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Paul: Welcome to the Resilient Leadership Podcast. My name is Paul Marks. I'm an executive coach, leadership development specialist, and researcher with a passion for helping leaders thrive in an increasingly complex world. For the last 30 years, I've I have lived and worked in Asia, and during that time I've had the privilege of working with thousands of leaders and teams from across Asia. The Middle East, Europe and Australia. Those experiences have shaped the way I think about leadership, resilience, and human performance too. In this podcast, I'll be sharing stories from the field, reflections on leadership, and practical insights to help you become a more resilient and effective leader. Drawing on leadership psychology, neuroscience, behavioral science, and my own experiences working with organizations from around the world, these episodes are designed to bring together evidence-based ideas, practical strategies, and stories that you can use and apply the learnings from in your own leadership. Thank you for joining me and welcome to The Resilient Leadership. Podcast. In today's episode, I would like to kick off with a story. Now there's one thing I I'd like to share as well, that the stories that I will be talking about in my episodes are from real cases. However, I changed the names of the individuals and the organizations simply for their protection. Having said that, the individuals that these stories are drawn from know That I'll be sharing their stories on the podcast and have given consent. Now, with that in mind, I want to tell you a story about a leader that for this episode I wish to call David. So, David ran a commercial printing company. It was sort of a mid-size company. And this company was started by his father some 30 years earlier. And I can tell you straight away that. David was good at his job. He knew his customers by name, he knew their order cycles, and he actually knew how to run his shop well. And his team performed well and they all looked happy and engaged when I met them. Now for the first or for most of his career, David's success was doing the things that he'd always done that had kind of Produce the results that he needed. So he had very set strategies in place, processes and systems that honestly they really, really worked. Then over a period of about 18 months, there was a shift. Something changed. His biggest clients, his most loyal ones, the ones that would order huge numbers of printed catalogues and brochures. Well they started to order less. Now, in David's, you know, his thinking and his his instinct, I guess, was for him to think, right, well, I'm just gonna work harder at what I already know. And so he kept doing things harder. He also offered discounts to try to get his his customers to re-engage. He tried speeding up the turnaround. And he really tried to push his team to perform better. But here's the thing: his customers weren't leaving because his printing was too slow or too expensive. They were leaving because their business had transformed. They were moving away from print and onto online marketing. These organizations were going digital. They didn't need thousands of glossy. Catalogues or brochures anymore. What they needed was to show up in their customers' inbox on their social media feeds and in adverts online in front of us or on the screen. The problem in front of David wasn't a printing problem at all. No amount of doing the old thing was also going to fix it either. And of course, the turning point wasn't even a new strategy. But when we were having our coaching conversations, some interesting questions came up. And David found that instead of asking, How do I get my customers to buy more of what I make, David started asking, What does my customer actually need now? And how has that changed? Hmm. That one shift in thinking eventually turned, eventually turned his printing shop into a small brand and packaging studio. It was the same people working for him, the same building, but a completely different understanding of the problem. Now I want to be open and very honest about this shift. It wasn't easy for David. To make this happen. David didn't wake up one morning excited about trying to reinvent his company. He honestly fought it. Everything in him wanted the old way of working back. The one where he was the expert, where he he knew all the answers. And it was a real blow to him as well because changing his thinking in the way that he did. Made him feel like that he had to admit that the last 30 years of hard won knowledge had somehow expired. But of course it hadn't. It just been updated. And David recognized that in the end, that it it was about updating his thinking and align what was happening in the market today. Now there was that emotional resistance too, that pullback towards the familiar throughout. his transformation. And as we'll see as we will see as we go through our our episode today, that isn't a character flaw. It's more about how we are wired as human beings. Now this ability to notice that the ground has moved or shifted around us and the and the ability to be able to think and respond Differently in new ways is linked to something called cognitive flexibility. Now, cognitive flexibility might be the single most important leadership capacity for the world that we live and operate in today. And that's what we're going to be talking about. Now, if cognitive flexibility is so valuable, you'd think it would come naturally, but it doesn't. And there's a good reason for that. And it lives in our brains and it lives in how our brains are wired. Now, without without going into this too much, your brain, above all else, is very much an efficiency machine in some ways. It loves to be able to predict the future so that it can keep us safe from harm. And so therefore it loves patterns. It loves routines. When we do something over and over, a route to work, maybe we drive the car the same way every morning, we have a
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certain way of running a meeting, we use the same thinking approaches and approaches for solving problems. Your brain builds very well-worn pathways. Neuroscientists sometimes refer to this as neurons that fire together, wire together. The more you repeat a way of thinking, the stronger and faster that pathway becomes. Now, deep down inside the brain, there are a set of structures called the basal ganglia. Now that quietly takes those repeated patterns and turns them into habits so that we don't have to think about them at all. Now this is a really important feature. It's not a bug or a dysfunction of the brain at all. You actually want most of your day-to-day routines and tasks probably on autopilot. Because you don't want to have to wake up every morning and learn how to, you know, turn on the kettle or drive or relearn how to drive your car to work every morning. So when we have habits, actually what happens is it frees up mental energy. But that same efficiency, of course, has a cost. Your brain would generally, generally rather run on the old patterns than build new ones because it consumes less energy and it feels much safer. So the known path, of course, it feels easier and faster as well. Even, you know, if we keep doing the same patterns, even if it's leading us off a cliff, how many of us have got unhealthy patterns that we know are not good for us, but we keep playing them anyway? Well, David's cutting his prices was exactly that. His brain was reaching for the familiar move, the one that he thought, based on past experiences, would Now there's one piece of knowledge worth knowing here. shifting from one way to another way of thinking actually costs your brain something. It really does. So this switching doesn't come for free. Researchers call it switch cost. So every time you pull yourself out of a familiar pattern and into a new one, there is like a a small tax, if you like, a little friction. There's a bit of mental fatigue. And that's why you know when it gets to four o'clock on a hard day, we default to the easier, the easy, familiar moves that we are used to. It's not laziness. Your brain is conserving energy, it's it's conserving its fuel. Knowing that switch cost actually really helps because it means that flexibility isn't about. willpower alone. But it's about creating the conditions, the time, and the calmness and the questions that make that harder path or that harder route a little easier to choose. So our brain obviously tries to conserve energy, it tries to stick to things it knows and it is challenging for us to make changes. In the way that we think. But if we create the right environment and the setting, it's very possible. And this is where the good news comes in. And this is the part that I love. The brain is not fixed at all, it's plastic. Neuroplasticity means that you can build new pathways or new neural pathways at any age. So the the old saying that you can't teach an old dog new tricks is absolutely not true.
And it's been proven in the literature time and time again. so if you believe that you know you can't teach an old dog new chicks and you stick to that belief, maybe it might be tougher to learn. But actually, if you are willing to be more flexible on that, you will see that we continue learning throughout our you know middle and later years of life as well. Now, cognitive Flexibility also isn't personality trait. So it's not something that you either have or you don't. Cognitive flexibility actually is a practice. And the good news is of course it can be strengthened. So how do we actually build it? Well, it starts with a skill psychologists call metacognition, which is really a fancy way of saying thinking about your thinking. Stepping back and noticing not just what you're concluding or making decisions on, but how you actually got to that decision and whether that path still fits the situation in front of you today. Now, most of us go through the day without ever doing this. We react. We reach for the answers that have worked last time. And in a stable world, That's fine, but we're not in a stable world. Markets shift, customers change, technology rewrites the rules, and of course now AI is changing everything. In that kind of environment, the leader who never questions their own thinking is the most vulnerable person in the room because they confidently believe that their old ways of doing things will work. Tomorrow, and honestly, in most cases that might not be the case anymore. So here's a question I'd invite you to sit with. How much of what you know about your business, your customers, or your team is actually current and update? Or is it beliefs you have about those, you know, your business, your customers, or your team? They are they from the past? We carry around a mental model of the world. And that model was accurate or pretty accurate the day that we built it. But models get outdated. The customer you understood perfectly even a year and a half ago may have completely different needs today. And if you're navigating or making decisions off that old map, it doesn't matter. how skilled you are, you are actually driving your organization or your business in the wrong direction. Cognitive flexibility is really the discipline of updating the map. It's asking on purpose and on a regular basis a simple question. Is what I believe about this situation based on what's true now or on what was true before? And notice this, this is not the same as being wishwashy or being blown by, you know, the wind in every direction. No, a flexible leader isn't someone with no convictions, but it's someone whose convictions are attached to reality and who is willing to look at and really willing to look at reality often enough. To know when it's changed. Now there's a real real strength in that, I think. It takes more confidence, not less, to say something like, Well, I've been thinking about this the old way. You know, I think I've been thinking about this
that is maybe in, you know, without dated information. And I'm thinking about how it may be different now. So that ability to recognize that there could be a mistake in your thought process or in your beliefs and having that courage to step back and challenge them, I think is a real strength. Now, moving forward, let's talk about how we can develop this muscle then of cognitive flexibility. So let me leave you with a simple ways that you might be able to do that, practical ways. So the first one is catch those phrases like, Well, we've always done it this way. That sentence is a signpost. It's not always wrong. But it's always worth pausing on. When you hear it from your team or from your own head, treat that as an invitation to ask. And is this still the best way, given the things are today or how things have changed? Challenge your assumption around how things have always been done. Secondly, schedule time to think about your thinking. Reflection almost never happens by accident. Your day fills up, you know, your calendar is full. So it's critical that you block at least 15 minutes a week to step back and ask, what's changed this week that I haven't fully absorbed? Or what's shifted that may have gone you know past my attention. And Where am I running an old pattern here? It's a question you need to ask. Where do I need to update my thinking? Third, go to disconfirming views. Our brain loves evidence where it proves that, where evidence proves that we're right. You know, it's called confirmation bias, right? And it quietly ignores evidence that may suggest that we're wrong. So s so I would say deliberately seek out people who see the world differently from you. Go to those people that will challenge you. Go to those people with a different perspective because that flexibility grows when you invite information into your pattern that would have otherwise been filtered out or deleted or just completely ignored. And the fourth is get comfortable holding two ideas at the same time. So you might say, well, this worked before, and this may not work now. I've got these two ideas. Now both could be true, but the ability to hold both and examine both is where the power is. Now cognitive flexibility isn't about throwing away everything you know. It's about being willing to hold on to what you know loosely enough to change it when the evidence changes and the circumstances change. Now I'm gonna go back to David. David didn't save his company by becoming a different person. He saved it by becoming a more flexible thinker. By honestly noticing that the world had moved, and he had the courage to move his thinking with it. That's the work. And it's work our brains will resist because. Familiar path always feels safer. But the familiar path is only safe when the world stops changing and the world isn't going to stop doing that. This week I offer you one small practice. Catch yourself running an old pattern, and instead of pushing harder on it, get curious. Ask what actually what's actually true here right now. What's actually true? That single question is often enough to open up different ways of thinking and looking at things. Ladies and gents, I hope that you've enjoyed this sell this episode of the resilient leadership podcast. In the next episode, we're going to be talking about the topic of uncertainty. And we're also going to be discussing: is uncertainty really the problem, or is it our relationship with uncertainty that causes the biggest challenges? If you've enjoyed this episode and you found it interesting or useful, please make sure that you subscribe to my podcast and like. And also, I would ask you to share. my podcast with anyone that you know that would benefit from it or who is looking to upskill themselves or develop themselves as a leader. Thanks for listening.