Mindset, Awareness, and Practice: The Leadership Map with Garrett Benz

Great leadership builds trust. But. But one of the. One of the key ways to build trust is to simply not break it. And because trust is built slowly over time with little acts and precedent set and doing what we say we're going to do and following through on behaviors. And we can either trust some, trust that someone is going to be reliable or trust that they're going to be unreliable. But ultimately missteping and. And breaking trust. And one of the key ways and one of the most drastic, I think, pieces. And so the notion of building trust is going to be powerful, but one of the. One of the key ways to build trust is to simply not break it. And because trust is built slowly over time with little acts and precedents set and doing what we say we're going to do and following through on behaviors. And we can either trust some, trust that someone is going to be reliable or trust that they're going to be unreliable. But ultimately misstepping and breaking trust. And one of the key ways and one of the most drastic, I think, pieces. And so the notion of building trust is going to be powerful. Hi there and welcome to the Step up podcast. I'm your host, Kent Knievel. Every week I talk to experts who focus on helping leaders step up their leadership game and leaders telling their stories of growing up through the ranks. If you're new to the show, do me a favor and subscribe so you never miss an episode. One last thing. As a leadership development consultant and executive coach, focus area of mine is supporting newly promoted leaders. One in three promotions fail because we never teach newly minted VPs how to stop being a director or a newly promoted director how to stop being a manager. That's you. Or if you support a leader who has been recently promoted, I encourage you to visit my website at Kent Coach Toolkit and download a free copy of the Promoted Leader toolkit filled with practical advice and tools to help new leaders stick the landing and truly step up to their new leadership level. All right, I've dillied and dallied long enough. On with the show. Welcome, everybody. Today we're going to be talking about developing yourself as a leader. And with me for this conversation today is Garrett Benz, leadership consultant, author of the Profound Space. Welcome, Garrett. Glad to have you here today, Kent. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. Yeah. Before we get into our topic, I would love to hear just a bit more about your journey, whatever of your career journey you feel like telling the day. For those listeners out there who don't know who you are yet. Yeah. No, I appreciate that. Thank you. The journey, wow. It's. It's such an expansive question. The journey is vast. I think to cut it short. Right. I. Leadership has always been such a, an important and powerful part of my life since I think as back as far as learning athletics. Right. Sporting competitions. And you learn great things about skilled leaders and you learn amazing things about poor leaders from the very beginning. And leadership, sorry, has been central for me. I think I had some key mentors who said, hey, you have some natural leadership tendencies. Was I a great leader? By no means, but they pushed me in that direction. And so over the course of my life, I've always been engaged in leadership roles and responsibilities and then eventually turned it into a career. Whether I was either in a leadership role full time or I was consulting as a leadership development consultant. And currently I'm working in the finance industry. I help top level leaders expand their leadership skills, expand their leadership presence and grow their business. So from a leadership perspective, I, I've been engaged in it for a really long time. There's a lot to talk about. Leadership is a big, broad, fast topic. Right? Yeah. You have a framework you call the leadership map. So I'd love to dig in on that. Yeah, we can do that. So the leadership map and the leadership map, to be fair, does stem from the work that I did in my book Profound Space. Ty Lovett Profound Space. Three illusions keeping you from the life you want and the leader you could be. And the leadership map is. Stems off of those three illusions. We can get into those illusions later if we want to. But the leadership map is a fairly simple framework. M A P. I'm routinely interested in helping people understand their leadership mindset. That's the micro. What is their mindset as they're entering into either a new leadership role, working with a particular situation, having a difficult or crucial conversation, facing something that they're. That's. That they're feeling up against. Mindset is such a powerful piece of leadership and I always encourage my leaders to start thinking about it from a courageous mindset. And we can get more in detail into what courageous mindset looks like in a bit. But the second piece of the leadership map is a awareness. Working routinely with leaders on their own sense of personal awareness as well as awareness of those who, whom they're leading or whom is leading them. Awareness is part. This is where we get the eq. This is where we set the ego aside. These are the tools or the skills that we often talk about in the sense of awareness. And then the third piece of the leadership map is practice or plan or sometimes even precedent. But typically it's practice or plan. And the, these three components. And by the way, the leadership practices, what are the routine practices that you employ? What's the plan of action, the strategy that you have to move forward? These three components, they're not always complete. And this is where we get leadership wrong. Sometimes we think, hey, if I can learn this skill, that skill and this skill, I'll be a complete leader or I'll be a better leader than I was yesterday. But the truth of the matter is we're constantly needing to be reaware of how we're interacting with others and how people are responding to us. Awareness is a never ending scheme. Your mindset is a routine challenge every single day. You don't get to say I've got a great leadership mindset. And that happens every day. No, you probably start from scratch. Right. And so all of these, all three of these components are dynamic. And then of course, the plan or the practice and also recognizing the precedent that you have set, oftentimes as leaders we forget about how we set precedents and then we break those precedents, which also breaks trust. Right. So that's the notion of the leadership map and that's the tool that I use regularly with high performing leaders to help them understand, look, you're not looking for perfection, you're looking for a balance. Almost like a Venn diagram. Right. How am I working in all three of these areas and giving them the attention due, recognizing I might be skilled and more so in one area than another. Yeah. And before we started recording, you had said something about, and I want to bring us there pretty quickly around skill versus and I can't remember what you were saying now. Leadership skills versus leadership. Don't get me wrong about this. Leadership skills are extremely important. And we, I think in the HR world and in the corporate world, we spend a lot of time focused on skill sets because they're measurable, they're trackable to some degree. We want especially our younger employees, even our growing employees to learn new skills because we can track that. But at the end of the day, I feel like, like focusing so much on skill sets is a very fixed mindset perspective. It's not dynamic. Here's the skill, here are the five things that you have to do in order to learn that skill. Practice that skill, perform that skill, master that skill. Great, you've moved on, you can learn a new skill. I don't know a single skill. I've learned in my entire life where I haven't had to go back and relearn it. And I think it's easy to think that we're like the two or three stage rocket that we would shoot off in seventh grade physics class where our skill sets. Just one performs, one performs and the next one performs and the next one performs and you keep escalating higher. When we leverage the leadership map, we recognize these are all intention altogether. We're in a routine understanding of what it means to be aware of how I show up as a leader and how other people respond to me and vice versa, how I respond to other people. Because it leaves open the human condition. Yeah. I think if I can layer in there a little bit too, because I think what we're talking about is skills versus, I think what you were just saying, mindset. Right. And those elements. Yep. So take feedback as an example. By giving and delivering feedback, there's skill there. Maybe even what you're talking about is going from skill to mastery. Right. Which is someone who's maybe just starting out as a leader needs to know how do you deliver feedback. Right. And so you throw a rock and you'll hit a feedback model. Right. But teaching a feedback model is a great place to start. Yeah, but we teach it in a vacuum. Right. We teach it in either a safe environment or we just give you the model, we tell you here's what it should look like and then gotta go both. Now do this outside of a vacuum with a real human who's going to have real human reactions to it. But you also have to get your 10,000 hours in, so to speak. You have to get your reps in before you're then at a point where it's more or less in then internalized or what have you to where you're able to deploy a wider array of probably even to the, you know, your point here around mindset, awareness and practice. Right. Which is somebody who's been diligent about giving regular feedback for years is probably leveraging a wider arsenal of ways to approach a feedback conversation because they've had their, their 10,000 hours, so to speak, and they're able to maybe bring more mindset to those conversations and more variety and nuance and EQ to those conversations than someone who's just recently been promoted to their first. For sure. There is undoubtedly a need for basic skill development. Right. There's no question whether it's formulaic or whether it's. It's practice and reflection. The feedback. Feedback. I always like the term feedback. Because feedback, I call it, feedback's the new F word, right? We all know what we mean when we say feedback. We're hiding the word constructive feedback, we're hiding the word critical. Critical. We're pretending that there's only one type of feedback. Even though on our best days we all want to say all feedback is good. Right? And it is. Giving a compliment is also feedback. Right? Standing up and advocating for position is feedback, right? So feedback comes in so many forms. And at the end of the day, yes, we need certain skills in our too provide quality feedback and to provide criticism and direction. What the leadership map asks then is mindset, awareness and practice, right? What's the mindset going into this? And do I feel as though I'm showing up with the F word for this person? Am I showing up with a critique? Am I showing up with a critique? And is my anxiety so involved with it that I'm actually needing to resort back to the formula of how to deliver feedback? Am I so concerned about. About. And this is the awareness piece. Am I so concerned about how this person's going to respond to me that I'm not sure how I'm going to respond when they respond? And so we start asking those questions. And I think the important questions need to come back to the mindset piece again. And if I truly believe that feedback is a gift, which most of us don't, but if I truly be a feedback gift, I should have no problem worrying about the anxiety piece. But the truth of the matter is that I know that feedback's not always a gift. I know there's something inside me that doesn't want to hurt you. And so this is where I think the leadership mapping, the mindset, awareness and practice. The practice is that routine skill, and that's what we're talking about, or the plan of action, maybe my plan is to sit down with a colleague whom they trust to be there when I deliver this challenging news that we're calling feedback. And there are bigger issues than just formulating play for key executive leaders. I think, yeah, the thing that's in my head right now, I want to get your take on it because I think you're. It's in this space. And I'm going to be shocked if you've had 0 thoughts about this at all, which is we're in this time immediately. Right now. We're recording in March of 2026 and we have seen, my guess is over a million layoffs in the last 12 plus months, probably. Well, let's just call it 12 months. And some of them are leaning on AI and moving toward reducing headcount for things that don't need human intervention or what have you, or. And I'm getting to a point, I promise, which is, it seems maybe this is just the leadership consultant in me as well. Like being, I don't know, for lack of a better way to put it, high on one's own supply, which is it feels like human to human. Like human leadership is something that's not going to be easily replaced. And in fact, as we look at, I'm thinking even back to the pandemic here, where I think people were really questioning the meaning of work. Right. And is this where I. I'm spending how much of my life here? I'm spending how much of my emotional energy tied into what's happening? And so as we look at the ways in which we still probably can't even fully comprehend how society, let alone work, might change Right. In the very near future, I'm wondering how much of what you're talking about is only going to become more important. Right. That leaders are attending to not only their own mindset. Right. And checking in with themselves, having some level of self reflection on, like, how am I doing? What's the mindset I'm in today? Am I even in a place where I should be having this feedback conversation with Garg today, let alone attending to how my Garret be doing today? I don't know. You probably see where I'm going with this. I'm curious what your thoughts are. I do see where you're going. And I think, yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot there that we can unpack. Right. Maybe that's a whole other episode. That's probably several podcasts. Right. But from my perspective, I think, I think about it from the title of my book, Profound Space. I believe firmly that, that as leaders, we need to figure out a way to create profound space for humans to interact. And I don't mean going to the movies, Right. What does it look like to have a profound workplace where we don't all show up in mundane ways and all have teams, chats with each other while we're in separate offices in the same bill. Right. There's something profound about having the right mindset, a sense of awareness and a strategy plan, a precedent, a practice that, that, that brings people together in a way that is profound enough to drive business. And that's what businesses are there for, Right? It's to drive business. Make no mistake about that. But at the end of the day. I. AI and the layoffs that we're having with AI sure. This is just beginning. I don't. I've never met a single person and I know a lot of people in tech who really, truly believe that they feel as though their world is going to be better when they don't have to interact with anyone else. And so at some point we're going to have to return to basic human contact. Yeah. And if. Let's take tech for a moment. Right. Um, what roles are. What roles are most likely to go away? Right. If the. As the tech evolves and gets better at certain things, it's the things that probably require less human to human connection. Right. So if you think about it, the roles that aren't going to be as easily replaced. I'm not going to say they're never going to be replaced, but not as easily replaced. Sooner are the roles that require humans to be in a room together or on the phone together and interacting. Right. With one another. So there's almost this. I'm going completely off topic from the book here, but it's almost like social skills. I'm just going to use that broadly. EQ mindset could quite possibly become pretty valuable currency for not only just people to be employed, but leaders, you know, in particular. Here's a good illustration. We have a little fly fishing shop in the town in which I live. And it was a small little shop struggling along. And then Covid hit and there was this resurgence, this return to nature, this opportunity to try a new thing, and all of a sudden business took on. And now he's well known around the area as one of the best fly fishing shops around with knowledgeable people. But what it took was it took a change of world to drive people back. The permits in the boundary waters in northern Minnesota were off the charts during COVID and they remain elevated and hard to get. The national parks and the state parks are flooded with people in ways that they never have been because the world changed. Okay, so we go. We re. We kind of. Humans revert back to some sort of internal, innate sense of primal need at some point. And I wonder if AI is going to develop that socially. Are we going to return to some sort of primal need to. You and I are having a great face to face conversation, but maybe we're going to do podcasts over a beer or in the backyard, over on a fire or whatever. And this is convenient, but. But beyond convenience, there's something more profound, right? Yeah. And so I wonder if a. And this is just Me wondering, I wonder if AI is going to push us in that direction. Yeah. And, and this is why I make the big books to bring it back to the leadership map. Right. The importance of. I think it's going to become only more important. Right. That a leader attend to mindset, awareness, even precedent. I think to your point on how trust, easily trust can be broken. Because I feel like even if as I just think about the whole leadership development space and some of the things that we've been talking about for years, it feels like they only become more and more important every year that goes by. What's interesting, great leadership builds trust. But, but one of the, one of the key ways to build trust is to simply not break it. And because trust is built slowly over time with little acts and precedents set and doing what we're saying we're going to do and following through on behaviors. And we can either trust some trust that someone is going to be reliable or trust that are going to be unreliable. But ultimately misstepping and breaking trust is one of the key ways and one of the most drastic, I think pieces. And so the notion of building trust is going to be powerful. AI in and of itself is going to, is going to break trust. It's going to break human trust, human to human, but it's also going to break trust in various industries I currently work in, like I said, in the finance industry. And I brush up with a lot of say wealth advisors and this is true for all wealth advising companies. People are concerned about AI taking over the business. And I say, look, if I get. If Kent, if you're a financial advisor and you do someone wrong and someone posts out on social media, Kent is the worst financial advisor. I would never use him or his firm. You have a black eye. But all financial advisors don't get a black eye because of your response. When AI performs and does someone dirty and it will happen, someone's going to post, hey, you know what? I tried this AI tool and it ruined my financial plan. Guess what? All of AI is going to have a black eye. You see what I mean? Yeah. And so AI is going to break our trust somehow. In fact, it probably already has. It's probably in the process of doing it. And so as this new technology comes up, there's going to be trust broken and the only place we can return to find trustworthy things is going to be human connection. Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to make this the AI. It's all important, right? Yeah, yeah, but it just some of what you were Saying just hit with some conversations I've been having recently about pace of change and who's going to be impacted first and how do you. I don't know if protect yourself's the right word, but like how do you. What are the ways you can protect yourself and your own employability and where does some of what you're talking about? It's already protecting your sort of employability and your brand and effectiveness as a leader. Right. First and foremost it's that mindset piece, right? If you have a fixed mindset around, hey, these are my skills, this is what I'm good at, this is my personality. If you have the mindset of this is just who I am. And so I need to find a place where I can just be who I am. Chances are you're going to suffer more if you have the mindset of, okay, there's a next new thing coming and I probably should be curious about it. I don't have to like it, I don't even have to pretend to like it, but if I'm not curious about it, I'm probably going to suffer consequence. I think curiosity is going to be extremely important and I see it, I see it a lot with our older people in the workforce. I've gotten to a point where I don't need to be curious. I'm not going to be. But you're going to struggle. And also with our extreme younger people who are tech reliant, but they're also the ones who are going to face like they face the worst of everything in society sometimes they're also going to face AI because the entry level positions that are mundane can get replaced by the AI. Right. So I know you work in the financial industry, which I think particularly, I think probably with leaders you're working with, especially if you're working with folks in the field, so to speak. I think we've been looking at that industry for a while as having a real aging leadership population, for example. So going right to where what you were talking about, I'd imagine there's an aspect of talking with leaders about mindset and awareness that depending on maybe their own experience with leadership development or coaching might be new if not feeling a little woo right to them. How are you interacting with as you're stepping in with leaders and talking about mindset, maybe for the first time with them, like how are you stepping into that conversation with those folks? That's a great question. I gotta show up as non as possible. I can show up with a little woo, but not a lot of woo. And you might be surprised, Kent. High performers and people of means and of wealth long for personal connections on a very deep level. And so more so than what I think our general population will give them credit for. Okay. And sometimes they long for it because they're so isolated from personal connection somewhere. It's almost a symptom of their own success. Yeah, yeah. Or a consequence of their own success. But if you can relate to them on a human level and ultimately it's taking a little bit of initiative, feeling your intuition and taking a risk on it and just going in you, you'd be surprised after a short period of time where you built relationship of trust again, where they trust that you're not going to laugh at them. Only give them feedback with the F word in mind. Right. But also support what they're doing. And I think. But that's a good leadership lesson for anyone. If I want to be able to help guide you in a direction that you're not currently going, I want to understand your ultimate goal. Right. If I'm leading entry level people or high executives, if I understand their goal and they understand I'm on the same side of the table as them and want them to get to this goal, it's gonna be a lot easier for me to make some suggestions on some alternative ways to get there. Which that's what feedback is. It's alternative ways to accomplish your goal. Right? Yeah, yeah. But yeah. So I gotta show up with some. This is the strategy piece. Right. What's the strategy behind making an intimate connection with the finance world where you don't think, you just imagine that's not there. Yeah, yeah. I think. Interesting angle to think about it. Right. Because I talk about. I've had Kevin Wildey on or Willie on the podcast who wrote the book. Coachability is local to the Twin Cities area. Yeah. Former General Mills HR leader partners at Carlson Shout Out. Kevin, I didn't mean this to become a bio for him suddenly, but one of the things he talks about in his book is the how you know that I'm going to put it maybe in my words that it's. It can be a little lonely at the top. Right. You're not getting as much organic feedback anymore the higher you go. Right. Because there's more risk involved for those providing it. Right. Where you know, it becomes almost more important that you are asking for feedback. And I'll even point towards Kim Scott's book, Radical Candor. Right. She talks about. She goes through the whole book, the first three quarters of the book. Is all about just this, the case for feedback and why it's important and why it's the caring thing to do, actually. And she has got some good frameworks for thinking about. I think it's a call to action, for caring enough to provide feedback. And then in the last quarter of the book, she talks a bit about how do you implement this in an organization and how do you build a feedback organization? And one of the very first things she says is, counterintuitively, you don't build a feedback culture by wildly and radically providing feedback left and right. It's actually the opposite. It's by asking for feedback and leading the way, by showing an openness to feedback. Yes, yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think, Simon, not to go off and quote other people, but I. Think Simon, we'll pick all these names up off the floor later. I think Simon Sinek said it best. He said, if you want feedback, don't ask for feedback, ask for advice on how I can make this. Would you please give me advice on how I can make this, because. Oh, you want my advice on how to make it better? Yes, I can do that. If you ask for feedback, you're going to get. Oh, yeah, good job. Now, that was nice. Yeah. And he does a good job of laying that out. But the heart. But the thrust of your point and go back to it, because I just. I totally just forgot it here. What was the thrust of your point? I was just. Because it's lonely at the top, right? People aren't necessarily providing feedback. You've got to lead the way, which is also how you build a feedback culture. Leading the way by asking. Yes, the loneliness at the top is a real thing. In fact, I might even argue that if you haven't experienced the loneliness at the top, you might be leading wrong. If you are not, you go home as a leader and you carry all those difficult decisions with you and no one else has to. You carry the weight of the consequences of potential decisions you might make and no one else has to. So if you have somehow offloaded all of that, the leadership decisions and choices to someone else and you're not feeling that you might be doing it wrong. Now, I tell my people that at the same time, I say, look, I want you to. To fully understand the loneliness at the top, but I want you to be alone up there without feeling alone up there, like, without feeling the loneliness. I want you to know that you're alone but not feel lonely in. It's kind of. It's like the person who knows I'M alone, but I'm okay being alone. I'm not feeling alone. We want to be able to get to that point. And, and that particular issue is a real challenging one. But that's where I think great leadership development consultants, great coaches are willing to have the courage to step in there and say, look, no one is telling you the truth. Many people are telling you what they want, what you want them to say, and you know it. And if you're an egomaniac, you love it. If you're a great CEO or a great executive, you're like, no, I need to, I need some construction. And that's where. And I feel very fortunate every day because I work with so many great executives who really do welcome the critique and the suggestion, the advice, as Simon Siegel would say. And I would say that's where I think a great coach needs to step in and say, I'm on your side. You. I think we've established a little bit of trust. I've got some suggestions for you because. But a lot of people don't have the courage to do that, especially if their job relies on it. And there's no one more vulnerable in an organization than probably a consultant or a coach. When you're out there coaching and consulting and you're struggling with that courage, that's, that's gonna be a tough place. You might not be in the right, the right spot. So before I get on to the advice column, what was the work research thinking? What, what led you to writing the profound space? What led you to the leadership map? I'm a. I like to observe human behavior. I have forever right background in social studies and sociology and psychology and everything what I've found in working with people over the years. These are the three, what I call three illusions and they're really three false beliefs. The first one is confidence. I think that we put so much weight in confidence. Whether you're developing young adult, a developing middle aged adult, full fledged experience, mastering your craft in the workplace. We'll say things like do it confidently or find confidence. Muster up the confidence. Confidence is such a pile of bs, right? Is it important? Yes. When you are confident in something, it's amazing, right? But you don't get there by pretending. You don't get there by faking it and fake it till you make it right. And we hear podcasters talk about this all the time. And this is where I think Brene Brown has done a stellar work and discussing courage and vulnerability. And we have to take a courageous mindset in everything that we do we have to come from a place of courage? I like to say that leadership is one courageous act after another. Because if you're not engaged in the full act and emotion of being vulnerable, you're not being courageous. Right. You don't need courage to do something that's not making you feel vulnerable. Right. It's inherent in the term courage. If you feel safe doing it, you don't need courage. You're just doing stuff. I think that's the misconception people have too, Right. About fear versus courage is that. That they feel like misconception is fear is the. Or courage is the absence of fear, when in fact it's the. There's a book title. I'll just put it in the book title. It's to feel the fear and do it anyway. It's the willingness to act. Yes. Yeah. Fear. Courage is just acting in the face of fear, doing what's necessary. Sometimes I say what's right, but really what's necessary in the midst of it. Yeah. So what's the second illusion? You started getting into illusions. The second illusion is this sense of information. We live in an information overload. It used to be the more you know, the higher you go. It used to be gain knowledge. Gain knowledge. Everything's at the. At the touch of our fingertips right now. We don't have to worry about information. You don't have to memorize data. Knowing more is great. It's. But what's really important is not information, it's insight. Once you have the information, how. And I don't mean what do you do with it? How does it change you if you gain more information and it doesn't change you? You're lacking in insight. Right. And so I think that that transformational piece is so important. And that's where the awareness sphere of the leadership map comes. And we talk about the courageous mindset. The awareness piece is, are you aware of how you've been transformed or have you been re. Have you refused to be transformed by the knowledge that you've gained? And then therefore, we're in this fixed mindset place again. Right. And then the third illusion is this sense of. And this is a hot button, I think, political issue. But that's not intended to be like that. It's a sense of freedom. Right. It's really hard to define freedom. And I think that what most people look for isn't necessarily freedom because it really isn't possible. What they're looking for is autonomy. They're looking for a sense of self and a sense of I have power to make decisions in every situation. I don't have all the power, but I have power in every situation. I have some degree of control over how I behave, how I live my life. Right. Regardless of the context. I think even Viktor Frankl, who spent time in concentration camps in the Nazi regime, will say that autonomy is one of the most powerful tools. Right. That even in that world, I had the power of my mindset. Right. Even in that suffering, I had some power. That doesn't necessarily say that was an okay experience. It just means that we don't have to give up our autonomy. And so the notion of the illusion of freedom is really powerful. And the book talks about how to build this sort of sense of autonomy. And you do it through practices. This is the leadership map. You do it through practices, you do it through plans, you do it through commitments that you make on a regular basis. Autonomy is really the term actually means self customs that are special to me, that are important to me, that help me be the best version of me. Yeah. Nice. A big area that I focus on in my own thinking writing practice is I focus a lot on newly promoted leaders, having been a part of that system, both of trying to help build leaders and get them ready, identify future leaders, plan for successors, and seeing a lot of newly promoted leaders be fairly unsupported in the mindset, skill set, tool set, shifts that they need to make upon stepping up into the next level. So I like to focus there when it comes to advice at the end of the podcast, at least I'm starting to focus there for anybody who's been listening the entire journey here with me. So my first question for you is for those leaders who are seeking that next promotion, wanting to continue to grow in their career, get to that next level. What's one piece of advice you, you have for leaders seeking their next leadership promotion? Yeah. Add value. Right. Look around the organization and find some place you can add value and profoundly add value. Doing your job as you're asked. Absolutely. And then take a risk and add value. If you find an area that you and every organization operates differently. I understand that and that maybe you have some boundaries or restrictions around you, but if you understand that the whole reason you're there is to add value to the organization, you're not there to climb the ladder for you. Right. Because you can do that at any organization, anyone. You're there to add value to that or so find what's important to the org and go add value. And people are going to start realizing that you're Valuable. Yeah. Nice. I love it. So for those leaders who have been recently promoted, they've found themselves, they're trying to stick the landing. What's your best advice for those leaders who have stepped in, stepped up, they've just moved from director to VP or something? I would say the same. I would turn that last phrase around. I would say look for the people who are adding value and be spending time with them. Recognize where value is necessary and that you, if you've just been promoted in a leadership role or even an advanced leadership role and you're not aware of who's adding value to the organization, step number one is find out who's adding value. Because if you're going to help them add value to the org, you're going to be adding value to the org. And I realize that's not a skill. This is more of a broad perspective on how to understand your role. I have made the mistake of stepping into leadership more than once. Mistake of stepping into a leadership role and feeling this euphoric joy around being a quote unquote leader. But I had not a clue what I was doing. I knew what, I knew how to do the job, but I didn't know what it meant to be a leader. If you enter the role of a leader and you don't feel the weight of what comes with that. Give it a week for one. But it would be start thinking about where that weight's coming from because that weight is going to start to have you ask the question, where are people adding value and where should we be concentrating our efforts here? The org wants you to add value. That's it. That's what leaders do for business organizations. And what comes with that? Of course. Yes. Courage and vulnerability and making smart decisions and taking that weight home and finding colleagues to collaborate with and all of these things that we know are so powerfully important. But at the end of the day, all those things add value. Yeah, right, Nice. So for those listeners out there looking for either, you know, getting the Profound Space book or wanting a little more geared bentz in their lives, where can they find you and your work? Oh, great, thank you. Obviously on LinkedIn, Garrett Benz, my website for the book and for some of the consulting work I've done is called create profoundspace.com just like it sounds. Create profoundspace.com you'll find the book link there. You can buy it on either Amazon or when I say non Amazon and either one is fine. Otherwise you can also reach me on that page as well. It'll send me an email. My email's probably posted in my LinkedIn as well. I'd love to connect with you. I'd love to have a chat with you. You. I'm always open to chatting with people who are in the HR or leadership fields. And yeah, nice. Make sure I get the site and book links in the show notes. Garrett, thanks for being here today. This was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun for me too, Kent. I really appreciate seeing the inside world of your podcast here. This is cool. Nice. Thank you. Take it easy. That brings us to the end of our episode. Thank you for listening. I'd encourage you to head on over to my website Kent Coach and start a conversation with me there. Or check out my Promoted Leader toolkit at Kent Co Toolkit. Before you go on with your day, please take a moment to leave a rating and a review. Wherever you listen to podcasts, click the five stars. That helps put this podcast in front of more ears. Till next time, take it easy.