Foreign.

Welcome, luminaries, and thank you for joining us.

On our recent episode of the Consulting for Humans podcast, we were talking about consulting superpowers, that is, superpowers that consultants would like to have in order to do their job faster, easier, better, and to improve their lives.

So, Ian, what's the full list we covered?

Well, Mike, our list was super knowledge or intelligence, mind reading, time travel, mind control, persuasion, shape shifting or invisibility.

Our little two bonus ones at the end were digital integration and infinite equanimity, or self control.

That was our long list.

And we talked and had some fun, I think, pulling out some examples of what those might be and how close any of those might be to being real world skills that we can practice.

But then, Mike, we said there are three of them that we think we can dig into deeper for a little bit of practical learning.

Yeah.

So today we're going to focus on mind reading, mind control, persuasion, and infinite equanimity, or self control.

Now your challenge, listener, is to find an actual superhero in the comics or movies that practices infinite equanimity.

Answers on a postcard, as they used to say.

Right.

Or text me now, as they say on pirate radio stations.

Okay, here we go.

Mike, let's start with mind reading.

We said that consultants would value being able to mind read because we might then instantly understand our clients and their needs and concerns, the office politics in our client organizations and I guess in our own firms as well, and the realities about decision making criteria.

This all sounds like it's something valuable.

Let's talk about what skills might actually be involved.

Mike, I know there's a skill involved here that I think is a favorite for you and me to talk about.

Well, there absolutely is, Ian.

I mean, active listening techniques, this whole idea, we've said it several times, I think on the podcast that we've always joked that consultants have two ways of communicating, speaking and waiting to speak when they actually should spend more time listening.

So, Ian, it's not just listening, it's listening with a little oomph, right?

Yeah, listening with your brain turned on towards the person who's speaking.

Listening so that you're actively demonstrating that you're hearing.

And there's lots of technique that I think you can read and learn about active listening.

But what fascinates me is that it's a conversation I have had with people at all experiences and at all levels.

Good listening seems to be a skill that's stretchable and coachable and renewable and learnable at every stage of someone's consulting career.

And that's interesting.

It tells me two things.

First of all, it says it's continually important and I 100% get that.

It also says to me that it has maybe not a sell by date, but that it can decay a little bit.

There's something about regular life as a consultant which even for a well intentioned person, starts to erode away their ability to really, really listen.

Now I've got a few ideas of my own about why that is, what's going on in the minds of consultants.

What do you think, Mike?

What makes it so difficult for us?

Well, I think part of it is time pressure.

I mean, we are so busy, we want to cut to the chase.

Cut to the chase.

I'm fascinated by the fact that AI, everything I touch nowadays, AI wants to summarize that for me.

Let me give that to you in a paragraph in a one page in two things.

And I think that's sometimes the way we try to listen as well.

But you don't get the full story.

You don't.

And it's a good point.

It feels superficially efficient to not listen.

Just go, yeah, yeah, yeah, move on.

Superficially it seems like you're sort of cut through and sort of purposeful and driven.

But as you say, Mike, in the long term, with a bit of depth, you realize that we're not listening.

So maybe our lack of time is a problem for us listening maybe as well.

I think we talked about this in some of our earlier episodes.

The tendency that we have to be a tiny bit intellectually arrogant, that what's going on in my head is probably of higher value than what's going on in your head.

And I might only be pretending to listen to you because I've got something else cooking that's going to really beat it.

And that, I think gets in the way, our elevated opinion of the value of what's going on in our heads.

And you can see why it might be there, right?

We've competed with ourselves and with our contemporaries and with our rivals to get these jobs and to get promoted and to get to the status of being trusted by clients with all these problems.

So we must naturally believe that we're the bee's knees.

And I think that's one of the other things that gets in the way of listening.

And if I'm not listening, you can't ever accuse me of borrowing your watch and selling you the time.

Right?

It's our ideas, not your ideas.

Right?

Right, right.

And again, it's easy to believe that our original thoughts are what Clients really, really need.

There's another thing that I think is happening over time, Mike, which is that the environments in which we're listening are changing, right.

Not that long ago, less than a decade ago, the majority of the work that you would do on a consulting project, you might do on a client's physical site, face to face, in person with clients, right?

Absolutely, Ian.

And I think this is, as you say, it's hard to express in my mind the magnitude of the change when I think back to that day when I was probably gone over 45 weeks a year, probably sometimes 50 weeks a year.

Crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy.

And even compressing that time most recently, how exponentially that's changed yet again.

Indeed.

So we're not present physically in person with our clients.

That doesn't just mean that we're on teams instead of being face to face, although that does have an impact.

It also means that I think our mindset is not that we are socially in the same place as clients anymore.

And I think that makes it easier to cut ourselves off from the.

The agenda of listening.

I know that in terms of training for a career in consulting, it makes it natural for us to deprioritize listening and soft skills and raise the priority of what you might call a hard skill, like analytics, for example, or coding.

I can't imagine what two years of pandemic.

Yeah.

Did to us in terms of listening as well.

I mean, everything that we were on being virtual, it was not listening was almost the equivalent of not having to wear pants.

Right.

And there was a blurring of a boundary there that I think was a really big part of the COVID pandemic and also a big part of the generational shift.

We were having our working thinking in our personal environment, in our home environment.

And like you say, Mike, we were wearing sweatpants rather than a business suit.

The other thing that's happened as the generations have come by and as the millennials and Gen Z have come and gone, is that it's harder and harder to establish a boundary, a clear boundary, at least one that meets the criteria for oldies like you and me.

A clear boundary between work and personal life.

It becomes very, very hard for people in the workplace to really understand when it's okay to speak about their personality or their home, their home issues or their politics or whatever, and to distinguish that from when they should be talking about the kind of regular organizational, professional stuff of being at work.

The distinctions that are in your mind and my mind, Mike, I don't think are the same distinctions as the ones in the minds of somebody under, under.

30 say, no, I suspect not.

Ian, in addition to advanced listening, active listening, what else puts this stuff in, makes this real life superpower?

Well, I think one of the things that goes with it is besides listening, of course, questioning, I think interpreting body language, being able to do the mapping and analysis of stakeholders, being good at doing discovery techniques like interviews.

These are all things that I think go towards our ability to, in air quotes, read minds.

Another one that's really interesting to me, and again, subject to some changes in the workplace right now, though, is culture.

I think you're absolutely right.

I mean, there's culture on multiple levels here.

I was so immersed with corporate culture and differences in corporate culture, especially working across industries, but also working across geographies, country culture as well.

And these cultural differences, I think we can see them on multiple levels and having really significant effects.

Exactly.

And if you're going to read someone's mind, it's doable with your human skills.

As we said in the main episode, we're pretty well equipped for reading people's minds because their thoughts are often out there for us to interpret.

But if we don't have a shared context, it becomes harder to read the signals.

And if you and the person whose mind you're trying to kind of read, if you and they have a different culture, a different context, then there's every chance that you're going to misunderstand or totally fail to understand each other.

So that might be one of the reasons why this counts as a superpower.

Although humans are actually well equipped.

Like I already said, there are all these things that militate against it.

Our lack of willingness or a lack of ability to spend the time and focus, to really listen.

The complexities of all the culture that we have to navigate nowadays.

I think all of that means that you're doing a great job if you can listen well, you're doing a great job if you can understand and adapt to context and culture.

If you can do those things, then you're well on the way to having the superpower of.

Of mind reading.

And, Mike, you can then think about flexing our second superpower.

Right.

So, Ian, the second superpower, it's not mind reading, but mind control and persuasion here.

Yeah.

And we talked a bit about Obi Wan Kenobi and Jedi mind tricks in the main episode.

And I thought that since we've got such a theme of kind of fantastical superheroes, I doubled down on the movie connection here.

I made some Gen AI film music for a superhero Movie to get us in the mood.

So, Mike, going back, as I said, to Obi Wan Kenobi and all these other movie characters who practice mind control, have you noticed something?

Anytime somebody mind controls another character, it's always somebody they don't know.

It's always a stranger.

In the case of Obi Wan Kenobi, he's mind controlling a faceless soldier in a white plastic suit.

Right.

And when we're talking about mind control here, it's not faceless stranger.

And if you do know somebody, if you do share some cultural context, if you actually know know them, you don't need necessarily to have mind control superpowers to influence or persuade them.

Let's talk about some examples.

Who in our lives might we want to, if not control, then at least persuade?

Well, for example, let's talk about spouse and children.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, God, yeah.

Yeah.

Can you control them?

I would say we hope not.

Is everybody's answer, not in a healthy family.

Exactly.

Not in a healthy family.

And healthy or not, I know I can't.

Can you persuade them?

And I would say sure.

Sometimes I think I've got at least a 7, maybe 8% success rate.

Yeah.

Persuading members of my family to do things.

Amen.

And I count that as big success.

Absolutely.

So it's funny, Mike, almost every movie, not only movies, every novel, every play, every TV commercial spot, any story that ever gets told, somebody is being persuaded of something as part of the story.

So persuasion is something that happens between people who get to know each other based on some revelation and some discovery.

Not many people in fictional stories experience or exert mind control, again, apart from extreme cases like horror or fantasy or sci fi.

So actually, then, mind control isn't quite what we need, because if we get to know somebody, all we need is a bit of skill, of persuasion in order to get there.

Mike, I guess the name for what we're talking about there is empathy.

And again, I want to play on the movie connection here.

There's a very famous quote by movie critic Roger Abert, who said that movies are machines for creating empathy.

And I think that's true of lots of dramatic works, lots of fiction.

It's about helping somebody understand the position of somebody else in the world, somebody else in their life.

And I think that's a really powerful sign that you can change somebody's view if you can get close to them, if you can express empathy.

Now, Ian, you've.

You've run into this, you know, like handling disagreement here.

Tell me, tell me about that.

It's funny.

I was giving a talk at a conference a couple of years ago on the subject of persuasion in a very scientific context.

People were talking about how to persuade somebody with.

Of something with scientific evidence.

And a relatively young member of the audience stuck their hand up and said, well, what happens if the person that you're trying to persuade really disagrees with you?

And he kind of leaned into the word really, like, you don't understand.

Some of my people I have to persuade, they have a completely different view of the world.

And I had this moment where I realized something and I tried to explain it, but probably in it, what was a baffling way, I said, well, if you really understand why they disagree with you, then that's it.

You've won.

And he looked at me like, that's kind of a weird thing.

And I wrote back a bit.

I said, yeah, I have quite won.

But if you really understand the truth of why they disagree with you, then you've got all the options in the world that you need.

You can either say, well, gee, if that's your world, I'm not going to persuade you.

I can go and do something else with my time.

Or you can say, oh, I understand now.

I've been employing arguments that made sense to me but that make no sense to you.

I need to go away.

I remodel my arguments.

I need to rebuild my view of the world.

And actually having empathy for someone who disagrees with you.

That.

That moment of getting there is a really profound step forward.

And if you talk to anybody who's ever been in a big negotiation or any kind of a big pitch or a big persuasion event, the.

The moment when one side starts to see what it's like in the side of the other shoes is normally a moment when big progress gets made.

If you can spend time finding out really why the other person disagrees and what it means to them, then that's time much better spent than time that you spend trying to tell them what it is that you want and why it's important to you.

Yeah, yeah.

What they want and why they want it, not what you want and why they should give it to you.

I think that's true.

Who's the hero of this story?

Exactly.

Exactly.

Boy.

Well, it.

We always go back to one of the most famous books, books on this subject, at least in modern times, Influence the Psychology of Persuasion by Robert CD Now, I think this has a little bit of a reputation as a book of tricks to control people's behavior, but it's really not that no, it's really not.

It's all about understanding the factors that drive people's decision making, including the role of emotion and the role of their recollections of past experience, and understanding the role that that plays in decision making and what you can do and the limitations of what you can do to influence them.

So it's a really great book.

There are loads of Internet resources about Cialdini.

We've probably mentioned that before on the show, and we'll put a link into today's luminary episode show notes as well.

Cialdini's book is great, especially if you understand really where it comes from and really what its purpose is.

Mike Thinking about emotions and understanding them and adapting them or even shaping them brings us to our third and arguably juiciest topic.

This is the superpower that I'm envious of.

Not having this superpower is a bit of my kryptonite, if I were Superman, if you will.

This is the idea of, we called it infinite equanimity and self control.

And we're going to balance both sides of this a little bit.

I mentioned on the show that the dictionary definition is kind of mental calmness, composure, evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation.

But maybe we should dive into this a little bit more, especially for our consultants and our humans out there.

Absolutely.

So, luminaries, let's think about this.

I actually want to start out by talking about a wider skill set.

There's a wider idea here that I think is worth digging into.

If you've never come across it before, many of you will have done.

And it's the idea of emotional intelligence and being able to stay calm in either bad news or a good news situation.

And not being overwhelmed by your emotions is a key part of emotional intelligence.

And I think, Mike, of all the people that I've ever known who seem to come close to having the superpower of equanimity or in fact, any of these other superpowers, and I think they all have excellent emotional intelligence.

So let's just take a minute here.

Find out a bit about emotional intelligence and where it came from.

The author that most people refer back back to on this is Daniel Goleman.

And the significance of his work was that before he did his research back in the 1990s, lots of big corporations hired and promoted based on cognitive ability iq.

They thought that raw IQ was kind of the power there.

But he found that raw IQ alone was not correlated with success, even in occupations with an expectation of high cognitive ability.

Insert if you Will consulting for one.

In fact, he found the opposite that the big corporations in the 1990s and before, and I remember this heavily in the 80s as well when I was doing turnarounds, lots of turnarounds had been very damaged in some cases almost beyond repair by the emotional backwardness of very smart people who were put in leadership roles that being emotionally backward that were beyond their emotional capabilities.

Right.

And Goldman discovered that just being smart is not correlated with success.

And he painted this picture for us of smart but non emotionally intelligent people.

And it's a picture that you've got to say Mike is quite familiar in the business world and as we're going to say in a second, it's quite familiar in consulting.

What do these people look like?

Smart, but non emotionally intelligent.

These are the people who perhaps without realizing it, can cause tension in personal and professional relationships.

Their decision making can sometimes be a bit hasty or contrary, as you might say.

These are the kind of people who sometimes lose composure when they get bad news or face a setback or a disagreement.

These are also people who despite their smarts, can have sudden breakdowns in the level of performance when a crisis comes along.

So they have a kind of brittle state.

They're super high performing and super resourceful and super capable until the moment when they're not.

So let's talk about who we're talking about, right?

For a While there were CEOs and you've got to say these days, in some cases there still are CEOs who to some extent harm the people around them.

But despite that, were revered at least in some quarters, for their smart, for their intelligence and for their technical leadership.

And lots of the names that come to mind, I think Mike, are in the world of technology.

Depending on your generation and your industry background, you might be thinking as I was at the time, I thought about this, thinking about Steve Jobs at Apple, thinking about a fellow called Jim Clark at Netscape.

That's an old name, more up to date.

Travis Kalanick at Uber and a few others besides.

These are people who were super smart, super technically able, but you've got to say left scars behind them with the lack of emotional intelligence.

I think it's sad to say that it's still possible to get hired and promoted with a low EQ in some parts of the consulting industry.

And if you've worked in consulting for a while, you've probably seen a few partners and other seniors with that kind of personality.

You actually may have seen some new joiners who stepped right out of business school and seem to have honed this kind of personality very quickly.

But most decent firms as far as we know, and many of the very best ones know these days that emotional intelligence is really key.

So we'd like to see a little bit more Ted Lasso and a little less Logan Roy, but only a little perhaps.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Now one of the elements of emotional intelligence is to use Daniel Goldman's phrase for its self management.

And this is I think where the key to equanimity comes in.

This idea of self control.

And equanimity is a subset of all the things that you can be good at in order to exhibit emotional intelligence.

And having this equanimity or as you might say self management is like having an inner balance that can't be shaken.

It's like being able to be it to be a little bit poetic, to be in the eye of a hurricane and stay calm and stay clear headed and let the chaos swirl around you.

In practical terms this is about being able to maintain the stability, mental stability and emotional stability regardless of what's happening externally.

And Mike, I think the traditional pre Goldman view of this would be to be kind of tough and cool and just ignore what's happening around you and shut it out is the way to do this.

But I think the way that we're talking about doing this is a little bit more subtle but also a difficult skill for us to master.

Give us an example of the kind of situation that we might be talking about.

Well think about just typical consulting things.

A client suddenly changes the project scope two days before delivery or you find a major error in a presentation 10 minutes before a board meeting, a key stakeholder becomes hostile.

During a workshop, the team kind of breaks into a big conflict about the project direction.

Even those times we've talked about before where your data reveals findings are going to be very difficult to deliver to a client.

I'm already triggered here Mike.

Tell us, tell us what's going on.

Exactly, exactly.

Triggered is the word for it.

I mean most people are going to feel their heart rate spike, thoughts start racing through their heads and their emotions take over these situations and it makes perfect sense that they do because that's kind of how we're hardwired to react back in the days when we were dancing with saber toothed tigers every once in a while.

But developing equanimity is about learning to do things that help us rewire our minds, if you will, to maintain a calm, balanced state of mind.

It's not about being emotionless at all.

It's not just your daily dose of stoic, which can be helpful in its own right, but it's having such strong emotional awareness and some neural rewiring perhaps, that you can experience these feelings without being overwhelmed and controlled by them, without being hijacked.

And that sounds like a lot.

I mean, Mike, you talk about neural rewiring.

Lots of people that I know who find this kind of self control hard need some really, really serious rewiring.

But there's a payoff, right?

If we can be better at this, we can make clearer decisions, especially under pressure.

We can respond to challenges rather than reacting to them.

We can maintain the poise in our relationships.

Even in tough situations.

We can keep our cognitive brain switched on.

This is a key thing for me.

If you want to really think strategically when everybody else is caught up in emotions, you'll need to be able to moderate those emotions rather than riding on the wave of them a little and being able to be the person around that colleagues and clients can rely on.

And those all sound like attributes of the best experience and the best senior consultants that I've ever worked with.

So this is not just about, as you say, Mike, staying calm, but it's something a bit deeper, right?

It really is.

We didn't evolve to work this way.

So this is something we need to learn.

And through practice.

That's when we talk about rewiring.

It's through practice.

It's through practice, but it takes a lot of work.

And it may be work that's not appealing to a very, very busy consultant for many reasons.

The fact that they're busy or the fact that sometimes talking about some of this sounds a little like foo foo.

Yeah, and that's a shame, I think, because it's such a fundamental skill for us to learn.

And again, I think writing it off in that way, again, reflects a little bit of the arrogance that we have about the value of our own, our own intelligence, our own iq, if you like.

What can we do about this, Mike, if we might naturally be a little bit too busy and maybe a bit too adrenaline addicted to really take account of this.

I know that you've done lots of work on this.

What's a good first step?

Well, the first step is to catch yourself as you're being, if you will, hooked by emotion as you're being thrown off kilter a little bit or have the potential to be thrown off kilter at.

You just said adrenaline addicted.

And I think that's part of it.

Again, some of us, we've been rewiring ourselves to Be even more so like this.

Because we are adrenaline addicted.

So we've got to kick up the heightened state to get things done.

We think, but catch ourselves as this starts and pause, pause and say, wait a minute.

All right, let's just take an inventory.

This could be actually writing things down.

This could be going through this in our minds.

And let's record right about.

Give a name to number one, your thoughts.

You know, what am I thinking?

What are the thoughts just going through my brain, not judging them right now, just capturing them.

What all is going on here?

Because I have a tendency to react badly when I let all this swirl around and it goes to autopilot.

So pausing so that doesn't happen.

Then talking about writing down or giving a name to not just our thoughts, but our emotions.

Take an inventory there.

What's happening right now?

What do we see?

It's almost that control, alt, delete on the Windows thing.

Let's go see and see what all tasks are running.

What are the thoughts task?

What are the emotions tasks?

And what about before we get to blue screen of death?

Right, yeah, exactly.

Because that's where we're headed.

Well, put in.

Yeah.

So the emotions and just giving them a name or kind of calling them out.

And our physical reactions, you know, is our pulse racing, speech getting faster, palms getting sweaty?

We can even get a little feedback.

Am I changing color?

Are my, you know, pupils changing?

This is where you said we're so good at being able to read people.

Because a lot of people pick up on these things that a lot of times we don't pick up on ourselves.

And then stop and ask yourself, this was great wiring for when we were running into a woolly mammoth or a saber tooth tiger.

Is the situation I'm in right this minute really a saber toothed tiger?

Right.

This thing that seems like perhaps a life or death, at least in the way I'm in the fight flight and freeze thing right now.

Is it going to matter in 10 minutes?

Is it going to matter in 10 days?

Is it going to matter in ten years?

But just to pause.

It's funny, Mike, the clarity with which emotions are betrayed on the surface.

Like, of course, I think I'm the coolest cat imaginable.

I think that when clients announce a major scope creep, handbrake turn on a project, I can handle it with complete poise.

And exactly this situation happened just last year.

And I thought I was being so chill and so relaxed about it.

And my colleague said afterwards, Ian, we could see it written all over your face.

You Were ready to reach through the screen and tear their heads off.

I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, you don't understand.

This is me.

I'm mellow, and I.

No, no, no.

You were not mellow at all.

So it's.

It's going to be really great to get that external perspective.

And maybe these days there are some new ways of getting an idea of what it looks and sounds and feels like to be.

To be in our company.

Maybe there's.

Maybe there's more data available to us than there was a little while ago.

But it's a really important moment.

I think, like you say, Mike, to catch ourselves being emotional.

I love that description.

And I guess what gets in our way is that we miss those moments.

And once our emotions get hooked, we're in it.

We are overwhelmed by the emotions, sometimes positive as well as negative.

And when that happens, our IQ points are turned down.

The cognitive part of our brain is disabled.

We're back in, as you say, reaction mode, fight or flight.

And therefore, we're making judgments that are not rational.

And all of a sudden, the smarts that we were depending on have been washed away, and we can't make smart decisions anymore.

That's why this pause that you're talking about is so important.

Like, I think that's a really, really great moment to reflect on this superpower of equanimity.

It is almost a superpower.

It almost looks like magic when somebody else has it and we don't.

But this rewiring is something that we can work on, right?

Yeah.

And this is.

This is.

This is the stuff of brain scans that it's not just people speculating about.

It's actually seeing physiological changes in the way brains operate.

So it's true.

But we don't have to see brain scans to know that it's true.

I mean, I think we could invite all of our listeners here to pause in your life.

You know, try this in your emotional moment.

But even more than that, look around in your life, look around in your job, and look for the superheroes.

Look for those superheroes and those superpowers in others.

Whether it's equanimity or mind reading or mind control and persuasion or others, what do you see them do that's almost indistinguishable from magic and then start to dig in.

How do they do that, Mike?

That's really, really great.

We can start to curate our own superpowers by doing a bit of observation and a bit of active learning.

I think that's fantastic.

Well, Mike, I think three superpowers is enough for one episode.

What do you say?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think this is the time where we need to rip off our sunglasses, change into our red cape, and jump out the window.

Please join us next time with your cape firmly on your back here on the Luminaries on the Consulting for Humans podcast.

Sa.