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Lead Yourself First · The Expert Method

• speaker-0: Welcome back to Systems of Scale. I'm Ian Gatsky. Today, I'm joined by Dr. Kevin Mays. Kevin is a psychologist, executive coach, and founder of Mays Leadership. But what made this conversation interesting to me is that he is really asking a much deeper question beneath just leadership tactics, which is, what patterns are actually running you when you think you're the one in control? In this conversation, we get into why so many leaders think the bottleneck is the business when it is often their own conditioning. Why self-awareness is not about introspection for its own sake, but about interrupting patterns that no longer serve you. And why building a vision for your life or company is not a sterile planning exercise, it's a creative act. We also unpack Kevin's framework for presence, awareness, intention, and vision, and what it actually looks like to evolve on purpose instead of becoming a more polished version of your defaults. If you're new here and you get value from this conversation, hit subscribe and share it with a friend. And now here is my conversation with Dr. Kevin Mays. Dr. Kevin Mays, thank you for being here. speaker-1: I am so fired up. Thank you for the invitation. I'm excited about the conversation. speaker-0: Sweet, so before we get into leadership, which is your zone of genius and business outcomes, I'd like to start with the core idea behind your work. You often talk about leaders operating from a place of internal autopilot or an internal operating system. So how do you define that and what tends to happen when leaders start to see that system or that reality taking place more clearly? speaker-1: We're going to jump right into the deep end. love it. know, so much. It's like self-awareness is so difficult. We don't see ourselves very clearly. We don't see ourselves at all. Instead, we see the object of our perception and we tend to project out of our own state of mind onto the world around us and think the world around us is the problem. The reality is it's a hundred percent what we are. perceiving and conceiving. And the brilliant thing I love is you study how the brain works. You know, I think about it as our robot brain. We have three brains, a robot brain, a caveman brain, and a genius brain. Now the robot brain is this ⁓ really is the ingrained patterns that we develop over the course of our lifetime. When we come into the world, our mind isn't formed. We have a brain, we have the hardware, but we don't have the software. We don't have that robot brain. So our job as little fresh humans is to have experiences and based on those experiences, we start to form beliefs, concepts, impressions, self-concepts, and all that gets formed into the neural fabric of our brain to the extent that when we're three years old, our brain is forming a million neural connections a minute. Mind-blowing, right? So this is how deeply ingrained this robot brain is that we don't see. It's because mean, think about it. When's the last time you read something and recognized, ⁓ this is just learned behavior, right? It's so deeply ingrained. We don't even know. We just automatically see letters and know what they mean. We place meaning at everything in the world around us. That's the robot brain. And it's ultimately very healthy for us. But if we're not paying attention, the robot brain begins to own us and control us. And that is clear example. Let me ask you a question. You grew up, you have siblings growing up. Where did you fall in the sibling order? speaker-0: I am the second youngest, so I four siblings. I got three older siblings and one younger. speaker-1: The three older, they boys or girls, sisters or brothers? speaker-0: ⁓ Two brothers one sister speaker-1: Okay, and how much younger is your youngest than you? So the thing that happens is we establish a role in our family. So your oldest sibling. speaker-0: Three years. The oldest is a sister. speaker-1: ⁓ did she fall into the family hero role? speaker-0: I think from what I've learned more about her story, she definitely did. ⁓ speaker-1: you were the golden child. Okay, I love it. Just recognize that we play a role, right? You come into the world and you don't have you're this wild, untamed energy, are your feral. And you fall into this system, where suddenly now, ⁓ I bet that mom and dad come together and you were this new thing that got a lot of attention and a lot of esteem and a lot of expectation probably as well. regarding how you're going to behave and just recognize that when you came into the world, you didn't know any of this. You just started to have impressions of the people around you and how they treated you. And you started to form perceptions and conceptions and a self concept that got ingrained into the neural fabric of your brain that now drives how you show up. If you're not paying attention, it's robot brain and it's the secret to your success. But sometimes if you're not paying attention, it'll be Achilles heel. How does the way you show up, does it ever get in the way? Do you ever overdo things? speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. Fake time. speaker-1: Right? What is that thing? Like I think about that role, you're probably really good at performing. When I say performing, I mean like, you know how to show up maybe a little bit of a people pleaser and a little bit of a guy who gets it done. You don't ask for help, you just get it done. speaker-0: Folks, just for context, Tevin and I have known each other for all of 10 minutes and he's pretty much read me to a T here. This is a little weird. Yeah, that's right. People pleasing us. speaker-1: Yeah, so just fabulous to look at like, oh, do you ever say yes when you shouldn't say no? Do you ever not ask for help? Do you ever not delegate effectively enough? Oh, there's where robot brain is starting to sneak in. And it's good because you're completely competent at what you do. The downside is you don't allow others to help you. speaker-0: So how do you help leaders, how do you guide people through the process of unwiring or unwrapping that robot? speaker-1: Right, right, right. So for me, I think of it as a conscious leadership process, right? And really, there's a couple of core steps. Step one is to learn how to develop some mental muscles. The first mental muscle is just presence, knowing how to be right here, right now. Most humans don't. Most humans live either in the future, when you live in the future, you create all these emotions for yourself, right? You create anxiety, you create stress, you create frustration, all this stuff about what could happen, not based on reality. or they live in the past, but what did happen and they're frustrated, they're angry, they're regretful, they feel guilty, they feel shame. All of these emotions are not based on us being in this moment. It's all the fantasy that we're creating. Step one is strengthen the mental muscle and your ability to be right here right now. Fabulous, from that place, now you can develop self-awareness, right? Because what humans do, and I write about this in my new book, coming out, Lead Yourself First, I write about and what I've experienced is that individuals who don't have that self-awareness, again, they fall into the pattern over and over and over again of doing the same thing and they think the world is the issue. They don't recognize that the world is just a world. The world is not out to get them. The world isn't personal. The world is just a world. Like I've seen top performers who say, nobody's willing to help. No, it's because you're never delegating. And you've trained the world around you to behave a certain way. So the key is once you have presence at platform, then gain self-awareness to see the pattern and understand the cost of how that pattern is not helping you get the results you want in your life or in your leadership or in your organization, in your business. The biggest issue I find with founders and entrepreneurs is not anything in the business. It's them because they keep doing the same thing they've always done and they can't figure out why they're not getting to the next level. Leadership is a very different game than entrepreneurship. It's a very different game than being a top producer. Okay, so we have presence and awareness. the third step, very foundational, is intention, right? How do you then move in a way that isn't just owned by that robot brain? And the robot brain is really the neocortex, right? These patterns are alive. When recognized as you're learning new patterns, think about learning to drive. When you're learning to drive, takes all of your attention. It takes your prefrontal cortex, what I call your genius brain. takes everything you've got, but over time, once your genius brain masters it, your robot brain takes over. You don't even think about it. And you've driven 20 miles and have no idea how you got the last 20 miles down the road. ⁓ that's robot brain. So recognize that when you step out of then, that robot brain is going to be uncomfortable. But what happens when now you've established your expertise in driving and now you go over to England and you're driving around. Now your expertise gets in the way. Because if you're not paying attention, you'll drive into oncoming traffic. And then when you freak out because the car's coming at you, then caveman brain takes over, your limbic system ignites and you melt down. How do you manage these parts of your brain? This is the key. So it starts with a deep sense of awareness to see the pattern. not only over time, but in the moment as it happens and to recognize that the pattern is at once a mental pattern, emotional pattern, and a physiological pattern. So to be able to feel it, to feel the emotion in your body, to notice the thought pattern that you're projecting onto the world. You know, and I've seen so many folks, myself included, get frustrated at the knuckleheads around me who just don't get it. Well, guess what? That's just me being frustrated. They're doing what they do. I'm personalizing what they do. And now I'm creating this dissent in my own state of mind thinking the outside world is the problem. So step one is just that deep level of awareness. And then from that awareness dissatisfaction, that's key. When you're dissatisfied with the current state because you're not getting the results you want in your life, then you can realign. But until you have that sense of dissatisfaction, I find leaders are going to keep doing what they've always done because they are convinced it's the world around them. And when you realize that it's not the world around you, it's you. And when you change the world around you changes, then you're in the power position. speaker-0: It's not only that the world around you changes, it's like you're not going out and changing the people around you, you're just changing your interpretation of the world around you, is that right? speaker-1: you can't change other people. And interesting thing is, now they're doing more more research, I see, about how the observer affects the observed. And you see this in a lot of physics projects. They're now starting to understand the wall between object and subject, right? And realize it's all this apparent reality, but it's not the absolute reality, that you affect the thing you're observing. And the same thing when they see with an electron or a neutron, when you take a picture of it, shows up solid in space. Otherwise it's not. wild. I know it's wild and it's the same thing. You can't affect others. But the thing is when in our relationships, you know, I work in a lot of foundries and I watch them build objects out of metal, but they'll put two metals together to get a third metal, to get an alloy and recognize that you can't change what the other person shows up with. But when you change what you bring, the whole alloy changes. That's the wild thing. That's where you gain mastery in leadership is to recognize that you're not gonna change the other person, but they, especially as a leader, when you have this authority in the system, they are now projecting onto you all of their authority construct, or you might say authority issues, right? Their daddy issues. Unbeknownst to them, it's what's coming up because guess what? When they were three years old, They learned how to relate to the authority structure to get their survival needs met. That got ingrained to the neural fabric of their brain. And now here you are showing up being daddy's hero in a way that, you hey, you never let him see a sweat. Big boys don't cry. Don't worry. I don't need help. I got this. Ian, you know, I got your story here. And the beautiful thing is it's a secret to your success, but it will undermine you every time because it got you here. speaker-0: Exactly. speaker-1: That's not what gets you where you wanna go. speaker-0: Yeah, so a lot of leadership work lives in the world of mindset and awareness as you've shared and discussed here, which can sound powerful, but also a little abstract. So to make the outcomes a little bit more tangible, when somebody actually goes through your process and their leadership changes, what specifically becomes different in how they run their company or make decisions or just kind of interact with the world around them? Because leadership doesn't only just apply to the business world. speaker-1: No, right. And that's why I love before you can lead others, you lead yourself. And when you're leading yourself, that impacts and touches every element in the world you're constructing and creating. What it really does, this process, is put people in the driver's seat to recognize that they are 100 % responsible, accountable, and take ownership for the world they create. So it's fantastic. I worked with one organization. I started working with the president of the company. And it was interesting because so often at that level, they want everything else fixed. They're not the problem. Everything else is the problem. And so the work is this, yes, absolutely. Everything else is the problem. Let's just start with you and I'll do a 360 and do assessments. But a lot of it is along the way we're constructing this neuro rewire, right? Changing the old patterns, helping them see it. And I love so many times as I've worked with executives. After we do an intense process, I'll get a fruit basket from a spouse who says, I'm not sure what just happened in this leadership development process, but he's a different guy. I don't know what happened, but ⁓ my goodness, thank you. Because what happens, we start to let go of who we think we should be and step into our own power. And so what I see now, it's like the second layer. I worked with the president and it worked so well for him that he just restructured his kind of cognitive framework. began to understand what his role as an executive truly was and should be and recognize that when you think about a position on the mountain, the role of the executive is to be at the top of the mountain, a 360 view to see as far into the future as possible and to bring people that direction. However, he kept climbing down the mountain, getting into all the operational stuff and what it did effectively was throw everybody into their silo and make everybody defensive and they stayed in their lane. When he stayed up and he was the visionary who drove things forward, everybody elevated up. And then, so now what we have, we have this, I'm working with the team. The team is becoming the executive team. Understanding that how they show up impacts the dynamic of the leadership team and how the leadership team impacts the culture of the organization. It kind of cycles through like a waterfall cascading. So we start at the top, help the leaders become present, aware, intentional, and have clarity of their vision of who they want to become. And this is for me the key. It's an evolutionary process. So people evolve on purpose in this work as opposed to what most people do is just react to the world around them and then end up where they end up. Now, what have you created a clear vision of who you were becoming as a leader? Because guess what? The next 10 years are going by. The next 20 years are going to go by. Whether you're intentional about it or not, what I find And I learned this all after I watched one brilliant executive way back in the day and he was doing things different. I wasn't sure what it was when I first saw it, but people loved being there. The culture was completely engaged. People would do anything for the success of the organization. They felt a sense of pride. So that became my study and my research. And I found he had a self-awareness practice. So I started studying leaders who practice self-awareness. And in fact, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on it. I called it enlightened leadership, but I found that they were creating different cultures. I became obsessed. That's what the book is all about that I just, ⁓ just coming out. It's about the power in creating that level of aware and intentional leadership, how it transforms the organization. So bottom line, what do we get? We get on time delivery. We get fewer errors. We get more increased margin. Increase profitability, we get effective communication, collaboration, cohesion, everything. We create a healthy organization when people start letting go of their own stuff and step into their own, not personality, but their own presence. And there's a difference. speaker-0: I loved the evolve on purpose, the implication of all those outcomes that you talked about on time delivery, increased margin. I think that all stems from a team of people, a culture of people, a culture infused within your organization of people who care. People who have take pride in their work and are bought into what it is that you're working on. That only comes from a leader who is casting a compelling vision and reinforcing why we're here and reinforcing the value of the work that we're doing and pouring into the people around him and Yeah, it starts at the top. And I love your idea of you have to lead yourself first before you lead others. You need to set the standard. You need to set the example. You need to embody that standard, embody that example of the organization, of the group of people that you're leading, whether that's a father in a household, a mother in a household, a member in your community, a leader within a business organization. And a lot of your work, a lot of what you're sharing reminds me of the idea of extreme ownership, right? That idea of you are 100 % responsible for the outcomes in your life. every outcome in your life you are 100 % responsible for. You can bring it back to you and that idea, that mindset, that you are responsible for every outcome in your life is the most beneficial philosophy in my entire life. Like just any little thing. I am responsible for the outcomes in my life. If I showed up two minutes late, it wasn't because traffic was bad and that person cut me off, it's because I didn't leave. five minutes earlier. If somebody on my team didn't deliver something up to the standard or wasn't exactly what it looked like, it's because I wasn't clear in explaining how I wanted this to look or equipped them with the resources that they need in order to do the job well enough. Like you can always bring it back to you. Another thing that I would love to underline is the idea of entrepreneurship or growing a business is self-improvement wrapped in capitalism or self-development wrapped in capitalism. So it's like the more that you grow as a leader and as an individual, the more the organization around you. will go and the business that you're building will grow. speaker-1: Well, I want to pause right there because that is it. The only way to grow a business effectively and sustainably in a healthy way is to grow yourself. I've seen so many organizations and leaders who try to focus on singularly on the metrics and on urgency, getting stuff done and the metrics. And that's such a huge detriment because then nobody is casting the vision and nobody is engaging the people. Right. And this is so much of what I see when we talk about robot brain. I have a star model I use, right? An organization is four things. It's strategic, tactical, analytic, and relational. Those are the four elements and recognize based, and this is as old as time, right? This is the Greeks talking about earth, water, fire, and air just positioned now organizationally. There's nothing new under the sun. So, but what I find is that individuals have their own preference, like being right-handed or left-handed. You have two hands, but you have one that without thinking you will automatically pick up your fork with. Doesn't mean you couldn't do it with the other one, but you don't. In the same way, leaders will automatically show up and approach an organization, an issue with a particular mindset and the tools in their mindset. And most often I find in manufacturing, for example, they're tactical and they're analytical. Great. They're getting stuff done, paying attention to the data. They're not strategic. and they're not relational. What's that mean? Nobody has any clue where they're going, why they're going, what their role is in this whole thing, what the big picture is and why they matter. You're never going to create an elite organization on autopilot. speaker-0: You have to be intentional, right? Tying it back to your third step in your process. That goes beyond just being intentional about being aware of what you're doing or intentionally changing your own behavior, but intentionally casting a vision and intentionally moving in a direction, right? If you're just letting things happen and letting things go where they may, you're not going to like where you end up most likely. You're just kind of rolling the dice with the future that you're building in your organization. speaker-1: Well, it's so much bigger than work. Right? And so many people, I mean, I don't know what the stats are now, but for the longest time, 50 % of people ended up in divorce because the flash goes away, right? We all show up for our first date looking brilliant and we woo the other person. But then guess what? You're going to end up with this person, the real person three years and 30 years from now, if you do it right. But most people don't have a vision of who they want to become in their relationship with their partner, with their spouse, with their parents, with their children, with their siblings, with their friends, with their business. Every organization has a clearly, every good organization, a clearly defined vision. It surprises me how few leaders have a clearly defined vision. When we talk about evolving with intention, to what end? And that's the fourth step, right? Vision. Who am I becoming? Who am I meant to be on earth? Because there's the neuro programming of the robot brain of who we learn to be. But underneath that, when you peel back those layers and it is, let me tell you, it's uncomfortable when we do that because our survival was at stake when we learned those patterns. And so our brain's going to act like our survival's at stake, but now it's survival of the ego. What's that look like? ⁓ I learned to be important when I was a kid to show up, show off. I was the youngest child, get my attention needs met. Now, when I see somebody having a conversation without me. Suddenly I'll feel uncomfortable. Like, am I being left out? Am I not good enough? All this garbage in my head comes up. There's the awareness, right? So it's one thing to talk about awareness. It's another to have it in the middle of everything going wrong. Every leader can smile when everything's going well. The man worthwhile is the man who can smile when everything goes dead wrong, right? And how do you... I ask a room full of people ⁓ often, like, hey, tell me about your leadership style. And they all have these glowing terms. ⁓ I'm a service-oriented leader. I make people better. I'm transactional, transformational, whatever they tell me. Like, ⁓ so what happens when things don't go your way? Well, I get short. I get condescending. I get frustrated. I shut down. ⁓ that's your leadership style. That's what people remember. How do you manage yourself? speaker-0: That's key. Especially in those times of when things get hard. My buddy really good at basketball and I've gotten into playing pickup basketball, but he talks about most people practice when they practice shooting. Like they don't really get exhausted or tired before they go shoot like you would be in a game. Like he encourages that you should go practice, get up shots. If you want to actually shoot better in a game, like go run on a treadmill for 30 minutes and then go shoot. Practice shooting exhausted because that's how you're going to be in the game. Right? Sweaty. it's like your leadership styles, right? when you're practicing leadership or you're learning these leadership skills or you're putting these into practice, right? You shouldn't only practice when things are going super well, when you aren't sweaty and exhausted, but you need to reinforce and build these patterns so that they show up in the moments of crisis and they show up in the moments when things are going hard. speaker-1: That's fantastic. Some more research along those lines. They tested basketball players doing free throws. This is fantastic. They have pre-tests. They're going to shoot and get your average from the free throw line. Then they had a group that practiced consistently over and over and over and over and over. Another group that never touched a ball, but visualized it. And they made it every time. In their head, they would smell, use all their internal senses, smell the ball, feel it on their fingers, hear the sound of it, whooshing through the... through the hoop over and over and over and over, but doing it without touching the ball, the post-test showed the people who visualized did more effectively than those who didn't. And what it came down to was when you visualize, you're doing it correctly every time. When you are practicing, you are not. And so this is when we talk about full circle back to rewiring the brain. It's so important to pay attention to what that internal narrative looks like and to have a practice. It's going to sound kind of corny or like from 1970, I'm good enough, doggone it, people like me. But there's power in the affirmation. Who am I in your own mind's eye, who you're becoming in current state? I am an inspired executive who brings out the best in others. I manage myself under pressure, you whatever the I ams are, right? To think about those, I call them I am statements and to have a list of those. that you practice again and again and again and again and again and again. It's no different. You go to the gym, you go to the basketball court, you go work out to get better. But nobody works out their mind. And that's one thing to do. One is to not allow your mind to continue to ruminate on things. It's like I like to downhill ski. When I'm downhill ski or snowboard actually, when I'm snowboarding through the trees, Well, when you're going snowboarding or skiing through the trees, there's one place you do not look at the trees. You don't look at where you don't want to go. You look at where you do want to go. And that's how the brain works. So if you're over here complaining in your mind, you're creating that. You're strengthening that neural pathway. And it's not based on any truth or any reality, even though you believe it is, it's simply a pattern playing itself out. See, you're the victim. They're wrong, they don't get it, I'm right, if they only understood, they'd see how brilliant I am. It's foolishness. speaker-0: Put that down. And I think one of the characteristics of a great framework or something that you've gotten to where this is like a foundational principle is that you can move forward and backward through it and you can see how all the pieces connect together. And as you're saying, these IM statements, these affirmations, you can only get to those true affirmations that your mind is going to buy into and believe if you've done the intentional work of mapping out that vision of who you want to become. So it makes sense by that. is where things can start, where you have that vision of who you want to become, or maybe that's where they finish, right? You start by getting present, right? Being able to acknowledge the thoughts and the things that are happening, just finding this present moment, and then that'll allow you to be aware and see the thoughts, the things that are taking place. And then you intentionally practice or change your behavior, and then you cast that vision of who it is that you want to become. And then once you get to that, then you can go back to the, you can create those affirmations or those ideas or those visions of who you want to be. speaker-1: Yeah, well, it's like a lining. The act of aligning with your vision is bolstered through having, I think of it almost like a mantra, but it's a statement of not only who you want to become, who you are becoming. Right? there's, I mean, just a stickler for words, right? It's like, no, I don't want, because that wanting means it's different than where you are. There's a separation between where you are and that, no, I'm in this process of becoming. Right? You don't say the seed wants to become a sunflower. It is becoming the sunflower. ⁓ okay. I'm on this pathway of evolution. I am becoming. The biggest obstacle people face in their growth is obviously themselves and the internal narrative and how that internal narrative, right, recognize when we come into the world and we're these feral creatures and we learn that we are not okay as a feral creature. Use your inside voice. Go outside and play. Don't throw that in the house. Big boys don't cry. I'll give you something to cry about. We hear all these messages unintentionally, right? We're trying to make us functional members of society, but what we end up doing is kind of constraining this wide open raw energy into something restrained and constrained. And we learn that only if we do that are we okay. And if we step outside of that, if you ask someone for help, It's a sign of weakness. That's not okay. To demonstrate that you are good enough, you don't ever ask for help. You take it all on yourself. You carry all the weight on your shoulders. And there's a demonstration that you're good enough. And when you don't do that, it feels uncomfortable and you feel like you're failing. There's how the pattern gets ingrained because that's not truth. That's just a bunch of patterns. Yeah. And if you're going to scale a business, you're going to grow business and scale a business. Guess what? You darn well have to get good at delegating. You darn well have to get good at saying no. I worked with one organization. This was a $150 million organization. The founder was brilliant, created the security technology company. He was the worst leader ever. And he attracted, his leadership team was four-star generals. They were brilliant. They would come and stay for six months. And I had one guy say, I've never felt so stupid. I used to run freighters in the ocean, our freighters, frigates, and aircraft carriers, all this stuff. And now I come here and I feel like an idiot. I'm out. Because the founder didn't recognize that if he wanted to grow a business, the way he was showing up was getting in the way. He just knew he was right and everybody else was an idiot. What do you want? So self-awareness is tough because self-awareness is tough. mean, ignorance is bliss. It's just good to know you're right and look at, you know, turn on the TV and you'll see politically and you know, in every which way, groups of people who know they're right. And you're not, no matter what you tell them, they're not going to see it because it paints the lens they look at the world through. Self-awareness is tough and it's not for everybody, but if you can be grounded and be present and start to look at yourself, you can start to access wisdom. And that's the pathway. The pathway is wisdom. And I believe that you said leadership is one of the most difficult, important paths. For me, it's the most spiritual path there is because it requires you to tear down the walls of ego and the layers of illusion and to truly be able to sit in the present moment, sometimes sizzling in your own juice without reacting. Than to be intentional from that place. speaker-0: Yeah, get off your own pedestal. Look at ⁓ the often hard to digest truth about yourself and doing it in a loving way where you're not just flogging yourself, which is something I think I've struggled with where, you know, I can really easily point out my flaws and then just kind of beat myself up over it. But I don't think that that's the most productive way to actually change iPhone, right? Like I've speaker-1: And I love it though, and there's the awareness and that pattern came from somewhere. And it wasn't that somebody told you how you had to show up, but as this new being with a newly formed partnership, man, there was so much attention on you, unbeknownst to you. And you learned to play the role, to always be good enough. And I love it, your siblings are much older than you, so they really were like parental figures. You became a little parent, a little adult at a very early age, hyper responsible, hyper critical because you're trying to keep up and have conversations with people who are 15 to 30 years older than you. So probably over-adultified. again, there's where you see now, look at the, it is, you're coming to the world of this feral being and you learned, oh, nobody had to tell you this, you picked it up. Be the little adult. Be smart, keep up. have to measure with all these people, have conversations. And now here you are. And when you step outside of that, right, you act like a child, you don't know an answer or whatever the thing is, you beat yourself up. It's uncomfortable. And there's the whole pattern. The remedy is to allow yourself to be a fool. Not all the time, but recognize being a fool is not mean at all. You're going to be a fool. It means kind of giving yourself a break a little bit, man. Sure, you're harsher on yourself than any of your friends would ever be. Am I right? Yeah. How do you let yourself get away with that? speaker-0: Absolutely. Right. Yeah. Right. Exactly. speaker-1: It's just this old pattern just playing itself out. And again, it helped you survive and not only survive, but thrive in your family system. Brilliant. But now it's the DOS programming that's still running you. It's time to upgrade your leadership. speaker-0: love it. Amazing. You had mentioned earlier, there are some self-awareness practices that you saw some of these leaders that you studied in your thesis. What did some of those self-awareness patterns or practices look like that maybe some people could use? speaker-1: Absolutely. So I studied everything from Buddhist monks, went to monasteries, deep into psychology, into sports, into performance. And what I found is that it really comes back to a couple key things. How you control your attention. Our inability to manage our attention is key, or it's the key to us not performing. Nowadays, there's so many distractions and It's so difficult to just be the owner of your attention, to place your attention where you want it, when you want it. This goes back to being intentional. So the act, I love it, of developing both presence and awareness is absolutely essential. How that's done, I found simple practices, but difficult practices. Simply focusing on your breathing. In the Vipassana tradition of Buddhism, they call it Anapanas. Just simply focus on the sensation. of your respiration entering your nose and leaving your nose. What that's doing, your breath is an anchor into the present moment. It's eternally present when you bring your attention back to that present moment, you're strengthening that mental muscle of presence. Secondly, if you're aware of the sensation, you're strengthening the mental muscle of awareness. Brilliant. Now it's just like a continual practice and recognize it's not just something you do when everything's going haywire. No, but if you did it like going to the gym every day for just two minutes a day, just sit without moving. This is the third thing I love too, because as soon as I sit to focus my attention, my mind will spin. All those things I have to get done. Like, nope, come back, just focus on my breathing. And then my body, I'll start twitching and I'll start scratching. Nope, no moving either, right? This is now opening the door for intentionality because most humans move towards what feels good in a way from what doesn't. What feels good? ⁓ things that validate my self-concept and my worldview, that feels good. That is, when it agrees with that thing I'm holding onto, it creates this warm, positive, I get a swing in my step, I get a swagger, but that's all conditional. And when things don't feel good, right, when things invalidate my self-concept or worldview, it creates this other sensation in my body, this churning in my stomach, and I get smaller, and I become reactive or defensive. All of this is conditional. Right? Not based on the reality, but based on the perception and the narrative we're making up. So coming back to simply one thing, focus on your breathing. If you could do that, just come back to the present moment and train your brain to be able to come back and stay present. Develop awareness. That's brilliant. Another thing I find is writing down your vision, much like the I am statements. How do you know who you're becoming if you haven't written it down? And I love it. I always on my car, on my sticky notes. Here on the front page of my folder, I have a list. All the statements for me of who I am. I am becoming, hey, I am a best-selling author. Huh, I got a new book coming out. I am ⁓ making record revenue. I'm an international speaker. I'm exercising and meditating daily. I'm healthy of mind, body, and spirit. I'm taking my ⁓ family to amazing international locations. Guess how I've been living? Last year we went to Rome, the year before that to Greece, the year before that to Costa Rica, right? I mean, this stuff works as goofy as it is and getting specific with numbers. So writing it down, absolutely key. A lot of other practices, but nothing for me is more simple and profound than remembering it's cultivating presence, awareness, intention and vision. Vision, write it down. We know if you write it down, you're going to magnetize that direction. Part of the brain called the reticular activating system. And that is, we're taking in millions of pieces of data every minute. Yet we have a filter that screens out most of it. So it came to be one point I wanted to buy a new car and I decided I wanted a new Jeep Wrangler. Those four door Wranglers, I was loving them. Soon as I made the decision to get one, guess what I started seeing everywhere? Jeep Wranglers. How they show up. Where they come from all of a sudden. ⁓ my mind tuned into it. That's the power of the reticular activating system. We have the ability to program. that filter and then as we do it, see things that move us that direction. Suddenly I'm aware of these everywhere. That's why the I am and the vision are so essential to be able to develop the presence by bringing your attention back to your breath. Be aware of the sensation, the actual feeling, that subtlety of your breath and to not react to sensations in your body because that's usually where the reaction happens, but to align with the vision of who we're becoming. Practice that. Yeah. Over and over and over. Write down your vision. That's the one key takeaway. Write it down, put it in words. speaker-0: And we could have a whole conversation about how you kind of get through that. Cause for me, like I've come into the last, you know, three, four years, you know, just gone through this process of writing down my goals, my vision. feel like I've, it's a complicated process. can be really difficult to get clear on that vision. And I think it's just kind of me, one of my own patterns of trying to do everything perfectly. ⁓ speaker-1: Perfection, right? It's difficult to see that pattern. That's what I'm going to challenge you to do. Because when you write down your goals and your vision, I'm going to bet you take a ballpoint pen and a piece of paper and you write in script. Am I correct? You're saying what else is there? OK, recognize that that really activates part of our brain. The left hemisphere is very logical, analytical, black and white, scientific. I'm going to encourage you to pull out a like a sheet of flip chart paper, colorful markers. speaker-0: Yeah, and if I did Yeah. speaker-1: and to not be linear, to write things more in color and use pictures and shapes that you just draw that are just for you, just like I drew a house out of blue and ⁓ I showed a picture of an island in Greece. What we're trying to do is just recognize that when you want your vision to include your whole brain, and as you're doing this exercise, as a left-brained exercise, it's not fully integrated through your corpus callosii, right? It's not full brain. Full brain, I want you to use color, use shapes, use pictures, get rid of the rules. What we generally do is we have lined paper and we write nice and neatly on the lines as if it's an academic exercise. This isn't an academic exercise. It's a soul exercise. Very different expression. Right. So the goals, great goals, absolutely left brain. Here's what I'm doing when I'm doing it, but larger to get that vision, to get it. It's got to be a vision, right? And it's a vision. When's the last time you had a vision that was letters on a page? Now you see, you smell, you taste, you touch. What's the whole purpose of it all? Why do you want the boat in the Mediterranean or in the Caribbean? Why do you want the house in Colorado? Right. And see it, see yourself in it. Let me tell you one quick story. When I first started practicing this notion of visualizing, because that's what the vision is all about. You visualize. I remember reading this book called Creative Visualization way back in the day. And there was a little simple exercise. It said to in your mind's eye with your eyes closed, see yourself in the scene you wanted to be in and to not only see it in your mind's eye, smell it, feel it, taste it, touch it using all of your senses. And this is back. many years ago and I wanted a sailboat, right? I'm like, okay, I'll imagine I'm on a sailboat. Here I am on Lake Huron, sun setting, I'm with my friends, we're on this big sailboat, we're sailing around and I just absolutely put myself there. And then this exercise said, now just cast the vision away. I don't know the right way to do it or what that's worth, but that's what I did, I forgot about it. I tell you what, two years later, I'm on this sailboat on Lake Huron. with my friends at sunset, the sail was full with a warm breeze and this like channel opened up between two years ago and that moment. It was like this deep deja vu, soul stirring, like a tear in my eye. I'm like, holy crap. This is the vision I created two years ago. I'm on my boat with my friends. This had happened and I didn't go out and buy the boat. I didn't go out and work towards it. Like stuff just happened and pretty soon I had this sailboat. It was just the weirdest thing. And it was profound. realized the world is not a logical place and it doesn't operate based on our laws of logic. So when I go back to full circle to when you're writing down your vision, just think about that. You're doing it in a very logical way, but we want to make sure we're using the fullness of, of all, your brain's capacity, the genius, color, shape, style, everything, make it messy. And then from there you can start, I've done this every year and I love it at one point. messiness all over the page and ⁓ my goodness, ended up, things fall, right? Because now you start to tune your reticular activating system and stuff starts to happen that migrates that way. And pretty soon I find myself on the coast of California or out in Montana and amazing things happening that never would have happened had I planned it. But when I visualize it, hmm, powerful. Lead, lead, lead. It's all about how you lead this and lead this. speaker-0: I can't believe that's the first time I've ever heard the idea of Like you asking the question of when's the last time you had a vision that you saw it as text on the page Right and using colors shapes images visuals as your way of getting your vision that you have for yourself You know down on paper or thought through or concrete or clearly defined I guess if those are the right words, but that's makes so much sense right and I think the process of casting a vision for yourself or for your organization or just casting any vision is a very artistic experience, right? Like my definition of art, I just stole from Naval where art is anything that's done for its own sake and the vision of the future that you have for yourself or for your organization should be something that's just done for its own sake. It shouldn't be done for any other ulterior motive. It should just be something that you cast and you create because you want to create it, right? So that Casting of the vision is a very artistic experience and I never thought about it being something that you should do with artistic kind of methods, right? But I thought it would just be, okay, I could sit here in this chair and I'm gonna write everything down and I'm gonna get it done in this two hour period. I'm gonna get it down. Right? So I it off the list. Okay. Exactly. Exactly. That's freaking awesome. speaker-1: Vision done, Jack. Isn't it cool though, it's like suddenly like, oh wait, what have I been thinking? It's like now it seems so obvious, right? And you'll never do it the same again. speaker-0: Yeah, no chance. I'm super excited to do that. Everything that we've talked about here today just kind of is really rhyming with a lot of the things that I've been learning. Like I've just been going down this rabbit hole of ⁓ basically just like uncovering that we really don't have it all figured out. Pretty much just kind of re-emphasizing that idea that we do not understand why we're here, where we're coming from, how the universe and all this stuff really works. Like there is so much more to it. And a lot of it has to do with our ability to tap into a higher power of some kind of creative or higher existence that exists there. And I think that comes through in lot of creativity and a lot of artistic expression. I think... speaker-1: The most effective leaders know how to tap into that. The hard thing is it's uncomfortable because we're in a world of expertise where your job is to know. And now I'm saying you need to empty your cup because that being able to not know is really the power. Your job as a leader is not to have all the answers and you'll never have all the answers in life. All it is is trying to validate the self-concept that you've created. Let go of that and just step in. unknowingly, like fresh and wide-eyed into the world, and you'll be amazed what happens. speaker-0: and curiously, curiously into the world. Yeah, I love it. One big thing that's helped me ⁓ in that, the value of meditation or value of some kind of present practice, it's changed my life. It's something that I've done now for four years and I do it almost every day. any day that I don't do it, I can feel it. It's just, it's the best. And it's something that I got from when I read Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss years ago. He... locked himself in a room in England for a month and he just went through all of his past interviews and just summarized the key takeaways, the similarities of all these high performing individuals that he has interviewed on his podcast. And in the front part of the book, he kind of does like a summary of like what was consistent across these hundreds and hundreds of high performers that he had interviewed. And the one standout, like by far, this was majority of people had this in common, stood out among everything else above working out above eating clean was meditation. 85 % of the people that he had interviewed had some kind of meditation practice. And I read that and I'm like, okay, I got to give this thing a shot. So I think that's one little small thing that I could recommend out there. But if somebody listening right now feels like they're capable of more, both as a leader and as a human being, but they're still operating inside those old patterns that you described, what's the first step that they can start leading themselves differently? speaker-1: Underneath all, I said there's a desire. You want to change. If you're happy with the way things are, hey, it's your world, but your beliefs drive your behaviors that get results. And if you want different results in the world in any way, recognize it's about one thing, you. I I love the word mindset, but it's not just your mindset, it's your emotion set, it's your physiological set, it's your whole being set and the constraint and the patterns that operate through you. And you can change those. can pull, pull back the veil. You can pull it apart and reinvent. No different than I think what Cortez came to the new world and burned the boats. When I moved to Michigan, my wife stayed home with the kids. I didn't know anybody, found a school system that looked good. We'd never been here before. Came up here over a weekend, bought a house. I went back to North Carolina, quit my job, packed the truck, moved up here, and I started a business. And I said, this is going one direction and one direction only. And when you have that kind of determination and there's no plan B, it's amazing. Again, your mind works that direction. You have clarity of your vision. That reticular activating system aligns with the vision, the I am statements, all of it together. You get to evolve on purpose. And I think that's the one thing I would leave with everyone to recognize that Next 10, 20, 30 years are going by, whether you're intentional about it or not. But you can become exceptional. You can create it according to your terms. There are people just like me and you who are wildly successful. People just like me and you who are failing and flailing. What's the difference? How they decide to show up. And there is a decision in there. Free will is a small part of who we are, because so many of the patterns are intergenerationally even passed down. In the same way our DNA is passed down, we don't even know. We're inheriting patterns and social dynamics from our great-great-grandfather. We don't even know, but it's absolutely part, it's passed down. You can interrupt that pattern in reinvent. It starts now. speaker-0: the next 10 to 20 years are going by, whether you're intentional about them or not, that is so good. And we could do a whole other conversation, I would love to have you back on too, of like exploring. do it. I don't understand why these things just aren't more commonly discussed and taught in schooling and things like that, but that's a conversation for another day and hopefully a change that you- speaker-1: Well, if I can tee it up, we are masters through the scientific method of the external world. We aren't masters of learning how of the internal world. And this is what got us into the state we're in where we're doing things that might not be completely aligned with our environment and our reality around us. Cause we're learning how to manage and manipulate the external world, but we never really learn how to manage and master the internal world is an interesting thing, right? But you don't get a job by being a master of yourself. ⁓ that's changing. That's changing. That's a whole podcast we're going to spend some time talking about how society is evolving right now, this year, a lot is happening. And I'm excited. We'll have that conversation. speaker-0: Absolutely. Love it. But if you had a giant billboard that everyone in the world could see for 10 seconds, what would it say and why? speaker-1: lead yourself first. I would say that because that's the name of my new book pick it up now on amazon.com and leave a five star review. The real, I mean you get it right the reason I would say that is that's where it all begins and ends. Where a peace is an inside job. We have so many wars that happen over us blaming each other as humans. It doesn't need to be that way. Heaven and hell are for us to create right here right now. speaker-0: Yeah, I love it. speaker-1: And if we can lead ourselves first and everybody can do that, we can create a profoundly peaceful, positive environment, a positive world. Lead yourself. speaker-0: Kevin, thank you so much for your time today. speaker-1: It's a pleasure. Thank you, speaker-0: Thank you for listening to my conversation with Dr. Kevin Mays. Here are my three main takeaways from the conversation. Number one, before you lead others, you have to lead yourself. This is the core principle behind Kevin's work and it rhymes with a lot of durable founder wisdom. The business eventually reflects the maturity, clarity and limits of the person running it. And something that I heard Alex Jemozzi say is that entrepreneurship is self-improvement or self-development wrapped in capitalism. Number two, you are 100 % responsible for the world you create. which means you have to evolve on purpose. One of the strongest ideas in this conversation was that the next 10 or 20 years are going to pass whether you're intentional about them or not. The real question is whether you are becoming by design or by default. That sounds a lot like the principle behind extreme ownership, but it's applied to not just operations, but to your identity. Number three, vision is not just a planning tool, it's a creative discipline. This was probably my favorite part of the episode. was something that really just struck me in the middle of our conversation. Kevin made the point that if your vision is really a vision, it should not live only as neat text on paper. It should be a vivid sensory experience. It should be directional. It should be alive. That pairs naturally with his broader process of presence, awareness, intention, and vision. And with the simple practices he emphasized like self-awareness work, visualization, and writing things down, even if they sound a little woo-woo at first, they work. Kevin frames these as practical tools for changing beliefs, behaviors, and ultimately, your results. If you want to get connected with Dr. Kevin Mays, I'll put his social links in the description and his new book, Lead Yourself First is available for pre-order and will be released and available on all platforms on March 27th. Go buy it, leave a five star review, let's support Kevin. And if you're an author, course creator, consultant or coach, and you know your clients aren't following through the way they should, download the free program execution engine toolkit in the description. It'll show you how to install execution infrastructure inside your program so clients actually complete the work. Thank you for listening and I'll see you in the next one.