Welcome to week 12 of the Art and Science of Success podcast.

Thank you for your involvement so far, the aim when we set up the podcast was to offer some free help and support for leaders coming out of the pandemic.

Some of the conversations this week have been with friends

and clients with the theme – “Great and what should/can I focus on right now?” so that is what we are going to focus on. In this 30 min podcast, I review some of the main points and share some questions we are helping clients with. There’s a clear recovery/preparation focus in what we are doing. For some clients we are offering health screening and personalised performance plans, for others it’s boosting their resilience work so that their people will be able to tackle what ever comes their way in the next six months.

Here’s the key talking points.

00.00     Welcome and what’s your story?

02.30     The Man Who Could Fly.

05.50     Values matter even more and becoming a 3C leader.

07.00     Create a shared positive focus with your people.

10.00     How can you ensure your past is perfect preparation for today’s challenges?

13.00     How can you boost any resilience work in your organisation?

17.00     If in doubt, build relationships and be with people you want to emulate.

19.30     How can you increase courage to do what is necessary?

22.00     We can make Post-traumatic growth more likely than PTSD.

23.30     Some questions to consider as you prepare for the next 6 months

29.00     The “soft stuff” gets you through hard situations.  

30.00 Thank you and Close.

I will send out the final summary email at the end of the week.

Best wishes,

JB

Hello, well here we are at week 11 the penultimate podcast in this series. And in response to one of the main themes of the catch up calls and (as you’ll find in the podcast) data from the CDC in the USA [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention- they play the same role as Sir Chris Whitty and colleagues in the USA] showing that fear and anxiety was the second biggest cause of hospitalisation and death when someone fell ill with COVID.

In this podcast, we speak with Gavin Andrews, MD of HeartMath UK and Ireland, co-founder of WeAddHeart a now global meditation initiative set up in response to the pandemic and also of Syntropy, a new app that integrates digital art, music and meditation to help people get faster and easier results from their meditation and relaxation efforts.

And we also get into the great advice many of you shared in the questionnaire from last week. There were some fantastic contributions showing the care and wisdom in this community. Thank you. 

I have known and worked with Gavin for over 10 years and we recommend the HeartMath tools, techniques and biofeedback devices to help people perform more effectively for less cost. He’s super smart and a really nice chap! 

Here’s what we discuss:

00.00  Welcome and Introduction

02.00   Gavin’s work – Making it easier to live through the heart every day.

07.00    The CDC research – fear and anxiety making COVID worse – the comorbidity you can change the quickest. 

11.42    The UK Government using fear as a motivator – well intentioned but with side effects.

16.00    Noticing, labelling and accepting our negative feelings- fear, anxiety, stress, call it what describes it best for you.

21.00    What is fear and anxiety? What happens in the body? (see diagrams)

26.00    How our stress affects our brain function. 

35.00    Why triggering our recovery response is so important. Clear away the debris.

41.00    Using emotional regulation to get us to Plan-B

44.00    Start with breathing more effectively – here’s how.

50.00    Practice session. Heart Focused Breathing.

1.01       Advice from the questionnaire -stunning stuff!

1.05       Build capacity skills and connection while we can.

1.12       Finding your senses.

1.13       Community and how to learn more.

We go through two slide. I have included them as images in case there was a problem with an attachment on your company systems.

Best wishes 

JB

Hello and welcome to the 10th podcast in our 12 podcast series. It’s been quite a journey so far reconnecting and connecting with the speakers and so many of you. Be sure to get in touch if you haven’t already.

This week’s speaker is John Butler and comes courtesy of Shepheard Walwyn publishers, the ethical publisher I support. John Butler is an 84 year old YouTube sensation with his own channel with 200k subscribers. He had his first book published in his 60s but only really came to people’s attention after a YT interview on stillness and spirituality went viral. That video now has an estimated 10m views on all platforms.

In this conversation, we explore his life and how he’s found “success” in life. John was one of the first organic farmers in the 1960s and collaborated with people like EF Schumacher, author of Small is beautiful and Lady Balfour, co-founder of the Soil Association. He’s also half Russian (his mum escaped Russia after the original Russian Revolution) and lived there for some years.

Whilst this conversation is easily the most spiritually minded of the series, I felt it was a great conversation to include because his ideas on (and experience of) meditation and remaining calm and connected to stillness in challenging situations works at every level. Also, his ideas on consciousness would resonate equally with philosophical idealists such as Bernardo Kastrup and Christian theologians such as Meister Eckhart. His commitment to meditation (almost 60 years of twice daily practice) is staggering and inspirational.

Harmonious relationships are at the heart of everything john has done in his life. He demonstrates this in the way he interacts with others. Interviewing him and spending time with him was a real highlight. I spent most of the day with him recording content for ethical publisher Shepheard Walwyn. The first was interview about his book was in the church in Bakewell, Derbyshire. I will post a link on Friday. The interview we have here was in his “first church” as he describes it, which is the hillside overlooking Bakewell. There is some background noise in this interview so apologies in advance. The worst part is around minute 16 but it gets better after that.

Here’s a summary of what we discussed.

00.00 Welcome and Introduction

03.00 Nature as John’s first Church – seeking space.

07.00 John in Africa – Space, Freedom and Spiritual Connection.

14.00 From organic farming as raising soil consciousness to human consciousness.

16.00 Wanting to be a farmer from before he was born (wind noise worse here).

20.00 Lessons from being a farmer for daily life-The challenge with “helping others.”

22.00 To make whole, be whole and finding meditation.

26.00 Inheriting Three Acres at Bicker Fen, Lincolnshire – Can you farm without destruction?

32.30 How to align intention and purpose.

36.00 Listening to your environment to know what to do.

38.30 Eating his favourite pig – recycling love. TLC in everything you do.

44.00 From tending to vegetables to tending to people. And making the economics fit your approach.

48.00 “Sinners” and “consumers” - are they the same thing? Connecting with God.

54.00 Taking whole.

57.00 The upside of failure and depression.

1.03 Russia and being with your own people for the first time.

1.10 The funniest “additional information” section ever written on a CV – Don’t fence me in!

1.12 Close.

Hello and welcome back to week 9 of the 12-part podcast series. Thanks again for such a positive response. This week we have the second part of the podcast with Chet Richards, author of Certain to Win and long-term friend collaborator with philosopher, John Boyd. We continue reading Boyd backwards as this makes it easier to apply his ideas to normal levels of competition (i.e., non-violent but competitive).

So, if you have yet to listen to part one, I suggest you go there first. In this podcast we will be focusing on Organic Design for Command and Control, Patterns of Conflict, Destruction and Creation and we explore how Chet has applied these ideas in his life and we start with one final insight from his Strategic Game of Isolation and Integration.

I expect this to be the longest podcast in the series. However, I think it’s worth it – not for situations where you are stressed right now but worth it for a leadership team that is looking ahead and looking to create a more successful future. Next week, we will be back to an hour or so and the guest will blow your mind!

So, here’s what we cover in today’s podcast.

00.00 Welcome and set up.

02.45     Boyd’s Motherhood and Mismatch Strategy – how to attract others to your strategy and move them away from your opponent.

05.00     Lessons from Brexit and Dominic Cummings!

12.00     Lessons from Covid – how can you seek mismatches in your own ideas about what is actually happening.

17.30     Introducing Boyd’s Organic Design for Command and Control. What are the principles for running a successful organisation?

21.00     How can you get people to do the right thing for the organisation?

31.00     It’s not Command and Control but Appreciation and Leadership that makes the difference in dynamic situations.

34.00     How can a leader find out what’s really going on – Does the Queen really think that everywhere in the UK smells of fresh paint and new carpet?

47.00     Boyd and Alan Watt’s Tao: The Watercourse Way – how the relational and organic view fit together.

51.00     The importance of creating a shared view in your organisation.

54.00     Introducing Patterns of Conflict – what does history tell us about succeeding in the very toughest situations.

57.00     The Toyota Production System v G.E.’s approach.

1.10.00  Boyd’s summary slide for Vitality and Growth. Slide 185. Insight, Orientation, Harmony, Agility and Initiative.

1.21        Chuck Spinney’s Evolutionary Epistemology.

1.26        Linking new ideas with Destruction and Creation.

1.31        In what way has Boyd’s work contributed to your success?

1.36        Where were your ideas before working with Boyd?  Yoga and Asian philosophy.

1.47        Chet's final advice: Focus on building Snowmobiles.

1.48        Close.

This week (and next) we are speaking with long time friend and mentor, Chet Richards. Chet is the author of four books, the most famous (and relevant) is Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business. As many of you will know, John Boyd is the military philosopher whose work ranging from how to win a war to how we can win in non-violent competitive situations, has had such an impact on our work and on the results we help people achieve.

In this podcast, we look at Boyd’s body of work and, following advice from Chet, we read Boyd backwards. That is, we begin where Boyd finished – looking at how someone can win in life or, in Boyd’s words, how to generate vitality and growth and the essence of winning and losing. We then work our way back to look at how we need to adapt when the situation becomes increasingly challenging or contentious. 

At first glance, it may not seem to have much to do with succeeding in the non-violent situations most of us face. However, I have found his work to be the most important work I have integrated into my work. Success in stressful situations does not come from bolting on a few extra steps to a philosophy of action designed for peaceful situations. Success comes from figuring out what works in the most stressful situations imaginable and then stripping the ideas back to suit peaceful situations. Then when the contention or conflict increases your philosophy is returning to it’s most natural state. This can give you confidence that your ideas will stand the pressure placed upon them. So I encourage you to give this one a little time to sink in.  Now more than ever, we are going to face tests to our philosophy of action.

Chet and I summarise the key ideas in Boyd's presentations and papers. You can find them for free at Chet's website here. 

Click here to listen

Here’s the rough outline of our conversation.

00.00     Welcome and Introduction.

02.25     Who was john Boyd and and what did you do with him?  (John’s military career, his work figuring what causes someone to win in a dogfight, all the way up to winning in battle.

06.00     Who can handle the fastest rate of change survives. 

07.30     Fingertip Intuition (fingerspitzengefuhl) How mastery not resilience is the real key to success in challenging situations.

11.00     Why the Taliban won so quickly.

13.00     The moral (character and relations) is to the physical as three is to one – Napoleon.  

15.00     Finding Boyd through Tom Peters – “General, you need to kill more pilots!” Why it’s important to read Boyd backwards.

17.00     The Essence of Winning and Losing. Intuition and the importance of orientation – situational awareness.

21.00     How can we make our under pressure reactions intuitive?

25.50     Boyd and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow.

27.30     The Conceptual Spiral – how to win through novelty and mismatches. A.k.a. how to do new stuff?

36.00     Why are mismatches (errors in our understanding or orientation) the most valuable thing to discover?

39.00     How does this relate to both sides of the COVID debate ignoring/shutting down...

My guest today is business and sports coach, David Whitaker OBE. I was fortunate to be colleagues with David and Sir John Whitmore when I became a partner in Performance Consultants, one of Europe’s most important pioneers of coaching in business.

David began his professional life in education.  He combined that with a successful sporting career in men’s hockey, representing England and Great Britain over 100 times.  On retirement from his playing care, he became England and GB men’s hockey coach from 1980 -1988. In that time his team won Olympic bronze (1984), World and European Silver twice and Olympic gold in 1988.

In 1989, David co-founded Performance Consultants with David Hemery and Sir John Whitmore. Together, they pioneered the introduction of coaching to the business world. John’s book, Coaching for Performance detailed the approach the three pioneers took to coaching. This book has since gone on to be the best-selling book on coaching around the world. 

With his wife, top coach Sue Slocombe, he also established one of the first Coaching and Development MSc programmes at Portsmouth University.

He has written extensively coaching and has written three books, his most famous, is the now classic Spirit of Teams.

David was our senior partner at Performance Consultants and  I had the pleasure and privilege of working with him and being coached by him. I have had the fortune to work with many great coaches and many thought leaders in the field of coaching. No one before or since has more successfully lived the values of a coach as David does. He is, quite simply, the best coach I have ever met.  So, I am excited to share with you this conversation where we explore his coaching journey and his insights into how we can help our people to achieve sustained high performance. Again, whilst force seems to be increasingly used to "persuade" people, I am more and more convinced that the only way we as leaders can generate the performance we will need to navigate the challenges ahead is through collaborative relationships where everyone wants to give and be their best. Therefore, coaching will be essential.  

Here's the conversation markers.

0000      Welcome and Introduction

03.00     Starting out – how coaching and teaching combined for pupil centred learning.

09.00     Setting challenges to teach tactics to children and then to international athletes.

14.00     What other skills do you employ as a coach?

18.30     Giving your people space to find their own answers.

23.00     Helping players (and donkeys!) find a way through new situations.

24.00     Career recap, from international hockey coaching to business coaching and a partnership with Sir John Whitmore and David Hemery CBE.

31.05     Running a coaching business in a recession is actually a good thing.

34.30     What are the differences and similarities between business and sports coaching? How has coaching grown in importance during your career?

42.00     What are the principles of coaching? – Awareness.

46.00     Second principle of coaching –...

Welcome to Episode 6 of "The Art and Science of Success."

Today’s guest is Elizabet Sahtouris, evolutionary biologist and ecological campaigner. Elisabet combines an extraordinarily deep appreciation for the environment with practical ideas for forming a better relationship with it – i.e., one based on respect rather than plunder. This is particularly useful as we come to terms with the recently published IPCC report.

She may seem to be a strange addition to talks run by a stress specialist but some challenging ideas aside, she’s extremely relevant as I have found that stress is mostly a relational issue – it’s something that happens between us- it just happens to come through individuals so we blame them instead of looking at how we are all interacting together. 

She’s been in the field for over 65 years collaborating with people like James Lovelock and Willis Harmon. She’s also spent many years building links between the different types of science in the world.   

She says things that I don’t agree with or rather I don’t know I agree with her. But that’s one of the things I find so rewarding interacting with her work – she makes me think and gives my foundations a shake. AND her work is also immensely practical.  

Here’s the summary of the topics we cover.

0000       Introduction and shock warning. Listen only if you want to give your beliefs a shake.

4.50        Nature as a dance with reality and how she developed her ideas on evolutionary biology

8.50 -     Importance of agency and co-creation

12.00     The different sciences around the world and Elisabet’s keyboard metaphor for describing

consciousness.

16.00     Exploring the creative process in consciousness and entrepreneurship (and reincarnation?!!)

21.00-   Challenging your perspective: Nature, holarchy, the donkey and the rose.

28.00     The role viruses play in our evolution – virus as information.

33.00     What can I do to boost my immune system?

37.00     How to focus on contribution – on making a difference.

43.00     How does Elisabet regain her perspective and her optimism when she loses it?

48.00     Imagining an economy where you recycle everything – Anaximander’s wisdom.  

54.30     Closing wisdom.

Really hope you find it stimulating.

Welcome to the fifth episode of "The Art and Science of Success." This is part two of our interview with retired Brig General Tom Kolditz, executive director of the Anne and John Doerr Institute for New Leaders at Rice U in Houston, Texas.

In this episode, Tom continues with his advice and experience for leading people out of lockdown. We start with Tom’s research on perhaps the biggest issue in leadership today - cowardice - caused by excessive self interest. 

He gets into how he developed a truly amazing team and has an extraordinarily simply policy for increasing the likelihood of a successful hire. He also talk about psychological safety and how he creates it (and sometimes fails to). And how he has created a mentoring network for himself and the institute.  Hope you enjoy it.

Here’s the detail of the interview.

2.10 – The number one leadership problem? Cowardice (defined as excessive self interest) instead of courage– why leaders do bad things and what we can do about it.  

5.30 – How Tom applies service to others in his role developing leaders.

8.56 – Arizona Airspeed parachute team – from the best individuals to the best team

7.16 – How can you get your people to commit to serving/helping the organisation first?

10.00- What qualities should you look for when recruiting people?

15.30 – Perhaps the funniest and most useful test for recruiting top team players to your team!

16.40 – Psychological Safety – how to create it (and how not to).

23.20 – Addressing bullying and harassment – fulfilling the leader’s duty.

27.15 – how Tom’s Institute is turning “competitors” into collaborators. More and better leaders- everywhere.

30.30 – The Extraordinary Board of the Institute including Klaus Schwab, Jim Collins, Colin Powell, Al Gore, and Wendy Kopp.

35.00 – Creating a demand for your services – how students are now coming to Rice for the leadership.

38.00 – Why are you optimistic about the future?

42.00 - What advice do you have for people working in an unsupportive or toxic environment?

44.00 - Focus on contribution as seen through the people you impact.  

Hope you enjoy it.