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Camille Rapacz: Welcome back, George.
George Drapeau: Hey, we saw each other recently and that was great. It was, it was a really good time. And we did, the weather could not have been better.
Camille Rapacz: And we don't tell anybody we're having perfect weather in the Pacific Northwest. Don't tell anybody. And yeah, and we did zero podcast things while you were here, which was probably the best thing.
George Drapeau: I guess so. Although, you know, I, when I came home, I thought, wait, why didn't we sit together and do a podcast episode? We would've been so cute.
Camille: / Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful business.
I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
Camille Rapacz: /And now we're back in podcast land. You did get a little time off while I did some mini episodes of my own, which was kind of fun, but not nearly as fun as recording with you. And today we need to do a little celebrating because this is officially our 52nd episode, which means we've been podcasting for a year.
George Drapeau: That blows me away.
Camille Rapacz: I know, me too. We are at the one year mark, which also kind of blows me away, but it's good because I feel like, wow, that went fast. It wasn't, it was hard, but not hard. You know what I mean?
Like I do, I I could definitely see how it keep going, but I was curious. I mean, I have all of my own business-y learnings from it, but I was curious, what's been the most interesting or maybe unexpected for you about doing this podcast together over the last year?
George Drapeau: I was gonna say that I learned that I, I do better with shorter episodes and longer episodes, but I don't get to say that.
Camille Rapacz: Well, I mean, you haven't done episode by yourself. That's a different thing.
George Drapeau: One thing that has very little to do with the podcast, but it's a reflection on time, is, you know, I'm losing track of time much more easily than I used to. And I, it's, I don't think it's my age. I think it's covid. Since Covid, I've lost years. Like if I have a memory of something that I think is a year ago, it's usually at least two.
It's three years ago. It's four to five years ago. And related to that, it doesn't feel like we've been doing this for a year. If you ask me, pop your head without thinking, how long you been doing this? Six months. Maybe eight. I would not have not have said a year. The time is just different.
Camille Rapacz: Agreed. I have the same experience with time and also related it to, since Covid, I Can't I go what that was too, no, wait. I think that was, yeah, just warped time somehow and I, I, I can't fix it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Agreed.
George Drapeau: So, when we started out, we were, I mean, we were talking about how we both see management and leadership issues in different contexts. We'd have fun sharing stories and talking about that. And then you had this idea for the podcast, and this angle seemed like fun. I'm not sure, I would've imagined we'd have 50 plus topics so easily. I mean that, I would just say the audience, it's a credit to you that you've created all this stuff and if people could see all the work that you've done and all the prep you've done is phenomenal. Nonetheless, that we had this many different topics to talk about fairly easily. It actually surprises me.
It does. I would've thought, yeah. We've got, we've got a couple stories. We'll have a couple of topics and then I'm gonna be grasping for straws, but that is not how it's been, it's not been difficult talking with you about, any of these topics. I dunno if that makes sense.
Camille Rapacz: It does and also doesn't because you and I never have trouble finding topics to talk about.
George Drapeau: That's true. Yeah. And even if, if we, why should I be surprised?
Camille Rapacz: But, even if we put it into this narrow bucket of let's just talk about work, there's always a story that leads to some interesting, you know, discussion. Not even just us telling a story that's just complaining about work, but it always leads into some more, you know, philosophical or principle-based conversations.
So what does that mean? Like, we always end up going there, so in a way I'm not surprised. And so we'll see if after this next year of podcasting what you think, because i, in some ways do also get a little surprised when I look at the list of topics that I have for us. I think, holy moly, I, there is kind of no end to what we could talk about here.
So they also say that's a good sign of a podcast that you just never tire of talking about your topic. So, That's good for us.
George Drapeau: Yeah, that is good for us.
Camille Rapacz: But I have found that you know, doing, doing this work, being able to create meaningful content for people is definitely work, but also some of the most fun work that I've ever gotten to do.
Having a reason to really go research a topic that I, a topic that I feel I, so every topic we pick, I feel like, yeah, I know about that topic. This is a chance to learn a little bit more to just level up or see what other people are saying about it. And I just love that I have that opportunity to do that, which I don't always get in all of my work.
George Drapeau:
Yeah. Yeah.
So
Camille Rapacz: I love that I've been able to have that opportunity to do it. And then of course, mostly I just love that I get brother sister time, which is you know, on stuff maybe a few times a year we get time when we can break away and talk about stuff like this.
But it's been really fun to be able to do it so often. I feel like, wow, I really kind of know more about what's going on in George's life than I otherwise would. So. Oh, interesting. That's fun.
George Drapeau: Hmm. That is that, that reminds me. That's definitely big a gift for me. I have a much better sense of your business just from doing this 'cause I hear about this. I love that. It's great. Makes me think I should do a podcast with your husband too, although you have a pretty good sense of what's going on with him.
Camille Rapacz: I mean, we can just bring him as a guest on the pod and then you can just find out.
So, yes, it, it also is interesting as I try to strike the balance of, well, it's just fun to talk about these topics and I find topics that I wanna talk to you about.
And then I always have to think, wait, does my audience care about that? I better make sure everybody else wants to hear about this. So if we've ever had episodes that you guys are like, why the heck are they talking about this? We apologize, but it just might be, let us know. It might be part of the deal that you just got into by listening to our podcast.
So happy anniversary, one year podcast.
George Drapeau: Happy anniversary.
And congratulations, Camille, truly. Oh, thank you. Making this happen. It's impressive.
Camille Rapacz: Well, thanks for doing it with me. I definitely wouldn't have done it otherwise. I didn't really see a path to doing it that I could sustain, so thanks.
George Drapeau: That's cool.
Camille Rapacz: So today I do have a good topic for us.
George Drapeau: What's that?
Camille Rapacz: It is leading yourself or self-leadership, whatever you wanna call it. Huh? So here's where this comes from. Okay. so we all know that if you're gonna raise the performance of a business of your organization, it really comes down to good leadership.
So leadership, they're setting the direction, they're establishing the systems that run the business. They're determining the culture. All of the underpinnings of success sort of lie with leadership. But when it comes to leadership, I find a lot of focus on what's happening externally to the leader and not enough on what's going in on internally.
And so there's these layers of leadership that you've probably heard. So one is, you know, you need to be good at leading yourself. Then you can think about leading others. And then the third, the sort of next advanced level of that is then leading other leaders or leading an organization.
Yeah. So there's first yourself, then there's others, and then there's the bigger picture leading the organization.
George Drapeau: May I interject something here? Yeah. So this, I don't think this is gonna change the the layering, but what this brings to mind is, so my last company at Red Hat, red Hat was probably one of the, Two or three best companies in the world are doing open source software, which is all about dealing with communities.
And the way they do it is, I mean, I could whole episodes about how Red Hat did it and merging, you know, hippies and suits together there. When we talk about promoting people within Red Hat, part of the promotion criteria talks about this kind of scope, but also includes participation in communities. So not just internal, but external.
I'm not even gonna say organizations. That's what brought it to mind. Communities, like loose bands of people who are volunteer armies of, of folks doing stuff that you wouldn't really call an organization by the standard definition we think of, but they are a group of people and leadership of those is hugely important to Red Hat.
And it's a different angle than thinking about leading a structured organization. I don't think it's different, but I just wanted to add that thought in there. You know,
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, it seems like it kinda lies between the leading others and organizations, like there's a community leadership aspect.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah. Yeah. It's enormous. Yeah. Yeah. I think it still fits into this, you know, this idea yeah. Of you're, you're going through these layers of leadership, I guess is the best way I can think of it, right?
George Drapeau: Yes. I love that. Love it.
Camille Rapacz: So I wanted to talk about this today because, well, I think it's, we don't talk about it enough, right?
We talk a lot about just leadership of. The typical things we think of when it comes to mostly leading others. Right. So that's the emphasis that I see mostly out in the world and not a lot about leading self. Or if we do, we might think about it in terms of just, well, that's just personal development, but I don't even know if it's just that, like, I think we sort of diminish it by just saying it's just that.
So it's an area I think just easily gets either overlooked or underappreciated.
Yes, sir. From the audience. Yeah. People can't see raising your hand on the podcast because we're audio only today. I know. Audio only. I'm person in the back. I'm what? This, that I'm doing head exploding. Yeah. Head exploding emoji.
George Drapeau: Yes. So and you know, this is interesting. I, this is one of the things I was gonna ask you about this, honestly, about the difference between self-leadership and like personal. And stuff, and it reminds me there's a long time ago I took a course. It was based on Stephen Covey's principles, and the course was called Time Management and Personal Leadership.
It was called that time management and personal leadership. Their angle is very much like, and two separate, but related concepts like the, the course was for meant for people who were horrible at managing their time, and I was horrible at managing my time and wanted to be more structured about it. But the whole, once you got in there, the angle was very much about self-leadership and time management was one aspect of that. It was totally, once you get it was like we were tricked, like we're baited and switched. I'm like, I'm gonna learn how to schedule myself better. I was like, oh, whoa, whoa. What? What do you mean write your epitaph first? But it was, it was great.
Totally worked this way. So I wanted to ask you how you differentiate, like self-improvement from personal leadership. If that makes sense.
Camille Rapacz: Yes. Well, let's get into the definition of what it means to lead yourself and then flush that out, because I do think that it's yeah, I think it can be a little bit tricky and it might just be more about the way that the language has taken on its own meanings today.
Mm-hmm. So, I'll, I'll hold, I'm gonna hold that for later for a minute, but great question.
So this idea of self-leadership. What I find is that companies will sort of fairly easily invest in people in, in leadership development programs, right?
Mm-hmm.
But there can often be this lack of investment in being a better individual, you know, leading of self. And I think it's partly we look at it as well, that's their personal development that they own. That's true. Yeah. But as an organization, I think you have a responsibility to make sure that that's an expectation that's clearly set, that there is a space for that to happen. And I think we miss out when we skip that step and go straight to just how do you lead other people?
Hmm. Because what I find that does is it just creates a lot of tension. I don't wanna, I don't wanna jump ahead. I'm about to jump ahead, so I'm just gonna say that for now. So determining, so, so let's just talk about what self-leadership is. Okay. So what does it mean to lead yourself?
Self-leadership is this idea that you're, you understand who you are.
You are identifying with what are, what are your desired experiences, so what do you want? Mm-hmm. And that you're intentionally guiding yourself towards those experiences that you want. And so it sort of spans this concept of, you know, what we do, why we do it, and how we do it. Mm-hmm. Sounds pretty personal, developmenty, right?
Yeah.
But what does it mean to you? So I'm curious what it means to you in practical terms, George.
George Drapeau: Okay. I'm gonna have to work hard on this one because I will tell the audience in cheating. I saw show notes and I saw these words, and when I read 'em, I'm like, yeah, that's, that's how I feel about it. Dammit.
But I'm gonna bring in an AVI story. Okay, good. And the Avi story, I hope will illustrate how I think about self-leadership.
Camille Rapacz: And if you're new to the podcast, Avi is George's son.
George Drapeau: Wonderful son, 90% of the time, he's seven and a half years old .
So Avi, the relationship to self-leadership, I feel that as a parent, I have two jobs and I would love to get feedback on the podcast where you guys feel like I'm missing the boat or how you think about it differently or if it resonates with you.
But the two jobs are, first, the first and most important job is to help our son to help Avinash understand himself. What that means is learning how to explore himself and his world, give him tools that he can do, self reflection, self-exploration, and figure it out. So figure out who he wants to be in in the world his whole life now and as he gets older, give him tools for self-exploration. Get to himself.
The second job is to. Let him know that I get him, that I understand him. So doing what I can to try to understand him, pay attention to him, see what kind of a person he is, not what I want him to be, but who he actually is, and let him know that I understand that.
If he gets the latter, if he grows up knowing that his parents get him, then he's gonna have confident attachment to people in general. He will always know that he's not alone. There's somebody in the planet who understands who he is, and that will give him great inner confidence.
People who have that sort of connection have that. Just read Harry Potter. If you wanna understand Harry Potter versus Voldemort. That's all you need to see for that. And then for the first time, it's true though. For the first thing helping him understand himself. I strongly believe that if you have the tools to reflect and explore, and you're not afraid of all the things that go with understanding yourself, to me that is personal leadership.
There's a bunch of tools that go with that. Am I able to reflect? Am I able to honestly evaluate myself? Am I able to understand who I am and what I want? So I'm just basically now repeating your words and then do I understand what it takes for me to get there? Because different people get there in different ways.
Do I understand how I do it and how I can best execute? To me, that's what self-leadership means, and so to me, to simplifying, if I oversimplify it, I think about job as a parent to get Avi to understand himself. That's the basic. Everything else flows from that right and wrong. Interacting with other people and all that stuff.
Okay. That's what it means in practical terms. To me, that's my best, best way of basically repeating what you said because I completely agree with what you said.
Camille Rapacz: You are welcome to always agree with what I say and repeat it, especially if it involves a story about Avi.
Good to know.
Okay. I mean, because it also is great because it really does put it into perspective of like, this is really what we're talking about.
Right. And it starts at a very young age. But I think the important part here is we should never stop doing that. Yeah. And at some point we just end up having to do it for ourselves. Like our parents aren't helping us do it. You're trying to build those capabilities for him now. Right.
So he knows how to do this. Yeah. As a lifelong skill teaching. And it gets back to the idea of just, you know, this what we talked about before, this continuous learning, continuous improvement mindset. Mm-hmm. Of, I'm always on this journey, I'm always focusing on this level of development. And it's easy for us to, as we mature, start to look outside of ourselves and stop looking internally.
Right. We sort of. Maybe think we've got this, or for whatever reasons, there's, it also gets more complicated what we're dealing with externally. So maybe it seems like it needs more of our attention. Yeah, and so I bring this up because I think it's just something that we all need to be reminded of. That is part of the journey of being a good business owner or business leader means you've gotta be doing the work of, how do I become better at self-leadership at leading myself, not just leading my team or leading my business or leading, you know, whatever you're in charge of. So, yep. Something I think is important to distinguish here is that and it, what I talked about this in a prior episode, so an episode, it was one of the, the summer shorts episodes I did on what is leadership, where I talked about management versus leadership.
Yeah. And there is self-management and self-leadership also. And when we think about, say, time management, we're thinking about self-management. How am I managing myself? Yes. But there's also self-leadership, which is really about setting myself some long-term goals and aspirations and those what, like what direction do I wanna go?
What, what, who am I aspiring to be kind of thing, right? Yes. That's more about self leadership. So I just call that out because they think that, It's important to distinguish between the two, but also know that good, self-leadership requires good self-management skills. Hmm. And the better you are at self-management, the better leader you can be.
Okay, so self-management, you're organizing and executing on tasks and how well am I doing that? And self-leadership, you're really saying, what, what are my values? Am I working in alignment to them? And am I working with in integrity in that way? And am I choosing to expand and learn both externally about skills, but also internally about myself because I myself am also changing as life goes on.
So assuming I got this and I know who I am is also kind of foolish. 'cause we are, we are, you know, as human beings we're always changing. So, you know, sort of, oh yeah, I used to think that way and now I think this, that happens. Right.
George Drapeau: Interesting. And brings up a philosophical question that I will throw out there and not talk about.
You know, a lot of people say people don't really change. I actually don't know where I sit. I do not wanna, I don't want to believe that, but I get the point when people say, yeah, people don't really change. They are who they are. Yeah. But I agree with what you're saying. We, we are different over time.
How I am, how I think about the world now is not how I thought about the world when I was a teenager. Oh my goodness. No. Mm-hmm. I don't know. Maybe you and I can talk about it either in another podcast or just separately outside. Yeah, but I believe you, I totally agree with you. We we're, have different angles or different attitudes in different points of time and so to, yeah, that's, that's awesome, Camille to think that you can kind of figure it out once and be done and never, and stop improving or stop change that's, you're not serving yourself well.
Yes.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. This might be served well in an episode that I wanna do on all the personality tests that we use for leadership development really. Yes, because I have strong opinions, so I'm gonna save that for later. There
George Drapeau: really, you have strong opinions. I'm shocked.
I have strong opinions about that. So yes, we need to to, because I think that that's related to do we change or do we not change over time?
Camille Rapacz: Okay. So holding that out separately, but great. Yeah. Yes. I mean, this does bring up all sorts of great questions like that, which is also why I love these topics. Mm-hmm. But to not turn this into a two hour episode. Let's just focus on this self-leadership aspect. Sounds good.
So when we thought, think about self-leadership includes developing self-awareness, which in a way can be, I think one of the hardest things to do is being self-aware of how am I showing up in the world and what, you know, these are hard things to do, but you can learn how to do this, developing self-awareness.
Setting clear goals. Practicing self-regulation, like am I, am I managing myself and my reactions and my emotions? Funny, I'm just thinking about the story you told me before we started the pod about your friend. Self-regulation could be a challenge for her, right? Yeah. Time management skills, decision making, self-motivation, adaptability, initiative, self-discipline, continuous learning, self-reflection, and seeking support in membership.
So this is just a big list of things that you consider in the, am I developing my self leadership skills? Those are the types of topics that you would take on. And, you know, part of the really starts with the self-awareness is what, where you can't work on all of those all at one time. So where should I focus in any given moment?
So that is self-leadership.
George Drapeau: Awesome. I mean, that list itself is fantastic.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. And you know, maybe overwhelming. As I was reading it, I was like, this is a long list, but I think they're all important for us to consider. I like to think of it in this way. If you look at the list and you think, wow, that's a really long that, that's a lot of work.
Mm-hmm.
Instead, I like to flip it around to, well, I am never gonna be bored. There's always some aspect here that I can work on and think about and explore. And like, thinking of it as I have this discussion with my clients a lot about, think about what we're doing as a, it's a journey. You're not trying to, you know, just get to a destination and be done.
We don't want to ever be done. We always wanna be, when it comes to learning, we
always wanna be on the journey of learning. And you know you're doing it well when the more you've learned, the more you realize there is yet to learn. You know, that experience, like I've learned something. Yeah. And then it just opened up a, oh my goodness.
There's all this other stuff for me to learn yet. Oh yeah. And I love when I work with people who get excited, like their mindset is, holy cow. And then they're just excited to keep going. Go further, go further, learn more.
George Drapeau: Me too. Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: And that's when you know you're also doing work that suits you is that you have that energy to, I wanna learn more about this, I wanna learn more about that.
That's a, that's a great space to be in. Right. We don't always have that in our work, but when you can make those aligned, yay.
George Drapeau: Yeah. Awesome.
Camille Rapacz: Okay, so that's what self-leadership is. Hmm. Now you can see in there, back to your question about, you know, personal development. Mm-hmm. Sure. There's a lot of personal development stuff in there.
The reason I like the self-leadership term better is, I don't think it's necessarily that it's that different from personal development as much as I think it's about what it leads you toward. So when I think about self-leadership, I think about what that means in terms of what happens when I lack self-leadership in the context of my business and what I do. Okay. So personal development can be for anything. When I think about what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to elevate the performance of a business which relies on good leadership. And good leadership is leading self, leading others, leading the organization.
If you think of self-leadership as it is in service to elevating my leadership into these other areas, or I guess advancing or whatever words you wanna use, I'm moving through right from self-leadership to leading others to leading the organization. I need to be a good self leader if I'm gonna do those other things.
So here's, here's what maybe would be a good question for you, George, to think about this. Can you think of, so you, you've worked with tons of leaders in your experience. Yeah. And you have probably run into plenty of leaders who were running large teams of people, but you could tell that that leader didn't have strong self-leadership skills.
No. I'm wondering if you have a good example of that. I have. I have some versions of this that I can share as well, but I wonder if you can think of good examples where you're like, wow, they just weren't really good at leading themselves, and they might have actually been a fairly good team leader, but you could see where their self-leadership was lacking and there's an impact of that, right?
George Drapeau: Yeah. This is great. Wow. So I'm flashing back. To, I've never thought about it from this angle before. This is really cool. I'm definitely gonna spend time thinking about this while I'm running because I want to, I wanna think about this in more depth. What's happening right now is I'm thinking about leaders I've seen who I think are like, they are effective in some ways at getting stuff done or leading a, changing a team, doing, having a lot of mechanics of management, but not great leaders and like they're not in.
Where I'm gonna go with this is I'm gonna make a connection between the concept of you can't really fully love somebody else until you love yourself properly. And I'm gonna make that analogy here. You can't really lead others until you learn how to lead yourself properly. And if that's true, and I don't know if it is, but if it's true, then yeah, I got a bunch of people I can think of who clearly don't lead themselves well.
'cause they don't self-reflect. So I can think of one guy who does not reflect about how he was seen by others, and so he would just go and do stuff or have expectations for a team. Set goals reasonably clearly, but was chaotic, was not inspiring, was not good for morale, for people who didn't really think about how to grow the capabilities of this team. All these other things that went wrong. We just kind of knew how to get stuff done and knew how to hire and fire and organize a team. But I don't think of that as leadership really. That's just all the mechanics of what he needed in his organization. Yeah, absolutely.
Management and not leadership. So I, yeah, by this definition, I can think of some people. Who are not good leaders. I'm, there's one guy who comes to mind, two people who come to mind immediately, who I think were excellent self leaders, and I love them as managers. My first manager out of college, out outta school in my first job, that guy, super self-reflective, super clear about who he was in the world.
\ So that's, you're asking me one thing, I'm answering kind of the opposite. Can I think of somebody who clearly you could see, oh yeah, you're good at leading yourself. And I could see how that's made you a better leader. Yeah. Wow. Okay. I gotta think more on this. This is an awesome, awesome question. Where are you going with this?
Camille Rapacz: Well, so where I'm going with this is I think one of the things that I have found most frustrating in my experience with leaders is just the hypocrisy of leaders that are expecting their teams to be one way and they're doing it another.
Oh, interesting.
And it's this frustration of, as a coach, when I go into help leadership teams improve, that I can see the leader as clearly not living up to the standards that they want for their team, but they're not. Mm-hmm. They're not asking me to help them be better. They're asking me to help their team be better, but it's actually them that needs to be better first.
Yeah. Because their team can clearly see it, even if they can't put it into this context of what, you know, they can, they're frustrated by the way that their leader is leading. Yeah. And usually those leaders are, they're getting away with it because they are also high performers in other areas. Yeah.
So maybe they do hit their numbers every, every quarter. Right. Oh yeah. But the way they're doing it is also so, so their team's like, yay, we're winning. But also, I'm kind of miserable because, yeah, I had to work all these super long hours and my boss wasn't really clear about all of the expectations of what I needed to do, or the goal kept shifting in order for us to hit that market. It was really frustrating that we kept getting redirected all the time and. There's all these different ways that we can go about hitting these goals, and some of them are really debilitating to a team, to a team, being able to be a high performing team, and this is what leads to some people just exit out.
They're like, I don't wanna work in this environment. I'm out. So you end up with high turnover or just frustrated teams that are burning out and they start to make mistakes. So I see this as well where teams are, they get these big projects and they just, they cannot follow through on them because they don't have the fundamentals of leading this effort through.
And so they make a lot of mistakes along the way, and that costs the business money. So there's all these places where I think this, it really comes down to me of the frustration of I, I don't know, think that teams necessarily could put this word on it, but I think if they took this word and thought about it, they'd go, that's what it is.
Which is just, I feel like my leader is being a bit of a hypocrite by expecting us to deliver an X way, but they get a pass, right? Yeah. So like classic examples I see are time management. Everybody should be on time and get their work done efficiently. Mm-hmm. And yet I as the leader, am too busy to follow that rule.
Yeah. I get to be late, I get to come in late and leave early. I get to like, I get a pass on sort of what I, I don't, I don't have to do it the way the rest of the team does it. Right. Yeah. Same with the seeking of support and mentorship. So this is the example I started with, which is, At a certain point, you know, these leaders, they're so focused on getting their teams to perform better that they forget that it actually starts with them learning to lead better and asking like, coach me on how to coach my team to be better.
Yeah. That rarely happens. Yeah. So this is where I'm going with it.
George Drapeau: Okay. I, I totally buy that You're bringing to mind. Something else that I hadn't thought until just now and I can think of a couple of examples of managers who are not great leaders, but they genuinely want to be and they try hard, but they haven't been given tools for soap leadership, so they don't have their own personal, like the good people.
And I've been thinking kind of negatively about this, but no, I definitely know people who like fantastic intent. I hear them talk to me in the past about what they've wanted do, and I'm just like, oh, look, I, I'm gonna work with you 'cause I can see you wanna be a good leader and I can see you. Just don't, yeah.
Get they haven't started with themselves. Yeah.
Camille Rapacz: Oh yeah, 100%. I mean, I think if you're gonna be a good leader of a team, the place you start is do, does every individual on my team understand what self-leadership is, and do they have the tools to improve that for themselves? Hmm, right. Cool. Do they know how to work on this?
So, you know, even if you're talking about the basic things of like, oh, let me help you with some time management skills, or decision making skills, or whatever that is that they need work on. Mm-hmm. I do think that this is the space that organizations overlook as being really important, which is how do I create in all of my employees, especially my up and coming leaders who do have a lot of high potential, but just maybe haven't been given this chance. Mm-hmm. The opportunity to learn. And so this is why I also like to call it self-leadership, because personal development always seems to be something that is just, it's put upon you to just go figure out for yourself.
Oh, I see.
And I think organizations do themselves a disservice by just expecting that to happen instead of setting the expectation and creating some level of support for it. Now, I don't think organizations should own this. Individuals need to own their development. But it's a two-way street, and the organization will benefit so much if they just do some small things to let employees know how important that is to them.
It's important that you develop yourself. It will lead to being in service to our overall leadership being better leadership for the organization than being better. Mm-hmm. And it's shortsighted to not think of it in that way.
George Drapeau: Cool. Yeah, I like that. Okay.
Camille Rapacz: So now that begs the question, how do you do it?
George Drapeau: How do you do it?
Camille Rapacz: Do you have ways that you either have in the past or do work on self-leadership for yourself?
George Drapeau: I have a yes, but I'm not sure that I have a system that I could describe to you right now. I can think of a couple of principles I have, which is I, I have this philosophy that life only becomes harder, which sounds like it's pessimistic, but it's not.
I mean, there are things about your life that are gonna get harder. You're gonna become less physically abled as you get older. And so things you could do, you can't do. You have to work harder to do it. There's the new challenges as you go from a child to an adult. You learn about managing your finances and getting married and all that stuff.
There's a continuing set of challenges that life presents you as you keep doing it, as you keep living. And if that's true, then. How I think of myself is I always have to be learning is going back to your point. We both believe in self-improvement, continuous improvement, continuous learning. So probably my core principle is to always be learning.
I can always be learning something, even if I don't focus on what it is. That's good. But I do try to focus on learning something that's relevant to my context. Now. I'm reading a book right now that's gonna help me learn about how to onboard myself in my new role at the company. You know, it's something that's gift from my wife, which is great. She knows this about me too.
I think about reviewing from time to time, where am I? My core attributes, relationship, health, job, emotional stability, and what can I be doing to make sure those are on track? Or what am I doing to keep those healthy? That's a good start for me. And so that gives me different kinds of things to think about.
How do I think about my health, my physical health plan? Start from there and go from high level to detailed, you know, what are my goals on a week by week basis? Same thing with career, what's my overall career plan? I'm on track and I pay the least attention to that, which is bad. So I guess my answer here is, first of all, I have a mindset of continuous learning, which happens to suit me well 'cause I like learning. But it's, it's helpful. And I guess my other thing is I evaluate from time to time, where am I in the key areas of my life, and am I keeping myself on track? And if I'm not, what kinds of things should I be doing to keep myself on track? I think I have all these, I do all these things that you have in the list, but they're not explicit, and seeing them in an explicit list is great.
It's the kind of thing that I could go at the beginning of each year, at the end of each year and say, okay. How many of these things am I really paying attention to? If not this, this great checklist. I'll stop there. What about you?
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, I if I'm doing it well, then I do have more of a system that I like to think of.
Of course. 'cause that's how my brain works, of course. And so I think of it like this. So I'm actually gonna share what I, my ideal approach is when I'm doing it well, I'm not always doing this well. I think we all sort of fluctuate in and out of doing this well. Yeah. But I'm gonna answer with also my, what I recommend people think to do to improve their self-leadership.
So the first one is to really decide on an area to work on. And so you can consider areas that you either want to improve for yourself or your team for whatever that is. There's there's an area that you wanna work on in general, and then you translate that into what's my area of self-leadership that supports this.
So you can pull from that list that I gave, which I will drop in the show notes, that whole list. You can sort of think about it. So maybe your team, you know, your company is working on a lot of changes and so maybe you think, gosh, I really wanna work on my adaptability. How am I gonna be more adaptable to the changes that are coming?
'cause change can be really stressful. And as a leader, you wanna demonstrate what you want for the organization, which is to be highly adaptable to this changing situation. Okay. So say you think about that. So once you figure out the area to work on, then you can move into the, okay, well now I gotta learn more about this.
So maybe I need to understand what does it even look like to be a highly adaptable leader or individual? And you start, so I start to take in information. I might look for podcasts or books. Like you said, you're reading a book on this topic so you can learn some ideas about how to do it better. So I start taking in lots of different information and I like to take in lots of perspectives so I can start to get to the underlying theme that I need to understand. Then come up with some experiments to see what's gonna work for me. Like start trying some things out. Oh, I think this is a great idea. This really fits for me. I'm gonna try this, I'm gonna try that. I, I never prescribed the idea that you would take any one book and follow it step by step, because I don't think that that is ever fully there's no one solution that fits for everybody. That's just never the case. Usually these books will have all of these, you know, steps and you'll find like half of them might be useful or a third of them might be useful to you.
And then the third step is to really figure out what kind of support do I need? Do I need a mentor, a coach, a consultant, or a teacher to help me along the path?
'cause we all need help with this. So thinking that you can do personal development or develop yourself leadership skills without some extra help. Mm-hmm. I think is a mistake. Everybody needs a little bit of help. And my previous episode to this talks about those four methods of help so you can get a better understanding.
So if you didn't listen to that, go back and listen to episode 51, which is about teaching, consulting coaching and mentoring, and what's the difference. So you can think about what type of help might I need? But improving yourself without somebody to serve as like that mirror or that guide for you in these areas, it's really gonna slow you down and it's just gonna limit your abilities because yeah, it takes a village is actually true.
The other way I like to think of this that I would add in is a, like a bonus way to think of it to think of seasons of learning. So maybe this season, this quarter , I'm focusing on a topic.
That just is interesting to me that I've been intending, maybe I don't have an urgency around something to learn, but I do want to be in a continuous learning mindset, so maybe it's a skill that I wanna improve on, or maybe it's a personal development, self-leadership aspect that I wanna, learn about and I just have a season of, of learning about that.
George Drapeau: I love that concept.
Camille Rapacz: Like we said, you can't learn all of those things all at the same time. So I do actually have a season of learning coming up where I really wanna focus on the idea of decision making. Wow.
We've had some discussions on this and I wanna learn more about different ways that people are thinking about decision making. So I'll start reading books and taking in information on this topic. I also find it helpful because if I bounce around to different topics, it's hard for the knowledge to stick with me.
Mm-hmm. So I have to stick with a topic for a while to really kind of let it settle in. Yeah. So seasons of learning can be helpful for that too.
George Drapeau: That makes a lot of sense to me. Too much context is switching really disrupts your ability for learning to sink in. Yeah. That's awesome, huh. Cool. Pro tip. Yeah, I like that a lot.
Camille Rapacz: Any last thoughts about self-leadership?
George Drapeau: I really like this topic. I like that you distinguishing self-leadership from, you know, personal management. 'cause they're related but different. They can play off each other. I just, I like this, I like the layers that you mentioned of these three layers of leadership that's really important and a very simple framework itself.
Others and leaders or other organizations. In big enterprise business, that tends to map to kind of promotion criteria in big companies too. Yeah. So you think about this, you're on your way toward setting up yourself for promotions at companies. Yeah. This is great.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, I think if that's something you're looking at in your organization, you have to think of all three of these layers all the time. So if you're thinking, hey, I really wanna be better at, you know, thinking about setting the direction, setting a vision, like I really wanna get to that level of leadership in my mm-hmm company because I wanna become a director or a vp or even as a business owner, you have to do this if you're just running a small business.
You've gotta be able to set a direction and have a vision, starting with yourself is the best place to start. Well, well, how would I do that for myself first? Can I get good at doing that within my own life? Yeah. And then start thinking about applying it to the business. But, any topic that applies to leading of others and you know, leading of teams, leading of organizations, you can absolutely put into the context of leading yourself.
And that is the challenge to everybody listening. All right. That's all I have for this week's episode.
George Drapeau: That's great. Congratulations again on the one year anniversary. Nicely done.
I'm looking forward to this next year with you making possible.
Camille Rapacz: I know we got lots of fun stuff to talk about.
Yeah, we do. We gotta, the only thing I wanna improve on is we didn't have as many guests as I really wanted to have. Yeah. My plan was to have more guests. So I'm really gonna try and ramp that up because man I've been meeting a lot more great people lately.
I've been networking more. So I've got some people teed up that I wanna have on the podcast that I think are gonna bring great insights and stories. And so more of that to come as well. 'cause you know, there's only so much that can come out of our two little brains.
George Drapeau: That's true. I gotta tell you, I was disappointed when Oprah turned us down, but I realize she's busy. I get it. Maybe next year.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, whatcha gonna do? Maybe next year. Alright, well thanks everybody for hanging out with us. If you're loving the podcast, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, but more importantly, just share it with people you know who might wanna learn more about leadership and high performance businesses.
If you have any questions or you have topics for us, or you just wanna say hi, you can leave us a voicemail. Mm-hmm. At the belief shift.com. There's a little widget thing on the side of the website there where you can just click and leave us a quick voicemail. And lastly, I need to do a better job of this.
So starting now, I'm gonna do a better job of reminding people, telling people that there is a faster path to improvement than just listening to the podcast, which is to do a free consultation with me. Cool. So you can go to my website. There will be a link in the show notes where you can book a free consultation.
It's a one hour call with me where we'll just chat about what your challenges are and figure out your next path forward. What's most important about this, I think, is people sometimes don't do this because they think they're not ready yet. They're not ready to hire their coach, or they're not ready to hire their consultant.
And I encourage you to do this before you're ready so you know what it takes to get ready, whether that's setting a budget or deciding on what your first focus area is gonna be, or any pre-work you wanna do before that. So it's actually a great thing to do before you are ready. So, Make that free consultation 'cause so that means everybody, everybody who's listening, they have no excuse to not make this free consultation call.
How's that for marketing? I don't know. That's great. What my marketing consultant would think about that, but free maybe I'll ask her. Free. That's the part Free. Free but valuable. Full of value. Yes. Yes. Alright. That's all I have for this week and we will be back in your ears next week.
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