Welcome back, luminaries, and thanks once again for supporting the show.

Congratulations on joining our premium tier.

Very wise.

Yeah, and much appreciated.

Now, in the main show, we've been talking about what makes a perfect consultant and particularly the balance between confidence and humility.

Ian, what are we going to talk about this week?

Mike, it's going to be fascinating.

We are going to talk about how rare, even though desirable, it can be for consultants to exhibit both of those qualities.

We're going to dig into what they are and how they might combine somehow.

We're going to talk a little bit about what it means to be a super communicator.

We raised that in our regular episode and we want to dig into that, how we can learn from people who have this super communicator skill set.

We want to talk about just how far you can go in building your confidence by picking up a typical airport self help book.

And then also talk about how much better and cheaper it could be if you just seek advice from a nerdy Roman emperor.

And then, Mike, we're going to talk about how it all boils down to understanding what we don't know.

So those are our highlights, Mike.

We'll wrap that all up with some thoughts about payoffs for us as consultants from being able to do these two things successfully together.

So, Mike, what do we learn when we think about this question and break it down a bit more closely.

It's interesting.

So let's go step by step here.

Number one, why is confidence required?

You know, it instills trust in clients and in our team members, basically in everybody we're interacting with.

If you're spitting out a report on the fate of some company's strategy and you're looking unsure, a little nervous, not confident, that doesn't go so well much anywhere through it enables decisive action and recommendations and gives you a little bit more grit to stand behind them.

It helps, as I just mentioned, in presenting ideas and solutions effectively and persuasively and it allows for standing firm when you're facing challenges or pushbacks because sometimes that's required as well.

That confidence is what gives us the ability to take calculated risks and lead projects forward.

So I think just a handful of things that, you know, confidence is a really important, either major ingredient or catalyst.

Of, and I'm getting some good reminders there that exhibiting confidence is sometimes about being able to bring energy.

Clients want to make decisions.

Clients want to feel persuaded and feel like they're ready for the next step.

And you need to be able to help them to get there.

I think that's a really good summary.

Yeah.

How about humility?

How does that help us?

Humility promotes continuous learning and improvement.

Unless we're a little bit humble, we may just say, yeah, I pretty much have that mastered now.

I remember that David Maester used to talk about Dynamos and Cruisers and losers.

And this is one of the things is, are you standing on what you know?

You're learning more or you actually don't know enough to begin with?

Continuous learning and improvement enables openness to client, input to new ideas and perspectives.

I've got to have enough room inside my confidence, perhaps hollowed out by humility to welcome these other ideas in.

Facilitates being able to admit mistakes, course correct, and then continuously improve.

Because you can't continuously improve unless you can do this.

Now, sometimes also it allows us and propels us to acknowledge limitations and seek help when it's needed.

And there's one really, at all ranges of consulting, I think very important here, and I think without that humility, without some of that authenticity, it's really tough to build authentic relationships with clients, colleagues and team members.

I think we've all met that person who lacks that and.

And Mrs.

Standoff.

Yeah.

So it's going to help us to build strong relationships if we're humble, it's going to help us to keep our minds open.

I think that's important since so much of our work is intellectual.

It does sound, though, and I think of our attributes of confidence and humility.

Prioritizing one or trading one away in order to get more of the other might be tricky.

It might not make sense.

Even though I can think of people whose personality probably makes them lean one way or another.

Using the presence of one as an excuse for the absence of the other, I think is a worry for me, even if it's rare.

I think I feel like we ought to try.

I think lots of the people that I respect in our industry are trying, even if they're not all the way there yet.

Now, Mike, I can think of occasions when I've noticed individuals or teams try to do this kind of swinging between confidence and humility.

I can think of sports teams that I've followed where in one season or in one campaign, the coach is trying to get the team to be humble and to prepare them to be the best version of who they can be, and then trust that whatever happens on the field or on the pitch is taken care of by that better attitude and that more enlightened spirit I can see.

I've seen teams go only part way with that kind of approach and then be taken on by another coach who says, never mind what happens in the dressing room, what counters out on the field, and we need to get hungry for the outcome and we need to have that kind of instinct to close games down.

So I can see sports teams that have done that.

I can also think of individuals, maybe even including me, who've swung between trying to be more humble, trying to be more confident as we've grown in our careers.

What do you think?

I certainly resemble that remark, Ian.

I think I was driven so much by a number of kind of personal and background issues.

Had a very strong case of imposter syndrome, a very strong case of wanting to please authority figures and be accepted and everything.

I think it combined with kind of just showing up into situations where I went up the ladder really fast and went through a time of great financial distress and economic distress, did a lot of turnaround consulting, had great successes, really dependent upon things that I saw as outside my control.

So I felt like these were lauded, but there were so many contributions by other people.

There were things that came together.

I felt a credo that said, it's better to be lucky than good.

Because I thought, I don't think this is really me.

And I think I was so anxious at times that I couldn't acknowledge my role in it.

And that anxiety also prevented me from really balancing out confidence and humility the right way.

So for me, I finally got some solace around anxiety that allowed me to detach that from my thinking, which helped both confidence and humility, because I think we started thinking these are opposite ends of a continuum.

But really there's a strong interrelation here.

And I'm still trying to tease that out in my own mind because I know I can remember the night that some of that happened and feel like that was such a huge turnaround in my life and my career.

So it's fascinating.

The answer to both of these is partly be good at self reflection, understand yourself and seek feedback and take an inventory a little.

Do some practice and be deliberate about the choices that you make, about who you're in front of when you're being how you are and being committed to a bit of growth.

And I think to be able to do either of these things more consciously, to be confident or to be humble, we need to be able to be a bit deliberate.

And I know you very well, Mike, and I know that that's something that you excel at.

But I can also think of times in my life when I was a Million miles away from really wanting, I don't want to know personal growth.

I want to be excellent right now with the me that I am.

And I think that's something that we all need to get over at some point.

I'm just going to throw a personal comment in here, Ian.

I think if I was as incredible a Renaissance man as you are, I think when you bring all those skills, as you say, when it's true, it's not bragging.

That's very kind.

Anyhow, I think we all still need to get a bit of perspective, right?

Yeah.

And this all comes along with our ability to communicate to others.

And I ask myself, how can I tell somebody who is a little overconfident or a little over humble?

I can normally hear it in the conversations.

I don't so much read it in their PowerPoint or even in their emails, but I hear it in the conversations.

And Mike, in the regular episode, we've been talking about super communicators.

There is this kind of skill set that's been documented of super communicators.

What can we learn from that?

What's it all based on?

It's really fascinating, Ian.

Charles Duhigg, you know, has talked about three conversations, different kinds of conversations.

A practical conversation, what is really about.

Decision making, choosing, analyzing.

Also emotional conversations about how do we feel.

Helps shapes our beliefs and emotions and memories.

And then a social conversation about who we are.

And in this, he gives examples and talks about rules and methods and approaches of realizing what kind of conversation are we having and how do we share our goals, or we would say interests in negotiations and then explore our identities and what's important to us in this conversation and ask others about their feelings and share their own.

A lot of this, as you can see, people who are super confident to the point of arrogance probably going to be a little difficult to do here.

People who are too humble, if you will.

And I don't want to say that it's like too humble, but humble in a different way.

Like stay on the sidelines and perhaps sit back.

But the whole way this works is by matching other people and then experimenting to find out what's going on with them and with the number of different people in a group and being able to do that in different ways in order to then move ahead with different perspectives, different options, and coming up with better solutions.

From a humility standpoint, this empathy and perspective taking, I'm not so much in myself that I can't do this.

It's great.

And openness to learning that We've been talking about, as a matter of fact, this whole technique.

As you see, people do it, people who do it intentionally, people who seem to have done it unintentionally, that they just learn that this works.

Over time they've learned, they've been open to learning.

But to do this and to do this well and to do this intentionally, you have to have enough confidence to believe in your own abilities and to develop these abilities and promote them.

Because some of this is a little bit confrontational.

Sometimes it can be a little bit challenging.

It can be really stepping in there and moving in and out of your comfort zone or somebody else's comfort zone in order to explore where are we?

What kind of conversation is this?

What's going to take it to move it there?

And sometimes being that to the point of assertiveness, again, not aggressiveness, but assertiveness, again, really relies on confidence.

I hope we'll continue to come back to this a little bit as we move through because these people just have a really outsized effect when people are working in groups or in teams or in multiple person situations in being able to get more out of conversations and more successful outcomes.

Awesome.

There's a really nice visual Mike that you found summarizing the ideas and the way that these conversations work in the Super Communicators model.

We'll share that.

We'll share it on Instagram and we'll share it on the show Notes as well, a link to it so that if you want to take a look at what we're seeing in this summary of Super Communicators, you might appreciate that and help as well.

It seems then Super Communicators, among other things, are able to strike this balance between confidence and humility.

And Mike, we were talking about this before you pulled out some really great points here.

Super Communicators ask many more questions, asking 10 to 20 times more questions than the average person.

And asking questions is generally for me a signifier of humility.

There are, there are arrogant asshole questions as well.

Where did you stop?

Caring about the quality of your work is a non humble question.

But I think in general asking questions is absolutely a sign of an open and curious outlook, being a good listener and listening closely to what's said and unsaid.

And Mike, you and I have dwelt on the skill of listening for lots of our clients in lots of different contexts over the years, and also recognizing and matching mood and using your knowledge of emotional cues and your emotional intelligence.

Mike, let's just pause here for a minute because I'd like to talk about bringing the listeners in.

We're having a great time talking this through and there's plenty more for us to say before we're done with this episode.

But what about you, our luminaries?

If you have a question that you'd like us to consider or some points that you'd like to add to the discussion, we want to get into that.

The luminary tier is all about getting your say in what we discuss here on the show.

And therefore, please get in touch.

Our social channels are everywhere in the show notes and on the show homepage.

We'd especially love to get emails from our luminaries.

So contact us at Consulting for Humans.

That's all one word@P31-consulting.com.

who knows, the next episode could be all about you.

Meanwhile, back to the show.

Ian, from time to time we like to reach out to a wide range of references and information.

You've been working on this one.

What are some of the things you found?

Oh, Mike, I had fun with this one.

Maybe this says more about me than it says about the books.

There's a whole cadre of books that are about developing confidence about, you know, your basically ego led and purpose led be all you can be books.

And it's very cruel of me, but I characterize these as airport reads.

Most of these, the spines of them I've seen in bookshops in airports.

Some of them you might be familiar with.

I dug a little bit into a book called you're a Badass by Jensen Ciro.

My personal favorite, the Subtle Art of Not Giving a fuck by Mark Manson, which is all about self confidence of a kind.

And a slightly more worthy textbook which is called the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Jim Detmer, Diana Chapman and Kaylee Klemp.

And I'm being very cruel at tarring these all with a bit of a brush here.

I would say they're all okay.

Like they're all useful if you want to give your confidence a boost in the self oriented, goal seeking, I would call it the American self help tradition.

Then reach out for Jensen Siro or Mark Manson, probably by picking them up at your next airport bookshop stop.

The 15 Commitments book is a little bit more gentle.

It's still really a manifesto for being a better person.

It's the reverse of the badass book and the not giving a fuck book in that it's a set of lessons for being self aware and for being thoughtful about your conduct.

It reminds us, I think, to watch out for the biases and flaws that we've talked about already in the regular episode.

Ultimately, I'm going to give all three of these a solid meh okay verdict because I think they're all a repackaging.

A very palatable and engaging repackaging, but still a repackaging of deeper and older ideas.

To go a little bit deeper, I found a really nice article on a website called Leaders for Leaders that gives a nice summary.

And by the way, it's cheaper to read the article than to read these books.

Gives a really nice summary of how you can cultivate confidence and humility.

The references do all tend though to point in the direction of leadership.

And Mike, you've already talked about how leadership and being a consultant are not necessarily the same thing.

Even good leadership qualities point toward consulting success.

And you and I would probably both say, Mike, that the most successful consultants that we've met have demonstrated good leadership and therefore are likely to be exemplars of these kind of skills.

Now, the author of the article on Leaders4Leaders CA is a guy called Tim Arnold and he points us towards a book that I think is one of the best of the modern generation of self help books.

That's Mindset the Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck.

Now Mike, I know you and I have talked about this book many times.

We've used it in class, we've taught about it to participants and coaches.

It's a really fabulous book.

It's got something that seems to go down very well with learners as well.

The idea that a mindset could be holding you back and a better mindset can take you forward.

It doesn't talk about completely transforming the person that you are, but it talks about regarding yourself as continually a work in progress.

And Carol Dweck's big idea is that we don't have to accept abilities and skills that we have now as innate or fixed.

We can work on ourselves.

We can learn from mistakes, we can learn from difficulties that we encounter along the way and don't have to be trapped by a fear of failure.

So I think that this synthesis that we're talking about here of confidence humility is a really useful and practical one for people to keep coming back to.

And I think Carol Dweck's book is taking us in a good direction here.

It's a nice readable and useful and genuine attempt to package all the ideas up before we do the next one.

I was taking a look at Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday, which sounds like an anti confidence pro humility kind of pamphlet and Anik bizarre.

It is quite a good analysis if you talk casually about somebody having an ego.

This book explores what it really means in psychological terms, what he calls ego.

He means the exhibition of self regard and ambition and arrogance that all can hold us back.

And he picks some great examples from history, from contemporary culture of people whose ego had dragged them off course and pursuing ego had led to bad outcomes.

Now he has some messages for us.

One message is we should be willing to undertake hard, unglamorous work.

And I guess staying up late at night indexing documents is good for your soul.

But presenting to the CEO might not be in every situation.

And it's a good idea to be wary of the temptation to talk about ourselves too much.

And he's got another chapter that I think was really great for us as coaches and teachers as well, Mike, about seeing yourself as a perpetual student.

And I think that's a really good one for consultants to think about and come back to.

And again, strongly linked in my mind with Carol Dweck stuff for leaders and managers of consultants.

I think that Ryan Holiday's book is also great because it gets us thinking harder and deeper about what it's going to take for our direct reports and our new recruits to learn and develop.

Anyway, Mike, I've got one other idea for a motherload of all of this, but I've been talking for a while now.

I know that you've got another reference and another model that you found super helpful.

You're a big fan of Adam Grant, right?

Tell us a bit about Adam Grant's thinking and how it can help us here.

Yeah, I am a big fan of Adam Grant as a guy who had his undergraduate education in religion with a concentration in Zen Buddhism and psychology and could decide which way to go in either of those directions and went into business instead.

I love that Adam Grant's a top Wharton professor and is an organizational psychologist.

I thought, yeah, there is.

I found that my other side sometimes helps almost as much as that psychological side.

But all of this above.

So Adam Grant really in Think Again.

So there's so many great books that he has, but Think Again, the Power of knowing what you don't know really points out strongly that humility is a virtue for a lot of the reasons that we get to here.

I think I mentioned quickly once earlier in the main episode.

But to get down to it here, part of what he does is to contrast the downside of the Dunning Kruger effect that says individuals with limited experience tend to overestimate Their skills and knowledge due to the unawareness of what they don't know.

And boy, how many times have we seen that in our lives?

How many times have we seen that played out big time in history?

Here he contrasts that a little bit with the potential benefits of imposter syndrome, something that we're talking about earlier here, which happens when people underestimate their abilities.

And he's saying that the imposter.

If you want to go on both ends of those things, the imposter syndrome could be a much better thing because it can cause people to work harder and to double check that their assumptions are correct.

So I think this is that one.

And he argues in this book for what he calls confident humility.

So are we coming right back to what we're doing here?

He said people can believe that they can accomplish what they're setting out to do while still being open to the idea that their initial ideas may need some rethinking and to remember to check along the way.

Here, one of my tests for anything I read is what do I do about this?

How do I apply this?

And Grant suggests some things.

He says, you know, develop self awareness.

And we talked a little bit about this too.

But regularly reflect on your strengths and your achievements and your areas for growth.

He says that this self awareness helps us to lead with confidence while still staying grounded.

And then he says, if we're practicing this, to grow this, we have to do this.

We have to lead by example, display vulnerability, admit mistakes, demonstrate accountability by owning up to consequences and all of that, transparency, trust, innovation, all of these.

That balance of trust and humility.

Yeah.

By the way, this one.

Leading by example and being willing to admit mistakes is probably where it starts to get difficult once you get past the conceptual level for consultants.

I can think of plenty of people who will openly admit that they have a hard time with admitting mistakes and admitting failure.

This is when we always see the active tense immediately flip to the passive tense.

What about that project?

Mistakes were made?

Yeah.

Oh, really?

They just.

Mistakes happened, right?

Yeah.

I think I even remember my first consulting training as a young buck.

And that final case, presentation and feeling in front of a senior person who's listening to us present our results, wishing the floor would open, I could drop through it because of the big mistake I just made.

I never made that mistake again on a real project.

So that, you know, there's much to be said here.

And wrapping all around this, these are things that we can do as leaders.

We can foster a culture of psychological safety as participants.

We can look for and try to help develop this an environment where all of us feel safe to express ideas and perspectives and concerns have and it might help to drop a super communicator or two into the group here to empower the team to be and do their best.

Right.

Maybe that could be us.

We've been talking about just in case anybody wants a little kind of inventory, we've been talking about Adam Grant, who wrote a book called Think Again.

We've been talking about Ryan Holiday, who wrote a book called Ego is the Enemy.

We've been talking about Carol Dweck who wrote a great book called Mindset Psychology of Success.

And we've talked about Secret Art of not Giving a Fuck and you are a badass and 15 commitments.

These are all helpful.

And by the way, we'll put links to all of these in our show notes.

I found something new.

I was digging around for all of this stuff and I found that what you might call the original source, or at least an original source millennia ago, Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, is a really great source.

If you can get past the slightly fruity way in which it's normally translated into English out of Latin.

It's a classic text on self discipline, personal ethics and humility.

This book, or this series of books, was written as the private journal of Marcus Aurelius, who was a Roman emperor in the second century ad to get hold of a copy is easy.

And by the way, it's going to be cheaper than any Kindle or audiobook edition of any of these regular books that we talked about.

Do not pay more than $2, is my advice.

There are loads of great themes here.

There are some really excellent quotes, some of them not very relatable to consulting, but many of them are.

And he's talking about these same ideas of openness and curiosity and empathy and communication.

Some quotes that I really liked.

It's silly, says Marcus Aurelius.

It's silly to escape other people's faults.

They are inescapable.

Just try to escape your own.

Nice.

I'm getting a coffee mug made of that one.

And then we've got the excellent line which is all about humility here.

When you've done well and another has benefited by it, why then, like a fool, do you look for a third thing on top for credit for the good deed or a favour in return?

Which is great.

It's a bit long for a coffee mug, but I'll take it the best of all.

And that call to action quote here from Marcus Aurelius the impediment to action, advances action.

What stands in the way becomes the way.

And if that's not a first century AD guide to how to deal with learnings and setbacks and mistakes of failures in the 21st century AD, I don't know what is.

You can see why they call him the last of the five good emperors.

And I'm super glad to have found it.

Mike, you'd come across Marcus Aurelius before, right?

I had.

I've really had a bit of a renaissance in stoic thinking, which is.

Is what we're talking about, right?

It's exactly what we're talking about.

And I realized what several years back, what a big misconception I had about stoicism from a very high level view and how practical and applicable some of this is and how very motivating some of this really does make for great coffee cup.

Pop it right there to light up here.

Very good.

So Mike, we're getting towards the end of the show here.

Let's get some final thoughts.

We've been talking here about confidence and humility and first of all, why might we need to combine them rather than just alternate or just focus on one?

It seems like they do balance each other out a little.

Preventing excess of either is useful.

Preventing overconfidence, preventing excessive self doubt and imposter syndrome and all the things that go with it.

And also taking advantage of a dynamic where you can learn.

That's been a big thing for me.

I thought that we might just get to talking about showing off and making presentations.

But actually all of the thinking about this says if you can balance confidence and humility, then you're going to be a better learner and you'll be making greater strides in your own development.

And that was really great for me.

Take us towards some of the payoffs then.

What might we get as consultants?

If we can be good at doing.

This, it allows us to do both assertive problem solving and maintaining a client centric approach.

I think this has been a big push pull I've seen in firms, in consultants and individuals, in partners enhance credibility by demonstrating both expertise and a willingness to learn.

To make bold decisions and stay open to feedback, to lead assertively while valuing team input, to project expertise without a appearing arrogant and to admit mistakes while maintaining credibility.

These are some pretty high level payoffs in my mind.

Yeah.

And as Marcus Aurelius and Adam Grant and Carol Dweck all said, doing this means that we'll be able to learn and adapt continuously.

We'll grow the trust of others, and we'll navigate complex challenges.

So, Mike, I feel quite inspired.

I think thinking hard and more deeply about what confidence looks like and what humility looks like and how they can both help each other, it means that it's not just about toning down your rhetoric or toning up your point of view.

I think it's about thinking harder about who you are and the situations that you're in now.

I also love the fact that when we dug into super communicators, that had more to give.

Right.

What else did we learn from looking at super communicators that might point us towards what's coming next?

It's interesting I mentioned that we've talked about a couple of seeming contradictions that consultants need both.

And one of them, this idea of certainty versus being okay with ambiguity is a key one.

It's a very key one.

And super communicators are certainly comfortable with both and embrace the ambiguity to get to the certainty.

Fantastic, Mike.

This sounds like we've got a great introduction to next week's topic, and I.

Hope we'll have all our luminaries with us.

That will be fantastic.

See you next time.