1562 – The Person You Have to Pay Attention to with Think 2 Perform’s Chuck Wachendorfer

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0:58with us right now chuck walkendorfer chuck thank you so much for joining us you are an executive coach uh you're a professional speaker and you are the president at think to perform that website is think the number two perform.com also you are the co-author of the new book don't wait for Someone Else to Fix It, Eight Essentials to Enhance Your Leadership Impact at Work, Home, and Anywhere Else That Needs You. Well, Chuck, good to have you. Absolutely. Great to be with you, Josh. And you're in the great city of Indianapolis right now. Yes, I am speaking at an EOS conference. I had a presentation this afternoon on a lot of the same material we're going to talk about today.

1:39That's wonderful. So I need to ask, so the title of the book is Don't Wait for Someone Else to Fix What does that mean from a leadership capacity? You know, great question. You know, I know your website is upmyinfluence.com, and leadership is all about influence, right? And leadership anymore is not necessarily based on title or position because we're leading and influencing all the time. A lot of what we watch, we listen to, who we hang out with, what we read is influencing us. And likewise, a lot of what we do is observable and influencing other people. And so Doug and I are my co-author, Doug Lenick, and I were thinking about this book four or five years ago.

2:23And we wanted to write a leadership book that wasn't a business leadership book, but that could impact people no matter where they were, no matter what they were doing anywhere around the world. And for a lot of us, we see things that could be better, either in our own lives, in our communities, in our businesses. And as the title might imply, we're waiting for somebody else, our elected leaders, our company executives to fix something, you know, in our lives. But really, in many cases, it's us stepping up and leading ourselves and becoming more effective with other people. And that's the essence of the book.

3:01Yeah. And why is this relevant today? Like if we think about, you know, you know, it's just kind of I think there was something you said and I was like thinking about, you know, leadership that I think you could have gotten away with maybe in the 70s and 80s, where I think generationally, hey, that's the boss. You just listen to the boss. And I think today more so my observation from, you know, as an observer, it to me feels like leadership is earned more so today rather than just endowed from on high. Yeah, it's not as hierarchical as it used to be, and it's not necessarily based on position or title.

3:40In fact, part of my presentation today at the EOS conference was about, like, we're all leaders. And specifically, it starts with leadership of myself. So effective leadership of other people begins with me managing my own behavior. Managing my own behavior involves me making better choices, and making better choices is grounded in self-awareness. So it's almost counterintuitive that for me to build a great relationship with you and influence you, the person I have to pay the most attention to is me. And for many of us, we see opportunities around us, either in our own lives or in the lives of other people.

4:17But we sit back and wait. And our point is, like, you can step up and actually make a difference in your own life. But it begins with me being clear on who do I hope to be? Who do I want to be ideally as a person? None of us is perfect. But we do have an idea of who we'd like to be. And so we have a values exercise that we talk about in the book that helps me clarify what my values are. Now, when you ask people, do they have values, they act kind of insulted. Most people tell you yes. But when you say, what are they? It gets kind of fuzzy. They talk about things like family or honesty or integrity.

4:55So our point is, well, let's help you go through an exercise to identify your top five values. Because if you know what your values are, then you're more likely to make decisions consistent with them. One of the big things we talk about, I think, to perform is performance in any area of life. I don't care what you do for a living, where you live, the color of your skin, male or female, is a function of talent, skills, and decision making. So talents are things we are just naturally good at. Skills are things we develop over our lifetime. And decision-making is the third part. And of the three, decision-making has twice the impact on performance than talent and skill combined.

5:35I'm not saying talent and skill don't matter. They just don't matter as much as decision-making. And we make 35 ,000 decisions a day. Most of them we don't think about. So how I take my coffee, brushing my teeth, getting dressed, those are all choices we make. And we don't have to make all 35 ,000 better a day. But if we made one or two better choices a day, you're talking five, six, 700 better decisions a year. Right. And so. It's being clear on who I hope to be, that's the values exercise, and it takes about 20 minutes to complete. You can take it on our website for free, and then I start to like notice when I'm consistent with them and when I'm not.

6:16And we do this with individuals, we do companies, companies identify their values. and it's part of what I was, as I mentioned earlier, is what I was talking about here today in Indianapolis. Yeah. You just mentioned that you had an assessment or a quiz or something? It's a values exercise. It helps you identify your top five values. Yeah. We have it as a deck of cards for like$14.95 or you can take it on our website online for free. Yeah. It's a virtual card deck. It takes about 20 minutes. Look at that. It helps people identify their top five values. In the last six months, we've had over 38 ,000 people complete the values card exercise.

6:57Yeah. So to our friend that's listening right now, you go to thinkthenumber2perform.com. You click on resources, and then that's where you'll find the values cards exercise. Click on start the exercise. Visually, it's cool. It's a deck of cards. It's a virtual deck of cards, yeah. Discard pile or the key pile. Right. And so that's one of the things we teach is how you discover your values. Now, the other side of it is improving self-awareness. So none of us is 100 % self-aware 100 % of the time. So in a normal conversation, we check out. Somebody will be telling you the dog died and you're nodding and smiling.

7:38And then you realize like nodding and smiling probably isn't appropriate for what this guy just said. right we we read books to ourselves and we realize we read 10 pages and have no idea what we just read that's us not paying attention to ourselves so we teach an exercise on how to improve self awareness in the book so when i get clear on who i hope to be and i notice that i sometimes fall short it then raises the question how can i be more consistent with who i hope to be more often And that becomes the journey of self-leadership. And then we talk about in the book, how do I become more effective at leading others?

8:16But it begins with us. yeah uh so so you're saying so let me make sure i understand this like so um if we want to be more aware of you know our biases and you know and you know just be more self-aware so uh first thing obviously being clear about you know our values is going to be really tantamount to that anything else that you recommend for for today's leaders to like you know because i think what you just talked about they're like i want to i you know that as you were kind of using the example of the dog dying like that would be i would be so humiliated if i done and i'm sure i do that frequently sometimes i mean we all get caught in that i mean unfortunately and so it's like how do i become more self-aware because leadership effectiveness is based on my self-awareness so in order for me to lead others more effectively i have to know understand what my strengths and weaknesses are.

9:14I have to understand what my blind spots are. And every pattern of behavior we have, Josh, is a pattern because at some point it worked for us. And what happens is as we get older and our lives change, some of those patterns begin to hold us back. So I worked with a woman, a female executive, very successful woman, about 10 years ago. Her name was Sharon. Sharon was very, very successful and miserable at the same time. She was about 100 pounds overweight. She worked all day long. She'd come home at about eight o 'clock at night, eat one meal and go to bed at about 1130 and start it all over again, day after day, after day, after day.

9:52And so we were talking about this pattern that she was noticing of how she really took care of everybody, her clients, her staff, she had a stay at home husband, she had two adult children that lived at home. And I was asking her like this pattern, where did she learn this pattern of not taking care of herself. Without any hesitation, she said, well, I was raised by a single mom. And when I was seven years old, my mom came down with cancer. And so from seven years old till 11, when my mom died, I took care of my mom. Now, that was a pattern that Sharon needed as a child to survive, but it was counter to what most children learn about their parents.

10:34Most parents are there to take care of their children, Sharon learned she's there to take care of her mom. And it's what she and her mom needed, but she continued that pattern behavior well into her 50s. And so she was able to reconcile like, that worked for me then, it's not working for me now. So she's beginning to change some of her pattern to become a more, you know, successful, fulfilled person personally, and then more effective with those that she led around her. Yeah. Chuck, the book, it's available on Amazon right now. What is the transformation that you would expect? First off, and I'm going to give you a real easy question first.

11:19What types of leaders should be reading this book? That's part one. Part two is what is the transformation that you would hope that they would experience? is? Well, first of all, it's for anybody anywhere. So if I want to become more effective in my life in general, this book will help you. Number one. Number two, you don't have to read the entire book. You don't have to incorporate everything we talk about. You don't have to incorporate all eight essentials. What you do have to use is something. And the book gives you exercises, gives you tools that you can begin using. In fact, I was just talking to somebody earlier today.

11:57Okay, pick any chapter in the book and start there. Pick a chapter that resonates with you and begin to apply that. And as you apply that, you'll see a difference in your own life. And then you can worry about applying some of the other tools. But if I don't apply anything, then I'll see no change in my life. But the nice thing about the book is it's very application focused and you don't have to use it all to see a difference. Can I ask you another question? I'm going through the values exercise a little bit. but I've got to multitask a little bit here. I'm just really curious and excited about this.

12:31I'm putting way too many cards in the keep pile. That's okay. Like that's about, yes, I agree with that. Yes. There's no bad values in that deck. I know, right. So what the process will do, and you're just getting started on it, Josh, which is a four-step process. So you're on the first step. The second step is to get it down to 15 and then get it down to 10 and then get it down to five. And so the process of elimination then forces us to think about what's really important. And for most of us, our top 15 values don't change over our lifetime. But I can't remember 15. So we want to get it down to five because that's what I can remember.

13:11And if I can remember the five, it's more likely to guide my decision making. So back to the driver of performance. The driver of performance is decision making. And the two things that drive decision-making are moral competence. That's me knowing and using my values. And the second driver of decision-making is emotional competence, which is how well I manage myself emotionally. And we can get better at both those things. So the values guard exercise is a chance for us to improve our moral competence. And then this exercise of self-awareness, which we call the freeze, helps me manage myself emotionally.

13:49So emotions aren't good or bad. It's what we do with the emotion that makes it good or bad. So anger is a real emotion, excitement, euphoria, sadness, frustration. But it's the action I take based on that feeling that could create the problem. So it would be more effective for me to tell you I'm upset than for me to yell at you. Right? But it takes my self-awareness to recognize that I'm getting upset to make a different choice, to choose something other than yelling at someone. So we talk about like, how many people believe stupid is optional? Stupid is only optional if I catch myself getting upset.

14:31It's when we don't pay attention to ourselves that our decision-making and behavior is most at risk. We're hardwired to be what's called emotionally reflexive. So when I feel something, my body wants me to respond very quickly, and our emotions tend to sacrifice accuracy for speed. They want us to respond quickly and are usually wrong. So any regret we have in life, a lot of them anyway, have to do with when I get emotional and I did something I regret. Yeah. Chuck, your website, think2perform.com, what else, what would you write when somebody goes there, say they're listening to our conversation, really jiving with what you're talking about, and they're ready for that next step.

15:18What are kind of some of those next steps you'd recommend? Well, we do a lot of individual coaching. We do individual and team development. We have assessments that help people understand what their emotional strengths and blind spots are. We have all kinds of virtual series on breakthrough leadership to work with mid-level managers to help them become more effective and give them some tools and concepts. You can buy the book. So there's a number of places. I mean, a deck of cards, a values cards is$14.95. I think the book is$29.95. Executive coaching, obviously, is a lot more expensive than that.

15:52So our vision and thing to perform is to enhance the world. So we were building tools that you don't have to hire us personally. If you do, great. But you could buy a deck of values cards that would help change your life. yeah so we're trying to really reach people based on where they're at and what they need our values cards we have in multiple different languages so we love the spanish yeah so we have kids values cards for people that want to use them with their children i mean there's all kinds of ways to apply this content and you've got your values listed here as well that you've rolled it down to as well so absolutely yeah again the website is think the number two perform.com so think to perform uh and then of course the new book congrats don't wait for someone else to fix it uh and again that's on amazon and everywhere else and you can again find that on the main website chuck walkendorfer again thank you so much for joining us thanks for having me yeah great conversation thank you all right man

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