Leading People
Gerry Murray talks to leading people about leading people. Get insights and tips from thought leaders about how to bring out the best in yourself and others.
Leading People
Discover the Leadership Superpowers that Emerge Beyond 40
In this episode…
We challenge traditional views of midlife and explore how this phase can be a powerful transition for leaders.
Aneace Haddad, a former tech CEO and an executive coach with extensive experience, invites listeners to rethink what it means to lead in the second half of life. He examines the cognitive shifts that occur as people enter their 40s and beyond, revealing that this period often marks the emergence of unique leadership superpowers that younger leaders may not yet possess.
Through engaging storytelling and practical advice, Aneace illustrates how leaders in midlife can embrace ambiguity and let go of the need for the granular detail-oriented thinking that served them well in their youth.
Instead, he emphasizes the importance of big-picture strategic thinking, collaboration, and fostering a supportive environment where every team member can thrive.
Aneace's insights shine a light on the positives of aging, reframing the concept of resilience into a joyful and rejuvenating process.
Listeners looking to enhance their leadership approach will find this episode rich in resources and inspiration, encouraging personal reflection and growth.
Whether you are in midlife or simply interested in understanding leadership evolution, Aneace's wisdom will resonate with anyone striving to improve their impact in the workplace.
Curious?
Join us in embracing the beauty of growth at any age, and let’s celebrate the incredible potential that emerges through experience.
Remember to visit Aneace.com to connect with Aneace and explore his work!
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Welcome to Leading People with me, gerry Marais. This is the podcast for leaders and HR decision makers who want to bring out the best in themselves and others. Every other week, I sit down with leading authors, researchers and practitioners for deep dive conversations about the strategies, insights and tools that drive personal and organizational success. And in between, I bring you one simple thing short episodes that deliver practical insights and tips for immediate use. Whether you're here for useful tools or thought-provoking ideas, leading People is your guide to better leadership. Thought-provoking ideas Leading People is your guide to better leadership.
Speaker 1:What if midlife wasn't about decline, but the emergence of new leadership superpowers? In this episode of Leading People, anis Haddad, executive coach and author of Soaring Beyond Midlife, shares why our leadership potential evolves as we age. He explains why embracing ambiguity, letting go of unnecessary details and trusting emerging strengths can make you an even more effective leader. In this episode, we'll discover why leaders over 40 develop new cognitive strengths that younger leaders don't yet have. How to transition from detailed, focused leadership to big picture strategic thinking, and why resilience isn't enough, and how to reframe it for the second half of life. And how to reframe it for the second half of life If you're in midlife, or coaching, mentoring or managing leaders who are, or even a young leader who's curious about what's ahead of you, then this conversation is one you won't want to miss, ani.
Speaker 2:Saddad, welcome to Leading People.
Speaker 1:Thanks, gerry. Wonderful being here. So, although you're originally from the US, you're also the former CEO of a tech company in France, and today you're working as an executive coach based in Singapore. So it's quite a blend there, not just in terms of professional background, but in terms of geography. We've kind of covered the world, I think, in that one, and you've recently written your second book, which we'll get to shortly, but first so my listeners can get to know you a little bit better, how did you get here? Was there a person placed, an event or an epiphany moment that sort of stood out on your journey to where you are today? And why did you choose your current career path?
Speaker 2:Okay, wow, that's a big question. Let me see how I can boil that down. I had, so I built a payment software company in the South of France, where I was living at the time, grew it to 30 countries. I had a big team in Singapore, so I was traveling to Singapore very often and we sold the company in 2007, just before the global financial crisis and just before my own midlife crisis, because I was 47 when I sold it and I thought I was going to be a serial entrepreneur because I thought I really didn't have.
Speaker 2:I was a programmer originally, so I'm an old techie, and I found through that process which is the first book I wrote, the Eagle that Drank Hummingbird Nectar a couple of years ago I found through that process that what I was most proud of wasn't the technology, the patents that I'd filed and all that. It was the people. So people that used to work with me that can go on and become CEOs, ctos, cfos of other companies. I found that was much more fulfilling than the technology. So I realized as a programmer, it was a weird thing to realize that I liked people more than computers, and so that sent me in a new direction, and by the time I was 50, I had transitioned into mentoring, coaching, and over the last 15 years that's all I do. Now I just specialize with C-suites, the CEO and the top team coaching the team. So that's in a nutshell, but the actual story is enough to fill that novel that I wrote a couple years ago.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm going to come back to that little epiphany around the people versus computer thing because I know you mentioned it in the book. I'm going to come back to it a bit later. So stay tuned everyone, because we're going to explore that and unpack it. So let's get to the book, the new one. Introduce it please. What's it called?
Speaker 2:the new one, uh, for introduce it please. What's it called? Soaring Beyond Midlife. That's the title. Uh, the subtitle is the surprisingly natural emergence of leadership superpowers in life's second half that just came out a few months ago.
Speaker 2:Okay, so I had been noticing, gradually, over the years, I've been noticing a qualitative shift in the conversations I was having with people under 40 versus the conversations I was having with executives over 40. Under 40, people would tend to say you've been a CEO before, you've managed a board, what would you do in my position, what would you do in this situation? So they're looking for advice and it would come out in a variety of different ways. Over 40, I would never get that. So that was one thing I started to see. And then, as I noticed, as I looked, I saw more and more differences in similar areas. So at one point I simply decided I would really focus on executives over 40. And I decided I wouldn't be coaching individuals or teams under 40, and really make that my specialty.
Speaker 2:And that then, through that process and the research that went into that, that eventually produced this book Soaring Beyond Midlife, what I was noticing was that there are things that slow down, like we might forget our kids' names or where we put our phone or whatever, but at the same time, the two hemispheres are connecting more with each other. So we can connect the dots. We can see patterns. We're a bit more comfortable with ambiguity and paradox because of this hemispheric integration that's happening. So there are some extremely positive things that are happening during that period that, uh, bring a huge amount of value to leadership, and what I was noticing is that people were trying to be the same kind of leader as they were younger, with the stamina and all that, and it didn't work too well. If they can embrace these superpowers that are coming out of midlife, they have a potential to be much, much better leaders.
Speaker 1:And hemispheres are in the brain, not on the geography map right. Yeah, right and left hemisphere in the brain not on the geography map right, yeah, right and left hemisphere in the brain, yeah, and your kids' names. I have a situation where I have two children whose both names begin with M, and that creates some interesting challenges at times.
Speaker 2:So I know what you're talking about yes. Yes, those things tend to happen, and hopefully your wife's name doesn't start with M, so because you could add to the complexity there.
Speaker 1:No, I could tell you a story about that, but it might not be appropriate to the podcast. So what makes this book unique? So what makes this book unique On Leading People? The goal is to bring you cutting edge thought leadership from many of the leading thinkers and practitioners in leadership today. Each guest shares their insights, wisdom and practical advice so we can all get better at bringing out the best in ourselves and others. Please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and share a link with friends, family and colleagues, and stay informed by joining our leading people LinkedIn community of HR leaders and talent professionals.
Speaker 2:I think what I keep hearing from people is that they feel positive, emboldened, joyful through the book because it really allows them to let go of the things that they used to do well when they were in their 30s and maybe early 40s but are not doing quite as well now and, rather than just obsessing over that, they can let go and embrace all these new areas that they hadn't really thought about. For example, a lot of people that get to the C-suite are excellent at keeping a huge amount of details in their minds and they're used to that. That's what got them there. So they'll be up in front of the board and they'll be presenting and they've got their spreadsheet up on the screen of the PowerPoint presentation filled with numbers, and then they'll go oh my God, I don't remember what's behind this particular cell, and then they'll try to pretend like they know everything that's going on with that. And then somebody asks a question that touches an area where the person's memory has kind of lapsed a bit and it can get difficult because they might get defensive, they might firm up and get hard. So rather than that, it's kind of an attitude of saying, ok, well, my brain isn't mastering the level of detail that it used to, it's not keeping these things in memory. I need to be surrounded by younger brains that can do that. But here, talking to the board, I'm going to skim over the details. Maybe have a couple of my people in the room who can answer some of the more detailed questions. I'll be comfortable with that. And, however, I'm going to connect the dots in ways that I never did before and really take it to another level. So it's a different kind of thinking. It's really moving up in an executive capacity.
Speaker 1:You mentioned the details there and I don't know whether you've come across a concept called the hierarchy of ideas, which is the ability to go from really massive big picture down to detail and back up. It's like navigating a space between the more abstract, ambiguous, etc. Right down to very fine details and even moving laterally within that space. How important a skill is that for people who aspire to the C-suite?
Speaker 2:I think it's extremely important Now, with the caveat that a lot of people get to the C-suite able to manage much more of those lower levels of details that you just described. So they're comfortable in that space and they'll spend a lot of time there and they'll occasionally go up to what you're describing, that back and forth. The invitation through my book is to kind of although I don't use this model, this framework you just described, it makes tremendous sense. The invitation is to step into areas that are less comfortable than than when they were younger, because there are new areas that are developing. But because they're new they're going to feel uncomfortable. So it's kind of playing more at that big picture area as opposed to really being comfortable at the detail. If they can bounce around between them and all that and later, that's just fantastic. Yeah, it's a hard thing to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I work a lot with high potential groups like people who are designated for advancement, particularly in the EU context here in Belgium, and they're on this program because of their ability to follow those very detail, specific. You know they deliver well and the one pattern I've noticed I've been doing this since 2007 is the ones some of them really struggle to to get up to that higher chunk and deal with the lack of certainty and ambiguity that comes with moving up an organization. And you know, always it's not my role here, but sometimes you're looking at it thinking maybe this is not the path for you, even though it's a path that would advance your career, because it's not going to. Some people just maybe are more comfortable just in those detailed roles and have you noticed that over the years where some people just it looked like they had the potential and then when they were put into those contexts it just wasn't going to happen?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's so common that it doesn't necessarily appear in that make or break manner. You just described common situations at the c-suite where the ceo wants the c-suite team to uh engage more on things that are not in their specific areas. So basically it's kind of like the old silo mentality we used to talk about, but here it's another level of silo. It's uh, um, the image that I have is a ceo is kind of like the center of a wagon wheel and in those sessions they'll be talking to one person who's responsible for one area and then they'll turn and they're talking to someone else and you don't have conversations really happening along the edge of the wheel between participants on an equal, equal basis. It's like if it's a finance question, the cfo is going to talk. If it's a finance question, the cfo is going to talk. If it's a marketing question, the marketing person and the others are like I won't talk now because this is not my area and that's that works okay.
Speaker 2:When business is really kind of the old-fashioned way, top-down, hierarchical, we know what's happening next month, next year, things are pretty fixed. But when things are really changing and there's a lot of ambiguity, you can't have that. You've got to have the top team all talking together on issues where even speaking up on things that maybe somebody feels that they should not have the authority to speak about. So that's the level that's moving up to that higher level that maybe somebody feels that they should not have the authority to speak about. So it that's the level that's moving up to that higher level, realizing that even though I'm a I don't know that the chief product officer or something chief technology officer, I still have something extremely valuable to say about finance marketing, hr um, and it's embracing that and speaking even though that's not my area of expertise.
Speaker 1:And, in your experience of this evolution, what types of themes unite them then, these people who are used to being in their specific corner, their specific silo? What themes have you found? I'm imagining that you're not just doing one-on-ones, you're probably doing teams as well. C-suite teams are you, and so what kind of thing, when you find that situation where it's the hub of the wheel interacting just with the spokes and you're thinking this wheel isn't turning, it's turning but it's clunky, what kinds of themes have you found?
Speaker 2:start to get that cross-fertilization that you're looking for okay, yeah, around two-thirds of my work is with the teams themselves and one-third is one-on-one coaching. Um, now the I. There are two areas that first pop up where the themes come out. One of of them is I'll start a retreat, a first retreat, with a team. We'll look at a very simple old school no PowerPoint or anything, put a flip chart up and then a gauge one to 10. How effective are we as a team? From one to 10? Each person puts a dot and then put another dot on how effective do we need to be in order to achieve everything we need to achieve as a team? And universally, people put higher dots on where they feel the team needs to be. So what that demonstrates is that, even the team themselves, they sense that they need to be more of a team in order to get the complex stuff done that they need.
Speaker 2:That's a first step, because before that they may not have really thought about that or they might not really know what their colleagues think. So this establishes that everybody believes they need to be. If it's four, five, six, seven where we are today, people are putting eight, nine, 10 on where we need to be. So there's a gap. The second one goes much deeper. It would be once they've identified one or two or three big initiatives that are very critical to the organization. We'll go through a process of how much do you agree that this is a? This is a top initiative, one of the top three. From one to ten. How much do you agree? Um one to ten. How confident are you of achieving this? And then the third one is really where all of this comes out. The magic comes in. It's from one to ten.
Speaker 2:What is your sense of personal ownership in this particular initiative? So the agreement is an interesting conversation. You can by talking about the initiative. Agreement goes up or goes down. It just creates clarity, confidence. Same thing. If you talk about the details, you go deeper into it. The confidence goes up. You have more time, more money. Confidence goes up. Those are interesting. They're mechanical.
Speaker 2:Ownership is a real eye-opener for most people because we tend to equate input with ownership. So if my input into an initiative is high, I'll have naturally a high sense of ownership. If my input is low, I'll have naturally a high sense of ownership. If my input is low, I'll feel that my ownership is low and we'll see the dots up on the flip chart. Then there's that conversation all unpacks and then I'll ask them are there areas in your life where you have low input but very, very high ownership?
Speaker 2:And invariably people will think of something like yeah, my kid's education, I have a very high ownership in it, but I'm not in their classes with them every day. So my input level is quite low but my ownership is very high. A marriage, but my ownership is very high. A marriage my input ideally is maybe 50%, theoretically, but my ownership is 100%. If I say my ownership is 50%, we all know what happens with Adam, so they get it because they see in their lives that there are many areas. So then they can then stretch that and say what would it look like if I take an attitude of 100% ownership on these initiatives, even if my input is low? That breaks the silo mentality and it really brings them together as a team and then they're no longer in that wagon wheel mode.
Speaker 1:It sounds quite brilliant that actually, actually, and I guess, as the facilitator, when you ask that question and you see people's uh, you know, body language, physical reactions, you start to see the people who are really not comfortable with the initiatives because they're going to be very hesitant to to even maybe answer the question. They're already start. You start to see it in their face, in their, in their. They'll be maybe fidgeting and fumbling and things and and so I guess you already know who you're going to start maybe drawing out a few things with to find out what's really going on beneath the surface yeah, all of that, all of that comes out and then another thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sorry, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yes, I was going to say all of that comes out, and then I rely very heavily on the trust. These are people that tend to be in their 50s. I know that they're going through these changes of midlife because of the research that I've done in the book that I wrote. So I can watch those hesitations in the room but trust that the person's comfort with ambiguity is greater than it was five or seven or ten years ago and they'll come along. It's very rare for people not to come along. It's only when they're already planned on leaving or there's some kind of there's something else going on with the team. But generally, even with the hesitance, it'll come along.
Speaker 1:So, just as a question, because it intrigues me personally, and I'm sure some of our listeners are probably also wondering about this, when we talk about a C-suite team, it's quite different from a team that's on a project or in a department, you know, like the sales department or the marketing department or the finance department. How do you define the concept of team when they're all kind of running big parts of the business and they have to be a team in in a kind of different way, isn't it so? So, then, what we would say, like if you took a football team, well, they're all on the pitch, right, but here they're often not all on the pitch, but how they play is going to affect the results on the on the ultimate results, the ultimate results. You're listening to Leading People.
Speaker 1:With me, gerry Murray, my guest this week is Anis Haddad, a former CEO of a successful tech company and today an executive coach to the C-suite. So, coming up next, we'll explore the six leadership superpowers that emerge in midlife, why detail-driven leaders need to shift gears, and what truly defines a leader's impact in the second half of their life, and we also have some advice for young leaders. So stay tuned for more insights.
Speaker 2:It's an extremely rich and complex area. That's very transformative for executives that get to that level, because it's just so different from what they experienced earlier and because business is changing and things are moving much faster and there's so much ambiguity, there's a much higher need for them to act as a team, whereas maybe 15, 20 years ago that need was a lot less.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's get back to a little bit the way you've done the book. So in Soaring Beyond Midlife, you merge leadership insights with stories, fiction and poetry. So, why this combination and how does this help you convey your message and what makes it interesting for the reader?
Speaker 2:It's a very different. The way we learn at that age, in our 40s and 50s, is very different from the way we learn younger. It's much less directive. So you'll notice the very popular business books all have like the five steps to this or the 10 things to do. It's a, it's a very, very directive kind of an approach. Um, here, at this level, it's very different.
Speaker 2:So I'm in a, I'm engaging with people through fiction, through storytelling. Um, because it has a. It has a storytelling because it has a more powerful way of engaging with complex and ambiguous ideas. Poetry I love in this space because poetry is all about paradox. It's how do you bring paradoxical ideas together in a way that feels fresh and gives you an aha and we get pleasure from, from that kind of paradox. So, uh, it's such a different, it's such a different area.
Speaker 2:Something I noticed in the book and I write about it in the book is that, um, the frameworks that we use, uh, um were in leadership. Many of them were developed by people just before they hit their own midlife period. So you have things like um, jim collins, good to great, uh, his book on the five levels of leadership, and the top one is a mix of humility and iron will. He was like 38 when he came up with that and he wrote at the time that he didn't believe that that top level you could really. He wasn't sure, but he didn't believe that you could achieve it. It must be innate, he felt, but he was 38, he hadn't gone through that process yet. Who else? Bob Keegan, robert Keegan on the self-transforming mind, on the levels of learning, excellent, excellent work, but it was published in 1941, 1942. And he also said that his statement was only 1% of people ever reach that highest level of self-transforming mind. And I'm I I question that. I'm like no, actually, I think it's a lot more common.
Speaker 1:When you've gone through the things that I describe in my book, the stuff that, the stuff that can produce a midlife crisis, um, is the same type of stuff that, uh, that can really stretch you in these areas you actually, as you talk there, you remind me of a model from a psychologist called claire graves, which led to the concept of spiral dynamics and even the concept of teal organizations, and that this idea that you would, you went through different um phases in your development, from more individualistic to more collective phases and you would reach level seven or whatever. And level seven was the integrative part where you could navigate back and forth into different parts of how you operated. So the four was really the the establishment you know follow the rules, you know run the business, the big corporation. Five was the entrepreneur I'm going to leave that world and I'm going to, I'm going to really show what I made of. Six became sort of the more collective consciousness around. You know the planet needs saving and everything else.
Speaker 1:But then seven was when somebody emerged from all this and went actually I can be who I am and my followers are going to be my followers because of who I am, not because I'm trying to push an agenda whatever, whether in the big corporate or as an entrepreneur, or as a, you know, ngo or whatever.
Speaker 1:And it's also one of those models which, um, once again, when you study it, um, the goal in studying it is to to try and figure out where you are on that path and try and figure out what would it, what would I need to be doing in my life to to be able to get beyond the, you know, up to level seven. And then there were people added other levels above that, more spiritual levels, but um, it does echo a little bit of that and, once again, I guess you need to have those life experiences before you could get to that integrative level. I mean, maybe that's what you've discovered, that there's a certain point in your life where there's that I suppose glad we'll call the tipping point. You know that point where all of a sudden, one day you think, well, actually a lot of things come together and I suppose we call this, some people call this, wisdom.
Speaker 2:Is it like, yeah, yeah, that's what we call wisdom I I don't think it happens automatically. I think the environment of experiencing life the way you described it makes it more likely that some of these higher levels are are reached. Um, is it possible for a younger person? Absolutely. You have people that are really brilliant and they, they do have a much different way of thinking. My point is that with age, the potential possibility of accessing those ways of thinking, I believe, dramatically increases If we want to access them. There's another question. A lot of times we stay on what we're most comfortable with, so we don't necessarily go into it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you talk in the book about self-awareness and a re-evaluation of goals and values when people get to midlife. Could you elaborate a little bit on your experiences with working with C-suite, on how this manifests itself, so our listeners can get to a little bit of an appreciation of that?
Speaker 2:So there are themes that appear. There are a few that are bouncing in my head as you ask the question. One of them is late 50s. Someone starts to say I really have to make this work. This is my last chance, this is my last gig before I retire. It's not working out the way I'd want it to and they're becoming very brittle and a bit defensive and it's hard and they're looking at things very short term and they're saying I just want to throw it all out because it's just not working For them. Part of that is a reckoning it's looking at.
Speaker 2:Here I am coming at this 60-65 point, which traditionally is where it stops, and I haven't gotten to where I wanted to. I'm not as good as some of my colleagues and friends and stuff. Maybe I'm a failure. I don't want to be a failure. What am I going to do? And it becomes very, very difficult. So the process there is to take a step back and to look at actually I may have a few more decades of life. We're not back in the 40s or 50s when we retire and then we die a couple years later. I may have 30, 40, 50 years more of activity. I might not want to do what I'm doing today, but I'll probably still want to be contributing in some way or another. And that often then relaxes things so that they can reconnect with their values, and what is it that they find really that they're passionate about Then? Their life, their work, then it's rejuvenating. That's one element I see. Another theme that I see at that level, at the c-suite level, is uh well, these are, these are parts of the um, the three winds of change that I talk about in my book on things that happen to us in midlife.
Speaker 2:One area is kids growing up and leaving home, and I know it's a generalization because there are people that don't have kids or their kids are younger, because they have them later in life, but it's quite common. In the C-suite, a number of people around the room have kids, and they tend to be 18, 19, 20, 21. So they're going through a process of re-evaluating. What does it mean to be a parent when my kids are growing up? They don't want my advice anymore. I can't tell them what to do. I can't give them KPIs the way I gave them KPIs when they were younger.
Speaker 2:What's my value as a parent in that case? And it's a very, very similar process to leadership at that level. If I'm not managing people and I need to lead them and inspire them, not through KPIs and punishments and stuff like that. What does it look like? How do I do that? There are times I can walk into a company and if I see lots of kind of tedious KPIs around, I know that HR still has little kids running around at home. They haven't reached that point where their own kids are older, so they've got all these little rules that really feel like house rules and stuff. So that's another theme that people are grappling with at that time.
Speaker 1:It strikes me that that, um, I'm just going to react and interact with that. It strikes me a little bit like, um, the, the nature of, of one's influence changes as your kids get older and they start thinking for themselves. And you know, you know this concept of coercive power, etc. Which most, most leaders will have used a little bit, even though we say, some leaders are more enlightened than others and you know they, they look for more social power and other factors to to bring people with them and get commitment. They will occasionally be grateful for those rules because they'll just throw them at people.
Speaker 1:And yet they, when you get to that late teenage years, because I know it, I've been there, uh, you get to that late teenage years, I got four daughters. So, and and that makes it even more interesting, um, as a man in a woman's world, and but in the sense that one has to talk to the to, to, to the kids, and it's never easy in their world, you know, meet them where they are, and each of the my four kids are quite different in many ways in terms of what they want and what their aspirations are. So there's no cookie cutter approach. There's not like.
Speaker 1:Well, that worked with daughter A. So it must, it must work with daughter c. You know, has to right, it ain't gonna go. And yet at the same time, the, the, the dna and other things unite, provide something uniting the thing. So how, how have you noticed that type of it's am I? Am I talking complete rubbish here? Or is this kind of making sense to you and what you're seeing with these people as they grapple with this third wind of change that you mention in the book?
Speaker 2:I find it an extremely beautiful process, because it's messy, it's ambiguous, you don't know if it's going to work, you don't know what to do, you haven't been there before and it just kind of through life, forces you, through the ringer, to learn how to be more accepting of others and seeing what is it? What value can you bring in those situations? When they're younger, the value is clear Put a roof on their heads, keep them safe, tell them what to do, teach them right. All those kinds of things are clear. Later it's more so. I think it's beautiful that it forces us to find what is our value when those things are gone, and it's that exact same value that's really, really powerful at that C-suite level.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and in the book you talk about the six leadership superpowers. But I'm actually going to leave that to people to go and read it in the book, because I would like to ask you a question. Because I would like to ask you a question, what advice would you give your younger self, based on all your experience? Would?
Speaker 2:you give the same advice to young leaders today. Well, the younger self that I would I'm asked that question quite often and the younger self that I would go to is my, uh, my mid forties self, so 20 years ago. Um, and the advice there is to, um, take perspective, take a bigger perspective and realize that, uh, you don't just have one shot in life, cause I that's kind of where I was at all. I had was tech entrepreneur. I built a company. Um, that was one company I wouldn't be. I really had to make it work, so there was no room for error or failure. So when errors and failures inevitably happened, it felt profoundly destructive to me. Um, so, being able to take some perspective and think life is going to be going lots of different directions, I got many years ahead. Uh, I think that would be the advice to my younger self.
Speaker 1:Um, I wish I had a coach back then.
Speaker 2:But we didn't have a coaching was for like, if you're broken or something, or you get a media coach if you need to talk in front of the camera. But the kind of coaching that we see today, that's extremely common. It just really wasn't around when I was a CEO. I wish I'd had a coach at that time.
Speaker 1:And if you go back, I saw the ICF celebrating a sort of I'm not sure if they were founded in the mid-90s, but they certainly were celebrating some milestone recently from about 96 onwards. And you know, when I was training and coaching in the mid-2000s, even the ICF was not a major um force in coaching or the EMCC or any. There were several academies and you kind of, I suppose, went with whatever felt right and whatever you you noticed was helping you get results, rather than I need to belong to that particular body or whatever. So it is. I mean, if you go back to the late John John so John Whitmore, um, and his journey into coaching through um, uh, Galway's inner game of tennis, and that you know, you can see that it was.
Speaker 1:It was something that evolved gradually over time and today, of course, maybe that is the advice for younger people, particularly if they're at that age in an organization and you know, making progress is to get that coach, because the coach is not there as a remedial person. The coach is there, like in any sport. It's the person who's there to help, try and help you get the best out of yourself. And if you can do that for yourself, transfer that to getting the best out of yourself and if you can do that for yourself, transfer that to getting the best out of the people that you're working with right yeah yeah, so yeah, that would have been extremely valuable.
Speaker 1:I have a another question for you, and I'm just wondering what daily rituals do you practice these days and would you recommend them to others?
Speaker 2:I meditate every day. I think it's extremely valuable. That's the first ritual that comes to mind and I would recommend that for everybody, but not necessarily like you sit down and close your eyes. There are all kinds of meditation meditative practices, walking without the phone on, without just kind of consciously being purposeful, and walking swimming. A lot of people I know that they find that very meditative, so I think that's very powerful. Another one is exercise. I have to get my physical exercise in. I try to do an hour a day of exercise, gym three times a week, walking and stuff in between that. I need to have that constant physical, otherwise I get stuck. What other practices do I have? I love love to write, so I've got a third book that's kind of bubbling right now.
Speaker 1:Um, I like to noodle new ideas, so that's kind of a practice, I guess okay, and I want to just come back to one of the things that you mentioned at the very beginning, just to help round out this conversation. You said I like people more than computers. This was your big kind of I suppose we could call it a little bit of an epiphany moment I like people more than computers. What are you learning about the future for humans and AI?
Speaker 2:Oh, I use AI all the time. Um, it's such a big question. I think there are big parts of AI that obviously are just going to come in and really help us do better what we do today. It's going to free us up from a lot of the details, like the C-suite person I mentioned earlier in front of the PowerPoint presentation, who can't remember what was in the cell. That's no longer going to be something that really we have to be doing. Ai is going to be handling a lot of that. So it's going to force us to really find what is human, what is most human in what we do that has value. So it's really going to force on a very massive scale, globally on people to explore this big question what is uniquely human about me, what is what is less human about me that I can use ai for, and what is uniquely human that has value to other people and that I really enjoy? It's a very different kind of question than we've had in the past.
Speaker 2:This morning I did a podcast with a lady who uses humor. She's a comedian and she brings humor into the workplace with C-suites, and it was exactly the same conversation. Is that AI doesn't do humor? You try to get ChatGPT to do something humorous and it fails. It'll recognize humor. When you do something, it'll go oh, that's funny, that's humorous. It's very nice how you pulled that together, but it has tremendous trouble pulling together the self-deprecation of humor, all that stuff. It'll go to crudeness, sarcasm and things like that that are not really that level finesse and, interestingly, it's like it's a bit like poetry, as you're playing with paradox, you're playing with ambiguity. So I I I'm excited that ai is pushing us to really explore. What does it mean to truly be human? One of my favorite times in my retreats is, uh, invariably at the end of the retreat somebody will say um, I don't know how to share this, but I really feel a lot more human.
Speaker 1:um, and it's it's.
Speaker 2:I've heard that different countries, different cultures, different companies and industries, and I love that because that's really that's, I think, really what this is all about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so they often talk about which professions are safe from ai and the comedian profession. I think, uh, having I'd done exactly what you said when, when gpt chat gpt first came out, I was writing a sunday post you know, a short thought piece every sunday and I actually decided to. I always had some humor in the post. This was part of the, the way I'd structured it, and I I decided to get gp chat gpt to help me with it and, as you say, woeful, um, I shared them anyway and I said look, guys, this is as good as they can do. They either just do cliches like you know, all those kind of silly jokes that kids tell to each other, and they still don't even get them. They're very, very correct. What sorts of things are on C-suite mind? Because my personal take on this is that nobody knows. We are guessing as we go.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of hype and, at the same time, if I put myself into the shoes of somebody sitting around a boardroom table, it's also like it's going to require investment. Investment always has risk. You're looking for returns, the evangelists are projecting, so it's like's this fast train that's coming at the same time I sense is maybe not as fast as people think, because a lot of people won't want to get it. You know they'll want to make decisions around this that are sound business decisions, not just getting onto that fast train that's zooming past and not actually sure where it's going to take them. What's your sense from the conversations you're having? Because this has to be a topic in boardrooms this last year or so yeah, um, I, I think you just nailed it.
Speaker 2:I don't know what else to add to what you just said. It's all, all in. What you just said, um, it's uh, and ai is not just one monolithic thing. There's all kinds of areas of AI. So there are certain areas where people are going, yeah, that's a no-brainer, that has to go in. We need to include that in our customer engagement connection platform or whatever. There are areas where it's absolutely a no-brainer, other areas where there are a lot of, uh, different questions that can be explored. So it's not monolithic, it's, it's uh, it's another wave yeah, and it's not just chat gpt either.
Speaker 1:There's a lot more technology out there than just the stuff that ChatGPT does. Okay, so, coming to the end, so reflecting on our conversation, what are perhaps a few key insights that you'd like our audience, my audience, to take away, my listeners today, take away from our conversation?
Speaker 2:Something we didn't, something we talked about, but kind of on the edge of it. Studies show that resilience naturally increases at midlife. So there's something through living life causes resilience scores to go up and these studies have been done a number of times and there's something very natural in that. So it's like one thing to take away is to kind of starting start to notice what are these positives of aging, rather than the, the, the normal things that we hear through the media and everything are all the negatives of aging. There's some tremendous positives of aging, so things to embrace. The other element is a part of, also linked to, resilience.
Speaker 2:I've given resilience keynotes in the past and then I stopped. I don't like the term resilience and in my book in chapter the last chapter was written as an afterthought and what I realized was that the whole book is kind of a reframing of the term resilience into what I call it's a wonky term jovial rejuvenation. Jovial rejuvenation so the sense of growing and changing and rejuvenating and finding joy in that as a way to reframe resilience, which is kind of a bounce back Me against the universe and I'll bounce back and I'll get it done and all that. It's more a joyful rejuvenation process. Yeah, there's something fun about getting older Great.
Speaker 1:And so, as you get older and I get older, as you get older, what's next for you, anis?
Speaker 2:So the big question in my mind now and I like to have open questions that don't have easy answers and just noodle them for a while the big question is what is it that we create in our 60s and 70s? I know what we create in our 30s and 40s and in our 50s we're kind of consolidating that and building on what we've created. But what is it we create in our 60s and 70s? It's different, um, it's different and and that excites me- right now.
Speaker 1:Is that what the next book might be touching on, or?
Speaker 2:it's actually not. Uh, or it might, if this idea of the book that I have now kind of takes a back seat and something else comes in. But the one that I'm working on is not really that. Uh, this feels like. This feels like a question that I'll be able to answer in 20 years, 15 years, getting closer to the end of that 60 to 70 period all right, okay.
Speaker 1:So how do people get in touch with you? What's the best platforms to reach you on?
Speaker 2:so the easiest. Uh, my name is is unique, so I have the dot com. So anisecom a-n-e-a-A-Ccom is the easiest way to find me and from there you can reach me on LinkedIn, facebook. It'll link to my company, my aramiscom. My books are all on anisecom, so that's the easiest way to find me. Just my first name, com.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I'll put some links in the show notes to make that even easier for people out there. So, as ever, thanks, anise, for sharing your insights, tips and wisdom with my listeners here today.
Speaker 2:Thank you, gerry, wonderful talking with you.
Speaker 1:Coming up on Leading People At that point. Some of the models are 50 years out of date. Now make that 60 to 65 years out of date, so I'm still hearing stuff being said that is 65 years old, but it's far more pernicious than that because, if you're in any leadership role, these are the assumptions you're bringing to the development potential of entire teams of people.
Speaker 1:Next time on Leading People, we welcome Professor Patricia Riddle to the development potential of entire teams of people. Next time, on Leading People, we welcome Professor Patricia Riddle and Ian McDermott to explore how neuroscience is shaping the future of leadership. For example, what if some of the leadership models we rely on today are actually outdated by 50 or even 60 years? Patricia and Ian reveal why understanding how the brain really works, especially concepts like neuroplasticity, can transform how leaders develop and reach their potential, make better decisions and support their teams. If you work in HR or you're a coach or a leader looking to future proof your leadership approach, you won't want to miss this. And remember, before our next full episode, there's another One Simple Thing episode waiting for you, a quick and actionable tip to help you lead and live better. Keep an eye out for it wherever you listen to this podcast Until next time.
