Latest / The Humanistic Leader Podcast- Dr. Craig Nathanson / When Staying Becomes the Mistake: Choosing Change Before It Chooses You

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When Staying Becomes the Mistake: Choosing Change Before It Chooses You · The Humanistic Leader Podcast- Dr. Craig Nathanson

• 0:00
  Hello, everyone. This is Craig Nathanson, and this is the Humanistic Leadership Podcast.
• 0:06
  You know, I view my new podcast as kind of a short, reflective pause on leadership and life.
• 0:13
  Oh, it's been an interesting week. Of course, I think every week is interesting.
• 0:18
  I think it's important, as I tell my students, to learn how to slow down and
• 0:22
  reflect and really, you know, enjoy the moment.
• 0:25
  There's two things in life we can't really adjust, and that's yesterday,
• 0:30
  which is gone, and tomorrow, which isn't here yet.
• 0:33
  So I think learning to live in
• 0:35
  the moment is important, especially in our fast-paced age that we live in.
• 0:40
  Anyway, I think every week is interesting if we slow down enough to notice it.
• 0:44
  And maybe that's the part of living, as I said, in the age of AI,
• 0:48
  is learning how to slow down.
• 0:50
  And actually pay attention to what's right in front of us.
• 0:54
  So for me, I've been trying to observe this a little bit more in my own life
• 0:58
  You know, think a little bit more, reflect a little bit more,
• 1:01
  And that led me to something I want to talk about today, the idea of mistakes.
• 1:06
  Well, early in my career, I thought mistakes were about making the wrong decision in the moment.
• 1:11
  You know, a bad call, poor judgment, you know, something visible.
• 1:16
  But looking back, most of the mistakes that shaped my life weren't like that at all.
• 1:22
  I think those mistakes I know that I made were slower, quieter,
• 1:26
  harder to notice, and even harder to act on. And so what I think about that
• 1:31
  now, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't that I didn't know.
• 1:34
  It just wasn't I wasn't ready to listen yet.
• 1:37
  I remember near the end of my corporate career, I was giving a PowerPoint presentation
• 1:44
  about the budget, something that I had done, you know, multiple times.
• 1:49
  I remember standing in front of the slides, looking out at my bosses and kind
• 1:55
  of a big audience. And all of a sudden, in the middle of the presentation,
• 1:58
  I got a little sweaty, fainthearted.
• 2:01
  And I looked at these people and I thought, who are these people?
• 2:04
  And I looked at the numbers on the slide and I thought,
• 2:07
  what are these numbers? And who cares about these numbers? And what am I doing anyway with my life?
• 2:14
  And I don't know, my boss must have noticed that something was off because he
• 2:17
  said, Craig, you look like you're not feeling well.
• 2:20
  Maybe you should go home and get some rest. We'll pick this up tomorrow. And I said, okay.
• 2:25
  Went home, got some rest, got
• 2:27
  up in the morning. I did feel a little better, but I knew I wasn't sick.
• 2:32
  I knew something was off, wasn't quite right.
• 2:36
  So I drove to the company parking lot. And as I prepared to get out of the car door, it wouldn't open.
• 2:43
  You know, it's like my body was holding me back.
• 2:47
  I just was unable to get out of the car. And I sat in the car and I realized
• 2:53
  it wasn't just this morning.
• 2:55
  It had been building, you know, for a while, you know, and no matter how many
• 3:00
  times I tried to get out of that car that morning, I just couldn't.
• 3:04
  I stopped negotiating with myself, and I quit and never came back.
• 3:09
  For the next couple of months, I spent every morning at 8 o'clock,
• 3:13
  instead of walking into this company that I didn't look forward to,
• 3:16
  I spent every morning at a local cafe, smelling croissants, having mochas around me.
• 3:25
  It seemed like most of the people there were retired, older.
• 3:28
  And I wrote my first book, my second book, actually, my first real book,
• 3:32
  you know, P is for perfect, your perfect vocational day.
• 3:35
  And I had bought a crystal ball off the internet.
• 3:39
  Back then it cost me more to ship it than actually the ball itself.
• 3:42
  And my idea was I was going to create a model. I called it the 10P model at
• 3:47
  the time that helped people look into the future to envision like,
• 3:51
  you know, what could my perfect day be like if I could just envision it?
• 3:54
  Like what time would I get up in the morning?
• 3:56
  You know, when would I, where would I go? what would I do? All focused around my work.
• 4:01
  And in some ways, this book I was writing was also a reflection of what I was going through.
• 4:06
  So for two months, I sat in this cafe every morning for a couple hours and wrote my book.
• 4:11
  Of course, I had bills, I had a mortgage, I had responsibilities.
• 4:16
  But in the moment, all I could think about was how happy I was.
• 4:20
  I don't think I ever felt so happy in my entire life.
• 4:24
  It was a feeling of being in control, you know, in charge of my work,
• 4:28
  having autonomy, and just being creative, having fun.
• 4:32
  And of course, I was making no money for this.
• 4:35
  Back in the day, this was, you know, 20, 20, let's see, 25, 26 years ago,
• 4:39
  you know, you would print four or 5,000 books.
• 4:42
  And, and, you know, I used to sell them at my motivational talks.
• 4:46
  But the point is, I had so much fun when I was, quote, you know, out of work.
• 4:53
  So when I look back at the time, I thought, well, maybe that was a mistake with leaving this job.
• 5:00
  And soon I realized, maybe not so soon, that the mistake wasn't leaving.
• 5:05
  The mistake was, you know, how long I stayed after I knew that this job no longer fit me.
• 5:12
  So that's kind of the part we don't always talk about. Not the decisions,
• 5:16
  but the delays in adjusting to the mistakes that we thought we might have made.
• 5:21
  I think a lot of us experience, you know, these moments and,
• 5:24
  you know, we don't act because we don't see them.
• 5:27
  Not because acting would require us to let go of something.
• 5:30
  You know, sometimes it's a role that no longer suits us.
• 5:34
  Sometimes it's an identity that doesn't, you know, doesn't feel like us.
• 5:37
  And often it's just a version of ourselves that we've, you know, we've simply outgrown.
• 5:42
  Sometimes, as I experienced, it's just a fear of, you know, what comes next?
• 5:47
  So we don't ignore the signal because it's unclear. We ignore it because it asks us to change.
• 5:53
  And change can be difficult for us. I had
• 5:56
  a dream this morning before making this podcast and
• 5:59
  it's kind of stayed with me I was in a hotel room working
• 6:02
  alone being creative and some suddenly I heard someone in the bathroom taking
• 6:07
  a shower and then someone else walked in and then someone else and before long
• 6:12
  five people were in the room all convinced it was their room I remember feeling
• 6:17
  you know angry in my dream like like my space had been taken.
• 6:22
  And when I woke up, you know, I thought about this and I said to myself that,
• 6:28
  you know, maybe sometimes a life change doesn't wait for us to be ready.
• 6:34
  Sometimes it just shows up, interrupts what we thought was ours and ask us to respond.
• 6:39
  And our first reaction is often to resist, to push it away, to try to hold on to what we had.
• 6:45
  But in those moments, Maybe the question isn't how I stop this change.
• 6:50
  Maybe it's how do I respond to this change in a way that moves me forward.
• 6:54
  How about you? Is there a change in your life right now that you might need
• 6:59
  to respond to differently?
• 7:02
  And if you did, what impact would that have on you and your life and those around you?
• 7:07
  This past week, I was talking to my undergraduate students about change,
• 7:12
  and I discussed with them the importance of being open to change,
• 7:16
  being flexible around change.
• 7:18
  That change is how we grow. We become comfortable, too comfortable,
• 7:22
  but then we need to change to become a little bit uncomfortable to change again,
• 7:26
  and so on. And the pattern repeats.
• 7:29
  And so we talked about change and we explored something simple, simple but powerful.
• 7:35
  The idea is that when we go through change, we don't just move on.
• 7:38
  We need to, you know, we need to mark that change, have a closing and maybe an opening.
• 7:43
  So my students shared examples, leaving an apartment and having one last dinner with roommates.
• 7:50
  Ending a relationship with a real conversation instead of just drifting apart,
• 7:54
  starting something new with intention and not just by default.
• 7:59
  And it made me realize something, that sometimes the reason we stay too long,
• 8:03
  is because we just don't know how to end it well. You know, we skip the closing.
• 8:08
  And so we never really begin the next chapter.
• 8:12
  So what I've learned since then is that those moments don't, they don't go away.
• 8:17
  If we don't listen, they get louder until one day, you know, we don't have a choice.
• 8:22
  But I've also learned something else. When we honor the ending,
• 8:25
  and we make space for a better beginning.
• 8:28
  So how about you? Is there something you need to end in your life so that you
• 8:32
  can make space for a better beginning?
• 8:36
  So here's something to sit with. Where in your life have you already received
• 8:40
  this signal, but haven't acted on it yet?
• 8:43
  If you were to act on it, what would it look like to create a real closing and
• 8:48
  a new meaningful opening?
• 8:51
  Because sometimes the most important leadership decision is the one we make for ourselves.
• 8:58
  This is Craig Nathanson, and this is the Humanistic Leadership Podcast.