Bill: Welcome to another episode of Not Your Typical Leadership Coaching with Dr. Martin Kettlehut and Results Coach Bill Tierney. I'm Bill and this is Marty, as I refer to him. Others refer to him as Doc and others refer to him as the Clarity Catalyst.

Marty: That's right. When

Bill: did you pick up that Clarity Catalyst, uh,

Marty: test?

Marty: Well, It, you know, it came along with this transition from being a business development focused coach to being a leadership focused coach. And in that, what I saw that, you know, leaders were getting out of the coaching relationship was clarity, clarity about what to say. What to do, and clarity about whether or not they really should be doing in the leadership position.

Marty: In other words, you know, leaders are coming to me, like, doubting themselves and wondering is, am I just an imposter in this leadership role and they wanted clarity about should I even be doing this? Right? So, um,

Bill: those would say what they do and how they think of themselves.

Marty: Right. Exactly.

Bill: Right. Would identity be the word for that 3rd one?

Bill: Or is that something different? Sounds

Marty: richer than what I'm referring

Bill: to. Oh, really? Identity is something richer than what, so say more than, is what I'm doing, what I heard. I don't want

Marty: to get into a discussion about identity. That's all I'm saying. Right. I

Bill: see. I see. So what you're pointing at Is this, should I even be in this position to be providing leadership?

Marty: Yeah, people get doubtful, you know, we all do like, gosh, should I even be in this marriage? Should I, you know, should I even take this job as manager? Who am I to be the leader? And so people want to, Clarity around that, like, should I or should I hand this off and get somebody else to do this

Bill: step?

Bill: I know this was reminding me of a conversation that I had earlier this morning with a client who caught on to a thread that inspired her. And when she began to consider, maybe she could get involved in this thing that she found that she was passionate about and began to creatively come up with these, I noticed that she's having these ideas about how she could have that could manifest for her voice came in and said, who are you?

Bill: Who are you to think that you can do this? So, I think that's what we're talking about, right?

Marty: Yeah, that's that that 3rd major thing that people want to clarity on is, you know, who am I to be doing this at all? Right? But then I think the 1st thing that people wanted clarity on was just the, how to what to say, you know, how to get people on the same page, how to get people in agreement, how to get people to.

Marty: You know, that the communication piece is the first thing. And that also is what I think is key to being productive. Is the communication because you can't be productive in isolation. So you've got to communicate. There are two, two main things. You can't be productive in the past or the future.

Marty: You can only be productive in the present, but you can also, you know, not only was Rome not built in a day, but it wasn't built by one person. Right. And so clarity about what to say or ask, it's a communication thing. It could go either way is, is key to producing anything. Especially if you want, if what you want to produce isn't just for your personal benefit, you know, but you're, you're in a leadership position, it's going to benefit the whole team and the whole and potentially if you're not, you know, selling cigarettes is going to benefit the country, you know, the world as well.

Marty: Right. Right. So communication with your team communication with your clients or customers and all of that is, is part of what, you know, contributes to your productivity.

Bill: You and I were talking before we hit record today as we always do and what we were talking about was an event that you're beginning to plan for now going to you don't have it fleshed out yet.

Bill: You don't have all the details. Part of the what we would had us deciding to go ahead and hit record was. That we would record this conversation and if nothing came from it, we wouldn't use it as an episode. But if something came from it, it would have it would serve you in in your planning and fleshing out what you wanted to do with this.

Bill: It also might serve the listener as we're talking about the concepts and ideas that are going to go into this event that you'll be presenting that you're going to be calling productivity for profit. Is that accurate?

Marty: Yeah. Yeah. I think, and so, you know, to talk about those different levels now, um, you know, like one of the biggest drags on your product, your personal productivity is your brain, you know, there's all this thinking going on instead of actually.

Marty: Cause productivity happens in the meeting of ideas and material, that's where production things get produced, not just in the spinning of the thoughts, right? The rubber has to grip the road to move the car forward. The 1st thing you always want to look for personally. You know, about your productivity.

Marty: Like, am I thinking too much? I remember when I first came across this, I was living in New York City and everybody dresses up in New York City to, to go to the grocery store. Really? Let alone to, to work in a corporation and like, it's not like here in Colorado where, you know, you're in a T shirt and flip flops.

Marty: Most of the dime, you know, even in winter, there's no, there's very little reason to ever get dressed up here. Right. So I was spending a lot of time sitting on the edge of my bed, looking into the closet in the morning, wondering, well, what should I wear? Does that go with that? How dressed up do I need to be today?

Marty: Would I look better in red than blue all? And I noticed as I was learning about productivity, like this is what gets in the way. Productivity is deliberating, right? And, um, and I remember at the same time I was reading, this is a long time ago, I was reading Tim Ferriss's book, the 4 hour work week. And there's a sort of, it's a minor passage of the book where he says, you know, it's better to just head down 1 road pick, you know, pick, don't deliberate, pick a which way you're going to go.

Marty: And if it doesn't work out, then come back to the Y in the road and go the other way. Instead, it's usually going to be more time saving than stand there at the fork and go, huh? I wonder which way to go. How am I going to decide this? And then, right? So that's the first thing about productivity. Yogi,

Bill: Yogi, Yogi Berra, Yogi Berra, Yogi Berra.

Bill: He knew that too. He's, he's the one that said, when you come to a fork in the road, take it.

Marty: That's right.

Bill: Yeah.

Marty: My dad had a baseball on his desk signed by Yogi Berra. Oh,

Bill: he did.

Marty: Yeah. He was a big fan.

Bill: He said some of the greatest things.

Marty: Similarly, when you go to be productive as a team, you want to get you want to get the thoughts fleshed out fast.

Marty: Like, what do you think? What do you think? What do you think? Let's get all the thinking done so that we can actually, get into producing I don't have my notes on this right in front of me, but, process that gets everybody heard, right? So nobody's left out to become a drag on the productivity.

Marty: Everybody gets heard, everybody's contribution gets taken into consideration. And, and there's nothing left in anybody's head about it. Like, All energy goes into productivity. Now it's like clearing your own mind so that you personally can be productive. You want to clear the co the collective mind as well.

Bill: Well, yeah, you're, so you're, you're talking both about the, the internal, which would be self leadership and the external, which would be the leadership of Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And it's the same principles, the same dynamics. I need all voices inside need to be heard and cleared and all voices outside need to be cleared and heard so that we can get into productivity.

Bill: Otherwise, as you say, there's going to be people or parts resisting, or holding back or maybe even sabotaging the success of the productivity.

Marty: Right. And they don't mean to, they've, they've got principles why they're doing what they're doing. They think they're right.

Bill: Yes. Okay.

Marty: So that it's, it needs to be a totally, you know, everybody's justified.

Marty: Everybody needs to be heard. It's, it's not like, um, you know, this is a necessarily, I mean, let's put it this way. You can see why dictatorships are efficient because it doesn't matter what anybody else thinks. Just that one guy. Right. But if you want to, appreciate the strength there is in diverse opinions and, and principles and thoughts about something, then there needs to be a clean way to collect all of that and deliberate over it and get back to moving the car forward.

Bill: And, and so do you

Bill: have

Bill: a process? Do you

Marty: have a way to do that? I have some, uh, in the middle of my book, I don't like, this is what I don't have right in front of me right now. There, there's some guidelines for conversations. But we also know, because you participated in this with me that if the team is in the habit of doing the, like, the spiral method, for example, yeah, would.

Marty: Promotes this ease of communication gets us, uh, thriving on each other's intuition rather than, you know, getting locked in each other's psychopathology. Right? Then there's going to be a readiness for that communication already. If you know, if you practice the spiral method,

Bill: I'm actually looking up right now so that anybody listening or watching this episode can refer back the spiral method was something we had a conversation with Leslie Jones about in episode number 6.

Marty: Right. And so if the team is practicing that, then, then it doesn't take long to get back to productivity because the, the, the boundary, those, those barriers, I should say, are more fluid. And. There needs to be, you know, certain checks, like safe words, you know, like if things, if it's getting hot for me in this conversation, I need to be able to say, this is, I'm in the red zone here.

Marty: I need this to cool off a little bit. I need to be heard. I need, you know, more explana, you need safe words so that it doesn't ever get too, too far off track. And there are other, there are other safety measures that you can implement as well. You know, um, but so though that that gets us back into actually producing rather than personality

Bill: fights. Safety is something that I've been talking with my group members about quite a bit.

Bill: What is really abundantly apparent is that if things are going to change, it means that we're going to have to try something different than what we've been doing. Think differently. We have to act differently. We really, we need to feel differently in order for things to change. But in order to try something different, even if what currently is happening is unworkable or dysfunctional, in order to actually make a change, it needs to feel safe enough to try something different because chances are we may fail.

Bill: And at the very least, because of, the fear of failure, possibly, there's going to be like a built in resistance to trying anything different. I already know how to do this thing as, as well as I do. Even if it isn't working, even if it isn't productive or producing the results that we want, I know how to do it.

Bill: And so now, if you're going to suggest that I do something differently. It feels risky, and I need to feel safe enough. To get uncomfortable

Marty: and I, I would say that this is vitally important as well at the planetary level, right outside. So let's say we got, I'm the leader, I'm clear, my team, we're all clear together.

Marty: Now, now we have this interaction with the world, right? And if our marketing is two faced, you know, it's, it's tricky or, you know, and it's manipulative and, uh, you know, then people are going to get. Unclear in that relationship, right? Like, why are they doing this to me? Why did they say this? And now it's this way and and what good is this do me, you know, all of that, you know, like, like, I get that some way sometimes, you know, because we're it's very popular these days.

Marty: And useful and easy to order stuff to be delivered. And it comes in paper and it comes in plastic and it comes in cardboard. And then we got to throw all that stuff away, you know? And so there's, there's, I think there's a, there's un clarity there, you know, about. Anyway, that's for me personally.

Marty: Maybe other people aren't bothered by that, but it's like, it's a resistance that I have to doing business with those deliverers. I see. Mm hmm. Right. And so the clearer that relationship is, the more productive sales will be. So this, this, you know, this, this clarifying, you know, emptying the mind of all of that junk that gets in the way of actually moving things forward.

Bill: Right? So that's what this event is going to be about. Productivity for profit is going to be about clearing the mind. Clearing the obstacles and hearing all the voices, all the concerns, addressing them all so that and you said this before we started and I wrote it down so that it's profitable for the business owner or the leader.

Bill: It's profitable for the consumer of that leadership, whether that's the, the customer, the consumer, the client, the staff, and that is profitable for the planet that had actually been. In other words, the word profitable. And in this context is synonymous with beneficial to. Yeah. And it benefits. And that seems like a tall order to bring everybody together to bring to take it all into consideration.

Bill: We, I'm thinking of, you know, how local our thinking is. I live in, uh, Liberty Lake, Washington, and recently I've been hearing about the tornadoes that have been hitting down in the South East, uh, and Midwest, and it's, and I can see, I mean, I used to live in Topeka, Kansas, and on the 8th of June, 1962, I'll never forget a tornado ripped through town and killed 17 people and destroyed Burnett's Mound, and it was, it was a horrific thing that happened, and that's happening.

Bill: Now, on a regular basis, especially this time of the year and in the in the South Southeast area of the country. And because I live in Liberty Lake up in the Northwest, I'm a local. I think locally. I just think about what's happening here. I'm safe. My property is not being damaged. I'm okay here. That over there is so disconnected from me that it's really challenging to wrap my mind around, uh, what it must be like for the people that are experiencing that.

Bill: Yet when when a disaster happens here, of course, I'm feeling all of it. I'm and I'm dealing with all of it now. So I'm sharing this right now because if we're going to take into consideration the entire planet, we have to think beyond our nose. We have to actually be able to. So do you have, what do you have to say about that?

Bill: How do we help people? How would you help somebody like me to be more aware and conscientious in terms of the choices that I make in my life about how that impacts the planet and, you know, Everybody else on it.

Marty: So help me out with what you're asking, because it sounds like a, it sounds like a, how do I drop a hot potato question? You just get informed.

Bill: Oh, really it for you. It lands as a pretty simple answer. I get informed, but all right. What stands in the way of me getting informed? I guess that would be a question for me.

Bill: And it would be the answer to that for me is the total involvement in my own life.

Marty: Let's take a popular or current affairs example, you know, like, how come there are so many people trying to get over the border? Between Mexico and the United, like there's a reason for that if we got interested in why that's happening instead of just, you know, fighting about, do we close the border?

Marty: Do we lock these people out? Are they evil? With all their drugs and, and diseases, it's not, let's look at why, how come these people are showing up? What causes that to happen? Right? That curiosity about what's going on there that's impacting us. So it's, it's not like getting curious about things that are totally irrelevant, but we have a problem.

Marty: Let's find out why that's happening so that we can address the root of it. Okay. Right and so there's, there's an example, you know, and we, me with my, you know, all these deliveries in trash. I started looking up. Well, where does this where does it literally go from here? You know, and I found out there's a, you know, there's a place that they take all this stuff and put it in the ground they plow it under and, you know, and and some of it has to be separated by hand by people.

Marty: And I went to see the plant where they. Separate it. So now I know not to keep the lid on the pickle jar, because somebody else is going to have to take it off later. And they might just say it's too much work and let it go down the conveyor. Like, you have to get curious about what's going on in the world.

Bill: Yeah, yeah, well, it's so easy as you're saying this to just be completely detached. Like, this can, this can go to, you know, Okay, I'm getting low on food. I'm not going to go out in the back 40 and pick some more vegetables. I don't have one. I'm not going to go, you know, shoot a deer. I don't have a rifle and I wouldn't know what to do with if I did shoot it.

Bill: But in other words, I'm completely disconnected from where my food comes from. I mean, I have some intellectual understanding that other farmers are farmers out there are growing it for me and that there's a whole whole system that brings it from the field into the grocery store where I just show up and give them exchange my money for all the work that went into producing that.

Bill: Fresh

Bill: product or that, that preserved product, um, so that I can bring it home and have dinner in a half an hour. Yeah. I'm, I'm disconnected from all of it. And, and if some disaster happened, and I know a lot of people put a lot of energy into really focusing on this. If something happened where power goes down, where communications go down, where we can no longer rely on what we just take for granted, now we're going to have to get really interested.

Bill: We're going to be forced to, if we're going to survive, we're going to, we got to get very interested in, And how do we replace all these conveniences? So it feels like we're kind of talking about something similar to that. Yeah, we just take for granted.

Marty: That's a sad thing. I think that we might not get curious until we're in pain, you know, when we could have done something about it long ago and turn things around, but that, you know, in a lot of cases, that is it. The people we experienced that individually in our own personal health.

Marty: You know, the heart isn't working and we go to the doctor and the doctor's like, well, what are you eating? And what do you, how do you exercise? I wasn't, I didn't realize that all that package prepared food had all these things in it that aren't good for me. Right. And so then you get curious because now you're in pain.

Marty: Now you're, you're, you know, facing it, you know, 50, 000 heart operation. So. You get curious, you know, and then you change your diet. But what if we were, you know, a little further in advance of that and sensitive and aware? Make a big difference for us. It would save us a lot of time and money and wear and tear.

Bill: So in this event that you're going to be doing, uh, is, is what we're talking about right now going to be some addressed in some way?

Marty: I was just thinking about that actually. I mean, this fits into the category productivity and the profit is that we're not putting out a fight. We don't have as many fires to put out.

Marty: Life is easier because we've been planning ahead. We've been right living in harmony with our, our people and our environment. And so there's, there's going to be less, there are going to be fewer emergencies to have to address. Thanks. So, in that sense, we can be more profitable with our time and our efforts.

Marty: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Bill: The other thing I've been thinking about, as we've been talking about this, is that The internal process, is what determines whether or not I would become proactive and informed or not. The management of my internal system. Right. As you say, if a crisis happens, I'm thinking of addiction right now.

Bill: So addiction, is a problem when it becomes a problem. It's a problem before it becomes a problem, but it doesn't, but we don't do anything about it until it becomes an obvious problem that we become aware of and we're feeling the pain of it. Yeah. For addictions. And this can be a sticky wick.

Bill: We, we, there's a lot of different directions we could go if we were going to have this conversation around addiction, because what is addiction and all of that, but, but let's just say. Let's just say someone's using alcohol excessively, and that sounds like a judgment. I'm using alcohol, period.

Bill: That's a fact. If that, I'm just making this up. I don't use alcohol, but let's just say I use alcohol. That would be a fact. I use this much alcohol. Hopefully that's a fact as well. It's accurate. Now we get into, I use this much alcohol, period. And because I use this special alcohol, there seems to be a co related problem that's existing.

Bill: My, my wife is complaining about us feeling disconnected and she thinks it has to do with the alcohol that I'm drinking and how much of it I'm drinking. If I'm the one that is drinking that alcohol and she's the one that thinks that the reason that we're disconnected is because of the use of alcohol, I can distract myself from doing anything about it by debating with her whether it's her attitude or my use of alcohol that has our disconnecting, and we can delay it, but eventually what's going to have to happen is it's going to come to a head.

Bill: There's going to be a painful reckoning, um, unless something happens inside that says, hey, you know what, she's, she's feeling disconnected from me and she's asking me not to use alcohol anymore. And I'm arguing for continuing to use alcohol. This is interesting. And I get to a point where I can look at it and say, And be aware.

Bill: I'm actually comparing my, my use of alcohol to whether or not the relationship is worth taking a look at and getting real. Unfortunately, before that can happen for most of us, the actual threat of the end of the relationship needs to be presented. Yeah. Yeah. Which seems to be kind of the nature of addiction.

Bill: And it's not. It's not from laziness. I happen to know it's not from laziness.

Marty: No, it's not. It's confronting. It's, it's, it's, you know, it's revealing. It's embarrassing.

Bill: Well, and if there's an overuse and I'm going to stick with alcohol, there's a lot of other addictions out there, but just continuing to use this as an example, uh, if it's alcohol that I'm using and it's become problematic because of the overuse of it, I got to wonder, you know, Eventually, if this is actually going to be, if there's going to be a change made, as you're talking about, why are people trying to get across the border?

Bill: Why am I drinking so much alcohol? What's underneath that? What's behind it? And what I have learned, it's taken me a long, long time. Hopefully it doesn't need to take this long for anybody else. I got sober in 1982 because I was afraid that the relationship with my wife would end if I didn't. But I didn't even get curious about why I drank in the first place.

Bill: In fact, the, the group that I was being supported by Poo-pooed the idea of even looking at that,

Marty: Hmm,

Bill: lack of knowledge. I mean, knowledge isn't gonna solve the problem was, was ba basically the, the idea there. I think that by, I was really missing the boat for over 20 years until I could ask the question, yeah, why did I drink so much?

Bill: What was behind that? Did I like the taste of alcohol? Yeah, I actually, I really developed a great taste for beer. I became almost a beer connoisseur. I love this kind of beer and I hated that. But when it boiled right down to it, if that beer that I hated was the only one available, I'd drink it. So what was behind that, that I would drink beer that I even hated?

Bill: It wasn't because I liked the taste of it, I still drank it. Uh, what was that? And, and then at 20 years or so of sobriety, I began to ask myself that question and what has, and then took, even then it took a long time to really get to the bottom of it. And what it turns out to be is. I drank because I didn't have to feel anything if I drank a little bit and, and interestingly, once I drank a little bit, if I didn't have to feel anything, I wanted to drink more so I could feel even less.

Bill: Yeah.

Marty: Yeah.

Bill: And it became a habit and I became consumed by that to the point of not being able to really even see or consider what my, what the impact of my drinking might have on other people as well as what might be happening in the world beyond my, my interest in my own numbing.

Marty: You can take that back to like a corporate team setting kind of thing and realize that, you know, like, I was just on the phone with the client earlier this morning, you know, like, she thinks the operation should be, they're figuring out where to put in this new building, their offices, right? And operations should be over there and her.

Marty: Right hand girl things. No, no, no. The operation should be on the opposite side of the and, and they were just like in a fuss about it. And I was like, well, ask her why she thinks it tell her why you think it. It's the same thing. Once we know the why, maybe there's a better way to get happy than alcohol.

Marty: Maybe there's a better place to locate operations than, you know, your first knee jerk reaction, you know. But when we get under that, so I'm what I'm discovering in this conversation. Thank you very much is how. Crucial curiosity is inquisitiveness is to be productive because otherwise we're just spinning around, you know, in our own waste, basically, uh, the wasted thoughts and the wasted habits and the, and the wasted product, you know, uh, um, material stuff, you know?

Marty: And so curiosity turns out to be really important to productivity.

Bill: Absolutely. And included in the problem of the absence of curiosity would be, this is the way we've always done it type thinking. Yeah,

Marty: that or just or or 1. I think another thing that we've identified is just plain distraction.

Bill: You know, business business just over operating over capacity for creativity.

Bill: I think that's really important too, is that we have a, we have each of us a level of capacity. That if we operate within it, we can still have access to innate resources, including creativity and clarity. That if we try to get ourselves operating beyond that capacity, we lose access to creativity and clarity.

Bill: There goes your productivity there. There's a lot of elements of this.

Marty: And I think the third major category Would be anxious, um, fear, worry about the future, right? Well, I'm not ready to act yet because I want to make sure this is perfect before we implement or I'm worried about what so and so is going to say, if we go that direction, right?

Marty: All of those kinds of things prevent us Exactly.

Bill: And I want to tie in what you said, what I, with what I just said, that operating within our capacity. Keeps us in touch and gives us access to these innate resources that we need to show up as the best and highest versions of ourselves when anxiety shows up and concerns about reputation and what other people think that those are sure signs that we're operating beyond our capacity, even if what's true is that we've had those concerns for as long as we can remember.

Bill: I want to cons suggest that if that's the case, if I've always been anxious, if I'm always concerned about what people think of me as far back as I can remember, then, then the work that there is to do is to go back as far back as I can remember and, and see what happens so that I can get my capacity back.

Marty: Yeah. So I can

Bill: tap back into the resources that are needed to have clarity, creativity, and curiosity. Hey, we're out of time, man. This, this, the

Marty: time just flies.

Bill: Yes, yes, yes. As always, Marty, enjoy the conversations with you until the next episode of Not Your Typical Leadership Coach. And of course, I'll be talking to you long before that, but this will be the next.

Bill: This will be the last time we record until next, next Wednesday. Thanks, sir. Talk to you later. Bye. Bye.