Leadership Blind Spots

Episode 1009: Leadership Blind Spots, with Craig Clark

Leadership blind spots — Learn how to open up new doors to options and opportunities by nurturing our guide on leadership blind spots.

Leadership blind spots — Craig Clark is the CEO of Momentum Consulting — a consulting firm that guides organizations and their leaders in the areas of personal accountability and personal performance by developing and implementing successful strategies. He has spent the past 30 years becoming a foremost expert on the science of human dynamics in the business world and believes that the only reliable approach to produce breakthroughs at any level is to ask, “How do I see myself in the world and amongst others?”

What you’ll learn in this episode is about leadership blind spots: 

• How Craig defines “iconic moments,” and how iconic moments can shift our reality and allow us to see the world differently
• What an iconic moment looks like, with the example of Sam Walton targeting small towns to create a massive business empire
• How business leaders can easily fall victim to confirmation bias, causing them to have unrecognized leadership blind spots that can hold back their businesses
• Why we must recognize our own leadership blind spots, and why revealing them can create powerful and transformative “iconic moments”
• How seeing what you didn’t see before can give you an opportunity to be accountable and shift your behavior to increase your performance
• Why being open to feedback from others can help you find your leadership blind spots and open up new doors to options and opportunities
• Why the challenges of the global pandemic often cause businesses to retreat to “tried and true” strategies and default behaviors that may hold them back
• Why automatic behaviors are the opposite of “getting into flow,” and why breaking out of automatic behaviors is crucial for achieving flow
• What steps you can take to help your team achieve flow, and why a strong level of trust and respect are key for getting there
• How Craig realized that what he thought was real wasn’t, and how this realization sparked his curiosity and made a powerful impact on his work

Resources:

• More ideas about leadership blind spots, and you can find Craig here.
• Learn more about leadership blind spots by nurturing the topics in this blog: Building Trust Through Confidentiality: A Vital Aspect of Leadership
• Email: [email protected]
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/craiglclark/
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/momentum-consulting_2/
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/MomentumConsulting

Additional Resources:

• Free Executive Leadership Summary report from Predictive ROI: https://predictiveroi.com/research
• Sell With Authority by Drew McLellan and Stephen Woessner: https://amzn.to/39y7x13
• Predictive ROI Free Resource Library: https://predictiveroi.com/resources/
• Stephen Woessner’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stephenwoessner/

 

 

Leadership Blind Spots: Full Episode Transcript 

 

Get ready to find your recipe for success from America’s top business owners here at Onward Nation with your host, Stephen Woessner.

 

Good morning, Onward Nation. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of predictive ROI and your host. And as always, I am grateful to have you here and super excited for you to have an opportunity to learn from our very special guest today. His name was Craig Clark. He is the founder and CEO of Momentum Consulting, and he’s joining us for a third episode. And I asked her to come back because of an impactful conversation that he and I had recently, we were talking about the litany of change, the stress, the choppy waters that we as business owners have had to navigate and how we’ve helped our team navigate those same situations over the last 12 months. 

 

No doubt. Of course, it hasn’t been easy, but as I mentioned in episode 1000 when I broke down the strategic and tactical framework that you and your team can take and apply to come roaring out of this recession, that framework will also help you spot some of the silver linings along the way. For example, did COVID force you to think through how you could be even more helpful to your clients? Did the pressure of COVID hope you see how you could double down and be helpful to your team by providing them with more training insights and mentorship so that when we reach calm waters again, and we’re starting to thankfully, and when we reached the other side of this recession, you’re ready to come roaring out in your entire team is ready to perform at a new level. 

 

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Leadership Blind Spots: Craig Clark’s Introduction

 

Okay. So back to the time that I was spending with Craig the other day, he said to me, Stephen, this is the time for owners to be about how to create those iconic moments with their team. So yes, I conic moments Onward Nation. And then he went on to define iconic moments in doing that in spite of COVID, in spite of the stress, in spite of the pressure, iconic moments are a critical part of making sure you and your team truly do come out the other side at a stronger position. So when he said that to me, I thought, okay, this is amazing. He and his team at Momentum had been doing this now for 30 years. For the last 30 years, three decades, they’ve been working alongside their clients in the trenches. 

 

So when he and I had that conversation, I thought, okay, it’s time to have you back to Onward Nation so that you can share this insight with our audience. So they, too, can seize this opportunity that iconic moments represent. So, without further ado, welcome back to Onward Nation. Craig, thanks. Great to be back, Stephen. Well, it is great to have you back as my friend in, so I’m super excited for us to dig into this topic. And I know that is going to take us into blind spots and I think this is going to just be super, super helpful for our audience. Let’s go high level first. So, iconic moments, something that you were introducing to me a few weeks ago when we had our call, like, how would you define an iconic one of us and give us a foundation for that first? 

 

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Leadership Blind Spots: Shifting Perspectives for Growth

 

For today, we’ll talk about leadership blind spots. Sure. Well, it’s what most people would call an aha moment. So there are things that simply just don’t exist in our reality. Then all of a sudden something happens, we, or whatever, something happens, then we go, aha. And we see something differently. And as a result of that, there’s a sum shift in our reality, such that we see the world a little bit differently, and the world opens up to you and me a little bit differently. So those things happen to us with some sort of regularity. 

 

Leadership blind spots — We may not always look back at them and call it an iconic moment. I suspect that when Gladwell was talking about tipping points and it’s kind of talking about the same thing, look on a simple level, I’ll go back to your introduction reminded me in my business cards, says CEO or founder. Well, so happened. I’m married, Marlene, my business partner, actually it’s CEO and co-founder and you know, at some point, I’m going well, that’s not a there was just a little bit of an epiphany for me.

 

Leadership blind spots? So I haven’t reprinted the car and shit, but you know, made a point of everywhere that now I represent myself as the co-founder, although she has been generous about that. A little just slipped over the years, I was reading something just this morning, there’s a local group called the Wizard of Ads. And they have what they call a business school for unusual thinkers, for small business thinkers. And Roy Williams puts out this Monday morning memo. He was talking about companies when something new moves in a little business and in a big business is moving in. And he was talking about how there’ll be typically a couple of different responses. 

 

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Leadership Blind Spots: Navigating Business Challenges with Strategic Insights

 

One, they will endeavor to complain to the city official. Don’t let him in which rarely works. Or if it does work, it’s not very long. Number two, they’re kind of like, oh, I’m a local, they’re a big, we’ll do fine. That one doesn’t work very well either. He said, but you know, one thing they never think about and he’s using a Sears and JCPenney’s and he says, I never see you. You said those were like a freight train coming in through the other option is stepping aside and grabbing a hold and writing the train. They never think of that. An example would be Sam Walton, a small-town hustler, a little store, ah, and his early adventurer, not in his early ventures. 

 

Example of leadership blind spots – He went to small towns, like 10,000 population towns that were too small for the big stores to come to you. And by the time he ever went to a larger metropolitan area, he was already an $8 billion business. So that would be kind of like an iconic moment realizing I can’t compete with those guys, but I can go over here where they can’t go. Because the bigger you are, the more regulated your direction becomes. If you think about it, big businesses are like trains, trains are relegated to follow the tracks. So another way of looking at iconic moments. 

 

Okay. So I’m just capturing this to my notes. That’s a really powerful metaphor of what you just said right there. Big businesses are like trains. There’s a lot of momentum there on these tracks, they build an infrastructure, right? And to be able to change course, that means laying down new track, which is expensive and time-consuming requires a lot of resources and all of that. So it’s very difficult for them to pivot. Okay. So how do I, as a business owner, have an iconic moment? My self or in we’re valuable? Probably. Yeah. It’s how do I help my team? Like collectively, how do I help or team have an iconic moment? 

 

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Leadership Blind Spots:  Exploring the Influence of Early Conditioning on Perception

 

So we can do this process together, not in a vacuum? Well, essentially, it takes outside. Somehow it takes an outside input for us to see something we haven’t seen before so that leads us, leads me over too. What we refer to as what we commonly call a blind spot. Okay. And everybody has blind spots. You know, automobiles have blind spots. We usually don’t discover where it is until we meet something we didn’t mean to meet. So, I’m going to back up a little bit on this. Okay. Think about how you and I are raised or a little bitty babies. 

 

We’re infants. We’re completely dependent on the big people. They feed us, they keep us warm. They keep us sheltered, and they give us affection. So we come into the world, totally dependent on that. And as we grow and develop, we tend to see the world by virtue of the surroundings were going up, which were pretty limited when we were small. And what are some of the first things you and I learned? Well, I learned what makes a mom happy. I learned what makes Dad happy. I learned how to make him smile, and I know how to avoid making them frown. 

 

So in essence, no different than I’m more of a dog person than a cat person. So you get a puppy. You slowly domesticate the puppy. You teach it to do as a business outside you you teach or when it’s meal timing and so forth. Well, we get domesticated, but as we grow up, our first, we are influenced by our parents and older siblings. If we have them, then we had kindergarten and we made other kids and so forth. And then what they say influences us. 

 

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Leadership Blind Spots: Unveiling the Influence of Conditioning on Reality

 

Leadership blind spots? So then there’s the peer pressure. Then we experience different kinds of peer pressure as we get older and go through school and so forth. Then we get into adult life, and then there’s a different kind of peer pressure. And there we go to work in so we were being careful to say, we develop a survival strategy. And then that evolves into a success strategy, how we get things done and it’s all shaped by how you and I were domesticated coming into the world. So our reality is limited by that and really whatever you and I think is real. Isn’t it? I’m fond of Einstein and pull a little quote, all reality is merely an illusion. 

 

Leadership blind spots — It’s just a persistent one. So and then I know confirmational bias now becomes a fairly familiar term where we tend to listen to the things that agree with the way we think, right? This is really to say how we see the world is you don’t just look at how we are politically divided up in this country right now. We know we’ve always been politically divided, but now, I mean, everybody is a lot and on there, and the election swing one way or another on that 15% in the middle, that can go one way or the other, depending on how they think about things. So as a result, I get into the business world. Let’s come back to you: Do you have a team, or are you an executive? 

 

Then there, I have a strategy for how to get things done, and how to succeed. And it’s worked well for me, I’m a team leader, I’m an executive. So I’m in a fairly embedded and my success strategies. So maybe I’m, let’s just say, I’m in a meeting, I’m pushing an agenda. Can we get outside the meeting? And one of my peers comes up and says, Hey, Craig I just thought you might want to check in with Joe I think the way you came into that, you, no, you got fairly aggressive and a little bit edgy with that. 

 

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Leadership Blind Spots: Building Safe Spaces for Open Communication

 

So you just might want to check out and see what the impact was and I’d go, oh yeah, I’m a man. You know, I know I can get that way sometimes what I’m really thinking. That’s how you get things done. It was not until I found out Joe felt stepped on or disrespected. And like, what do you have to say? And as a consequence, we’ll in the future avoid me or undermine me, et cetera. So back to your question, what do you do with a team? Well, you gotta build trust. 

 

During leadership blind spots, how do you build trust? You make it safe in your organization, is it safe for people to speak up? You know, if you’re running an organization are a team and they think you’re going down the wrong track, is it safe for them to say something? You know, do you, do they feel like you are open to their feedback? Even though it may not be what you would call positive feedback. If people feel safe enough to speak up, trust starts to develop. So if I see you have what I would consider a blind spot then, is it safe for me to pull you aside and say, Hey, Stephen, here’s something I’ve noticed. 

 

You know, when you get enthusiastic about something, it looks to me like you stopped listening to people and consequently, they shut down and consequently, you don’t get the kind of entail that makes a business really hot. You go well, so maybe you go, so then you go check it out with a couple of people and they’ll go, well, yeah, Stephen, you kind of do well. I never saw that before. 

 

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Leadership Blind Spots: The Power of Iconic Moments

 

And you know, I would call that an iconic moment when you’re going, I need to start paying a little bit more attention. And you know, or you might do something to say to your team looked. I just discovered sometimes you don’t feel like I’m listening to you. So that’s nevermind tension. And in the future, if that’s happening, please go, Hey Stephen, hold on. Or are you really listening to what we’re saying? And it’s the same time you start paying closer attention when you were pushing an agenda or something to notice I’m shutting people down. 

 

If we’re paying attention over there, there’s always, we’re always getting nonverbal cues of how this is landing. So it takes I Kotick moments really come down to listening and how we listen. Now I can listen to them from one to two places I can listen from Craig’s world. So what am I listening to having a conversation and my internal dialog with a toll text or call the narrator, which we can all relate to is that it’s a dialogue that’s going on internally. 

 

We call it sinking, but it’s just really this override assessment judging. Now that’s not bad, keeps us from stepping in front of the bus. However, how do I listen to you? As you’re telling me something, then the internal dialogue is going. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Nah, nah, I don’t agree with that now. So the internal dialogue is judging what you’re saying. So I’m really listening to my internal dialogue more than I’m listening to what you’re saying. I may hear the words you’re saying. I may even pick up the inflections in your voice, but the internal dialogue shadows your message. 

 

And in turn, my message or the other side of that is to get over Stephen’s whirl. So to the best of my ability, I sent my own point of view aside and I’m like, okay, this sounds important to Stephen. Okay. You know, and I’m trying to tune into the best of my ability once the emotional can what does the emotional state hear? What’s important to Stephen about how can I support Stephen has to say it doesn’t mean agreeing with you, but it does mean listening to you in a way that I can kind of get it from Stephen’s world that opens up a different kind of dialogue. 

 

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Leadership Blind Spots: The Power of Epiphanies and High-Trust Environments

 

You will feel safer talking to me, and that is what NLP is because the emotional pipeline gets established. And when we do that with people, they feel when you, when you said, when you said NLP, are you talking about neuro-linguistic programming? Okay. Yeah. So thanks. Thank you. Sorry. So, it all comes to do with how we connect with people, bringing all the way back to the blind spots. If I’m not getting that kind of feedback, then I’m not gonna that’s why they call them blind spots. We can’t see it. And every time I have an iconic moment, every time I have an epiphany, every time I have an aha. 

 

So every time a blind spot gets illuminated for me, then just like, oh, and I see the world differently. And it happens to us every day. The metaphor about domestication is a really good won in, well, the, the, the reason why you see that it’s a really good one. It’s super relatable and it’s easy to see how either our surroundings or we kind of train ourselves and others around us to behave in certain ways. A high-functioning teams are ones who are able to have a high-trust environment doesn’t mean that they necessarily agree with one another all the time, but they have a high-trust environment and can then have a candid conversation I can see that that’s important to you. 

 

Please help me better understand why it is. And again, maybe I don’t agree with or why it’s important to you but I won’t know. I’ll just be guessing. And I can walk away from the table with all sorts of things going on in my head some of those might be accurate, but largely many of them might not be right. Right. I’m thinking of, an executive there was a big organization that we were working with, and he had a reputation for abrasive and aggressive and the way he taught and a hammer. His point in time and in a meeting or after getting, getting some feedback on his blind spots, they’re in a meeting and somebody says, is that here’s how I think we should do. 

 

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Leadership Blind Spots: Embracing Authenticity and Challenging Assumptions

 

And he said Harold, I think that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. And everybody kind of went out, and he said, but you know, you’re a smart guy. So there’s something you must see about that. I don’t see you. Could you walk me through that again? So not only was he responding to some kind of an iconic moment or revealing a blind spot in that moment. So, did everybody else in the room about him? Whoever I had thought him to be up to this time, I suddenly had a new dimension of that person. Right. Okay. So hang on, let me, let me make sure that I’m understanding. 

 

So because, because maybe he has the reputation of being a gruff or a hard-charging or whatever. And then people didn’t understand that, that he actually also liked to be pushed and challenged, and maybe that’s how he learned. And so it sounds like when people discovered that, it was like, sure, he might be abrasive, but you should challenge him because he is going to what then be able to see your point of view. Well, it started with a blind spot getting revealed to him in some coaching, like about how the impact of being abrasive. 

 

And hard-driving because you don’t look smart or you’ve worked with people like that before. Yeah, of course. Yeah. What was the impact of, well, so that was early on in my career? And you know, before, before I really knew any better, I avoided that person. Exactly. So, did they benefit from your intelligence? Are you predictable? It would be somebody above, did they? You’re down, and you’re boots on the ground. You’re the, you’re one of the people that most know what’s actually happening. Right. Do they get the benefit of that if you are avoiding it? Of course not. 

 

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Leadership Blind Spots: Revealing Blind Spots

 

Right. So when that got revealed to him, he was like, oh, hang on. I don’t want you to know. I don’t want to do that. People are blind spots have unintended impacts on people, and we don’t see it because the blind spot blinds us to it. So I think in terms of the iconic moment is when a blind spot gets revealed or at least a dimension of one, and we see something differently. And as a consequence, our behavior will adjust to include that. All of a sudden I see something I didn’t before now I have the room to be accountable for that doesn’t necessarily mean I have to change, but I can be accountable for it. 

 

So if I happened to be gruff in abrasive and I’m now trying to be accountable, and I happened to notice, I’m saying, and I can kinda see people GLAS over a little bit and I can stop, oh, wait a minute. Okay. I’m coming on too strong about this a little bit, Craig. Okay, sorry. Let me back up. Boom. That’s how it will change for people. When a blind spot gets revealed, my behavior will shift to accommodate what I now see. And all performance is driven by behaviors. You want to change the performance, change a behavior and change takes feedback. 

 

Immediate feedback is the fastest way to change back. So there’s a few big ah-has in there in, I don’t mean to a mix words. ’cause I know we talked about iconic moments in action and the aha and the, and then also blind spots. But when you just mentioned there, there could be an unintended impact on our teams. And because we’re so focused on getting a thing done, we lose the brilliance and the contribution and the insights and expertise of our teammates. And so I think if I’m hearing you correctly, it’s important. 

 

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Leadership Blind Spots: Navigating Blind Spots for Enhanced Team Dynamics

 

It’s imperative that the business owner recognize when he or she is unaware of the blind spot. And it sounds like what you’re suggesting is that they should, they should intentionally open themselves up in front of their team and say, what am I not seeing? How can we make this better so that they can hopefully then see the situation through multiple different or multiple points of view and my tracking with you? Yeah, true. And the way we would express that, I’m really reluctant to tell people they should do something, even though I can see how it would really be to their benefit, but I’ll say it this way, rather than making one way, right? 

 

And in another way, wrong, or you can continue down that path and that’ll give you one set of results or you can open up benefits from the impact of other people that, which also allows you to give them impact that they’ll listen to not impact, but give them feedback and that’ll get you a whole different set of results. And I mean, particularly in the business world, it’s all about results. You know, it, as a consultant, if we can’t make a difference in performance, a result, what are we doing, where we should go to something else from our world, that’s about being consistently able to raise awareness, which is another way of talking about starting to erase blind spots or pieces of them. 

 

The more where I become, the broader, my spectrum of reality, then the more options that I see or different situations that I’m challenged by. So my guess is that when things like COVID or insert name of other crisis, yes. Because you know, we’re going to have another crisis of some sort of whatever that might be, that when, when, when we start feeling the choppy water, then, then that probably makes us even less trying to phrase this correctly. Then we probably become less open to our blind spots, or may we become more blind? 

 

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Leadership Blind Spots: Breaking the Default

 

Yeah. We will default to tried and true ways of dealing with things when the more heat that comes on, the more we are prone to default behaviors. So, grumpy and aggressive might be in default behavior. Cause I think that what you got to do to get things done, you got to get in there and kick some butt. That’s what moves action. Well, yeah, I’ll just may not be the most efficient or effective action you want. And particularly if I’m pressed challenge or stress, it is harder for me to listen to things that I don’t necessarily agree with. 

 

And I don’t have to agree to something to actually get over your world in here from where you are saying if I can listen from if you and I are having a conversation and I can listen from Stephens point of view. I’m going to get much better Intel than if I siphon it through whatever my narrator internal, internal narrator is saying about it, the better Intel I get out of the other people’s communication, the more effective I’m going to be. It opens up options. Isn’t that interesting? I’m like, the time that we need it, most we default to the behavior. 

 

This is going to help us the least. Yep. Yep. Why is that? Like, why do we double down? And maybe it’s just a human tendency. Ah, and I don’t understand why we double down on what’s going to help us the least. It’s like, we revert back to sort of the portion of our, of our, that’s not going to be that hopeful when, when the reality is we should be even more open or a more collaborative, a more communicative in seeking other points of view during times of crisis. But yet we hunker down and we go the other way. Why or why not? I would say it has to do with automatic behavior. 

 

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Leadership Blind Spots: Strategies to Break Automatic Behavior

 

So look, I’m you get into the car from your office. Ah, and you drive home. Yep. How much attention are you really paying to the driver? Well, that’s a great example, right? Because you’re almost sometimes an automatic pilot. Yeah. Yeah. And we can safely drive that way and less weird or your wife calls and says M Stephen a stopped by the, the cleaners on the way home you go. Yeah. Okay. Are you getting the car? You pull up the driveway, turn around, and go back to the cleaner. Unless you get walking out the door, she says for the clothes you go were on automatic pilot, and you and I are on automatic pilot. 

 

A lot of the time the concept to flow is a big conversation these days people like Peter, Diamondis Stephen Kotler, bayzos a long time. And all of that whole it’s about getting into flow. You know, what athletes call getting into the zone. Right. But it is an ability to bring your focus down that you are so focused on this, that your capacity for performance doing that goes up significantly. 

 

So what is that really about? It’s about getting out of our automatic behavior, automatic behavior. Doesn’t get us there. It takes the elder or there’s a whole conversation about how, the ways to get yourself into flow. Okay. So then, oh, it was just getting tried to get all this in, in my notes too. I’ve read some of Kotler’s work around getting into flow, which is really powerful and so that made me think of, okay if I can do that for myself and I can get out of it as you’re describing it, automatic behavior, can I help team by team or can a business owner help third team do something similar, based on your experience, does, is that possible to help a team get into quote-unquote? 

 

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Leadership Blind Spots: Building Collective Trust for Peak Performance

 

Absolutely. Well, in fact, a book that Kotler wrote with a guy named Jamie Wheel, I’ll think of it in a second, something fire the, the example they used for that, where the seals are not the art, but the Navy seals great sound effect, but I knew so I’m, and you know, the T they trained. So they have such a disciplined regimen of training, right? When they actually go on a sign-out, there’s a point where they just click into collective fault. 

 

And I don’t have to look to see somebody covering me over here, I know they’re there. And so when they, I mean, and it’s like, so yeah, you as a team can do that sports teams do that. Or the women’s team, that one, the soccer championship, what last year? the one Megan mapping though, the team that says they weren’t coming to the white house they were so connected that they got into group think group flow, which does, and being connected like that doesn’t necessarily mean I like everybody on my team. 

 

That’s not important, but it does mean that going back to you a few minutes ago, you mentioned you gotta build trust. There’s no doubt that there’s trust there. Right. So they may not be best friends, but they’ve built a lot of trust. Right. But you don’t. It’s hard to respect you if I don’t trust you. If you think about it and the arena of trust, which we talked about a lot, it’s an interesting dichotomy. They’re if you think about how do we, how did you and I relate to trust when we divided into two categories, either granted up front, okay. 

 

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Leadership Blind Spots: Accountability and Collaboration in Relationships

 

I trust you and I are now working on our new work together. Okay. I trust you. And then I’ll wait to see if you’re going to mess it up, or I with hole my trust and make you go through a series of hoops to prove you’re trustworthy. Then I’ll start to grant you my trust. But either way, if you notice, where do I look to see if someone is trustworthy? I look at their behavior. Now. Unfortunately, my bad; my assessment of your behavior deals with my narrator and my judgment. 

 

So if I don’t like you to tell me if I don’t like your voice, I’m inclined to listen to you less or let’s say you and I have never met, you come with a good reputation, four, what you do, and you’re qualified. However, you walk in, and you look like the first boss I ever worked for. You look like the principal of my school that used to bring me into the office regularly. And I immediately did not realize it, and so it’s always over there with you. And what’s really driving that as my own assessment or the other hand, if I started to treat trust, that’s my accountability. 

 

So if we’re working together, I grant you my trust. Then something comes up. I have a question: I’m going to be accountable for coming to you in a spirit of collaboration or partnership and saying, Hey, Stephen, I need to check something out with you. This just happened. Now, I got some feedback. You said this about it. And I noticed that I started a question about trust for the ad. So, I just needed to check it out with you. You might go well, no, that didn’t happen. Here’s what happened. I go, ah, okay. Yeah, I got it. Okay, Ma’am, thanks a lot. Or you might go, oh wow. You know, Craig, you’re alright 

 

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Leadership Blind Spots: Keys to Successful Relationships

 

I actually did do that. I hadn’t seen that. Thank you so much. I apologize. I appreciate you. And I’m like, oh good, okay. Trust in tech, but I’m managing it. I’m not a victim of your behavior. I’m not the effect of your behaviors. And we always have that choice. We just have to be aware of when it happens. There are so many great lessons here, Craig, and in it, I think it’s fascinating, too. That right now, we’re sorta coming full circle. Trust is at the center of all of that as a candid and open conversation. 

 

And then the bias piece, like the example you were just taking us through, ah, when all of a sudden I was the principal of a former school of yours for a principal of yours. But anyway, that’s like injecting past experiences and then by us and all of that into, which then the potential of a great relationship going forward, this has been so good. Oh, you’re welcome. I mean, look, science tells us how the brain operates and operates, identifying patterns. So if you looked like somebody that I’ve used to not have a great relationship with, there’s a pattern. So, the brain latches onto the brain and wants to feel a void. 

 

So this is so good, Craig. Before we close out in and say goodbye I know we covered a lot, but any final advice or any final recommendations that you’d like to share? And then please do tell us the best way for Onward Nation business owners to connect with you. Oh sure. You know, here’s what I can tell you from personal experience from the stem. I started appreciating what I think is real, isn’t it? You know, the more I can appreciate that. The more that allow curiosity to come into play, the more curious I am, and the chances are the greater my awareness is going to grow. 

 

Learn more about leadership blind spots by nurturing the topics in this blog

 

Leadership Blind Spots: Last Bit of Advice and Connect with Craig

 

The more reality about the world is going to open up, just like our primary education is dead for us if you think about it. I mean, particularly when we were a little kid when you learned to read, what a whole world that opened up. Sure. So if you are and are curious, it opens up the world, and you know, what curiosity has to take us questioning our own interpretation about things, and normally rare, particularly in the work environment, we just don’t check it out. That often we’re busy, we’re rushed. We got a da. So we don’t take the time to go and check things out. When we have an impact on other people, we don’t take the time to clean it up for a check-out, and as such, it has a powerful impact on how we behave and how behavior drives performance. 

 

So if you really want, if you’re really dedicated to raising your level of performance, when you have to start examining your behavior, and that’s introspective, not in extra perspective examination and the momentum consulting where we are our main offices in Austin, Texas and it’s [email protected]. Awesome. Thank you for that, Craig. And no matter how many notes he took in, I took pages of them. The key is that you have to take it with Craig. So generously shared with you. 

 

You have to take it in, apply it, and then accelerate your results in Craig. We all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day. And I’m grateful that you said yes for a third time to come back to Onward Nation to yet again, be our mentor in guide so we can move our businesses onward to that next level. Thank you so much. My friend, Stephen, it is a pleasure, as always. Thank you. I mean, every time we have this conversation, I’ve got a thing. So, it swings both ways in swings both ways. Appreciate it. 

 

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Learn more about leadership blind spots by nurturing the topics in this blog