part of your brain you're in, right? Where your ego switch is either on or off. All those are so huge. So anyway, I just wanted to get you to dig into each one of those a little more because they're so important about all of how we show up at work. Absolutely. And so many people don't know this when their toggle switch is down.

And I can't move your toggle switch for you. That's yours. What I can do is use a technique called self-reflection. So how do you get from low self to highest self? It's self-reflection. The brain can't vent and help at the same time. The brain can't create, story, invent, and self-reflect at the same time. So using questions like, what would great look like? Is it called a greatness? Like I empathize with you, but instead of sympathizing, go, I know they do that to me to include those people in accounting. Yeah. I, as a leader or as a colleague or on myself, when I find myself in low self feeling like a victim and I have no place for impact

is that call to greatness is, wait a minute, if I were great right now, what would great look like? Not if the situation were better, but if I were great, what would great look like? And I use questions like, what does great look like? I think that one gets misused so much. We're going to stop right there. It's not how do we change the situation? It's let me hold myself accountable. The situation is what it is. What would great look like if I was in my best self and reacted appropriately? What does that great look like? And if I'm leading a team or an organization, that's what I'm asking my team, not, hey, how do we change? Hey, the situation is what the situation is, right? I can't change the fact that

there's ships in the harbor with our stuff that I can't get delivered, so I can't build my building. Given that situation, what would great look like coming from you, teammates? What's the best we can do given the situation? I just want to clarify, when you're saying what does great look like, we're not saying how do we magically fix the world around us. What we're saying is how do you show up and be the best you can be, right? And that's the bulk of accountability because a lot of people believe their circumstances are the reasons they can't succeed. Your circumstances are the reality in which you must succeed. Amen. If your reality were perfect, we wouldn't need you humans. You

add no value in a perfect reality. Yeah. We just machines can do things in a perfect, perfect scenario. I can just have a machine go. Yes. Yes. can do things in a perfect scenario. I can just have a machine go yes, no, yes, no. Data centers can build themselves. That's right. It's like we don't need the humans in that. And so many people would rather spend time arguing with reality. Ain't it awful? And we

can't get our stuff. And none of this is our fault. And we are the victims. And what you need to do if you want to be accountable and what leaders need to do, and I love the word you use, it's one of my favorite, given this is our reality, how can we? That's right. Leaders don't manage people. They manage the energy of people and they manage energy away from why we can't to how we could. And especially in disruption right now in the supply chain, so many people are surrendering to, you know, this is so disruptive, this isn't about me.

And they're almost like emerging traumatized. And I'm like, no, you can emerge evolved. More people emerge from trauma with post-traumatic growth than post-traumatic stress. How? Leaders empathize. We don't just go, you know, suck it up, buttercup, or we don't have positive toxicity. But leaders empathize. Yeah, this is unprecedented. I personally haven't seen this big a disruption in supply chain in my lifetime. And leaders- In your 25 years, it's never been this bad, Cy? Exactly. And leaders also have to imagine

the possible positive possibilities and manage energy towards, but what if we could? And therein lies the competitive advantage. Also, therein lies calling people up to their highest potential. And in my work with Compass, I totally understood the value that Compass was getting at because they are hardcore on really blessed accountability, not the dirty word kind, but the really like, let's do great things together for great companies. But there was one thing that the founder, I had to call him out a little bit,

is that traditionally, if you didn't grow up as one of the founder's kids, being called out is a little scary. It's like, I'm going to call you out right now. I don't know about your childhood, but that meant- Yeah, you were in trouble. So it kind of panicked. So we just, with modernizing the language a little bit, say, let me call you up. Because all of us are capable of greatness. And a leader's role, a colleague's role, a peer's role is to call each other up because we have a human condition. I write books on this stuff. I can be in low self, toggle down, and I

can be in high self, same person. But the cool thing is, is it's the same person that in any moment I can toggle up and see the world differently, see the world as opportunity, see portals where I can plug and play ever so subtle that I didn't realize. And right now, we have a lot of people succumbing to a victim mindset. You alluded to Crosby, so I'm just going to call him by name, right? Chris Crosby. I will say our language, because of our work with you, changed, right? We used the call out language, and now we use the call up language. And I'm going to give you another one that we use now. You use toggle up, toggle down. We ask people, hey, are you choosing light today, or are you choosing darkness? Because if you choose darkness, you're going up, toggle down. We ask people, hey, are you choosing light today or are

you choosing darkness? Because if you choose darkness, you're going to hurt. I mean, the world's dark. There's bad problems. There's stuff. And back, I love the point you made earlier. Hey, if things didn't go bump in the night, I don't need you here. If everything ran perfectly every day, none of us would have a job, right? You could program a computer and everything. The reason we all have jobs is because things go bump in the night. What I need from you when it goes bump in the night is I need you to choose the light, not the darkness. I need you to choose what's the best way I can show up and help solve this problem, not how do I explain the darkness and how it's handicapping me and how I can't deliver. Hey, it's going to go bump in the night. That's why you have a job.

So choose the light every day. Choose to be toggled up. Let me call you up. I think that's so huge. And that's, you helped us change that language, Cy, by the way you coached us through that is, hey, let's not call each other out. Let's call each other up and let's choose the light today. Let's choose a positive way to see this and a positive way to solve the problem. Because given the circumstances that we cannot control, we get to choose how we show up. Absolutely. And what I also loved about that experience is being able to call people up has a lot to do with how they receive it.

They're like, thank you. Can I have another? And for so many of us, and again, this isn't toxic positivity. This isn't like imagining a different world. This is dropping the story you created about the same reality and the value that we can add by just moving through the world more skillfully. So I love that phrase, toxic positivity, right? This is not Pollyanna. We're not ignoring the problems. We're accepting them. We're embracing them. Given're embracing them.

Given these circumstances, let's choose how we respond. Exactly. And I call that thinking inside the box. It's easy to think outside the box. If only the world were different, I'd be a rock star. Thinking inside the box is given our constraints, how can we still attain our goal? What can I do towards that? And it's not about heroics. It's not about any of that.

It's about energy usage. It is about conserving my energy that I might put into judging or complaining or regretting or bemoaning and saying, I'm just going to use my energy to figure out where we are and what we could do next that would connect us. Right now, when the pandemic first hit and people would come on Zoom, I would listen to the first five minutes. People were pretty engaged. They're like, how are you doing? Do you need anything? If somebody needed something, collectively as genius, they would jump in and they'd go, let's figure it out.

I'm homeschooling three kids. I only have one laptop. People are like, we will get you technology. Recently, those first five minutes is ain't an awful. Somebody should do something. This is absolutely ridiculous. And I'm like, it's called disassociation. These times are challenging, but we cannot forget that these are our times. The next chapter written is one we co-write like it's written about us and and i personally believe i am here for in this moment in this time for this reason you all have to decide your own faith but it is no accident that raymond hawkins and sy wakeman and other people are here

in this moment and when you are in an unpreferred, what a lot of us do is argue with that reality. It shouldn't be like that. Some of us hope for a different future. Hold on, hold on. Hold on. You said when we're in an unpreferred reality. Let's be fair, Sai. That's life.

Yeah. Listen, every day, nothing's going to go exactly the way you want. So get equipped to handle unpreferred because that's life. And that's just it. So many of us want our circumstances differently, but what we need to do is grow the skills to evolve so that we can move freely in current circumstances. A lot of people are like, that's just how I am. I'm going to bring my authentic self to work.

And I'm like, do not do that. Bring your most evolved self to work. I don't want all of you. No, I want your diversity. Diversity, I love. I need diversity because I'm working a global operation here. And we've got to understand our customers. Bring evolved Raymond, not natural behaving Raymond.

Exactly. Bring your high self to work. And a lot of people want to either argue with reality or wish for a different future. But what leaders do is they find this tiny little space between an unprepared reality and the future that could be different. And they squeeze into that space and they start using their agency and their choices to make connections. While not ideal, let's move forward in the following way, putting all of our energy focus here so that we can connect in and co-create a different future for ourselves. And that sweet spot is where I see too many people right now avoiding.

And I feel so sad for them because if you want to wake up every day feeling pretty dang awesome about yourself, go into that dark sweet spot and bring light to it. Go into that crack and bring some light there. Because when you do that, not only do you bring out your balance, but it's contagious. People start to have hope again. I'm like, let's help hope make a comeback. We are not doomed and we don't live in the world we want yet. But we're the ones, I have a belief that God doesn't come find me. I grow into God. We're the ones that need to grow our way into nirvana. And a lot of us are sitting down wishing nirvana would come by. And it's like,

no, we got to co-create that. Here, here. So you said something about energy that I want you to talk a little bit more about. So I fall in the camp that I believe I wake up every day and I have a finite amount of energy. And I get to choose how I spend that energy. I can go walk my dog. I can go to the gym. I can go to work.

I can call and talk to my kids. I can complain. I can lay on the couch and mope. I choose how to spend that energy. And what I hear you talking about is I hear you saying, I think most of us think that in our personal life and think about that and how we, you know, do I have work-life balance? How do I spend the weekend? What I hear you saying is you get to choose how you spend your energy at work too. Now, you can spend your energy in a BMW mode or you can spend your energy in a BMW mode, or you can spend your energy

shining light into those dark places. You're spending energy either way. It is a choice. Yeah. Where we put our attention to energy determines the quality of our life at work and at home. Absolutely. And one thing I've been teaching people a lot is we've been having conversations in a lot of our businesses that are completely exhausting. Like they've been going on for years, like we're exhausted. And people keep trying to get into the same conversation and improve it. I'm like, end all conversations that are exhausting, just end them and invite people to a new conversation. So like just end to some of these conversations about who done you wrong? And what happened five years ago? Like, what do you need to let go of today to live the life you

want to create the results that you want? Like, I wake up every day, I'm like, what needs to die today, so that I'm freed up to live, you know, the life I want? And how am I gonna, you know, love and serve today. And so many times at work, I have to, and at home too, but I have to use my skill set to set boundaries. So I ask people, if they're frustrated, I'm like, what has this pandemic revealed to you about you? What's it revealed to you about your relationship with solitude or uncertainty or disruption, where do you need to grow next to have a little bit of immunity to this situation? Is it in

flexibility? Is it in tolerance? Is it in logistics planning? Is it in partnering with other parts of your organization? Because to conserve my energy with the pandemic revival to me is working from home. I used to let going to the office set all my boundaries. I'm just like, sorry, I got to go. Everybody figure your own stuff out. And I started learning, I literally at work or on Zoom have to say, I'm just not available to that. I'm not available for that conversation. Someone wants to gossip with me, it's like I'm not available for that.

What I am available for and I'd invite you to, is let's talk about how we bring that team to higher grounds. I'm available for that. I started that language has become so powerful to me where I hear myself say, what I'm available for that. And I started that language has become so powerful to me where I hear myself say what I'm available for and what I'm not. And somebody came to me the other day and they're like, well, I just really want to talk about, I've heard that other people are concerned about. And I said, you know, we have 30 minutes together. I need you to make a conscious choice right now, whether you want to talk about what other people heard and are upset

about, or you have 30 minutes with me as a consultant. Is that really what you want to talk about what other people heard and are upset about? Or you have 30 minutes with me as a consultant. Is that really what you want to talk about? Or do you want to talk about how you could move through the world more freely, more skillfully and with more impact? Because, you know, I want you to consciously choose and not just be reacting to what's happening. A lot. I love you. You said the comment of what's holding you back. You said, what are you hanging on to? What's preventing you from showing up at work and being your best self? One of the things I like coaching both my kids and team is, hey, don't let a bad thing

beat you twice, right? Because bad things happen, right? But don't let it beat you again tomorrow. And we may get, hey, we didn't get down selected on a deal. It's bad. Hey, we put a bunch of energy and effort and we chased hard and we thought we made a good proposal. And we, hey, losing is part of being in business. It can beat us today, but don't let it beat you again tomorrow. Don't let it beat you a second time. Don't show up tomorrow and go, man, I can't

believe the way that went down. No, no, let's choose today. And it's got a great professional application, but also with my kids, right? Hey, bad stuff happens. Just let it get you one time. I asked my kids, I'm like, hey, I'm okay with you being upset about something, but I want you to schedule it. And they're like, what? I just tell me how bad it is. Dad, my boyfriend broke up with me. Awesome. That's really bad. How long is it going to keep us down? Dad, it's really bad. Okay. Is a month enough? I'm okay.

If it's that bad, I'm a month. Okay. It's September 7th. On October 8th, we're going to be over it, right? And let's wrestle with it for the next month. That's a big deal. Y'all dated for two years. I'm good with that.

My teacher gave me a bad grade. Okay. You can be upset about that between now and dinner. Can you be good by dinner? Let's schedule our downtime and let's go. Let's let it beat us one time and be done with it. And what that does is it actually says, go into the feelings. Right now, people hold onto things for so long because they won't actually just go into the feelings. Follow your breath and embody the feelings. They're trying to identify externally and use hatred or use

vengeance or it's that's the work of the ego is identifying you externally and putting blame you know like why don't you you know date well I got hurt a year and a half ago by somebody so I decided never to date again that's something that beat you every single day. But we tend to do that, to be mad at the world, because we avoid just feeling the heartbreak. And the heartbreak is simply the space between loving big and having to let go before you were ready. So get about the business of letting go, put it on project status, like make it happen. Don't skim over your emotions, but settle a timer, go deep into them. What I have found, because we're both parents, when my kids were little and they would throw

that fit, you know, the two-year-old, like throw yourself on the ground, nobody can really feel for longer than like five minutes at that age. Did you say the 52-year-old threw herself on the ground, the two-year-old? I just want to make sure if you were describing me or my son. It's okay. Yeah, okay. Two-year-old, yeah. So when my kids would have one of those tantrums, I would be like, wait a minute. Set the egg timer.

We're going big. You're a wakeman. I want you to put more arm into this. I want more boys. They would do it in the middle of the grocery store. I am like, I am sitting down on the floor with you. Yeah, let's go. And I am just going to, let's do this, puppy.

I feel like crap too. Let's go. And what was so funny about that is like, they would be like, mom, what are you doing? Like, get up. I'm like, I'm not getting up. So good. I'm not to mock them, but if you're going to have a fit, have a fit. If you're going to a fit have a fit if you're gonna feel it feel it but what

you'll notice is that the feelings if you're actually willing to feel them don't really last that long feel them as they come and then make some decisions like if you have a chronic issue sit with that feeling till it tells you its name and it might tell you its name is i don't have good boundaries or its name is i ignore red flags or its name is like, like, I didn't do my part in that relationship. I don't know what its name is. But find the name, the lesson in it, and then move forward, getting about the business of evolving there so that you can move through the world more freely. I really think it is our time to step up, not necessarily to just have impact in the world, because we're all about mastery, but to step up and be willing to be impacted by the world and part of that mystery. Because so many of us go out with I know,

but right now the world is calling for us to unlearn and be undone as much as we're learning and doing. And so I really counter people I coach with, they're like, what are you learning today? And I'm like, no, what are you unlearning today? What have you believed worked for you that no longer does, that is not appropriate or relevant to these times? Like where does your knowing keep you stuck? And that's where I find partnering a lot of times between really good, like, you know, the partner vendors I work with, you know, on different projects, I find partnering together in vulnerability with, you know, Brene Brown's guidance to say, folks, we are saying, I know that you didn't do this. And you know that I, what is it that we don't know and how can we get vulnerable and come together and talk about I'm perplexed by this.

I have reached out as far as I can reach out. I don't know what else to do. Like when's the last time we talk about that? And what I am finding is that individually we try and muscle our way through. True resilience is not about how much stamina you have or how much perseverance you have, or if you're the smartest person in the room, because the world has shown us that even the smartest person in the room gets outdone. True resilience lies in the collective genius.

So the true resilient people are the people that have the best networks of positive relationships and ask for help most often and come together in vulnerable ways. Like we don't know how to do this now that all of our stuff is on the ship, you know, number 133 in the harbor, but let's get together. And too many times like clients and vendors, like they get together with blame and judgment. It's like, stop judging and start helping. Not one of us has the right idea about what to do, but let's come together collectively and say collectively we're genius. Let's talk about how we can make progress given our circumstances. And it just becomes conversations that really bring out the best in people. And I think we need more of that too. Here, here. I love that, Sai. I'll sometimes challenge the folks on my team to tell me something great that was accomplished by an individual. And I get so-and-so wrote a book or so-and-so ran a marathon or a race. Those are the ones. And I'm like, hold on a minute.

You don't think the book writer had someone who taught them English, taught them how to structure sentences? There was a whole lifetime of work that went into that. Invisible help. Invisible help. Yeah, yeah. You don't think that that runner had a coach and had a trainer and had a nutritionist. And I mean, we do great things when we do things. We don't do great things when we try to be individuals. And if I could think of one thing that would sum up what you do, Sai, is you teach us how to be better together. I think that's what you teach us how to do, right? How do we get together and be better? And that's not only good for us professionally, it's just good for us as people. And that's one of the things, it's probably the thing I love the most about you is that although you were in business, you're teaching us how to be better together as people.

Because I ultimately think the most important thing in life is the relationships we have. It really is, Raymond. And I love my relationship with you. I have such a fan. Truly. Awesome, awesome. So give us a couple things. So we've got listeners in Asia.

We've got listeners in Australia. We've got listeners in Europe. Let's say some things that I can get people to come look for you. So Reality Based Leadership is the official business name. Is that right? If they want to hire you to advise? RealityBasedLeadership.com. And you can sign up for the newsletter. Cy Wakeman, at Cy Wakeman. Sign up for the newsletter at RealityBasedLeadership.com. We've gone back because of all the algorithms, all the social media to the newsletter community. We don't sell you stuff, but we give you tons of great content.

Follow me on at Cy Wakeman. My podcast is W-A-K-E-M-A-N, right? Wakeman. Yep. And C-Y. Yep. C-Y on Cy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Because in Asia, it's a lot of times P-S-Y. It's C-Y. And my podcast is out there. It's under No Ego. You can pre-order my new book right now. It comes out March 29th. So it's called Life's Messy, Live Happy.

And even though it's not a business title, it is a lot of the topics we just talked about that you're going to need personally. Cy, we have to see each other again because there's a whole section in my personal library that I have books signed by my friends. And I have three of your books I have to get signed. I will be down there.

We moved our headquarters to McKinney. I don't know if you know this. No, I didn't know that. All right. Next time you come to McKinney, I'm bringing all my books up. Because you're in my library, but you belong in my home library on their books signed by my friends. So you got to tell me when you're coming to McKinney. I will do that.

And you tell my friends at Compass I said a big hello. Well, we think the world of you, Cy. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. We're so grateful. Be safe in your travels. And congratulations on the new book. And good luck that it just goes gangbusters. And we really appreciate you.

Thank you so much, Cy. Thank you.