Resilience Isn't About Being Bulletproof, It's About Becoming

We have this concept that resilience is you have to be bulletproof. You have to be able to like, grit, nut up, you know, whatever crass way you want to say it. Like, let's go. And I would tell you the concept that I give and I define within the book is that resilience is not this pressing through, it's becoming. And it's understanding that the distance between where you are and where you want to be is in who you become. And everything we face is teaching and training us in what areas of our life are required to get to where we want to go. And the universe will consistently show you areas of your life where you are not free. 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 how random regulating your nervous system is the new competitive advantage. And with me for this conversation today is Angus Nelson, leadership advisor and author of Is it the upcoming book or already out Neuro Resilient Leader. It's coming out May 5, so depending on when this releases, it's going to be right on time. Thanks for being here today. I'm really excited that you know, brief conversations we've had so far. I'm really excited for this recording. So as I start most of my episodes, I would love to hear just a bit more about your you know, for the audience who doesn't know you yet. Your tell us a little bit about your story, you know, what's your kind of life and or career arc, whatever you want to get into. Sure. So I'll start off real quick. You know I wrote this book as a kind of A an effort to help my clients. And what I found was it made me kind of revisit a lot of why I do what I do. And in many ways, the book wrote me more than I wrote it. And part of that is the context of how I got here in the first place. Years ago, my first business that I started was this nonprofit youth center we fronted as a coffee shop. And we were serving young adults and teaching them about leadership, leadership development. And we also hosted concerts and poetry nights, and we did graphic arts education. And we also had a couple of music festivals. And one of those music festivals was a band called Train was our headliner. And we had like 40 artists. We had thunder showers come in in the middle of it. And we lost $72,000 in the middle of the weekend. Wow. And for our little organization, that was a ton and like kind of what we were talking before we got into this, I thought I just had to put my head down, work harder, and I could turn the ship around. I wanted to prove to the board, prove to the community, prove to my wife at the time that I could turn this thing around. And that turned into 70, 80, 90 hour work weeks. And I was burning the candle on both ends. That turned into abuse and neglect of my own body, and then that turned into addiction issues where I started drinking and then porn, and then I started sleeping around. And I blew up my marriage, I blew up the business, I blew up my sense of myself. And that ruined me for years. And I got to the point where I wanted to take my own life. I was underneath my Christmas tree, 2003, and it was Christmas Day. I had just been officially divorced two days prior. Everybody in my family was out of town and I was by myself. And so there I was, contemplating how I was going to take my life. And I heard this voice that said, we're not done here yet. And that got my curiosity to figure out what. What do I need to do? And the very next week, I ran into somebody I'd shared how I need to do something and said, oh, I know this counselor. You should talk to this person. Immediately made a phone call, and within short order, suddenly I'm learning about human behavior and psychology, emotional intelligence, self awareness, and all these contexts that I had no idea before. Flash forward a decade now. I've pseudo got my act together. I don't know if I'll ever get my act together fully, but I was running an innovation association for Fortune 500 brands, and my co founder and I were working with some of the biggest names on the planet, everything from BMW, Coca Cola, Wells Fargo, et cetera. And as I'm working with my clients around these transformations, digital transformation, I started to notice patterns in how they were handling their leadership, patterns that I was very familiar with. And I started speaking to some of those. And one day one of my executives from Verizon said to me, angus, you'd make a great coach. And that was the beginning. And I got into this whole world as a result of me going through my own pain and transformation into working with leaders and realizing I could be a contagion for a different perspective. And that's how this all started. Cool, thanks for sharing that. That's quite the story. So it's making me want to talk about resilience, maybe on the front end, because it's, it's in the title, but I know that's not necessarily the full thing that we're going to be talking about. So maybe we, maybe we start there a little bit by defining resilience. Because I think, you know, you had said even just a moment ago, I thought if I just worked harder and longer, right? If I just gripped the steering wheel tighter, I always say if I just white knuckled it through, you know, we'd get to the other side. And I'm not sure. I think that's the as we were we were talking about a little earlier. I think that's the definition of resilience I was taught growing up, but I'm not quite sure that that's really what resilience is. I totally agree. And you know, as we've stated before, it's like we have this concept that resilience is like, you have to be bulletproof. You have to be able to like grit, nut up, you know, whatever crass way you want to say it. Like, let's go. And I would tell you, the concept that I give and I define within the book is that resilience is not this pressing through, it's becoming. And it's understanding that the distance between where you are and where you want to be is in who you become. And everything we face is teaching and training us in what areas of our life are required to get to where we want to go. And I also say in the book, I said, you know, the universe will consistently show you areas of your life where you are not free. And when you come against these resistance pieces of life and you're like, well, I'm going to be resilient. I'm a push through. I'm going to white knuckle and Some of these things we say it's actually not that because that's a force of effort rather than a force of being. And what I mean by that is true resilience is being able to absorb whatever is coming against you and be able to transfer that into power. Because what happens is we face some of these things thinking that we can push our way through, but we never actually experience the lesson or the guidance that that challenge is actually here to teach us. Yeah, I think that takes a lot of self awareness. Well, I think at the heart of the entire definition you're, you're giving here is learning, maybe growth, mindset. If we wanted to sum it up to another catchphrase. Right. Because I feel like the definition of resilience I got kind of growing up was we just have to get to Friday. Which has nothing to do with how am I getting to Friday? How am I? And maybe this is where, you know, how we kind of get into talking about regulation too, which is, you know, just getting to Friday doesn't really talk about how we get to Friday. And maybe how getting to Friday could, maybe it could be less tough, at least within things that might be within our control. Right, yeah. But again, you know, thinking of this, you know, I just have to get to the other side regard, you know, was sort of push through till we get to the other side as opposed to maybe slow down and ask some deeper questions and, you know, is there another way we could get to the other side less, not unscathed, but maybe less scathed than if we simply pushed through? And I think that takes us into another layer. So I'll respond to that in the context of this. There's never been a season in humanity where life has changed as rapidly as it is right now. We're living through an era of AI market velocity with, you know, global complexity and economic issues, right. It's accelerating faster than most people know how to adapt. And the perpetual agitation of media, that's reminding us that it's all changing on an ongoing drumbeat basis, right? But the leaders that are trying to outwork this, you know, outwork that velocity, trying to white knuckle it, pushing harder. Like, the truth is you cannot outwork this kind of tempo. Every single business problem at this level, like, that's when you start facing analysis paralysis. People are doubting themselves, they're questioning their, their own ability to trust their intuition. They're stalling on innovation because things are changing so, so much. They don't know what the tool set or what the stack should Be they're hemorrhaging on talent because people don't even know how to show up at work because they're afraid they might get let go, just like the other 30,000 people that just got let go from Oracle. Like there's so much happening under the surface that has nothing to do with the daily. But it's our own central nervous system and that internal operating system is the real problem. And it's the single greatest, as well as, I'd say the most expensive bottleneck that anyone in their business right now is facing. Because we don't have a strategy problem. We have artificial intelligence that can help you with strategy. It's a dysregulated nervous system that at the end of the day is treating everything like all those challenges are being treated like a threat. And so every slack message, every call, every bill that comes in, every request for your time or attention feels threatening, like it's demanding something of you that you're not ready to give. It's the everything's urgent feeling, right? Which is a feeling, right, that everything's urgent. To your point, you know, the. A new invoice hits and that feels urgent. Why am I stressed? Right? This kind of comes to sort of stress and pressure. You know, I know we're talking about resilience, right. But you're, you know, the author of your book is the Neuro Resilient, right. So I'm getting that wrong already. You know, the Neuro resilient leader. So I'm assuming we're, we're going to talk a little bit about what's happening in the brain. So what is happening in the brain? Why is it that all this. Right. Let me put it this way. One could look at the situation right now of. Yeah, I was just saying, and talking to some folks even last week that, you know, there's been now probably 51 updates to tariff policy in, you know, 370 some odd days. You know, I was coaching some folks last spring who were kind of, you know, hitting the brunt of that and having to sort of redo both their supply chain and sales plans every four days, I felt. And so we could look at this and say, pace of change with AI, you know, the two biggest things that are kind of every day kind of throwing people for a loop, AI and tariff policy, for example. Why can't we just address this as a change management issue? Why are we going deep into the, into the psyche here, Angus? Well, because a lot of the change management, what people are discovering is that we're Actually human. No, crazy that. Right? Yeah. Is that people have fear, they have emotion and they're reacting to things in ways that, you know, there's been movements where we want to talk about self awareness and emotional intelligence, but it's bigger than that. You know, underneath the surface people are facing steer stories and fears of their past and translating that into a modern day reality that they don't even know if they have a handle on it yet. And leadership, particularly if you're, you know, higher up on, on the food chain, let's say you're doing the best you can with what you got. Because as if you weren't having enough demands to execute upon before, you're being given more. And Jack Dorsey just put out this memo, I don't know, in some ways a manifesto I suppose. They just let go of 4,000 of their employees and it basically stated that middle management is going to be a player coach type of engagement from now on. Which in and of itself implies the word coach, which means guidance, which means advisory, which means being involved in the human element of relationship. And this is something that hasn't always existed. It's existed in, in companies that were smart, but now it's actually protocol. It's becoming part of a standardized system that nobody really has built out. And inside of the Neuro Resilient. That book has a context called the C3 protocol. And there's three phases in that that I just want to unpack for this real quick. One is clarity. And that starts with what I call the Spice Girl principle, which is tell me what you want, what you really, really want. And most people don't know what they actually want. So when you're in leadership you will communicate the task at hand, but you won't always clarify what does good look like? What is the actual expectation? What do I actually want to see here? It's a very human need and yet most people aren't seeing it from that kind of clarity. And in particular, if you're in a dysregulated state, it's really hard to think clearly. You're thinking about what is this going to mean for you? What does this mean for your job? Are you going to hit your quarterly numbers? What, what is AI going to do that might disrupt your role? Like all of that comes into play and that level of psychology starts to build opportunities for resistance, self sabotage, like operating in very reactive ways. And so the first thing we have to do is get you very clear and there's all sorts of elements we won't go into right now, but in the context of regulation being, you know, different kinds of modalities, of identity, of stories of narrative that you tell and repeat to yourself on an ongoing basis. And we'll, we'll get to that in a little bit about the inputs we put into our supercomputer called self. Yeah. The second piece is capacity. Like, what's your capacity for the responsibilities that you hold? And I don't mean capacity like that resistance, grit. We're talking about where you white knuckle, I'm talking about your tolerance level of. There's an element of pain, but that pain is to reveal something about yourself. That pain is not punishment. And we have to determine for ourselves what's the difference between my role and. And my soul. One of the things. And when I talked with corporate clients, they would tell me they just want to get out of this role with their soul. And I've heard that in a multitude of different kinds of ways. And that's the humanity is like, how do you separate yourself from the bureaucracy, the politics, the pressure, and be able to be comfortable in your own skin without being a people pleaser and without having to do things for other people's validation? Suddenly that becomes capacity. Which leads us to the third piece, which is composure. And composure is that quiet confidence that walks into a room and becomes a light and a magnet who creates a sense of peace when everything else feels chaotic. They have a sense of safety about them that people want to work with them, want to follow them, want to pursue wherever they're headed. Because the level of clarity, capacity and composure with that leader is what this world desperately needs. Right. Sounds a lot like a sort of a broader way of thinking about, well, being Right. That you, how are you caring for yourself and thinking of the oxygen mask analogy. Right. Putting your own oxygen mask on first. And what would be unlocked if in your leadership or your business, whether you're running a business or you're running a function or what have you in a larger business, what would be the unlock if you were truly taking care of yourself? Are you seeing organizations sort of push back against this thinking? Right. It's very personal. As opposed to we can put everybody through a leadership course on, like I said at the beginning, change management. Right. Yeah, yeah. We can put everybody through a whole course on bridges, change theory. Right. How are you, how are organizations reacting to this? And are you seeing, you know, openness and what is causing the openness? Or are you seeing pushback on, like having such a personal approach right now? The reason for this book is to stick a flag in the ground and say, y', all, something's gotta change. I'm creating a new category of leadership, and I know that. And so I'm pushing against a lot of resistance in the context of this is personal, this is spiritual, this is something to do on your own time. And I'm like, cool, so why are you still making demands on people to work on their personal time for your company and not giving them the wherewithal to be successful either in person or in their profession? Because if you're going to bring us technology that's changing the game, then we need to change the people who are behind it as well. Yeah. And I'm actually going to be in front of about 400 IT professionals of Fortune 500 brands in Ireland. I'm the keynote speaker. And I'm basically going to like, call it like I see it and let the chips fall where they may. Interesting enough, every one of those people. My experience thus far has been, you're right, you're so right. We just don't know what to do about it. And this is the part where we have to equip members of our teams with the capacity and the authority to be able to do it different. And every company is going to have a different context. There's going to be different flavors depending on different organizations within said companies. The truth is we have to dive in in the same way that HR was looking at how do we help a leader with self awareness? How do we help them with emotional intelligence? These are very personal traits. Now we have to go a story deeper. What's the next layer of that that helps them show up in a different identity is that I'm not the person who's here to execute for my proof of worth, but I'm execute because the power of the sovereignty I possess already. That's completely different philosophy. We, I spent years assessing leaders right across a, you know, four super factor competency model. Right? And one of the super factors is the thing that, you know, HR and the leadership development industry in general, you know, has constantly gotten the, like the, the, the side eye from which is around people, leadership, right around engage, you know, and I'll keep it simple without trying to hit out every sort of possible competency permutation, but developing people, engaging people, influencing people, right. That's just three of the big ones. And for years, right, there's results. Leadership, right, is the big one. Right. And how common it was, you know, and there was a lot of selection bias in terms of the people that were coming to our company. Right. If you were already pretty great, if they were spending 15 plus thousand dollars on, you know, a one day assessment in order to have some robust feedback and maybe some follow on stuff, but pretty big investment, you were already pretty great. And so it's almost without fail that the vast majority of leaders would be really strong in results leadership. And some of the biggest challenges people would have is in people leadership. Right. And it, and it felt like, you know, I was working for a company that was founded, I want to say probably in the 70s or so, like from probably, you know, local Minneapolis, probably hippie IO psychologists. And there was a part, there was a time when, you know, you could set your watch to people not doing well on, on people leadership. And there certainly was a time when I was like, how much are we leading? You know, leading it this way, like it's, it's in how we're measuring it, you know, or that we're purporting how important this is. And then, and yet you see the results on the ground. You know, I'll then fast forward to my time in hr. You see the results on the ground of people who can do both, who can both get results and attend to their people really well. And yet when we're sitting there in hr, maybe doing performance management or performance annual performance cycle stuff, we're looking at HR is still sitting here trying to nudge the organization on. Yes, the results are important, but how people went about getting the results are really important. And still you fall into this space of organizations rewarding people who are, you know, rainmakers. Right. Regardless of their behavior. Yep. And yet I would say I've, I feel like I've found more and more proof every year. Right. How important people leadership skills are. And I would say, you know, we were, we were talking a little bit before we started recording like AI for example. It's, it's, you know, and this fear of AI is coming for people's jobs. Right. And you know, someone will prove me wrong perhaps at some point, but my own feelings on it are, you know, it's coming for people to machine tasks, machine to machine tasks, but I don't know that it's coming for people to people tasks. Right. And so I'd say I would, you know, I would think people leadership skills are going to become even more important. Right. And I feel like what you're layering in here is the oxygen mask part. Right. You're going to be better able to take care of other people. You're going to be able to develop Your people better work on employee engagement, influence people, if you are able to ground yourself, if you're able to regulate yourself. Right. And so, you know, and we've been talking about, for years, we keep talking about this stuff as soft skills. Right. And I still remember, I don't know how long ago it was, but it was my colleagues in hr, particularly the learning and development people, who. I'm not sure where they got or who coined the phrase, but I started hearing, why is it that soft skills are the hardest ones to learn? Right. Yep. So what is. What is it about? I think you would. You would put it as leadership stability. Right. I'll kind of maybe sum it up in that way. Your ability to kind of regulate yourself and be a stable leader. In your view, what is it about that. That is, you know, the big unlock here. And why has that become a big focus area for you? Imagine, you know, this not as like just soft skills or emotional intelligence or feely or spiritual, all the woo, right. We're talking about legit infrastructure when we talk about leadership stability, because everything downstream of that is employee retention. It's keeping the best players on the team. A dysregulated leader will create a dysregulated team. A regulated leader will filter down a regulated team, like, full stop. So then you take it to the next level is that timing is a huge component in leadership. And that timing will collapse under stress, under pressure. And if a leadership isn't. If a leader isn't stable, then they're going to procrastinate. They're going to do what I call decision insurance, where they start bringing other people in. What do you think? What do you think? How about we get a consultant? Let's get some advisors in here because they don't trust themselves anymore to make a call. They're actually not leading anymore. They're just looking for validation on an opinion. And that way anyone else that's involved can get the blame in case it doesn't go right. And when your nervous system is dysregulated, you either move too early because you're anxious or you freeze for too long. And I've watched leaders, you know, pivot out of fear, out of scarcity, out of lack, and not out of strategy. And when you regulate your life, when you regulate the way that you see the world, and we'll talk about some tools that you can use for that, something shifts. Yeah. Suddenly you can hold tension without reacting, without, you know, snapping at people. You can wait without collapsing. You can move without the adrenaline having to be the driver of all decisions. Leadership stability as a whole. It's not about being calm. You know, this isn't an optics thing. It's about protecting the strategic timing under the velocity and the volatility. And that's where there's true enterprise value is because that leader in a regulated state determines whether an opportunity is won or lost, period. That's why it's so important. I feel like there's a couple angles here. One is the impact that you have on others around you. Right. And I think I've certainly worked for leaders who, you know, I've definitely had more than one. But you know, there's a leader I have in mind where a colleague of mine would kind of stop by my desk and do the temperature check. Right. Like how are they doing today? Right. Before they went to interact with them. Right. So there's certainly an element of taking care of yourself because you have an impact on those around you. Right. How you go about things. Right. And there's also the, I think what the point you were just making is also how does self regulation affect your thinking and decision making and ultimately. Right. Execution. There's a part I'm glad you mentioned talking, I want to maybe talk about like. Well let's, let's talk about some things that people can do because I think for anyone who's done any level of self discovery therapy, you know, you're probably tracking along with us just fine. For those out there, that might mean maybe some of what we're talking about is feeling a little woo. I'd love to get into just a couple things as we have time here around like so, you know, what are some of the things you're encouraging people to do? You know what, what are some steps people can take on self regulation? Sure. So inside my book I, I talk about a bunch of like modalities of self care and regulation. And real quick we're talking everything from like breath work and the book as a whole is not this, but I just wanted to give this for this conversation. It's breath work, it's box breathing, it's in and out. It's both from a clarity state of getting oxygen to the brain because most of us under stress will actually take a shortness of breath. We actually constrict and our brain is restricted of the much needed oxygen in order to have clarity. Second of all, it can be something like tapping, EFT tapping. If you're not familiar with EFT tapping, I highly recommend you go check that out. Energy just real quickly cannot be Created, it cannot be destroyed. This is the law of thermodynamics. It can only be moved. And most of us are carrying energy in our body. Energy freedom technique is the E F T of tapping. And you're basically tapping in the same way that you would do, say when they put pins in you with acupuncture, you're tapping different pieces of your energetic sources. And they do that from an eastern philosophy, Eastern science. In the same way you're tapping specific parts of your body, different modalities, which are different points that move energy through your body. Third I would say is, you know, they say exhaust the body, tame the mind. It's doing physical fitness, going out and putting your sweat on on a daily basis. You know, whether that's in the gym, whether it's go for a walk, whether that's, you know, do some push ups or what have you. Furthermore, there's pieces of rehearsing with visualization. Who are you? How do you show up? Rehearsing a speaking opportunity, rehearsing a pitch and taking yourself in. The same way a professional athlete actually sees the championship, sees the victory before they ever experience it. There's meditation, which is an emptying of a perspective. And it's just observing and not placing meaning or judgment upon what you're observing. And this is like what I call the defrag of your brain, right? And all of that in context is a change in story, a change in narrative, which brings a change in identity, and that identity brings a change in outcome, right? So if we follow the C3 protocol, you go from a mental to a somatic, that's your body into this outcome base which you know, is that expression of behavior. And so from the cognitive to the somatic to the behavior is how this all flows. And there's seven evolutions in the book that you know, know, kind of unpack all this. But I'll summarize with this. Imagine your brain as a supercomputer. This is the easiest metaphor to understand. Everything that you've experienced up into this point in life is data. And you have data. That's termed data. You know, it could be from fifth grade and some coach told you you were never going to amount to anything. It could be a parent who said crippling things about you and, and your possibilities. It could be things that maybe you've done, regrets or shame or mistakes. And all of that plays into your story. And then you will tell yourself one of three things. I don't deserve, I'm not worthy, or I don't have what it takes. And on your pathway up to success, you'll ask those three things. You'll have success, quote, unquote, success, whatever you define it as, you'll get to the other side and you'll face the exact same three, three, same three things. Do I deserve? Am I worthy? Do I have what it takes? Am I going to screw this up? Am I going to blow it? Are people finally going to see I'm a fraud? Am I going to lose everything if I try and start the next company? Blah, blah, blah. So these are all the storylines that are data inputs into our supercomputer. And so our supercomputer processes all that data. On top of that, we have our daily routines. And if you're listening to a bunch of, let's say, talk radio, a bunch of news cycles, you're taking in so much negativity and agitation that you operate at a heightened state. And your amygdala, or part of your brain that goes to fight, flight or freeze in constant state. So the smallest things will set you off. And now your computer wants to validate all of this information. So now you've created an operating system based on chaos, worry, stress, scarcity, less than. And you wonder why the results that you now produce, because the supercomputer wants to validate these facts and so it will seek to create or to attract relationships, opportunities and experience that reflect the data. And this is an incredibly subconscious, complex state and it's happening all the time and nobody's paying attention. Or you get intentional. You change the stories, you change the inputs, you start telling yourself new stories, creating and reframing old negative for positive. And you start building a new identity of who you are today, how everything you've experienced was nothing more than tuition that you paid to get to your new graduation. That everything you've gone through has been to teach and to train and to prepare you for what's next today. That all the things that you've experienced, bad, negative, indifferent or amazing, we're nothing more than just things that happened and they don't necessarily mean anything personal, but what you make of them. And suddenly you have sovereignty and power and you create a new narrative. And then you take in daily inputs of the things you're listening to, the things you're reading, the things you're watching, the people you spend time with who are of a higher caliber, a higher energy, a higher frequency. And now that becomes the new operating system for how you see yourself and how you see the world. The brain goes into that mode of saying, validation, of this data, the operating system says, okay, let's attract or create on a subconscious level a higher caliber of relationships, opportunities and experiences. And suddenly life shifts and you stand back and say, what just happened? And that's how we transform our lives. That's gonna transform your business. That's gonna get you more sales. It's gonna attract opportunity. It's gonna have people wanna stay as a part of your company because they wanna be around people who operate on that kind of caliber. Yeah, yeah. Cause right. It's, it's in the absence, right. Of sort of doing that work. How is your decision making being hijacked by. The first thing I did today was I spent 10 minutes, you know, watching national news, which primarily is there to frighten you. And as one sage in my life once said, it's really good at convincing you that it has the answers to all the problems if you just stick around for one more commercial break. That's the truth. Never does, Right. And then it never does. Right. And all it does is spin you up. Right. And so. Right. How is not attending to your own nervous system grounding affecting decision making, creating pressure where maybe it doesn't exist when you're trying to make a decision. Right. How does you sort of operating with a false sense of scarcity. Right. It leads to things like the idea of there being pies, right. Where it's like, well, if I'm going to give up ground here or for this person to gain ground here, I've got to give up ground when perhaps things aren't that scarce. Right. Or and I'm curious on one more thing. I'm not sure how you're, you're doing on time, so I don't want to, I don't want to push it, but. Right. I think you've said here that, you know, certainty, Right. We talk about analysis, paralysis, but I've never heard someone say that, you know, waiting for certainty is addictive. Ah, certainty, addiction. Yes. Yeah, tell me a little bit about that. Sorry, I, I don't mean to dive into yet another angle here, but I'm, I'm curious, so. Well, let's follow that. You know, I actually think this is related because if you are taking in all of these different negative scarcity, you know, type of elements, right. Your window of tolerance shrinks, you can't handle the capacity. And this is, you know, that, that second tier. And so now you're operating on this context that. And I'm just gonna put this really bluntly. I'll do this when. And typically, what Follows is when I'm more confident, I'll do this. When things feel more settled, I'll do things when. When things slow down. Kids get out of school when things slow down, and we'll. We'll fill in the blank with all this bs. And what we're actually stating is we want some sense of certainty that we can step into this thing and that becomes nothing more than a never will. And when we're making decisions in light of the velocity of which everything is happening, we're doing the best we can with what we got. Which means it's even more incumbent upon us to maintain clarity at all levels so that we can make the best decision possible and not restrict ourselves of opportunity. But if you're just looking for certainty right now, you're not going to find it. The only thing that is certain is uncertain. Right. And so if we say, well, I just wait till I'm confident, and then confidence, just real quick. Confidence can only exist in the past. It cannot. It's impossible for it to exist in the future. Confidence is proof of things that have already been done. It cannot be proven of things to come. And so when we say, I'm just waiting to be confident, you're actually just hypnotizing yourself to an impossibility. And what you're really doing is just certainly looking for certainty. I like that. I. It reminds me of. I feel like talking about failure was, like, very in Vogue about 10 years ago now. And I. I struggled with that. Not from a sense of like, I'm perfect and everything I touch is gold, but I had a hard, you know, and it could have been some of the training I had at. At PDI and Korn Ferry around, just sort of like a development mindset. I just never saw things as being done enough to have called it a failure. Right. Everything is just where it is today, and we're going to learn and iterate and things are rarely done and dusted. Right. Like you're creating a training program. Right. We don't just create it and then go out and deliver it and never adjust it again. Right. And so I think that's where I struggled with seeing. Talking about failure or trying to, like, talk about my own failures. Because I'm like, why? I mean, that word is just so strong. I can tell you when something maybe didn't go as planned, but I didn't consider it done and I walked away and called it a failure. Right. Which I think there's an element of fear kind of wrapped in here too. Right. And I think as you were talking, I was just sort of thinking about how many people I kind of came across in my time, particularly in HR and not HR people, but the company is just how many people operate with a sense of fear. Right. Of like I, and, and where it stops people from taking actions of all kinds. And you know what's interesting is, and I found myself pausing some from time to time being like, when's the last time you saw someone get fired for making a mistake? Right. And that's not to say it doesn't happen, but generally in a Fortune 500 company that's very compliance minded, it's gotta be a pretty damn costly mistake to lose your job overnight over it, right? Yeah. And the day to day stuff that someone at the manager level or below is working on, I don't, I've seen all kinds of mistakes in people keeping their job. So where, you know, where is that fear coming from? But obviously permeates, permeates, permeates right up and down. Right. The fear is probably coming from leadership. Yeah. And I would say there's, there's so, so many layers to this. One is if you're in a large organization with a lot of, let's call it politics, then people oftentimes create a culture of opportunistic attack. Meaning if someone has some numbers that don't hit on their quarterlies, then someone will exploit that to change direction to my opportunity. See, that person doesn't deserve this promotion, doesn't deserve this raise, doesn't deserve this team. That should be for me because I didn't make that same failure. So there's a context to that, that depending on the toxicity of the culture, that can be perpetuated. Right. But then there's this other piece which I think is far more and more conducive to the conversation. And that is to say that most people are people pleasers and we base our performance according to other people's responses. And so something that, and listen to my, my words here. Something that fails to meet the mark does not necessitate a failure, nor does it make one who failed to meet the mark the failure. Right. And what happens is we associate something that missed the mark with the fact that I'm a failure. And so oftentimes people will, because of the stories they've told themselves, because the identity, because of something, somewhere, somewhere, you know, trauma, what have you is now the thing that's controlling us and again putting us in a dysregulated state because our mind is not in a place where it's actually seeing ourselves from this power possibility, source and supply. We're not in overflow, we're in a place of scarcity, right? So again, this is where we have to take back our scarcity and step into sovereignty. Right? And that sovereignty is a thing that most people don't know how to, to deal with because we fail, if anything, to give ourselves permission to become powerful. We're afraid of our own greatness for various numbers of reason. And I talk about this in the book and we could go off on a whole nother tangent about this. But permission, I believe, is the biggest bridge between where you are and where you want to be. And no one else can give it to you. But the problem is everybody's waiting for someone else to give it to us. And I think, as, I think I'm on the right track here in that I think the interpersonal, the human to human is going to become even more front and center when it comes to the working world where most of us spend the, what is it, 60 to 70% of our waking lives, right? And at a job of some kind. And so I, you know, I, I think I'm there with you on like where this is. How do you unlock the competitive advantage, right? And I think, you know, part of that is through I'm going to keep dumbing it down in my own words, which is like putting your own oxygen mask on, right, so that you can take care of your business, your people, your family, you know, what have you. As we move into hour two of our podcast now, well, let's, let's, we'll bring it to a landing for today. This has been. Well, let, let me, let me answer your question and then we can bring it up for a landing because I think that's really important. So what you just stated was, you know, this place of that competitive advantage, which is our humanity. Because if we really play out the line of this continuum, just follow it for what it actually is, if we just stand back and get intellectually honest about it, artificial intelligence is going to be creating all the same playbooks, SOPs, frameworks, sales, messaging, copy for everyone in each industry. And so everybody's going to start looking and sounding the same amongst your competitors. And so therefore the only thing that differentiates a company is the humanity behind it. That's the competitive advantage. And in the book, I call it human success. Because when you have a team of regulated people, the way that they interact with one another, the way they speak about their company, the way they treat their clients and customers will be Highly tangible, right? In the book I talk about this, this girl, call her Stephanie, Brilliant, self, aware, read all the books, knows all the things I'm so emotionally intelligent, she would say. And I think that's where so many people get stuck is they stay in the intellectual, oh, I know these things. But when Stephanie stopped trying to perform composure, stop trying to perform self awareness, start, stopped performing and then instead like actually got to this place of regulating her nervous system and applying what she knew, that's when things changed for her and her leadership became more magnetic and she became softer, steadier, consistent. Because people trust regulated calm way more than they will ever trust something that is nothing more than performed. So AI can take all the process, can do all the data, can do all the systems, but it cannot regulate the room. And this is what's going to make all the difference in the world. So if there's one thing that your audience that you guys that are listening to wherever you're at, if you're in the car, if you're washing dishes, you're mowing the lawn, this is in your ears, you don't have a strategy problem, you don't have a capacity problem per se in this context, in terms of like having to white knuckle it as we were saying it, that what we're talking about is that capacity that you're looking for is actually trainable and learnable. And most high performers, they're actually only operating at about 40 to 60% of their true potential. And it's because their nervous system is still protecting them from a threat that doesn't any longer exist. And you can scale when you actually have that clarity, when you have that capacity and when you have that composure, all of it's hand in glove. So the good news is it's not about necessarily becoming someone else. It's about removing what's been interfering in the first place. All the stories and BS you've been telling yourself or things that you've been putting in your own way through own self sabotage because you were dysregulating. And so if this conversation has at all resonated with you, I challenge you to make a decision that when this book comes out, I want you to get it into your hands, into as many leaders hands as possible. So much so that I want to give it to you for free. And if you're listening right now, you can go to Freebook vip because you in and of yourself, if you've listened this long, you are a very important person. I want to reward you and you're here for a reason and a season to hear these words. So go to Freebook vip, download a free copy of the book. I'm going to give you 10 days of 10 minute experiences of everything we've talked about to take you through a moment of visualization, of meditation, of breath. Work on multiple days so you can experience what your life might be in 10 days. If you were to do this on an ongoing basis, how much more will your life transform? And there's no catch. I'm giving it to you because it's more important for me to make this movement a thing than it is for me to sell a fricking book. Nice. Well, I'll make sure to put that in the show notes and make sure I shout about, you know, stick around to hear about the book. So before we, we bring it to a full close, I ask everybody to come prepared with two pieces of advice. So the first piece is for those leaders who are kind of still thinking about their upward mobility in their career, who are looking for that next leadership promotion. What's one piece of practical advice you have for them? Shoot. Work on your human success. Like discover regulation. And I don't mean just my book. I mean follow YouTubers, find the books that are talking about this, find the, the audiobooks that are listening, and just pound your brain into understanding your infinite self. Because everything we've stated throughout this whole conversation, this will position you for a place of power. Yes. Learn the AI. Yes. Apply the AI. Yes. Get those tools in place for your company 100% and step to the next level where everyone else isn't and you'll be ahead of the game. I have a feeling I know where the next piece of advice is going to go. Cause I always say so. What's, you know, what's one piece of advice you have for those who were just promoted? Right. Up, up a level. Right. Cause there's a lot of unlearning one. Has to do if you just want up to the next level. Let go. Let go of what you used to know so that you can take hold. It's, it's kind of like if you look at the metaphor of a, of closed hand, everything that you're hanging on to is what you used to have, who you used to be, and the ways it used to be done. And now when you step into a new level, you open your hand so you can be open to some fresh perspective. And if you come with that level of curiosity, that level of openness, that level of, of, of receiving, you put yourself in an energetic state that people can sense that you are actually here to help and not trying to conquer. And suddenly doors will open where people will pull you aside, say, hey, this is a way that we do this. And hey, how do you think about this and how can this be done differently versus if you come in acting as if you know everything, you are only setting yourself up, especially in the power of what we've just been talking about, human success. People can smell it from a mile away that you're compensating. Yep. Nice, Angus. Where else can people find you if they're looking for a little more Angus Nelson in their lives? Simply that. Angusnelson.com all the social channels. I'm Angus Nelson. If you just do the old searches on whatever channel. And I would end with this. For a century, we've been chasing traditional success of wealth, status, power, et cetera. And that model's broken. And it's been leading people into burnout and despair and comparison. But the future belongs to a leader who pursues this thing. We've been talking about human success. That's where alignment, connection, resilience truly lies. And if I were to challenge you to anything, it would be to become irreplaceably human in a world that's become far more automated. Whatever you're experiencing, wherever you're at, know this. You're. You're not broken. You're just running outdated software. You're not burned out. You're just using stuff that doesn't work anymore. And you're experiencing the friction of an invitation to be somewhere else. If you've been listening to this conversation, you didn't come here just to hear a bunch of intellect. I want to challenge you to apply. Let this be a transformative moment for you and thank you so much for taking the time to listen to our conversation. Thank you, Kent. Or invite me on the show. Absolutely. Thanks for coming on today. This was awesome conversation. So. And I'm looking forward to perhaps having a few more with you. Come on, let's do it. All right, 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 Coach Toolkit. Before you go on with your day, please take a moment to leave a rating and a race 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.