The Fundamentals Of Future Ready Leadership With Shane Ram

What qualities will the ultimate leaders of the future possess? A lot of things will come to mind, but Shane Ram efficiently boils it down to eight fundamentals in his new book, Future Ready Leadership. Shane is the CEO and founder of Go for 10 and the creator of functional executive coaching – a holistic practice that gets into the root of what holds leaders back from going for excellence. In this conversation with Dr. Diane Hamilton, he gives a quick overview of each if the eight must-have strategies that leaders need to have to be able to succeed in the coming years. Be prepared to take note of these essential things that are going set you up for greater things down the road.

 

I’m so glad you joined us because we have Shane Ram here. Shane is the CEO and Founder of Go For 10. He’s an inventor of Functional Executive Coaching. He’s an author and keynote speaker. He does a lot of great things with life coaching. I’m excited to talk to him about his latest book.

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The Fundamentals Of Future Ready Leadership With Shane Ram

I am here with Shane Ram, the CEO and Founder for Go For 10. He’s a bestselling author. He has the latest book and it’s something I’m interested in, Future Ready Leadership: 8 Must Have Strategies for Tomorrow’s Leaders. It’s so nice to have you here, Shane.

It’s great to be on the show, Dr. Hamilton. I look forward to engaging with you. Hopefully, what I could share would be of tremendous benefit to your audience.

I’m sure it will be. Please call me Diane. We know each other. We’ve done many things in the past together. I know you have things that are similar to what I deal with. I know you do consulting. You’re a board member. You’re an author. You’re a mentor. You name it. Keynote speaker. Why don’t we get a little background on you for those who haven’t had a chance to follow your work yet? How did you reach this level of success?

 

When I think about it, Diane, I was a boy scout. In those days, there was something called The Scouts Promise. In that promise, you promised to help others and you promised to be the best at whatever you do. In my pre-teen and early teen years, I spent a lot of time in the temple. A lot of the material and texts in there were about the fact that we could be good at all the different aspects of our lives. That was my early exposure to success, if you want to put it that way. The interesting thing was that my reality was different from my experience in growing up with a poor background, relatively speaking. I got this desire to be successful and to have the appetite to be a learner, to search, to be curious and to find all of the information that I needed to have success. I still maintain that learning mentality and then use my roles as a coach, as a keynote speaker, as a trainer to share those nuggets that I have learned over the years with other people. That’s a short backdrop to how I got here.

Haven’t you helped organizations in more than 70 countries? You do a lot of international work. You grew up without a super amount of wealth and all of that. Where did you grow up? How did you get into wanting to be a consultant and do some of the stuff that you’re doing?

I’m from the Caribbean. I was born in a small village in a small country. We only have 1.3 million people here in Trinidad and Tobago. We are the most subtlety isle in the Caribbean. We are the closest island to South America, all the way from Cuba, Jamaica, on the north to all the other beautiful islands that make up the Caribbean. We are almost the last one close to South America. South America has a lot of oil, natural gas and natural resources. Us being that close, maybe we were connected at one point in time. Trinidad and Tobago has had a long history in oil and natural gas, for example. Many of the international players including BP, Repsol from Spain and British Gas, they all exist in Trinidad and have been here for a while. You would have had many multinationals existing in Trinidad and Tobago.

When I finished university, which I did here at the University of the West Indies, one of my first jobs was with the power company. When I joined them, they formed a partnership with a southern company out of Atlanta, which we’re the largest power producers in North America at the time. I would say from the get-go in my career, I had a lot of exposure to multinational organizations and that global perspective. With that, I also went on to work with another energy-related company, if you want to call it that, a company called Yara International. They’re out of Norway. All of the products that we produced, which is ammonia that went into producing fertilizer chemicals, went straight up to the Mississippi, the mouth of the food belt of the US. With those experiences, I had global exposure from early in my career. That gave me that global perspective. Being able to work with those multinationals was instrumental in having that global perspective and serving global clients.

[bctt tweet=”Your beliefs are at the root of your emotions. If you don’t believe that you’re good enough, you’re going to feel fear and anxiety.” via=”no”]

You speak at a lot of global conferences. I was looking at some of the people you shared the stage with, Malcolm Gladwell, Sharon Lechter, Bob Burg. A lot of the people you’ve talked with or had on your programs and different things, they’ve all been on my show. You pitched Kevin Harrington, who wrote the foreword of my last book, the Original Shark from The Shark Tank. It’s amazing. Bob Burg is one of the nicest human beings ever. I loved having Sharon on the show. All these people are interesting. What is it like to work as a speaker consultant and all of that in this market? How has it been with COVID? Have you been having to pivot at all? Are you doing things virtually? How are you doing that?

Back in the year 2000, I did a Master’s in eBusiness. I have always structured my business and helped other businesses to structure around that concept of the virtual organization. I honestly didn’t have to pivot too much. I’ve always structured my business in this particular way. It has also created a lot of opportunities because many organizations want help in pivoting. I would have been doing that quite a few years before COVID came around. I think I was prepared. It also created a lot more opportunities for me, less travel. I love traveling. I love seeing new places and meeting new people. That has been restricted. It may have also increased the opportunities because you literally can sit at your desk, coach, train and speak anywhere in the world.

Doing the show, working in online education and different things I’ve done. I’ve worked virtually. Even when I was a pharmaceutical rep, you don’t have an office. You work out of your home. I’m used to it but I know it’s been frustrating for some people. I feel for the people who have little kids. They’re taking care of them at home and doing all this stuff that they have to do and work. It’s a crazy time. I’ve had enough with my puppy too, where it’s so nice to point out before the show. I have a Labrador puppy. It’s her birthday. She has been a lot to do. It’s hard when you’ve got all this going on. I know that you have experience in so much HR and all these different areas. Are you getting more questions about HR-related things? What kinds of things are they contacting you for?

I would say in terms of managing performance in a remote context, that comes up a lot. I would say emotional resilience, understanding with kids. You still have your objectives to meet and how to manage that. Diane, being in the virtual world for a little bit and having two young kids, I’m glad because when I built my business and how I structured it, I wanted that flexibility to be there for my kids. Starting off as a life coach, I know how many issues develop out of parenting. I’ve got to be there. How it goes now, it’s Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I’m homeschooling and facilitating it. That means me getting up at 5:00 AM, doing my stuff, getting ready to get them ready to do their stuff and then jumping back into my stuff. I think that work-life harmony becomes a critical issue for a lot of people. How to do it, how to manage your time is important. Get things done. Those are some of the people issues that have been coming my way because of COVID.

 

Who hires life coaches? What kind of person needs a life coach?

There are a lot of people who are struggling. Both people who are struggling as well as people that want to get to the next level. What COVID has highlighted is that it has changed the dynamic. For some people or a lot of people, it was a wakeup call or a time to reflect. A lot of people are questioning whether they enjoy what they do and how they could enjoy what they’re doing. A lot of people who feel stuck in their careers have been getting a lot because they’ve got to choose a career before they could legally buy a beer. They’re stuck with it for the last few months.

I completed a six months coaching program with a lawyer. I started off deciding to be a lawyer out of necessity. Back in those days, lawyer, doctor, engineer, you will be set for life. They get to a point where they’re not fulfilled, aren’t passionate about what they do. COVID has exaggerated that a lot and that then results in a lot of anxiety, depression. That’s why we talk about emotional resilience. I’ve been finding that type of person wanting life coaching. I think that the recognition is that work-life balance concept, I always disagree with it because we have one big life that is comprised of all of these different parts.

What we are looking for is work-life harmony. We can’t leave those issues at the door and come into work more and more. I’ve been sharing stuff from Robin Sharma. He spoke about that you cannot get to mastery and productivity unless you have emotional mastery, which he calls hot sets in his four pillars of success with health set, soul set, mindset, for example. A lot of them are recognizing that I need more than the traditional type of leadership coaching and looking at life coaching, executives, entrepreneurs and professionals.

I wrote my dissertation on emotional intelligence and had Daniel Goleman on the show. We talked a lot about emotional intelligence and emotional aspects. My work with Dr. Maja Zelihic was fascinating. She and I wrote about perception. We saw that perception was a combination of IQ, EQ for Emotional Quotient, CQ for Curiosity Quotient and CQ for Cultural Quotient. The word “emotions” sometimes can confuse people. It’s a big part of how we think, how we react, our vantage point and everything that comes about. A lot of people ask me about life coaching. I am curious. What does a life coaching session look like? What does it entail for somebody who’s thinking about getting it?

I typically work in 3 months, 6 months or 1 year engagements. I don’t work on a per session basis to be clear because my process of coaching is what I call immersive. I’m in your head for the 3 months, 6 months as the case may be. If I were to describe it this way, it’s like we were born pure, so to speak, out of the hands of God with all of this potential. If you have held a kid, a baby, you wonder, “What are they going to achieve?” You don’t see any limits to what they can achieve in life. If we equate that to a glass that’s almost full of clear, clean water and then stuff happens. Life happens. That’s like taking some black coffee and throwing it into that glass of clean, clear water. It gets murky, so we don’t believe in ourselves anymore. There’s this conundrum that we know deep inside of us that we are meant for more. We feel it in our souls but yet we can’t seem to get past it. What some of us might do, we might look at a motivational YouTube video, read a book or do a short course.

Let’s go back to that glass of water. That’s equivalent to taking some water and throwing it into the glass. It doesn’t necessarily get clear quickly. Even if it does, there’s no significant change. If you can imagine that I take a big jug of water. I consistently and persistently pour into that glass or alternatively, I take it and put it under a faucet. I open the faucet and it’s eventually going to get clear. That’s why I say it’s an immersive process. What I tend to do is to understand what caused the murkiness. We discover what we call the original sensitizing event, as Oprah said in her CBS interview in 2018. I’m excited about this. I’ve been quietly doing this process when I really wanted to be shouting about it because it works. What she said is, “There’s nothing wrong with you but something happened to you,” which I call the original sensitizing event. If you can picture it like an onion with five layers. At the core of it are these original sensitizing events.

From those events, we create beliefs. You and Dr. Zelihic spoke about that in your book. That’s why I was so intrigued with your book and having this conversation. We started to have beliefs about ourselves, about life, about the world. We have beliefs about everything. Those beliefs create emotions. That’s the root of emotions, our beliefs. If you don’t believe that you’re good enough, then you’re going to feel fear. You’re going to feel anxiety. You create these stories, the next layer, the fourth layer and the layer that we observe is what we call the behavioral level. That’s what we see our actions, our inactions. In my coaching program, what we do is peel back the onion, so to speak. The only way out is through reframing those original sensitizing events. We peel back the onion and then we build it back up. We build up the new beliefs based on the vision that you have for your life. What do you want out of your life? What are the beliefs? What are the emotions that you can consciously choose to be able to achieve that?

[bctt tweet=”Rise above success and go after significance.” via=”no”]

A lot of it is action-taking, depending on the goals that you have. That’s what a program I would say as opposed to the session would look like in working with my style of coaching. Other people who do this similar type of coaching is Mastin Kipp. He has been touted by Oprah as the next Tony Robbins. He calls his process similar to mine, functional coaching. That functional is coming from a medical term looking at the root cause versus treating the symptom. I’m buoyant and excited about it. I wrote a blog saying to my folks and followers that I’m sorry for not sharing this because I felt it would have been too woo-woo to kumbaya to talk about these ideas and concepts. I kept it when I worked with my clients. Now that Robin Sharma is talking about it, Oprah is talking about it, I felt buoyant about it. I want to jump on the table, dance and talk about it.

I’m thinking maybe you need to write down the few other things that you’ve held back and then you could beat those two to the punch next time.

Probably dancing on the table because Oprah did say that if she could have, she would. I’ve got to learn a routine and say, “Because she didn’t do it, I’m going to do it and make some noise.”

I pay attention to how people present their ideas. You’ve had a lot of people discussing things that you’ve written about in your books and then you market. You’re good on social media. A lot of people could learn from watching some of the stuff that you do. I teach a lot of marketing classes. I have a lot of students asking a lot of questions. I use you as examples sometimes because I think that this is a good way of doing it. As you were promoting Future Ready Leadership, that’s one of the ways I was watching how you do that. I want to talk about some of these eight must have strategies for tomorrow’s leaders, whether we’ve covered some of this in some way or another. Can we go down the eight? Let’s start with number one.

Number one is slow down to speed up, finding time to be better. Future Ready Leadership was written out of a keynote speech that I did in November 2019. The context was that the world is becoming more VUCA, Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. That was a big term at that point in time. No way I could have predicted COVID. There was some level of intuition I could tell you, which is strategy number eight in there, that I felt that we could not continue like that. It’s important for us to be able to slow down to speed up. A lot of times, I would have found that COVID has caused us inadvertently to slow down. It’s about finding time to be better. Inside that, it’s also a lot of self-analysis. What am I good at? What am I not good at? What does the future hold? Do I have the requisite skills to be successful in that future? Let me do some self-analysis. Let me include some downtime so that I could get in touch with myself, my intuition. I could re-energize because it’s a tough world out there. In order to deal with this uncertain and volatile future, it’s super important that leaders first slow down to speed up and find time to be better.

A lot of that ties into my curiosity, getting out of the status quo, doing the things you’ve always done, start asking questions, start researching, start thinking of different ways. I could see it ties well in my talks, in my writing and everything I do. The thing that keeps people from being curious in my research was fear that nobody wants to ask. They don’t want to look dumb. There are a lot of aspects to fear but that’s one. Assumptions, what we tell ourselves. We think, “I’m not going to like that. It’s going to be too hard. I don’t have time.” Technology, we either under or over-utilize it. The environment can shape our fears and our assumptions because our family maybe had told us, “You should be this in your job someday. Your teachers didn’t have time to answer that.” There’s social media that criticizes whatever you say or do. There are all these different things. Would you say curiosity could be a big part of that? Where do you put curiosity? Are we going to come up with another strategy where that falls in?

 

I think when we did make contact, Diane, I said, “That’s the word.” I didn’t use the word but I said, “Curiosity, that’s the word.” I was so thrilled to encounter you, the book and everything like that. That’s the word that could put into context what the future ready leader needs. Curiosity about self, about the world, about the people that they lead, it’s necessary. If we were to delve into the chapter on slow down to speed up, we take the same model that I use in life coaching and have adapted it to a leadership coaching where you spoke about the affairs. We spoke about social media. We speak about technology. All of that could be addressed via the same model.

That’s why I call it functional executive coaching, where we get to the root cause of your fears. It’s not likely because of social media. We have what you call reinforcing events other than the original sensitizing event. Those are top and I think it should be seen as an asset to deal with those fears if we are going to take our leadership and business to the next level. I include the functional executive coaching process in there as part of that slowing down process to speed up. It addresses many of the concerns that you have there in terms of the affairs, in terms of the technology, in terms of social media. We address it at a deeper level.

I figured that a lot of what you write about crosses over with what Maja and I write about. It’s fascinating to go through these strategies because they’re important. I want to go to number two. What’s number two?

Have a vision, be significant. The subtext there is new ways of measuring success and progress. When I talk about having a vision is that a lot of company strategies are based on technology. What I’ve found is a lot of times some companies are allowing the technology to drive the vision as opposed to the other way around. If you look at Steve Jobs at Apple, for example, when he had the vision of the touch screen phone, none of his engineers taught it was possible. He was leading with a vision and the technology to supply or to facilitate the execution of the vision. That’s important to have vision and not be pushed and driven only by the technology, which is one of the major factors in the world in driving business and almost everything else.

Also, in terms of being significant, I think that the world is changing. I know that sounds cliche but in a way where social responsibility, conscious capitalism, some of the precursor terms in leading up to being significant. I encourage leaders to be significant in the lives of their employees and their customer as opposed to only looking to have financial success or to see employees as resources. How in your life if I could rise above success and go to significance? One of the ideas in my Go For 10 brand, you would see it’s a three-step pyramid, if you want to put it that way. In a particular diagram that I have in there is success is in the middle. The base idea was about survival. These are the steps that people go through. Let’s have success. After success we say, “How can you be significant?” Success is all over the place. How could you be significant in the lives of your customers, the lives of your employees and the world? That’s what number two is about. Encouraging the leaders to think not just beyond success but how they can be significant.

[bctt tweet=”Self-disrupt. Do it yourself before it’s done to you.” via=”no”]

When you have Go For 10, what does that mean exactly?

That brand or idea came out of a conversation I was having with someone. Similar to the question you asked me at the start in terms of, what was responsible for my success? Someone was asking me that and I said, “I came from a poor background. My parents had to sacrifice a lot to even get me to university. When I got there, failure was not an option. That was a big driver in getting me to success.” The person said, “Shane, that might be true but there may be other people who were in that similar situation. Is there anything else?” What came out of me was that, “Yes, because I came from 0, 1, if you want to use a ten-point scale in this case. A lot of people could settle for seven and they’re happy with that but I don’t. I go for ten.” That’s why the idea was born, Go For 10, go for the juggler, don’t settle. How do you achieve that is going beyond success and thinking about significance is how I help CEOs to go for ten, one of the concepts?

I want to touch on a couple of things. When I’m training, I’m helping them create smart goals based on doing a personal SWOT analysis. A lot of people make goals but they don’t make them measurable. They don’t make them certain types of ways to quantify and make sure you’re going to reach them. I think what you’re talking about is super important. Ours are a big, hot topic. When you’re talking about everything being possible as you’re creating some of these goals and what Steve Jobs was able to do, I’m curious how do you know what is possible? How do you not become Elizabeth Holmes and come up with Theranos? How do you become Steve Jobs?

Sometimes it’s hard to know what’s possible. There’s no real answer to that. I’m not trying to put you on the spot. I think it was food for thought. As you’re talking about conscious capitalism and servant leadership, I teach that in many of my courses. It seems an interesting thing to teach because they’ll go, “You mean you can be profitable and still be considered not gouging people?” If you’re delivering value, then that’s the thing. The value proposition is a hackneyed expression. I’m tired of hearing it but that’s what everybody’s got to keep in mind. Go ahead if you want to add to that.

I wish you had put me on the spot. The thing about it is that when you go through the process that I take people through in terms of peeling back the onion or getting that murky water clear, there’s a lot of clarity. What happens is that the center of the onion becomes what we call purpose or your why. How can you execute your purpose on your way through your business? That’s how we do it. There’s a lot more clarity. There’s more limitless thinking. It’s about bringing out what’s inside of you and in you through your business and your work, whether it’s an entrepreneurial venture. That’s one of the things I do in bringing that clarity. Understanding that whatever that purpose is that you could have that connection and live one life, I call it, that is purposeful in the sense that your purpose could be executed via a business that could also be financially viable. It’s all in that Venn diagram hitting the sweet spot.

I think a lot of people hesitate to answer some of these questions because it’s hard. It takes a lot of experience to know what works and what kinds of things. That’s why having a coach like you can be critical. I want to go into number three because I want to make sure we cover all eight.

Number three is learn, implement and unlearn agility, adapting to thrive not just to survive. The speed of change is so rapid that we need to learn, we need to implement but understanding that what we learned most likely would become obsolete quickly, so we need to unlearn. That speed and that agility to be able to do that will dictate whether we are going to thrive, whether we’re going to survive or we fail. It’s about learning, implementation and unlearning agility. Sometimes we need to unlearn some of the behaviors that we had in the past. What got us here wouldn’t get us there.

We’re back to the status quo thinking. That’s the curiosity of trying to create a new reality. I’ve had a lot of talks where I’ve talked about Ben & Jerry’s have flavors of ice cream that were successful in the past that people loved but then they weren’t popular anymore. They gave him a funeral on their website. They have little headstones that say, “We’re celebrating you. You did this great thing but no longer around. We want to remember you.” I think a lot of people don’t like to let go. Sometimes you have to let go because you’d still be having a Blackberry. We don’t want that. What’s number four?

 

Number four is intrapreneurship, foresight and freedom. The context of the book was more for the corporate environment. It’s intrapreneurship where I is fostered and chopping their own mindset within the corporate environment. The world has shown us over the last years that if you were to do your traditional PEST analysis and SWOT analysis, you may not pick up some of the traditional competitors. For example, yellow cab taxis, would they have picked up the Ubers of the world being started off in a garage? That’s on top there. Would the Hyatts and the Hilton pick up Airbnb? Most likely not. I worked for an entrepreneurial company, a mobile phone company here in the Caribbean but owned by an Irish entrepreneur. The culture was entrepreneurial.

Why the subtext for this strategy is called foresight and freedom was some years ago, there was something called corporate foresight. I don’t hear too much about it now but it comes before the traditional strategic planning process. I’ll give you an example that I used in the book. One of the biggest markets for this company that I worked for is called Digicel. It’s Haiti, which is one of the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere but yet it’s a highly profitable market for this particular company. If you did the traditional PEST analysis, Politically unstable, Economically one of the poorest countries in the region socially, there’s always Social unrest and rioting, Technologically behind. If you did that traditional analysis, you’d be like, “No, we’re not going there.”

If you had foresight, you got on the ground and you understand. One of the big advantages is that they have one of the largest populations in the Caribbean. A lot of them would have left Haiti and gone to different places like Canada because of the French-speaking background. There’s a lot of money that is repatriated back to Haiti. We are humans at the end of the day. Communication is so important. This is what this company provided, cheap, effective way to communicate with your loved ones. It’s one of their top-performing markets. Organizations need to foster and sharpen their thinking in their organizations.

I’m seeing a lot more of that with younger generations than we did in the past. It’s nice to see more of that. That’s critical. Let’s head into number five.

Number five is called self-disrupt. Do it yourself before it’s done to you. COVID disrupted a lot of people individually, their businesses. What I was suggesting even before COVID is that let’s figure out how we could disrupt ourselves, disrupt our industry, disrupt our company before it’s done to us. It’s about keeping nimble, being proactive. What I thought about in the book is the ultimate leader of the ultimate company. We need to keep disrupting because you don’t want to sit around and always be disrupted. You want to be that person who would disrupt the industry. What I was looking at the ultimate leader, Steve Jobs, had come to mind. He has disrupted so much. He was not waiting on anyone to disrupt the industry. He did it himself.

I’ve had Jay Samit on the show, the author of Disrupt You!. He is amazing talking about, “If you look around you and write down things that you see need changing, that are problematic for you, you’ll come up with ideas of something you can solve and fix.” I love that. It’s a great book by the way, if anybody hasn’t read it. Let’s go onto number six.

Number six, the new ages of collaboration. There’s a little pun intended inside of there in the sense that given that financially where the world is and a lot of people are not able to retire, maybe for the first time in history we have multiple generations, so all of the generations in the workplace. It is a challenge for many organizations and leaders to be able to get these generations to work together as one form of collaboration. There are all different types of collaborations that are required. I have a concept in there that we call allowable weaknesses. We all complain about the Millennials or the Gen X, who can’t change and who likes things done so quickly.

[bctt tweet=”Leaders need to go beyond emotional intelligence. What they need to build is emotional resilience.” via=”no”]

Any category of diversity, be it race or gender, have tremendous strengths and weaknesses. What I do in there is I bring in the concept of allowable weaknesses. There are many benefits and strengths. Why do we need to focus on it? Because each generation, each gender maybe, each race as it may be would have their positive and negative attributes. Let’s see how we could identify the positive ones, identify what we could allow because there are many positives. If I may say to myself, it’s insightful and useful because of what came up in 2020 with even the Black Lives Matter and the whole growth, diversity and inclusion discussion. Some of the content in that chapter would help a lot in identifying some of our biases towards the different generations and help to uncover what those are, which you speak a lot about in terms of perception and Dr. Zelihic in your book. It’s important so that we are able to work with whoever, wherever, whatever to achieve success.

When we wrote The Power of Perception, that was a big focus. You don’t understand how much that influences other people until you go through this process. You evaluate, you predict, you interpret it and then you correlate. That’s the whole perception process. It’s important in all these areas that you’re talking about. Thank you for mentioning that because I think that’s critical. I want to go on to number seven. I’m excited. I want to make sure we get them all in.

Number seven is emotional resilience, staying strong through deep awareness. It became a big topic because of COVID. I came up with this concept in November 2019. Not necessarily the concept of emotional resilience but we needed to go beyond the emotional intelligence and have emotional resilience in understanding. In my model, I go a little bit deeper and maybe challenge some of the original ideas of Dr. Goleman himself.

Tell me a couple of challenges.

He said the four blocks so to speak, personal competence and social competence. Being able to identify your emotions in the moment is important, secondly, being able to manage those emotions. Social competence involves being able to read the emotions of other people. The fourth block is relationship management, how we could bring all of these together, our own emotions, our ability to manage it and understand the emotions of other people so that we can have a good relationship. That concept is about we have emotions, develop some skills to be able to identify them and to be able to manage them. My little challenge to that is how about if we get to the root cause of those emotions and possibly eliminate them so that you won’t need to even manage them? If we understand where emotions come from, which are the underlying beliefs from the incidents and if we were able to change and identify those beliefs, we will not have those strong emotions that we then are going to have to manage.

What the whole concept of all the emotional intelligence experts is recognizing how you experience and feel these things and how you react to them, you can’t. I think that’s an important thing to try and see. Don’t sweat the small stuff because it’s all small stuff thinking. Some people think of zebras when they should be thinking horses. There are a lot of different aspects to that. That could be your next TED Talk is to be controversial. Look at emotional resilience and intelligence. That would be great. I’d love to see that by the way. I want to get the last one in.

Number eight is, develop intuition, trusting ourselves to make decisions in uncertain times. If I were to quickly take you back to the model of Go For 10, I have another three-step concept there, going for ten, getting to our higher self. At the base level is operating from instinct. The next level up is intelligence and then intuition. The idea there is that we have so much information out there and we have easier access to information. What I’m suggesting to lead us here is that we may not be able to compete on the level of intelligence anymore. We could tap to a higher function in a higher ability, which is our intuition. How could we tap into that resource? I would say that we always get the right answers because it’s coming from a super intelligent source, so to speak.

That ties in with number one, slow down to speed up in the sense that you need to slow down, maybe get some meditation and get some quiet in. What intuition does is takes the intelligence that we have. You still need intelligence to have intuition. The intuition works on knowledge. It works on intuition. If you want to think about it like a super processor that is going to process that knowledge and information, that is going to spit out a result, that is going to be beyond anything that your intellect could have come up with.

I was thinking my Myers-Briggs results were an ESTJ and not an ENTJ. My S is higher than my N. A lot of people don’t give a lot of thought to Myers-Briggs but if you do, a lot of it is more knowing yourself and what the opposite of what you are is. To be successful is what I got out of Myers-Briggs more than anything. Part of the training was you’re born with a certain preference. Being right-handed is more comfortable than left-handed. It’s more comfortable for me to use my senses than it is for me to be intuitive, for example. How do you develop that?

 

The first thing is to understand that we do have intuition. If you’re reading, you do have intuition. How do you develop it? I see it like a muscle, like going to the gym. I say, “Try it out. Have some downtime, jot down the ideas. The intuition that comes to you, jot it down and simply start implementing. What’s going to happen is that when you start to implement, you start to trust intuition. The more you trust it, the more it’s going to grow, the more you’re going to get more out of the intuition. The more you trust it and implement, that’s how you, in short time, grow your intuition, build your intuition.”

There are so much that people can learn from all of your work. I know we had to rush through these because there’s so much in here but this was so interesting, Shane. I know a lot of people want to know more to follow you and all that. Is there some website, social media or anything you’d like to share?

First of all, you could get a lot more insight into those eight must have strategies from the book itself. It’s available on Amazon. It’s Future Ready Leadership: 8 Must Have Strategies for Tomorrow’s Leaders by me, Shane Ram. You could get more information on ShaneRam.com. That’s simply enough. My primary social media presence is on LinkedIn.

Same with me, that’s the best place to reach. This was helpful. I have a student in mind who is asking me a little bit about these kinds of things that I’m going to share this with initially. There is so much that we talked about here that I think many people can benefit from. Thank you for being on, Shane. This is great.

It was a pleasure. I had a lot of fun. Time flies when you’re having fun. I appreciate you inviting me on your show. I hope this has been valuable to your audience.

Thank you.

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I’d like to thank Shane for being my guest. We get so many great guests on this show. If you’ve missed any past episodes, you can catch them at DrDianeHamilton.com. If you browse the website, you can find ways to listen to it. You can also read them on the blog, which is nice because you can have tweetable moments and share things that you find interesting. If you’re interested in looking for more information about Cracking the Curiosity Code or The Power of Perception, all the curiosity and perception information are in the dropdown menus. You can find them at the top but check out the bottom because there are more menus, testimonials and more. Other assessments if you want to take the DISC or Emotional Intelligence Test, there’s a lot of information on the site. Please take some time to explore. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you join us for the next episode of Take The Lead Radio.

 Important Links:

• Go For 10
• Future Ready Leadership: 8 Must Have Strategies for Tomorrow’s Leaders
• Kevin Harrington – Past episode
• Bob Burg – Past episode
• Sharon Lechter – Past episode
• Daniel Goleman – Past episode
• Jay Samit – Past episode
• Disrupt You!
• The Power of Perception
• ShaneRam.com
• LinkedIn – Shane Ram
• Cracking the Curiosity Code

About Shane Ram

Shane Ram is the CEO and Founder of Go For 10, inventor of Functional Execu- tive Coaching, business mentor, advisory board member, author and a global keynote speaker. Shane works with CEOs, Senior Executives, corporations, 6-7 Figure business owners and entrepreneurs to increase revenue, become better leaders and live more fulfilling lives.

 

 

 

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