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Episode #593: Kim Campbell - Contingency Planning, Responding to Adversity, Earning Trust & Respect, Flying in the Face of Fear, and How To Run a Debrief

• Aviate, Navigate, Communicate - "Aviate, navigate, communicate" is a fundamental principle in aviation that pilots learn early in flight training. It's a priority order that helps pilots stay focused and in control, even when they're under pressure or distracted: 
  • Aviate: Keep the plane flying
  • Navigate: Figure out where you are and where you're going
  • Communicate: Talk to air traffic control (ATC) or someone else as needed
• On March 20, 2003, Kim wrote letters to her loved ones in case she died in battle.
• Prepare, practice, and plan for contingencies. My college football coach, the late great, Terry Hoeppner used to always say, have a plan, work the plan, plan for the unexpected. As leaders, it’s on us to prepare, practice, and plan for contingencies. You don’t have to get ready if you stay ready.
• I love the way Kim’s dad helped support her dream to be a fighter pilot. If you want to do this, you have to put in the work. Run hills, and do pull-ups every time you go to the bathroom. He didn’t just tell her you can do whatever you want… He created opportunities for Kim to do the necessary work to achieve what she wanted.
• Kim’s telling of the story of how she was hit and how she responded. An amazing example of responding in the face of fear, dealing with adversity in a calm, poised manner, and making a tough decision. Kim’s training and her attitude is what set her apart and saved her life.
• Response to Rejection: Initially Kim was rejected by the Air Force Academy because of a low SAT score. In response, instead of quitting and moving on, she wrote a letter to them every week stating why they should accept her… Which they eventually did.
• Dealing with fear: What's most important is what we do in the face of fear. We can't freeze. We must take action.
• The Debrief:
  • Check your rank and ego at the door.
  • Write all the objectives down. Next to each one, grade it a plus or a minus. Find the root causes of each mistake.
  • What lessons can we learn from our mistakes?
  • What will we change for our next mission based on what we learned?
  • Share lessons learned beyond that room.
• Johnny Bravo - Be humble, approachable, and credible. That's how you earn trust and respect and inspire others to follow.

Read our book, The Score That Matters https://amzn.to/3XxHi7p

Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com 

This episode is supported by Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing company dedicated to empowering people. Please CLICK HERE for premier staffing and talent.

Notes:

• Commonalities of excellent coaches:
  • Not defensive
  • Respond well to feedback
  • Ability to learn
• "Leadership can't be taught but it can be learned."
• Coaching is not therapy, but it can be therapy-adjacent.
  • It's not telling people what to do and it's not just asking questions. It's a combination of all of them.
• There is ample research on the benefits of writing. It clarifies your thinking.
• The questions to ask someone who might need an executive coach:
  • Why do you want a coach?
  • Why now?
  • What do you hope to get out of it?
• What do great leaders do?
  • First, do no harm.
  • Walk the talk.
  • Be an embodiment of the culture.
  • Have high standards
    • Take risks
    • Coach people up
    • Train people
  • "Coaching is accomplishment through others."
• "Feedback is not a gift."
  • Feedback is data. Signal and noise.
    • Signal - Important and good.
    • Noise - Byproduct of someone's distorted lens.
• "Praise, Criticism, Praise (PCP) is terrible." Don't give the compliment sandwich. It's disingenuous.
• How leaders best overcome adversity – The most critical skill is "adaptive capacity..." It’s composed of two primary qualities: the ability to grasp context, and hardiness.
• Coaching - Asking evocative questions, ensuring the other person feels heard, and actively conveying empathy remain the foundations of coaching.
  • Connect: Establish and renew the interpersonal connection, followed by an open-ended question.
  • Reflect: Having elicited a response, reflect back the essence of the other person's comments.
  • Direct: Focus their attention on a particular aspect of their response that invites further exploration.
• Support and Challenge - A client once said, “It feels like you’re always in my corner, but you never hesitate to challenge me.”
• Master the Playbook, Throw it Away - Coaching involves a continuous and cyclical process of learning, unlearning, and relearning.
• Power Dynamics - The longer I coach, the more I appreciate and value the work of Jeff Pfeffer, a leading scholar on power. philosopher Ernest Becker: "If you are wrong about power, you don't get a chance to be right about anything else."
• "Meaningful coaching is always an emotionally intimate experience, no matter what’s being discussed. In part this is a function of the context: two people talking directly to each other with no distractions... Intimacy in a coaching relationship also results from a willingness to 'make the private public'--to share with another person the thoughts and feelings that we usually keep to ourselves... And yet an essential factor that makes such intimacy possible is a clear set of boundaries defining the relationship, which creates an inevitable and necessary sense of distance..."

Read our book, The Score That Matters https://amzn.to/3XxHi7p

Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com 

This episode is supported by Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing company dedicated to empowering people. Please CLICK HERE for premier staffing and talent.

Ryan Holiday is one of the world's bestselling living philosophers. His books like The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy, The Daily Stoic, and the #1 New York Times bestseller Stillness Is the Key appear in more than 40 languages and have sold more than 5 million copies. His latest book (a #1 NY Times Best-Seller) is called Right Thing, Right Now. This conversation was recorded in person at Ryan's bookstore, The Painted Porch, which sits on historic Main St in Bastrop, Texas.

Notes:

• June 16, 2024 – Birthday and Father’s Day. How does stoicism impact you as a dad? “What’s at stake today is how they remember you 20 years from now.”
• Choose a North Star -- Choosing a North Star can function as a compass professionally, personally, and morally.
  • Most people don’t do the work to figure out what their North Star is… Most people default to what others do, and then they end up comparing themselves to others.
  • Ryan Holiday's North Star? Writing...
• Pay the taxes of life gladly: Not just from the government. Annoying people are a tax on being outside your house. Delays are a tax on travel. Haters are a tax on having a YouTube channel. There’s a tax on everything in life. You can whine. Or you can pay them gladly.
• Oscar Wilde wrote in The Portrait of Dorian Grey “The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly. That is what each of us is here for.” —- What are you here for?
• Stoicism - "A stoic doesn't control what happens but they focus on how to respond to what happened. The virtues of stoicism are courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom."
• Build a coaching tree -- Popovich reference - and his coaching tree - how do we get better at making a goal to build a forest of leaders? What’s interesting about Pop’s coaching tree is there is a huge diversity of what he’s created. What’s interesting is the coaches who have learned from him are all different - they’re not replicas of Coach Popovich. 
  • RC Buford (GM of the San Antonio Spurs) said, "We have a good coaching tree. That's what we do here. In all roles."
  • A shocking number of players have decided to stay in San Antonio, so much so that they have an alumni locker room in their practice facility because they choose to stick around afterward.
  • "I love the idea of “hey we’re an organization, and we want to win, but our ultimate job is to bring good people in, and bring them better, and learn from them along the way."
  • "We don’t talk enough about the bad coaching trees… ultimately you measure greatness about how replicable their system is and others can take it and use it as well. Don’t just judge people on their wins, but on their coaching tree… or lack thereof.
  • When you’re hiring someone, can you both be on the same page - and there’s clarity. When I get invited to something, who am I bringing? Or when it’s a specific project, who on my team will crush it with me or on their own? Understanding that this will be a tour of duty.
• Robert Greene - "Robert knew I wanted to be a writer and he knew what I wanted to do, and it allowed me to realize that he was letting me do this to understand how the whole writing process works. If somebody wants to work with someone else, what’s the best way to reach out to that person, to try and get your foot in the door."
• Mentors: (Advice to mentees) "Don’t say 'I’ll do whatever, or I’ll do anything,' I don’t need anything done, I have very specific things that need to be done. Don’t present them with the problem of you…. Present them with the problem they have and several ideas that you have to potentially help. Be specific and present a solution to a potential problem that maybe they haven’t thought about yet."
• Keep your hands clean - the difference between Patrick Reed and Rory McIlroy.
• Be kind — JM Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan said in 1902, “Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight? Always try to be a little kinder than is necessary.”
• Discipline is a “me” virtue. Justice is a “we” virtue.
• Make "Good" Trouble - "If you got into this to gain a lot of fans, you’ll never do anything to lose fans….. you don’t have the fans, the fans have you… it’s the other way around. There’s a balance, I don’t want to speak up on every divisive issue, but at the same time if you’re not speaking up on things that you think are important, and you keep silent, then you’re creating a form of death, and you’re hurting other people that could potentially learn from your words and thoughts… You have to think about how you want to use your platform and the authority you have. It’s easy to say politicians live this way, but when’s the last time you spoke up on something you didn’t agree on?"
• President Truman - "An incredible example of an ordinary person doing extraordinary things… the last president to not have a college degree. He educated himself and had core values and a sense that he was obligated by the constitution, human decency, and trying to do what was right. He had a strong moral code that guided him in difficult stances, and he had confidence and security. When we think of Presidents and Generals who have outward accomplishments, what I love about Truman is that he watched everyone else steal millions of dollars and he continued to pay off his bankruptcy debts. It doesn’t matter that everyone else is doing it… I’m not going to do it."
• Goal Setting - "I don’t set any goals…” I just do the work every day, our goals are usually outcome specific and they’re rooted in what are other people going to think about the outcome of this. If I have a goal, they’re not geared towards a win or an outcome… the goal is to wake up and do… and I do it daily."
• The desk where we recorded: Was owned by Joan Didion... "Objects of history get me excited. My vice is I collect historically significant things, at some point, I’m going to re-sell the table… now other people have sat at it, and so I’ll probably re-sell it and donate the money… ”significant objects”.. a guy buys a random piece of junk on eBay, and then he’d have a writer write a story about the item and then they’d resell it and people would pay more money for it."
• Why is his publisher having him re-do the entire audio for the 10th anniversary of The Obstacle is The Way (instead of Ryan just reading the updated parts): "My voice is ten years older. A lot has happened in those ten years."

Read our book, The Score That Matters https://amzn.to/3XxHi7p

Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com 

This episode is supported by Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing company dedicated to empowering people. Please CLICK HERE for premier staffing and talent.

Notes:

Nat Eliason studied philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. Since he started publishing his writing in 2013, his work has been read by millions of people and spun out multiple businesses ranging from a marketing agency to a cafe. He’s the author of Crytpo Confidential: Winning and Losing Millions in the New Frontier of Finance.

• How to make our days more memorable?
  • Throw parties with 3-4 different phases.
  • When taking your loved one out on a date, have 3 different parts. Implement homework for life. Write down the stories of each day. This helps you remember them more.
• Do Hard Things – Our self-image is composed of historical evidence of our abilities. The more hard things you push yourself to do, the more competent you will see yourself to be.
  • "Build up your identity of being a capable person."
• "Money corrupts quickly."
• It’s never the right time. Any time you catch yourself saying “Oh it’ll be a better time later,” you’re probably just scared. Or unclear on what to do. There is never a right time for the big things in life.
• Moonwalking with Einstein -- Memory competitions.
• Die with Zero -- Create memory dividends (Bill Perkins). Be in the moment.
• Homework for Life (Matthew Dicks).
• Nat's birthday this year was the first time he ever felt sad (on a birthday)... Why? "It feels like it's going by quicker than it ever has."
  • Create time with texture? "Mine workers have time with texture. I'm not sure that's memorable or desirable."
• Crypto Confidential is the roller coaster story of getting rich, going broke, scamming, and getting scammed. It’s a narrative of Nat’s personal journey through the world of crypto, but it’s also a revealing look at exactly how the crypto sausage gets made—and how we can all be more educated participants during the next inevitable bull run.
• Money can buy happiness. So long as you spend it on upgrading and expanding the things that make you happy, instead of using it to play status games or on fleeting experiences.