Welcome back to another edition of Inside personal growth. This is Greg Voisen, the host of inside personal growth. And I have Dan Tocchini Joining me. And Dan, where are you joining me from today?

Hey, I'm in Horseshoe Bend, Idaho. You know, I might at my place where the right at the top of a pass going in from from Boise and Horseshoe Bend, and it's beautiful country. So I get, I love kind of recoup here. So,

well, it's a beautiful place. And and I was, I wanted my listeners to know that Dan is a beautiful soul and has a very interesting company called take newground.com take newground.com that's where you can reach his website. And I was just complimenting him on not just a wonderful website, but also the kind of man he is now. He has a book called The Change imperative that you can get actually for free, and you can ask for the download. It's innovating with your team. And I'm going to let the listeners, Dan have a little bit of insight into you, and then you and I are going to get into a dialog about your amazing career, somebody who's also been a minister as well. So Dan kochini is a distinguished entrepreneur and executive with a career spanning over four decades in Transformational Leadership and Organizational Development. In essence, that's a mouthful, but what that means is he comes in and helps your company overcome obstacles to growth and change, and as the founder and a senior partner at tng, Dan has pioneered innovative approaches to team dynamics and leadership training, emphasizing authentic engagement and candid feedback. Dan was also a co founder and executive board of director of the grid, pioneering developer of AI technology to design, construct and maintain dynamic website. He's committed to leadership development is further so showcased through his published works, which you can get some of them at his website. And I was just complimenting on such a beautiful website. And it's really his contributions to the field. He is really a pioneer and an innovator, and the way he approaches actually doing this organizational development and transformational leadership is truly unique. Dan, welcome back to the show, or I should say, welcome to the show. And I would like to kind of start our questioning, just a little bit about, you know, how did Dan get here? What really compelled you to be so interested in organizational development and leadership, and what is this kind of, this methodology that you use, in a very short sense, that makes your organization take new ground, different than anybody that you've seen out there,

right? So I got to do in this. Thanks Greg for having me, by the way. Thank you. So appreciate it. I started doing this as a young kid. I got interested in organizational families, basically families organizing because my family, I grew up in an Italian American family, very strong Catholic. You know, my grandfather and father came over here, and my father, we basically divorced my mother and my father got divorced her when I was about 18, but it started unraveling when I was about 12. My mother was just became schizophrenic with the birth of my youngest brother, and it was pretty traumatic, right? And so I ended up becoming like a go between, between her and a psychiatrist. I really at one point, they were going to give her a lobotomy. I talked my dad into letting me talk with her, and was able to stop all that with with the doctors. And I think the first book I read was Gestalt therapy verbatim by just by Fritz pearls,

did they do electric shock therapy on her? They did. They did some of that on her. Did that actually help the electric shock it helped in the sense that

it just put her in a daze, right? And so I was really into, I could communicate with her and so. And I don't know if you ever read any of Charles schraz work, but Dr schras, he's dead now. I read an article in the mid 60s. Let's see. I was 67 I think I was 12 or 13 years old, and he had written an article called The Myth of mental illness, which later became a book. He's now dead. He was a, he was a phenomenal psychiatrist who basically produced all kinds of breakthrough results, but the way he related to people who had these mental disorders, as we would call them, right? He said, Look, what if these, these are languages or ways of engaging the world, ways of being in the world, that people who are traumatic, go through great trauma, learn to deal with the world, and it's like a different language. And what if they're not mentally ill. What if they're, they're trying to communicate in their own way, and because they it's so out of our context, it's crazy, almost

like autistic people, yeah, just much like that, the way they relate to the world. I get what you're saying is like, Fritz Pearl, I studied all these great psychologists, you know it, and Carl Rogers and all of them, right? Yeah, I meant, the reality is, go ahead.

No, I've, I got to know some of them quite well, because I would go to, I'd have the pleasure of going to ESL and debriefing with some of them what I went through with my mother over a period of time. And, you know, I came out of that pretty banged up, went through a severe cocaine addiction as a young man, and got out of that, had a faith experience. I've been clean now 41 years, but congratulations, Dan. Went through quite a quite a dance. Did you

meet George Leonard while you were at ESLint? No, I didn't. George was one of the founders. It was George Leonard and Michael Michael Murphy. Michael

Murphy, I met Michael and I met my friend. Go from the King Kingdom two or three times, is one of my favorite books.

Well, so you, you went through this experience with your mother, so it laid the foundation for you wanting to see how you could help people, I would say, transform in a new and different way, right? So, and then you, then you yourself were heroin addict, then you ended up basically finding your spiritual practice cocaine, yeah, the other

side of the spectrum, okay.

But then you found a very strong spiritual practice which led you out of it, yeah, yeah,

yeah. And then, you know, my wife, having lived a double life, and she discovered it, and then her saying, Look, if you I want you to be the my husband and the son of my the father to my son, but not like this. I can't do it, and I've got a responsibility to him. So, you know, it's either us or out. And I could say that it wasn't a difficult decision, it was a difficult recovery, but it wasn't a difficult decision and it was worth making. And so initially, my work was to communicate with my mother. Then I started working on how I could re reconcile with my wife and and have a life together as a family and so, or, you know, systems, organizational systems, family systems, became and the study of neuroscience is something I really got into and steeped into and spent a lot of time studying phenomenology, which is a form of philosophy that is about it's big. Just means the study of human becoming. How does human become? What? And then, if you make you take neuroscience and you put it together, it's pretty amazing some of the observations that phenomenologists make. A phenomenologist you might not know about a sword and Kierkegaard or Martin Heidegger or any of these philosophers. And the basic idea is, you know that you don't learn like the idea isn't to just learn concepts, but to embody them in a way that you would. You would. It's like one thing to be to know what a leader, to kind of understand what leadership is in a conceptual way, but it's another thing to exercise effective leadership. Like, what does that mean? Like, how does one think and relate to the world, so that naturally, as a natural expression of who I am, I begin to react or respond automatically to situations from a place of leadership, from a place of inventing the future that mattered most to me, taking hold of whatever circumstances are there and using them to do it, not running from them. Now, you know, if you can imagine, if you grew up with a schizophrenic mother, the first thing you want to do is get away from it, but that's not actually how to recover the relationship, is to actually go into it and right that that well, you know, big market of my work you,

you got phenomenal background. I'm sure we could spend a lot more time on your background. But one of the things you mentioned in the book is that human nature often resists change, right? I have a podcast about inside personal growth you as an individual, how to do a very deep dive when you're an addict, to actually embrace change. Now you say one of the reasons that they resisted is because there's a need for predictability. You know, survival,

survival, yeah, yeah. And

so how could leaders out there, whether they're a mom or a dad leading a family or they're a team leader, they're a CEO, because really, our leadership follows us wherever we go. When we go home and take off our CEO jacket, we're now dad, right? So how can leaders help shift from resisting change to embracing it using some of the techniques that you've used, and what are the opportunities that you believe they would get if they let go of what they think is right?

Yeah, that's a great question. That's a very complex question. Let me start with the first part. Look, leadership starts with listening. And you know, lead to lead means to Order Chaos and release beauty. In other words, I engage where I'm at. And most, one of the most difficult things I found, it's like, think about this way, if you're doing something and you have a plan, right? And, and Mike Tyson said it the best. Everybody has a plan till they get punched in the face, you know, and and we have a plan, and there's nothing more exciting than when a plan meets reality. It's like getting punched in the face. And then the next thing is, but

I think they used to say, Dan, I don't want to interrupt, but you're making plans while God's making other plans. There's another plan, right? I just said that to my wife over lunch, because we're going through a lot of changes. My son's needing money. We've got, you know, a lot of things happening. But the point was, it's like, oh my gosh. You know, here you thought you had this great plan, and there's another plan going on for you. Oh,

well, I mean, I experienced that firsthand. My grandson was killed two and a half years ago, and you know, that wasn't in the plan. That's a punch in the face. And yeah, you know, connecting with my son bringing the family together so that, because immediately what people want to do is isolate to protect themselves. And so I was really blessed because my kids came together and we we got a place where we all came together for two months and worked through it, but work through it, meaning face the things we were uncomfortable with, talked about the things that brought us to our knees, put language on the things we didn't understand and we'll never understand, you know, like that. And I think any team is like that, like, things happen on a team, and people, a lot of times, leaders, want to go on with the plan, thinking that if they stopped and really dealt with or kind of faced what was there, somehow that would slow them down. But in my experience, it that's it's not happening to you. It's happening for you. And in the obstacle is the way, if you take the stoic point of view that that the obstacle itself, if you can just embrace it, we call it, hug the cactus. Let it pierce you, let it bother you, let it disturb you. Because that disturbing, that upset, can drive you into a situation much quicker than you know, because you're trying to get away from it. But let's say it's actually what you you need to look into. And I, you know, I have a saying, and it's I've seen it. I learned it the hard way, multiple times. What you don't face now will eventually defeat you, and that's the big deal. You know that that is and you know, you know, you,

you, you talk. And I want to throw this in because you're still answering my first question. But I do know about levelers in organizations, and so let's let the listeners know what it is those are the people that resist and try and keep things the same status. So yeah, and you're just saying, hey, look, if you don't embrace change, there isn't room for levelers. So what would you tell a family, a couple or an i change advocates, what would you what would you do? Okay,

so I missed someone because you blanked out, but I think I got

it. You're saying people want to resist change, yeah, but really we have, you have to embrace it. You just said, embrace the cactus, right? Hug that cactus. Hug the cactus, because at some point later, it's going to come and bite you in the ass. If you don't hug it,

that's right, you're going to pay with penalties and interest later on. So and that, that's what you know people talk about courage. That's what increases courage, if you see that what you're doing now is only going to bring you greater pain. Later, you're going to be more up, more courageous to deal with what's in front of you now, rather than let it go. But we don't tend to stop and think, if I don't deal with this now, what's coming right? And that's that's a good conversation. It's a good inquiry to get into is, well, if we don't do anything about this now, what are the long term effects? Effects? What are the secondary and tertiary impacts of not handling this now? And many times, it's the disillusionment of a relationship, of a partnership, of the bankruptcy of the company, or, you know, you know, a layoffs, etc. And then so being able to talk about that and put language on it before it becomes a crisis, is what, what, you know, Socrates would call that wisdom, you know. You know that you're going. You want to talk about and look at, where are we headed. What are the prices about where we're headed? And what can we do now to open up with, you know, to avoid that and have this and

those are say, they say you don't drive the car looking through the rear view window. You're looking through the one at front of the window. That's right. And you even use this thing about having a clear vision. How can the leaders, though, from a team standpoint, effectively communicate a vision in which they can get buy in. You know, I went through all the Richard Barrett training, which you probably know Richard is, it's spirituality and business, or spirit in business. And the way is that, you know, we all come to work. We're working toward a common cause. Hopefully we have a common purpose. Hopefully we're all headed in the same direction, and we want to get a win. How would you help a leader right now who's having trouble getting some I don't want to call it alignment, but at least agreement on the vision.

Yeah. Well, in fact, you want to get to get to alignment, because people, not everybody has to agree, but they get that it's worth doing, and it's not against their morals, that kind of thing. But the idea is to be able to hear what people are thinking, which doesn't mean you'll agree with it. I think a lot of you know, look, when I there's a way of being in the process that I'm describing. And the danger is, we make it a concept, and somebody goes, Well, I tried that. That didn't work. But the idea is, your concept of it is different than my experience of it. So I'm trying to communicate an experience which is because somebody will say, well, when do you stop listening? Well, I never stop listening, but I am going to put words on the process. So let's say you and I are working through something, and you're leveling you don't want to change. You are comfortable with the way it was, and it's showing up because you're not making the different you're not doing what, what we're up to, you're not making your deadlines, etc. So now I'm going to stop and I'm going to have a conversation with you, an inquiry, to understand where you are. Now I got to understand that when I have a conversation with you, how I'm with you is going so in the change imperative, and it's called the change imperative, because change is imperative. It's not a choice. It's always happening. And the idea that you can keep something the same is a loser's idea. It just doesn't happen. Things got to move right? They're going to change. Things die. Other things are born again, etc. So being able to identify what's going to happen. So when you when I put a change initiative in, and we're going to do a new project, etc, about 20 to 30% of the folks beyond boards, let's go. About 20 to 30% of the people are going to be I'm not interested. I'm going to keep things the way they are, even though they're shaking their head, and another 40% or so are going to be on the fence. And the idea is you want to win the fence over to the side of let's take action on the initiative, and the way that happens is by directly addressing those on the fence, but also by how you handle the levelers, the ones who who don't, who just out and out, refuse, by their actions, they might be telling you all the words, but they're not fulfilling what they said they're going to do, then is by working with them in a way that the ones on the fence go, oh, it's much better to go along with this than to get stuck over here and get drugged under the bus, right? So what? And usually, and so there's a lot of dynamics in there, like many leaders get stuck on. Well, look, you know, one of my best performers is a leveler. They want to keep things the way that it is, and in fact, they keep going along with the old protocols when everybody else is going this way. Well, now you're caught up against the moral dilemma, which is, are you going to compromise the minute you compromise for this person because they produced well, you are telling the rest that it's okay to be this way. So you're going to persuade they're going to start persuading you're you're going to start persuading them that the change really isn't as serious as you say it is. It isn't really as important as you say it is, because you're making an exception over here. And most leaders don't think about a lot of times the impact of their workarounds because they don't want to face the difficult issues that are between them and having maybe, let's say, in this case, a producer get up to the standard and align with the change they would, they kind of break that off as an exception that eventually undermines the whole operation Eventually.

Well, you know, you you speak about the energy that you address those fence sitters with to get the fence sitters to actually move in alignment with the people that are, yeah, yeah, rah, rah, I'm going forward, and I want to circle around here, because, you know, under the kind of whole change subject. There's a lot of leaders who want to initiate change, but they're also very fearful. They're afraid. What are the biggest misconceptions in your mind about failure in the change process and and how can leaders reframe failure more to a stepping stone? Because there isn't a person out there that sees uncertainty is like, oh, yeah, I want to rush into uncertainty as I you know, that's just what I do. They don't want to rush into discomfort, because the homeostasis of our body says, Hey, we want you to be comfortable, right? It's not like, Hey, I'm going to run the 101 mile marathon and be comfortable, even though I just ran that desert marathon, right? Or I did that bike ride that was 300 miles long, or whatever it might be. When I've when I've interviewed extreme athletes, I find there's something very different going on up here. Okay, but then not a lot of leaders have that same mindset. So what would Dan tell people about their fear of this and shifting the mindset to reframe failure as a stepping stone.

Well, I've engaged in an inquiry about look, so the background understanding I have is from all the research I've not only done but seen in the marketplace, is that people are five times more likely to change to avoid pain than they are to change to gain pleasure. So what I want to do is think about and listen to them about what they want to do, if, especially if, it's not what we said we're up to. And then I want to build a law. I want to build a long parade to horribles. In other words, I want to think with them about what's going to occur, should they continue down this path. And I want to in no uncertain terms, and I wanted to be clear and concise so that they understand that. Yeah, sure, you can make that choice, but eventually, this is what's coming. You can see it. I They're telling me what it would be. I'm not telling them. I'm asking them questions. Well, if you do that, what do you think is going to happen here, and what do you think is going to happen there, and what do you think is going to go and then down the line, what do you think? So they can start to see what they're setting up for themselves. Now they may not want to get all the way over. In that case, they may want to leave, which is okay, they they need to move on to where they can fit if they're not willing to get up to what we're doing. But, and I want to support them in that there's no bad but I want to be clear about this is the direction we're headed. How can what's, what's, what is, tell me about why you want to go into this direction, or why you you don't want to make this shift. What's going on now, if you don't make that shift, and I just get into an inquiry so they the bigger the the bigger the s, the the pain is for them, potentially, the more likely they're going to make a decision to either go along or get out. But I want to be clear, and I want to be and most leaders are afraid to do that because they don't want to be disliked. And I guess one of the things I would say to these leaders is, look, when you make a change, it's going to get worse before it gets better. It's got to because the old way has to die, and that it feels worse because the new way isn't in yet, and you're not, you haven't succeeded at it. So, you know, it's like stealing second base. When you leave first base on your way to second base, you have nothing. You just got to keep running, right?

Well, you have a potential out. That's right. So my, I guess my point is, is that you one of the things that we're talking about here, which is embracing change and avoiding the failure. You said, one of the ways to do this is to approach it instead of you. You say, approach this very boldly and and it's often more effective than a subtle approach to a major change. And then you say, you write, also in the change initiative, that it's about the need to set a fast pace in the early changes, that's right, or the early stages of change. So we're seeing that right now in this administration. I mean, there can't be more changes than we're all trying to, kind of like look at and cope with and see and determine and whatever, forget the politics aside. For a normal person who would make your head spin. For even somebody that has some even political background, their heads are spinning. Why is speed crucial? And what can leaders balance weekly,

this current example, again, political politics aside, when you have a bunch of levelers, and this President's facing a bunch of levelers, there's, you know, the press, there's all, all these naysayers, and he makes these changes across the board rapidly. They, they don't get a chance to get a foothold in they, they, they, there's too much to report on to be able to undermine the change. It's harder to undermine it. And what do you if you notice he's dropping key people into places that he knows are on board, and then they're going to push, they're going to drive the change. That's what any leader would if you're going to make a change, that's probably the smartest way to do it. You got, you've got to be, you know, one of the things I say is that, you know, if you really want to win, you just got to be willing to, you know, you got to, you got to be okay with people not liking you. You got to be willing to have people disagree with you. You got to be okay with people not inviting you, or wishing you'd fail, or thinking you're wrong, and if you can't live with that, you're going to actually make it more painful for yourself, because there's certain things, and that doesn't mean you don't listen to people along the way. You're listening well. In fact, you got to listen well to discern, because somebody may have a good idea you didn't think of, and it might be, it might benefit the change. That's what I'm listening for. I'm listening from the outcome I'm committed to, and seeing is this, how does this impact that outcome? It might take a little longer, but it might be a better way to the outcome, or it might be, you know, a little shorter, or it might be a little more painful, or might be a little more costly. I've got to weigh those things out. And there's no necessarily right answer, but whatever answer you make, you can, you can create alignment by vetting it well and keeping the objective clear, using the objective like a plumb line to have good, healthy arguments. Argumentation is crucial to being able to knowing how to argue is crucial for a high performing team to be able to get aligned and sharpen one another.

One of the things that you say, Dan in your book is that the communications during the change process, they should be generous and frequent. What are some of the most common mistakes that leaders make, and how could they correct them in this process? Because what I find is the in just, let's use this particular thing. With President Trump, there's a lot of just spinning communication maybe isn't as frequent, or if it is, it's misinformation, or it's information, or it's some kind of information. But the reality is, there's so many people that have their fingers in the pot. I think that can happen in a company as well. Oh yeah. I mean this organ, this organization, meaning the US government, is really not different than many other big corporations that run out there and they have the same thing that goes on. So what do you tell people about frequent and generous communication? How often and how do they actually stop the mistake and correct it? Yeah?

Well, one of the things I noticed is I laugh. I heard a comedian bagging on Trump about, oh yeah, he's gonna, here comes another press conference. Well, yeah, absolutely, as many as you can have, because that's going to true up the conversation. So you want to get the leaders communicating on a regular basis, listening to people and communicating what's up, because you're going to have plenty of counter communication so the the clearer and more, as often as possible, you can communicate the change in multiple different contexts, the more it begins to order, right? And so it's going to be chaotic for a while, and then you'll see it starting to order. I already see it happening with the Trump administration, with Bongino being appointed this morning, and you know, he's got his appointees, and he went through all kinds of trouble. There were all kinds of conversations about Tulsi Gabbard and Robert Kennedy and blah, blah, lot of naysayers, and Congress was teeing off on them, and they stayed congruent, and they stayed consistent about what they're changed, what they're about, what the change is for them make, you know, their line, make America great again. So America first, and that seems to be the line that they keep simple clear and stay on that and, you know. And so I would imagine that behind closed doors, when they have an argument, it's about, well, is this really America first, or is this Israel, or is this, you know, you know, Ukraine, or just what's first here, right? And those are, those are, those are things that I think you need to have, and you're going to have people disagree with you. It's okay their disagreement should make you clear about they may have some good points to their disagreement, and that can help you get clear about what you're doing, about what needs to be done, about how it needs to be talked, about how it needs to be positioned, and to whom and who should say it right? All those things come up when you have you're frequently communicating about it. And then when there's something that's a misstep, you can go back and correct it, and you can, and the key is to stay as transparent as possible, because the minute you start getting shifty, you're going to create distance from the very people you want to persuade. So it's,

it's same thing if you know you're at a family situation. There isn't much difference here in communication, because if you're not communicating, you're obviously going to have misinformation, and people are going to start to make up their own stories about what they think is going on. And you want to hear the stories because you can help them rewrite Well, you do want to hear the story because you you want to let it be heard and then have an ability to respond to it, right? That's right, as otherwise that story ferments in the mind and becomes their position, and there isn't any opportunity to speak to anybody, and they're going, well, then screw them, right? Because that's this is my story to it. I'm meeting

tomorrow with a team, and one of the guys is saying, I'm on board. I just don't understand it. And another team member says, well, that's, that's, how can you do that? If you're on board you don't understand it? And I said, No, that means there's something he needs to communicate that he hasn't been heard on and he needs to hear back, because this one person just wants to go on without him. No, no man will. This is a 10 minute, 20 minute conversation, and we want to, I want to understand what, how is he on board? What is he on board with? And what doesn't he understand? Which usually says, I'm not being heard, and okay, I want to hear you, and then I can create a narrative from there. Maybe he's got a good point and we implement it. Maybe we just need to hear him and he'll move on. Maybe he we need to let him see why we're doing so we can get on board. Like, who knows what that means, but we to just move on is to create a lot of static that eventually will get louder than, Oh

yeah, yeah. So question for you, because your work, doing organizational transformation and leadership development, requires so many meetings, and we've been lately informed by so many corporations that, hey, whoever calls this meeting better have a reason better know why. Who's going to be in the meeting. These meetings are investing a lot of money. What are you guys doing at your consulting company to make certain that you can make more efficiency out of all these meetings you have and being able to report to the people you need to report to,

we have multiple clients, so the question we have is, what's the meeting for who needs to be in the meeting? What form does the meeting need to take? How long does the meeting need to take, and what are the outcomes that we're aiming at? If we answer those questions before we set the meeting? There's a lot of times it might just be a phone call. We don't need to get into a meeting. Sometimes it might just be, you know, we could do it on Slack, or it could be a call like this, or it could be in person, depending on the purpose of the meeting and the importance of the meeting, whatever. So we ask those questions so that we don't waste our time and other people's time, and we're very careful about who should be in this meeting, and what should they be? How can we best prepare them for the meeting? Like, like, I, I'll have, I have a board meeting next week, tomorrow. I'm going through the agenda that we set up at the end of the board meeting, meeting with the two of the board members to see if they have anything. I'm sending out to the rest of the board meeting members see if they have anything to add. They've got to get it back to me by a certain date. That way they'll see what we already have. They know when the board meeting is. They can add an agenda, meeting times, and we got and I'll structure that for the meeting, and I'll conduct the meeting according to that agenda. And if it gets, if something gets out of hand, or somebody wants to talk about something, I'll just table it. Say, Okay, we'll get it on that off line. This is what we're meeting today. About you missed the Well,

I think the advice you gave the listeners just now about, you know, why are we meeting? How long is it going to take? What are the outcomes? What are the objective? You know, who needs to be in the meeting? Are important things. Now they may already know that, but the reality is, is for you to be as effective as possible. Not everybody needs to be in that meeting. Those meetings don't have to go that long.

It's surprising how few people think like that. It is surprising they'll call a meeting and invite a bunch of people in and thought, Well, why are you inviting I've done this so many times. Why are you inviting them? Well, you know, they might be impacted. Well, they might be but this is decision making process for the people who are responsible for it. We'll get to the impact later.

Yes, no, I agree. Now, one of the things that you talk about in your book is the and, obviously, remuneration, compensation systems, incentives, bonuses, they all impact the team, but it also is some way to help get people to embrace change. So some kind of monetary incentive to embrace change, and what can organizations do, or what can they do to align the rewards with some transformation? In other words, we get a lot of companies out there to listen to this. I'm sure they have KPIs key performance indicators, right? And I'm sure you deal with plenty of them. Yeah, it's like, Okay, so what's the KPI? What are we measuring? What are we trying to get to? On the other hand, what's the humanness of all of this? And that's the part that I know you can address really well. So my question is, really, how do we use these incentives? How do we use them correctly? And how can it actually help an organization move a transformation or a change initiative? Because, you know, statistics will show Dan, and you know this, of all people, about 93% of all change initiatives fail. They just did right, fail, yeah. I was very talking about it right now,

deeply involved in the change in the merger of ESPN and Disney, and it almost failed, and they, I was brought in to help smooth out some negotiations between the unions and ESPN, because ESPN and the MOU was allowed to stay as a right to work house, whereas Disney as a union house, and the unions were overstepping their browns, and then it was threatening the merger. So we had to work that out with the teams. And that was quite a vetting, a vetting process. But you know, when you start talking about kprs and OKRs, they're different, right? They have different purposes. So you got to know, why am I doing? Why am I tracking this? There's got to be accountability. Who's driving it? What objective is it serving? What are the priorities in those objectives? How do we you know that, and we're constantly revisiting that with our teams, like, Okay, wait a minute. Like, we'll get this. We have this little cheat sheet. It's like, we'll put all the OKRs together and make KPIs involved, etc, and then we put it down. We say, Okay, here's a one page business plan that has the key key components, so that when we meet, we're we're asking ourselves, what part of this is this survey? What and Is it really something that we ought to be calling these people into? And that takes, I don't know most people, for instance, that's just one thing. If I know like tomorrow, I know I'm going into a difficult conversation with this team. I'm preparing for the difficult conversations. I have a good idea going to occur. I don't know how many I know. A lot of the work I do with leaders is just a framework on how to prepare for a difficult conversation, because they're going to make they're going to they're going to address certain APIs that aren't being hit, and they're going to get some pushback. And so now, how do you, how do you deal with that? And then I have a very specific framework, and I've noticed that a lot of leaders, they'll do, they'll just prepare in their head a little bit, but they don't really sit down and think about what they're going to be doing. What is the issue that's at hand? Give an example of that issue. Notice what you experience when that comes up, how you act when this issue arises. How have you contributed to the issue? If the issue continues, what's at stake? What proposals could you make? Them? I like. I prepare all that stuff so that when I'm talking to somebody, I can go on any cat, any rabbit trail, and come back to what I really want to talk about, and then I can hear them, and I get information I didn't have before, which even changes that. So I'm dynamically prepared to stand with them, because otherwise that conversation might take two or three days because I wasn't prepared. And each time I do it, oh shoot, I gotta remember that, and I didn't do this, right? So most people don't take the time to really think out how what they're going to be discussing, the importance of it, and these little elements that if you do, you're going to go a lot farther in that conversation. And often a very difficult I've had multiple leaders say to me, Wow, I thought that was going to take an hour or two. It took 20 minutes, 15 minutes, because we were prepared, and we could listen and communicate. And when you're prepared, you listen much better, right? You're not worried about making your point, because everything's there, and you can learn about what they're seeing, which may change how you talk about what you prepare. Well,

Dan, it always comes back to the the change imperative. And you know, you're saying that everything's got to change. I agree, or you're going to be left behind. You're going to grow, and things are going to help, basically, move forward so you stay the leader with a vision is never held hostage by any circumstances. How can leader or Yeah, and how can leaders maintain a sense of control and confidence when faced with overwhelming resistance that they could come up to now, you just gave a great example of how prepared you are when you go into a meeting. You know you can go down this rabbit hole, bring it back, go down that rabbit hole and bring it back. But not everybody has that skill, and not everybody prepares that. Do you help middle line managers be that efficient at preparing for stuff I

don't work with midline. I work with executive teams, and they work with, if you train the executives, they ought to be training their people, okay? And, and I can. I've done, I've created, like, I created a negotiation class for Disney University for their execs. I've done a number of different things like that. But the idea is, this is a way of thinking, of being, a way of being in the world, right? It's right. It's being a leader, right? So, you know, these things, don't these things are a burden to to an immature leader. They to them. It's like the Cavalier leader. I'll just deal with it, and some of them are good enough to deal with it, but in the long run, you're going to get clipped at some point. And I don't know about you, I've been clipped enough where I'd rather be prepared than sorry that I didn't. You know, I get nervous when I'm not prepared well, because a I see it as a sacred gift to be able to lead people, and a lot of that gift is caring enough about them to be clear with them about what matters in this situation and to learn what matters to them and how that aligns. And I know that what I'm doing with them, if we're working together 40 hours, 50 hours, 60 hours a week, Well, hell, that's sacred. I'm taking time from their family, and this is going to benefit them, and if it's not going to benefit them, I'm I'm really dishonoring, you know, what God's given us. So there's a there's a part of me that's that really wants to connect with and understand how I can best serve the growth of this team and individuals on the team to using what they're aiming at, right, so that when they leave there that benefits them in other aspects of their life.

Well, question for you, you know, I work with a company out of Silicon Valley called solve next, and all they do is teach organizations. I know you might find this interesting, how to innovate under held out by a gentleman by the name of Greg galley. And I've been through all the training called think wrong. One of the trainings is about how to adjust it. So what advice would you give leaders who want to build a culture of continuous innovation rather than just react to change when necessary. Now I've noticed, like, look, we can, we can take an example here, true innovation iteratively. You have iterations. There's an iteration of the iPhone. We're on iPhone 16. That's not a true innovation. That's basically just another iteration of the same phone that's been out there forever. We could say Apple truly hasn't innovated anything other than the goggles in quite some time, and the goggles were huge failure. They haven't done anything. They respect money, right? So the question I have for you is, innovation is completely different than iteration. Companies can iterate themselves down the path as long as they can. How do you helps a leader truly come and put in a team of innovators to work with sales and marketing to make the company

like move forward? Well, that's a big that's a big order,

tough question, but I know you can answer it. You can

it's a psychological thing. I mean, there's a big psychological barrier there, because your biggest enemy is sec is people who are successful and people who are successful. When you're successful, you you know something, and if you know something, you're not looking to innovate. So you know innovation comes when you're curious about what else you could be missing, what else could be next, right? So, you know, there's got to be a psychological confidence where people can say, you know, it's okay to be wrong. Around here, I want to say what I think. I want to be able to communicate what matters most to me, and in a way that it can be heard and challenged, and I'm okay to be challenged. So you want to create that kind of psychological safety, if you will. Or I call it confidence, where people are confident that if they get challenged, it's because it's for the best of them, the outcome for the innovation, but they're

being paid to be curious. Curiosity is something that comes, in my humble opinion, before purpose, before vision, before goals. Curiosity is the first thing that you have that drives an initiative, right? We drive something I want to invent. I've been somebody like you. Probably has just been off the wall curious all my life. You know, people say, Well, you're a podcaster. You did 17 years of this show and to 1200 interviews. Yeah, it's because I'm curious about what people like you have to say and what I can learn, and then apply that learning someplace where it makes sense. So I ask you, if you were sitting in front of a board or a team where they'd kind of lost their curiosity, what might Dan do to invigorate a culture of curious individuals who want to actually innovate? Well,

I want to, I want to understand what what fascinates them, because fascination is the true and proper mother of discipline. So like, what are they actually being fascinated with at the time? Are they being are they fascinated with their success? Are they fascinated with the objective that they're serving? Are they fascinated with the people they're working with, like, what's fascinating? Because whatever you're fascinated with, you get curious about. So at some point, like a great salesperson was, is fascinated with working with people. Then if it starts with, it's kind of a natural human thing. When you start getting successful, you start thinking you know something, and you do, but you stop being fascinated with what else you may not, you may be missing. So I would work with them to see how much they, you know, like they're missing something, if they're not fascinating, if they're not curious, they're missing something. I would inquire into what they might be missing with all of their knowledge. Like, you know, the old tea cups story, you know, that kind of thing, I'd want to I'd want to understand what they think they know, and then I'd want to challenge it and have them see what they're what that what they know, how it blinds them to what they don't even know, they don't know. And if that's a larger Canvas than what I know, and being a father, if you've fathered any kids, you know what I'm talking about. And being married, I'm I'm perpetually amazed at what I don't I never knew about my wife 50 years later. You know, it's pretty amazing. So,

you know, if you can always say, I always say one of the words i i go to meditation retreats on the Orca silence. I've been doing it years with Dr Joel Michelle Levy, who is a couple that actually taught the Green Berets and people to use meditation for purposes even in the military, how well it could help them. But one of the things I learned there was really about something that people don't use this word very often, and it came up as a value for me, which is wonderment. You know, wonderment is such a fascinating term to describe. Are you in love with the world and the wonder that the world brings to you? And I think people can get out of their head and get into their heart and their I don't want to call it their creativeness by looking at the world as a wondrous place. So one of the things you've taught me today, Dan is the different approach that your company and you take and I can see why you've taken it, because of your background. And for all of my listeners, it's take newground.com Please go to this website. It is a very informative website. Meet the Team. Look at their approach, if you would. Because their approach is around candor, clarity and commitment, and it really is truly a great site to learn about the founders, what they stand for. He calls himself a boutique consulting firm, maximizing organizational performance and efficiency, and I can guarantee you that he and his team do that. Every time they take on a client, you'll be able to see the list of clients they've had and put your name in for the free ebook. Download that ebook and do reach out to Dan. You can get you can get to and through there or reserve your spot. The other thing is, they're having this workshop, March 6 through the ninth in Boise, Idaho, if it's not sold out, Dan, I'll encourage my listeners to reserve your spot there. I think it'd be great. So unleash your leadership potential with the Reverend a four day immersive

revenue, revenue process. It's a four day intensive, so don't plan anything else, just

you're going to be immersed, and you're doing it in his hometown. You're going to be in Idaho, and some of his clients are Broadcom and Lulu Lemon and juniper and Nike and Jenny's go there Los Angeles Football Club. Quite a guy. Dan, honor, honor, honor and pleasure to have you. God bless you. Thank you for all the the words of wisdom that you've given to my listeners today. It was great having you on inside personal growth.

Well, thanks for having me. I really enjoyed the great you're you're a great interview. You're fun talking. Our conversations are great. I enjoy them. Thank you. We

could have gone a lot longer, but I'm not certain the listeners could go that long. But I love you, brother. I love

you. Take care. Bless you.