Leading With Authenticity

Hello, everybody. Monday with major. You just came in bold. Hope you're all having a great Monday to start. I'm just gonna wait for a few seconds while we let people dive in and make sure that major gets the appropriate number of pets in a day. I read an article once that said, hi, Luke. Happy Monday. Hello, ta dum. Nice to see you all. My trusted advisor is down here laying on my feet. His name is Major golden retriever Lucas Mutton. I live for Mondays too. Right. So today, leading with authenticity, we're here.

I am simply going to invite you to just take a deep breath as you call in, as you listen on replay. Take 1 second to just take a breath with me. How'd that feel? If you want to take a second, I'll keep talking. The reason why I'm doing that is I, this morning on a Monday, have already taken a spin class and every single call that I've been on has gone late, which means the next one has started late and it's been a race. m. and I feel like I've been racing since I woke up this morning. And in the midst of all of those calls that I've had, I had one exchange with one of my employees.

And it was very authentic and real questioning a choice that I or decision I was making. And it gave me a pause. So in a five minute period of time, I needed to really read through what this information being presented or shared with me, which was vulnerable by my team member, so that I could understand their perspective and take a pause in my own hat to really understand if the decision that I was choosing was the right decision for the team, if I had an unconscious bias of some sort, or there was some other factor that I was just missing.

Now, one of the hats that I wear is I co own an indoor cycling studio. And I get the luxury of working with all of our instructors and our team and the schedules and training all of our team, whether it's onboarding a new person to work at the front of the desk or training somebody to go through the program to become an instructor and then evaluating them. And that's not always an easy hat to wear, pun intended. However, it's an important one, because like all jobs, whether it's a fitness studio, you work in healthcare, you are an entrepreneur, you work in a large corporation.

Any job that you work in, the number most important thing in all of that isn't the to do list that we have to get through it's who's asking us to do the things on the to do list. It's the people that we work with, whether we have different stakeholders, whether we have team members, whether we manage people, whether we are managed by somebody, whether we have a stakeholder. I also wear the hat as a consultant, so at any given point in time, I could have ten people that are my bosses, right? So we wear so many different hats.

But we always will have to make a decision about something, and all of those decisions, at the end of the day, will impact people. And when we go through our days and on a Monday morning, when I'm in back to back meetings, like many of you, we can make decisions really fast, because our brain has neural pathways that we've created based on history to help us make decisions fast. Our brains have done a really good job helping us to survive. Right? Historically, before 2024, our brains were designed to help us make fast decisions so we could survive.

We have pathways in our brain that are like superhighways. We don't even pause anymore. We don't even stop at the stop sign, and we definitely don't play the game monopoly, where we pass go every round. We just skip to where we need to be. And so, as a leader or a team member, it is really important sometimes that when we're flying really fast, making decisions, we can take a pause to really understand what is the impact of the decision that I'm making right now. And the decision I was making was, in the grand scheme of all things, right?

It's about where to put an instructor on a schedule because somebody needs a sub, somebody's taking a day off. Now, I have an instructor who is an incredible instructor on my team, and they teach a lot of classes, and they do a great job with that. So my first instinct is always to say yes to them when they want to take on another class. But I had a pause because I have two instructors on my team that don't have as many classes, who are doing an amazing job and are very new to the team. So my decision is to give the newbies more opportunities to create connections, to practice their trade, to do what we all love to do, which is why we're teaching spin classes.

However, the risk is that I might be deflating somebody on my team who is anxiously awaiting to always do more. And I never want to deflate that, that passion, that energy, that excitement. And so I had a pause before I made my final decision. And this person courageously and vulnerably shared how they were feeling by not being selected to sub certain classes because I asked them, hey, I might choose to do this decision, and here are my reasons why. Is that cool? And they said, yeah, I understand, but I feel like I'm now not the first person on the list because at one point in time, they were new to the team and they were first on the list when I needed somebody to fill in a gap because they needed experience.

And sometimes we forget what it was like when we were brand new. So, as leaders, we have so many moments in our day where we can make decisions with the superhighway in our brain, and sometimes our instinct, our gut, is going to tell us, wait a second. Before you hit send, there's something else you need to consider. What is it? And in those moments, whatever role you play, whether you are a colleague, an entrepreneur, a boss, an employee, whatever role you're playing in that moment, we can all take a pause, because on the other side of whatever that is that we're going to hit send on, there's a human that is going to receive whatever it is that we are about to say.

Now, not all decisions are happy decisions, and not all moments are moments that we can take a pause and think and reflect. And then sometimes we just have to deal with what happened on the other side. Oh, wow. That's not what I intended. So here's what happened in this two way interaction with my team member about them being very vulnerable with me. I gave them a response with some information. They gave me another response, and then they sent me a voice memo, and they said, hey, listen, we're talking two dimensionally.

That's not how we usually talk. I'm sending you a voice memo to let you know I'm in a good place. I understand why you have to make the decisions that you make. I just am having a moment today, and I just needed to share, and I gotta tell you what, that literally lit me up in the most positive way, because we were able to be vulnerable with each other, to understand each other's perspectives and say, here's how I feel about that decision or about this moment, so that tomorrow, when the same thing comes up, each of us can approach it and understand each other's perspectives differently.

So I picked up the phone and I called them, and we had a nice conversation. And then I learned some more things of things that I just didn't understand. It's a luxury to have that opportunity. It's a luxury to be able to take that time and hit the pause button before we move too fast through the superpowers and the superhighways that are in our brains when we are uncomfortable in situations, when we are new to a position, new to making a decision, new to a job, a company, a role that superhighway hasn't formed yet.

So sometimes we take more pauses, because in those moments, if you think about our brain as a road, and we stay with that analogy when we're trying new things, it's like walking over grass. And you know, when you're taking that walk with your dog or you're in a new city and you see a path that's starting to form, where the dirt is starting to take over the grass because so many people have walked on that path. That's how our brain works. So we struggle through it, we start to crack open those seeds, those nuggets of decision making, those ideas, those concepts, because we just haven't had enough of a challenge yet to work our way through.

And then eventually we've done this pattern, this repetition, so much that it starts to become second nature. And we lay down concrete. And then eventually it just becomes third nature for us or fourth nature for us. And it's the superhighway in our brain where we don't even have to think because past experiences have gotten us to where we are today. And we remember really fast and we decide and react and go. I find that we have the greatest opportunity for us to stretch our abilities when we are on.