The Journey of Leadership || Alisa Cohn

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The truth is, the first person you lead every day is yourself. The first the first person you lead every day is the person who wakes up in your pajamas in your bed. And if you can lead that person, you're gonna have a great day. And if you can't lead that person, you're gonna have a bad day.

Hello and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today we welcome Alyssa Cohen to the podcast. Alyssa is an executive coach who has worked with C Suite executives at promotion, prominent startups such as Venmo, Etsy and the Wirecutter, as Well as Fortune 500 companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Pfizer. Her clientele also includes leaders from around the world, including the first female minister of the transition state of Afghanistan and the former Chief justice of the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka. She's the author of From Startup to Grown up, which won the 2022 Independent Press Award, and she's also the creator and host of a podcast of the same name. In this episode, I talk to Alyssa Cohn about the journey of leadership. Before we can guide others, Alyssa believes we need to lead ourselves first. There are days when we just don't feel up to the task, but Alyssa gives us practical advice on how to show up on those difficult days. Drawing on her own Legendary coaching experience with executives. She shares with us that even the most successful entrepreneurs experience imposter syndrome and negative self talk. But these can be overcome with the right management tools. It was so much fun chatting with Alyssa. She has such a positive energy, and she has so much experience and wisdom helping people become really great leaders. So I think you'll have a lot to learn in this episode. So now I bring you Alyssa Cohn.

Hi. How are you?

Hi, Alyssa. I'm good. How are you?

I'm fantastic. I'm fantastic. Thank you for doing this with me.

Oh, it's my pleasure. I want our audience to really get a chance to know you. So let's start off by telling our audience a little bit about you and, yeah, just riff on who you are.

Absolutely. Well, thanks for asking. I'm an executive coach. I've been a coach for about 20 years. 20 years. And I'm also the author of a book called From Startup to Grown up, which is about the journey from founder to leader, but it's also about the journey that all leaders go through as they grow. Grow into leaders. And I guess I would say I'm obsessed with personal growth. And I'm also a kettlebell aficionado.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

So kettlebells, like, in the gym? Yeah, yeah. Like. Like these things?

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, that's my thing. I discovered kettlebells probably about five or six years ago. I reformed runner. I was a runner. I'm still a runner, but I realized I had to do cross training so that I didn't injure myself running. And so I started doing strength training, and I started doing kettlebells, and I would just. And I fell in love with them. And. And I think I just want to say that, like, part of what I'm in love with is I think it's important for all of us to fall in love with the process if and anything you're trying to do. And kettlebells and strength training has taught me to fall in love with the process because I don't like strength training. And also, I don't like. Fitness is uncomfortable, but it gives you a lot of benefits. There's a discipline to it. And when I started my own podcast called From Startup to Grown up, after writing my book, From Startup to Grown up, both of those were really freaking hard. And the notion of, like, putting one foot in front of the other and just trying and getting over your resistance and falling in love with the process that I learned from fitness and from strength training, I really drew on those resources to. To do These hard things.

Yeah, I'm sure you apply a lot of those principles in your coaching work as well.

Definitely, definitely.

What is executive coaching exactly? What is executive coaching?

Oh, it's such a great question. Executive coaching. The way I think about it is, first of all, coaching is a process that helps you figure out where are you, where are you going and how are you going to get there. When you think about that, there's, you know, you can do that in a personal context and then you can also do that in a work context. So I do that with leaders and with executives. That's why it's executive coaching. But the process is, you know, helping someone by asking the right questions and also kind of sharing my own expertise over time, helping someone be able to shortcut the process that it would have taken them to do it by themselves. So hopefully we together accelerate a process of growth and development and achievement and accomplishment that helps them move forward faster.

That sounds great. Where did you learn how to do that? Is there like an executive coaching school? Can you get a PhD in executive coaching?

You know, you probably can these days. When I started 20 years ago, there were sort of these like schools that sprouted up. So they were called like Coach Training Institute or Hudson Institute. I got my training from a place called Coach University, which was founded by the so called founder of coaching, Thomas Leonard. Now you can get degrees in coaching, right? You can Georgetown and Columbia and others, they do have certificates or programs in coaching. But I think if you're being honest, like for me, first of all, I got my MBA from Cornell. I'm a cpa. I have a lot of business experience and business background. So I was also the CFO of a startup and the head of strategy of another startup. So like having had leadership roles, having a business background, speaking the language of business, that really helps when you're talking about executive coaching. Right. The idea of understanding business, the second part of that, the coaching part of that, I think it's really important to have done your own personal work. So I've done all my workshops, I did landmark education, I did different kinds of like my own training programs to get a handle on myself. And then when you combine that with specific coach training as well as, you know, I was mentored by the greatest coach of all time, Marshall Goldsmith, and other amazing peers. Then you practice on clients, I apologize to you, my early clients, for practicing on you. That's how you become a great coach. It's a combination of formal education, but also your ability to learn from others out there and learn from Your clients.

Well, that's a great question. What makes a great coach? That sounds like those are the things that are good starter things to become a good coach. But surely that's not the full list. What is a good coach? Is it asking powerful questions that are transformative? Is it, you know, like, what is it?

I know it's a great question. I think there's a lot of ways to answer it. But the way I think about it is this. A great coach helps her clients get the results they're looking for and that they want. That's number one. Number two, and have a personal experience, a personal transformational experience along the way. And I think if you just do that, you're a great coach. There's so many different modes to do that, to your point, asking great questions, different tools and techniques. A master coach weaves all those together to help her clients get great results.

Wow. Master coach. Are you a master coach?

That's for my clients to say. But I.

That sounds like that's like, Jedi level. Wait, say that again. Say that again. Because that's something. That's amazing. Say it again. You were the number one. What?

I was named the number one startup coach in the world by Marshall Goldsmith, the greatest coach of all time in 2000.

Like, own that. You say that so gingerly. You said that so gingerly. Be proud of that. That's amazing. Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

I would. Yes, I would say you're Jedi level.

Thank you.

You're welcome. This book you wrote, from Startup to Grown up, is it your first book? Have you written books before this?

It is. It's my first book.

Congratulations. Congratulations.

Thank you. Thank you.

But it brought together things you've been thinking about for over 20 years, right?

Oh, yeah, for sure.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it brought together a lot of stuff. Yeah.

I would say. And I would just say that, like, it was 10 years in the making in my head, you know?

Yeah, I know that feeling. Yeah. So it has three sections and managing you, managing them, managing the business. My gosh. Many people don't really think about management as, like, managing you. Right. Like, like, why does it start there?

Oh, great question. It's because the truth is, the first person you lead every day is yourself. The first. The first person you lead every day is the person who wakes up in your pajamas in your bed. And if you can lead that person, you're going to have a great day. And if you can't lead that person, you're going to have a bad day. So I think it's really important to realize that when you're going out into the world and trying to do anything, managing other people, managing a business, being a startup founder, getting your kids to school, you've got to start with you and figure out the ways that you can feel good and you can get yourself together and you can have intention about what you want, what you're going to do today. And that is going to help you be great in all the other activities that you have to do every day.

I love that. Well, what are some of the major skills to manage yourself?

So first of all, it's about really igniting your own self awareness. So that has to do with recognizing what works for you and what doesn't work for you. Are you the kind of person who needs to have a strong morning routine, or are you the kind of person who can actually and does better, maybe just winging it? Are you the kind of person who needs to do something structured in the morning or throughout the day? Or are you the kind of person who prefers spontaneity? So self awareness is the key. The second is to then do the things you need to do to be that person. So it might be setting up structure for yourself, it might be creating, you know, space for yourself to have spontaneous spontaneity and choice in the morning or throughout the day. And then it's about, you know, doing the, doing the things that like make a human being kind of work. So it's like making sure that you probably get some fitness in or some movement in the morning. Maybe it's meditation in the morning. Having those kinds of strong routines really help you. The second part of self awareness is figuring out in the workplace what, what you're about. So what sets you off. So you have employees who come to you and they ask you questions and, and some people, for some reason, it's like you're really vibing with that person and you're happy to answer the question. And for some reason this other person's always asking these annoying questions. Well, how come like to really figure out your own operating system so you can teach other people how to get your best as a leader. And then you can coach and train other people about how they can get their best and how you can work together better. And then the third part has to do with managing your psychology because we all go through so many ups and downs in a day and an intense work environment. As you get more advanced in your career, you have a more and more intense work environment. Startup founders have an extreme work environment and there are lots of Ups and downs. And you need to find the different ways to manage your own psychology during the. Throughout the day. Yes.

How do you do that? What if you're not in the mood to do the day?

I know. What if you're not in the mood to do the day? So we don't usually have the option to opt out of the day. So you've got to find ways to get back on track. Right.

So you might be like, that's your problem, Scott. That's your problem. You don't have to deal with that.

Yeah, you gotta deal with it. And so I find it very helpful to. What I help my clients do is to think about making separations over different meetings. The problem is that we're in the workplaces and there are so many meetings. I meet, therefore I am. And people are going back to back to back to back to back. And the truth is that how you show up in the third meeting of the day is usually an accumulation of how the first two meetings of the day went. And if the first one didn't go well and the second one didn't go well, then I can almost. I can predict your third one is not going to go well. So you've got to find the tools to pause. What I encourage people to do is to take the five minutes between meetings. Pause physically when I say physically in your mind's eye, take all the issues from that meeting and kind of like put them somewhere, like in your. A drawer in your desk. You might touch the door handle the next meeting and you can leave them on the door handle and remind yourself, I've got to reset for this meeting. And then back to managing yourself. Like first thing in the morning, kind of remind yourself the leader. I want to be the professional. I want to be the product manager. I want to be the parent. I want to be whatever that is, reset in those five minutes and bring that to the next meeting. That's one way of encouraging yourself to do the day. Even though how you feel right now is not like doing the day. And your mood follows your actions.

Your mood files are nice. Nice. Behavioral activation theory. Represent. I'm sure you know all about that behavioral activation theory. Love it. Love it. I really love your stuff on combating negative self talk. I think it's related to what we're talking about. What are the three selves or the three selfs?

Right.

Why do you call it selfs instead of selves?

I wrote that article for Inc. And I wanted to make the point. It's not three. It's not Three of you. It's like you actually want to put it outside of yourself and you think of the three selves. So it's self talk and it's self observation or self awareness. It's self compassion and then it's self talk. So self awareness is, oh, I know that I'm telling myself negative things right now. Right now. And then you can kind of recognize that this is going on inside of you right now. It's not just like, it's not just like part of you can make a separation between you and how you're experiencing you. And then I think self compassion is really important because we all screw up, we all have difficult moments. We all are negative. Whatever it is, the only way you'll be able to counteract that is to be able to separate that and to be, or to, I should say not separate that, but like give yourself compassion. Accept that. That's what I wanted to say. Accept that about yourself and let it be that way with love and acceptance. And it's then that you can then transform and add in separate self talk. And self talk can be positive, as in instead of I really screwed that up. It could be, listen, I'm doing my best or I really screwed that up. One of the things I like is, you know what, ball players fail most of the time and find the tools and the specific self talk that's gonna help you reorient and get re presenced and to this moment. So when you apply self awareness, self compassion and self talk, that helps you lose that difficult identify and then lose a difficult state and then transform it into a better state right here in the moment.

Nice. I like that. I like that. You're really helping people with their mindsets.

Yes.

You're also. There's a whole thing called mindset coaching. Did you know that? That's a whole thing. There are so many different kinds of coaching, but I bet you bring in lots of goodies all in one under your executive umbrella. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think you, you probably know a lot more about the fine points of things like mindset and mindset coaching, but I do try.

I don't know that I do try. I don't know that. I don't know that. We don't know that. You could know infinitely more than me about it. Let's talk about imposter syndrome. You know, because it's something you talk about a lot. And I talk about it too in my work. I think that you're probably maybe kinder on imposter syndrome. Then maybe I'm A little more tough love about it, but I want to, I want to hear your perspective. I'll tell you my perspective. Yeah, really, people go. People let people off the hook too much with this one. But I want you to tell me a little bit.

Oh, interesting.

The work you've done dealing with founders and how they deal with imposter syndrome, like founders of companies, you know, or other kinds of leaders and how you help them overcome it.

Yeah. So it turns out that 95% of high performers experience imposter syndrome. So like most founders that I work.

With, 95% of high performers, that's a really high percentage. Where did you. Where. That's incredible.

Yes.

Really?

Where is multiple pop psychology. Multiple pop psychology articles? So we'll have to track down statistic.

I'm dubious about that statistic, but tell me more.

Yeah, maybe so. But, but all I can say is that many high performers, let's call it many high performers experience imposter syndrome. So imposter syndrome is the experience that you're going to be called out as fraud, that you've accomplished everything in your life because of luck, and your luck is about to run out. And that is the experience of startup founders, for sure, who are kind of out on the skinny branches trying to do something new that they've never done before. You know, I talked to one of my more mature startup founders and he told. And they were. They're at series E now. And even now, he says, everything I'm doing, I'm doing it for a first time. I'm still a rookie CEO. So because of that, you get confronted with this imposter syndrome and imposter for startup founders very much looks like, I don't know what I'm doing. I can't do it. Jeff Bezos would know how to do this. I'm no Jeff Bezos. You know, like that kind of, you know, comparison to like, you know, the sort of storied CEOs of our time. And so I think the way to counteract, to counteract imposter syndrome is first of all, to accept. Imposter syndrome is a thing. Everybody is going to experience it and I'm going to experience it. And then some of the tools that I give my clients to counteract, but my favorite tool is called the highlight reel. And the highlight reel is your best of moments. Moments where you accomplished big things and in particular, when you overcame challenges. And if you step back and actually allocate some time and write down your best of moments, times especially you overcame challenges, you will Be able to remind yourself of evidence that you're actually very competent and it's not going to cure your imposter syndrome once and for all, but it's like actually something you can go back to time and time again to remind yourself of your greatness and to kind of hold onto when you're feeling kind of shaky.

That's cool. And you found this is. You've seen significant changes with leaders that you've worked with on this. Have they really reduced their, their imposter syndrome phenomenon?

Yes. One. One of my clients was a young partner in a VC firm, and he suffered in silence with his imposter syndrome. And so I told him, you should write a. You should do this highlight reel. Now, Scott, I don't know about you, but all of my clients are like constantly rolling their eyes at me, like, oh, this touchy feely stuff. Oh, why are we gonna do this? Right? But to humor, he did this highlight reel. I said, write down that your accomplishments, especially times you overcame challenges. And he's like, oh, I don't want to do that. And I said, let's just do it together right now. So we did. We did it together. And we, like, reminded him of him talking himself actually into getting his first role in VC, which had been 10 years prior. We talked about even his experience in getting. Helping the firm land a deal they were not going to land, but specifically because of his efforts, they landed that deal. So things like that. And so he wrote more and more. And the next time I saw him and had a meeting with him, he was transformed. He's like, oh, my God, I did this highlight reel and I can't believe it. It really works. It just helps me dredge up the things in my mind that I don't tend to remember, and it puts them front and center. And then when I start off reading that in a day, it gives me kind of like, feel good mojo. And then I go tackle something hard. And then once I've tackled something hard, it kind of buoys me for the day. And so it kind of lets me keep going, even though I still can have these feelings of self doubt? That's what he told me. And that's one small example of how it works.

That's so good. Do you think that, like, there are some people that are legit, that are legit imposters, though? Like, you need to, like, tell them the truth, be like, well, you feel like you're an imposter because you are right now, but maybe someday if you learn the skills and, and Work hard, you know, you can, you can be at the table. Or do you think everyone who says they're feels an imposter syndrome is not an imposter?

Well, it's a, that's a very deep question. But it is, but I will say it is. Right. I will give you this one little anecdote though, which is that I spoke to Susie Batiste, who is the founder of Poo Pourri. Gino Poo Pourri.

No, no, no, tell me. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bathroom fragrance.

Oh, wow. Yeah, I saw a TV commercial for that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Susie Batiste is. This is a very funny statistic. She is the 80th richest self made woman in the U.S. right, I know. And she, and if you read about Susie, she like, was like, you know, bankrupt and had all these things happen. And then she founded Poo Pourri and she, you know, built this great company. And, and I said to her when I interviewed my book, do you ever experience imposter syndrome? And she said, I am an imposter. I've never done this before.

Right, exactly.

So I think that that is very helpful. And then I think the depth of your question is, are you an imposter? And you know it, and you're learning, Are you significantly under, like, under resourced in terms of having way too much self doubt and way too much, you know, like doubt in your abilities? Or to your point, are you a narcissist and do you not have any sense of, you know, your own, you know, lack of competence here? I think the best way to do that is to realize you're an imposter and you have to learn and then to aggressively do what you have to do to learn and grow. That's the best way for all of us.

Yeah. I find that a lot of people who suffer from imposter syndrome are very humble people. I don't think Kanye west ever feels imposter syndrome, like, let's be honest, like he did. Never, Never. So he thinks he belongs everywhere.

I know, I know. I'm happy to agree with you, especially about him. But I will say this like, you know this too. You don't know what's going on inside of him. All you know is his action. So for all of us, right, he's the expert in his intention, and we're all the expert on his action and his impact. So of course, from our point of view, from his impact, of course we say that, but it would only be really finding out what's going on inside of him. To use an extreme Example to find out what's really making him tick or driving him. And as I have coached people for the past two decades, I have been surprised at how many arrogant, entitled, you know, quote unquote narcissistic people or, you know, that's a technical term. Right. But how many very arrogant people who come across as a certain way inside feel a lot of self doubt and they're using this behavior to cover over their self doubt? Ineffectively, of course. But I think it's only when you really get in the sense of what's inside someone that you know what's going on with them.

Yeah. And a lot of people don't even know what's inside themselves.

That's true too. That's true too.

A lot of us don't have access to what really makes us tick.

That is true.

Well, let's talk about leadership skills. You've highlighted some counterintuitive leadership skills which I think are so interesting. Can you tell our audience about them?

Absolutely. Well, my first one is that my first line of my book from Startup to Grown up is leadership is an unnatural act. And I think that people assume that you're supposed to know how to be a leader or even that you learn to lead by going up through the ranks of organization and you don't learn to lead because most people are bad examples of leadership. And also to our point earlier, it's like if, what if you don't feel like getting out of bed, then what if you don't feel like, you know, having a good day? So everything around leadership is learned behavior. And I think people don't quite get that.

That's interesting.

The second thing, and the second thing in terms of counterintuitive is that, and part of why it is an unnatural act is that you have to do things which don't make any sense. You have to praise people and build up their confidence even though they're the ones who screwed up, like it's their fault this happened. So yeah, that could be very counterintuitive. But in a moment, like making sure this person understands they were wrong and blaming them is not your best leadership move when you need them to stay motivated and finish the project. Right. You know, it's counterintuitive to give people or unnatural to give people feedback, to give adults feedback in front of front. In fact, one of my clients once said to me, you know, when he wasn't giving his team feedback, I was like, what is going on? And we went and went on and on and on and he finally said to Me, I just don't feel comfortable telling other adults what to do. That's interesting because it's. Yeah, because it's like an unnatural act. And I think that if you go through the, you know, the things that you have to do as a leader, I would even say that something that's counterintuitive is just going back to positive feedback. I think that people think, oh, I have to hold them. My most important job as a leader is hold them accountable. My most important job as a leader is to like, you know, give them feedback and tell them what's going wrong. Not really. Could be that your most important job as a leader is to praise them and show them what's going right in order to give them confidence and build them up so they will take the action you want them to take and be proactive and be diligent and you know, kind of go above and beyond. So I think that praise is your superpower and a secret weapon that people don't use enough praise.

Is there, is there a good kind of praise, bad kind of praise? Have you noticed, you know, any kind of differentiation there? Is there more productive kinds of praise?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Long ago I taught in this new manager training program when I was, you know, a newish coach and I was still doing this kind of like facilitated training. One of the women in that we were talking about feedback and negative feedback and positive feedback and one woman said, I don't like getting positive feedback. And they were all, was like really? Tell us more. How come? And she said, because when I get negative feedback, they explain to me what's going on and why. And then I know what to do when they give me positive feedback. It just feels like, oh, good job. And it feels really superficial. Well, there you go. So that's not good. Positive feedback has to be as specific as negative or constructive feedback. You have to really point out what they did that had an impact, what the impact was. Right. So you achieved on you, you went to this, you, you, you were in this meeting. And it's not just good job in the meeting, it's you did the meeting. You first of all designed the meeting to get to our outcome. And in the middle of the meeting, someone was trying to pull us off track. But you politely and graciously but insistently got us back on track. And that was a really great job in that meeting. Keep doing that. Now that's good feedback. Now I understand.

That's very good feedback. That's very good feedback. And especially with someone with low self esteem if you just say something positive about them, they tend to not believe it. Yeah. Which is interesting.

Right? You know, Right, Yeah.

What about if you're a leader and you're looking and you're contemplating having a co founder? You've said that when you have a co founder, you have a marriage. Ruh. Ro scares me. Is that. How is that so? Well, maybe that's because I'm a commitment of phobe, but anyway, tell me a little bit more about this.

We can talk about that if you'd like to. And yes, even if you're a podcast, whole other podcast, if you have a co founder, you have a marriage. And the truth is that people don't treat it like that. They sort of, they meet someone and they decide, oh, let's just co found together. And they don't talk about their life goals. So if you think about a marriage, hopefully you date for a little while and talk about your life goals and that's when you know you're going to be compatible not just today and tomorrow, but for the future. The same is true with co founders. You're going to be spending an incredible amount of time with this person making very difficult, important life decisions and career decisions and the life of your baby, your business. Together, together. So you better have kind of talked through some of the key issues. So what I have is a tool called the co founder prenup, which.

Oh yeah, I see that. Yeah, it's a tool.

Yeah, to. Yeah, to look. So it gives you a set of questions to look at, as in, you know, what are our values when we kind of see the results of this business? What do we see as being successful for the future? How do we each handle conflict? How are we going to handle difficult decisions as we go forward in the place of the business? And the problem is that people don't talk about that in advance. And I worked with two co founders who one of them once said to me, I just liked it when we were 50 people and the other one was focused on getting to 500 people, as in building a really big business and they take in venture capital money to do it. And they had never discussed their two thoughts about how they wanted to run the business. And so then life got in the way and five years later they were really at odds with each other because they had different visions for the business together. So you have to talk about that in advance.

Yeah, this is really helpful. This is really helpful. Well, what surprises people the most about the journey of entrepreneurship?

You know, people talk enough about the ups and downs to know that there are a lot of ups and downs. What every founder has said to me, and when I'm on my podcast, also called From Startup to Grown up on, when I interview founders, what they say is, I knew there would be ups and downs, but I didn't realize that there would be ups and downs in a five minute period. It's like, on the one hand, the most important executive just resigned. Right? It's true. The most important executive just resigned. And on the other hand, this. I just. We just got our biggest client ever and sold our best order ever and everything in between. And so it's like recognizing that it's not just the ups and downs in a given day or even a given week, it's. It's the ups and downs in a given hour. And so that's back to managing your psychology. You need to manage your psychology through those steep ups and downs and find tools to help you stand an even keel and not go crazy in this extreme work environment. That's one thing that surprises people on the journey of entrepreneurship.

Oh, do we get another one? Or is it like, read the book, can we get another one? Well, a bonus. A bonus thing.

Yeah, I think a bonus thing.

Well, I do too. I do too.

Yeah. Thank you. I think a bonus thing is when you're the founder, you're starting the business, it's like, as I always say, like two guys in a beer camp. It's like, oh, it is the two of you there and you're doing whatever you're doing, and then you hire eight people and you're just all eight of you. Kind of like, kind of the version of playing house, like playing company. And then you got 20 people and, you know, now suddenly you're a real company. And it's surprising to entrepreneurs how quickly they have to make a shift from we're just making it all up to structure and communic. One of the founders I work with, he did an all hands to his 150 employees and definitely was super flip. And like, oh, we're just making it all up and, oh, you know, I'm sure we'll figure it out. And if we don't, you know, we, it'll be okay. And his head of HR came to him and said, you know, you guys did that when it was like 25 people, but we're now over a hundred people. And there are people making mortgage decisions based on what we do with this company. There are people who are relying on you. You can't be flip and say, oh, we're just making it up as we go along anymore.

That's true.

And I think that that quick transition is very surprising for entrepreneurs.

Yeah, it's. I mean, there's a lot of responsibility being an entrepreneur, being leading a company, a leader is a lot of responsibility. I mean, this is not a profound statement that I'm saying it's an obvious statement, but I don't know how often leaders really reflect on that fact. That obvious fact.

Exactly.

And think about the perspective of every single employee, like, perspective taking. Because they often tend to think about it from the perspective of them and their company and the bottom line.

Yeah, yeah, that's very, very accurate.

Thank you for giving us that bonus. 1. Is it true that you love meetings? I read somewhere that you love meetings.

That is true. I love meetings. I love meetings. I'm like one of those. Or actually, I should say I love. Know. I know. It's like, how did. How did this happen? I've outed myself now with kettlebells and with meetings. I love the potential of meetings. You get all these great people in the room. We're trying to do something. We're solving a problem. It's a dynamic experience. Unfortunately, most people don't have that experience of meetings because they don't do enough work preparing for the meeting. And they don't do enough work thinking about how they're going to keep the meeting on track. And then they certainly don't do enough work at the end of the meeting. Asking my three questions to end the meeting.

Here we go.

Would you like to hear my three questions?

No. Of course. Of course.

What do we decide here? Who else needs to know and who will do what by when? If you just add those questions to your meetings, you'll make progress. What people don't like about meetings is that they're boring, they're a waste of time, and then we just go back and re meet on the same topics. But if you follow my process about having an agenda, keeping it on track, and asking those three questions to end the meeting, you too will love meetings.

That's awesome. Even if, like, you have 10 meetings in the same day, will you still love the 10th meeting?

I know. Get up and walk around. Go swing your kettlebells and try to schedule fewer than 10 minutes in a day.

I acknowledge that I'm being a little bit contrarian today. I recognize I'm being a little contrarian today.

You be you. I love you the way you are.

Thank you. And I love you the way you are. I get really bored with podcast Conversations where I'm just asking questions and the person answers and then I move on. Do you know what I mean? I find those, Those. Oh, yeah, just boring. Yeah.

No, I love your conversational style.

Thank you. Go on. Okay. Have you ever seen that one before? Those who watch the YouTube video will be rewarded by that. Okay, you started this podcast called From Startup to Grownup, which is obviously the name of your book, so it's not that shocking, your podcast. But why did you create the podcast, you know, and, and have you. Are you learning from it yourself?

Oh, yeah, I'm learning so much. I created the. So in my book, as you pointed out, also called From Startup to Grown up, I interviewed 11 founders to talk to them about their journeys from founder to leader. And I love those conversations. I asked about culture and I asked about tactics for hiring and for feedback and how to manage your board and how to manage your co founder and, you know, all how to manage yourself. And I loved it. And I could only, you know, excerpt small snippets from all of those discussions. And when then, though it was done with that part of the book, I was done and I thought, oh, gosh, if only I had a way to continue the conversations I've been having with founders. I know I'll do a podcast. Ta da. Like no one's ever thought of that before, right? And so I started my podcast From Startup to Grown up to be able to continue having these conversations with founders. And so far I've talked to 30 different founders and other people in the ecosystem about their experiences, and I've learned so much about the way they handle. I just talked to Hubert Palin of Product Board, that episode's coming out in a few weeks, and I asked him, I really pushed him for specifics about how do you know when it's time to, as we say, upgrade an executive? How do you know when this executive that you have in your team who's worked very well so far, you've had them for 18 months, or that you've had them for three years, is no longer going to be up to the task of what it takes to scale in the future? And I really pushed him on that and he said it was, it was powerful. He, he's talked about how, you know, you have data that the job is not being done. You can see the job's not being done. You have a sense that they're overwhelmed. They talk about being overwhelmed, but they aren't able to do anything about it. And also their own self awareness is missing that there are Gaps here. And if you can kind of have all those things together, you definitely have a strong sense of that. An executive is not going to scale to the next level. And I thought, I've never heard it said that beautifully. That's, that's perfect. So that's a one example of all the many, many, many things I've learned from the founders I've talked to on my podcast. From Sharp to Grown Up.

That's awesome. Did you see them? The new movie? It's. I think it's still out in the theaters. It's called Tar.

No, tell me about it.

Oh, boy. Well, it's about a musical, classical music conductor who's very esteemed, but she doesn't turn out to be the best leader. And I just, I feel like she could have used to read your book. That's all I'm gonna say. I don't want to spoil the ending.

Well, great. Well, I want to see it.

Yeah, I think you would like it.

Yeah.

Okay, now look, we've talked a lot about advice for entrepreneurs, for leaders. What if you're listening to the psychology podcast and you're like, I'm not. I ain't a leader. Let's be honest. You're listening to this. Someone's listening. They're like, let's be honest, I'm not a leader and I don't really care that much for entrepreneurship, but is there anything I can learn here to help me still reach my goals in my life?

Absolutely. I would just say this. I would just say this. You know, I really want to come back to. The first person you lead every day is the one who wakes up in your pajamas. And if you aspire, hopefully that's you. Hopefully, that's you.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Or maybe not hopefully. Yeah, go on.

If you aspire to anything in your life that's more than what you have now. My book and my tools will help you achieve those things. And they might be professionally, even if you are an individual contributor and you enjoy your job and you're going to keep doing your job, you'll learn how to get more and better from the people around you. If you're a stay at home parent and you've got people, little, little people dealing with you, you're. You're dealing with little people. You will learn something from my book about how to deal with those little people called children if you are in school, that you'll be able to learn how to manage yourself and also think about your professors as your board and manage your board. And so there's A lot of tools in the book that are very much applicable to people who are not startup founders and not leaders.

That's awesome. What about those who are trying to pivot in their careers?

Yeah, so I mean, I think that's true too, because first of all, if you're interested at all in startups, this gives you an overview of what it's like to be in a startup. But also I think these tools help you think about how to excel in your current career so that you can use your experiences to then figure out how to pivot and evolve into a different career. Although I would also just say from me to you, the most important thing you should be doing if you want to pivot in your career is building a network which is deep and broad to help you get exposed to different people, different professions, different sets of skills, and, and help you kind of learn what's out there and help you find people who want to pull you into opportunities rather than you constantly having to apply to new things. Because people who know you are going to give you a chance and people who know you are going to refer you to opportunities which are not the ones which are out there. And so blanket statement, build your network, it's, it's good for everything.

Good. Yeah, no, that's a really valuable information. Your client list is amazing. I mean, the different people you've worked with and the range. The range is also amazing. So. But at the end of the day, humans are human, right? Like, do you find a really big difference between like Fortune 500 company executives that you coach and like the startup person? Like what, what are some differences and then what are some like common humanity similarities you see, regardless of, of that prestige.

Yeah, that's a great question.

Thank you. It wasn't on your list. I asked you a spontaneous question.

And yet I can handle it. And yet I can handle it.

Yeah, I know, I know the difference.

First of all, the differences. So when I work with Fortune 500 or Fortune 50 CEOs, we're dealing at a level where their impact is, is spreading through tens of thousands of employees. So when we talk about scale, the things they're doing are really with their direct executives and also in terms of public speaking to the outside world as well as to their all hands in their company. So finding ways to communicate in that way and take action to then affect kind of that big battleship is a very different mindset, a very different skill set. And the CEOs of those companies are rarely, if ever hands on. If I shift that to startup founders, depending on what stage they're in. They're very, I wouldn't even say depending on stage you're in. They're always very hands on one way or the other. There's something that is taking their attention that's very hands on. They can't just assume things are running. They also cannot take downturns in the business like, oh, it's okay, I'm sure we'll be okay, like IBM, you know. No, as a startup you might run out of money, you can't be sure you're going to be okay. And so it can be a five alarm fire what you need to do if things go wrong. So I think just those different mindsets are important. And so when I'm coaching someone the pace is different from that point of view and the things we talk about is different from that point of view. With a CEO we tend to be talking about the same thing. For a longer a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, we talk about something for a longer time. With a founder CEO, it can sometimes be like game changer over and over and over again depending on what's happening in the business at the same time. Yes, people are people, like you just said, people are people. And I will be working with my startup founders who are, who have very little leadership experience, maybe no leadership experience.

Okay.

And they are trying to get their team, they're trying to learn to delegate better and they don't know how to do it and it's hard. And I teach them how to delegate and I help them kind of build their own self delegation. Now fast forward to like working with a Fortune 500 or Fortune 50 CEO, one I'm thinking of in particular. He never learned to delegate. It was really hard for him to delegate. And so surprisingly, maybe, but maybe not so surprisingly. We had to spend a lot of time helping him both learn the right techniques to delegate and also the right level of supervision. And he had to reshape his perspective, which is it's not about him and his leadership style, it's about his specific executives who needed certain things from him and their leadership style or their style, their working style. And so I see that over and over and over again that you'd think that somebody with no leadership experience whatsoever would somehow be much worse at delegating. But actually it has to do so much with the person and what they've learned as habits, as leaders. Same is true of feedback. The same is true as holding people accountable. And so we ultimately talk about the same kinds of things as well as just the Inner experience of what it is to be the leader of a massive company or what it is to be the leader of a startup. And we just deal with those things together.

I love that. And also like a, a common thing, common humanity. You talked about how a lot of startup people feel imposter syndrome, but you didn't say like, I mean, do Fortune 500 people feel imposter syndrome too? What about the other end?

I know, you know, as I mentioned before, 95% of high achievers.

Now that seems a little dramatic.

Right? And whether or not you believe that statistic, I will tell you for a fact that Howard Schultz, as an example of the founder and then CEO and then former CEO and then CEO again of Starbucks experiences imposter syndrome and many other, you know, the sanctity of the coaching room. People will share with me their severe self doubt, their moments of imposter syndrome, their concerns, their fears. And that is, by the way, that's what makes coaching so beautiful, is that having this real relationship with somebody and helping them overcome whatever's going on, the negative difficulty and resistance going on with them and helping them make a difference. Because my mandate and mission is to make a difference. And I can do that at a leadership level if I enable them to make a difference.

Difference. Yeah, it sounds like. Well, sounds like you are doing that. Just that. So there's this book I really like as well as your book. I like your book, but I also like this book called how to be a Positive Leader. Oh, I was wondering if you ever heard of it. Small actions, Big impact.

Tell me about it.

Edited by Jane Dutton and Gretchen Spitzer. Anyway, I highly recommend it. It's taught me a lot.

Great. I can't wait to. What's it taught you?

Well, it goes through lots of different things, but one thing you talk about is positive identity. I think that's often not discussed in the leadership context. How you can have a healthy integration of the work you're doing in a harmonious way and in a way that also having a company having a positive identity is super important as well. So that was good too. That was good. But there's lots of other goodies, lots of other goodies in there. I don't want to turn on me all of a sudden. Also, we are interested in Broadway, which I am two and so this is something that we both share. I don't invest in Broadway like you do because I don't have the money. But why invest by my tickets? Buying tickets to Broadway shows. What are some musicals that you've Invested in. I'm just curious.

The musical that I and my business partner, Dori Clark, a good friend of yours. I know. We've invested in two musicals. Dory's amazing. She's an incredible human being. Tootsie the musical was our first investment. And right now. I know. Did you see it?

I did, yeah. It's so good. It's like, electrifying. Electrifying.

Thank you. Thank you. We love that show. And then also, we're invested right now in a tour. Not a Broadway, but a tour of Magic Mike Live because the world needs now. Magic Mike Live.

Live now. Is the casting still happening? Because maybe I'll audition.

Unfortunately, you've missed and they're actually right now in production, but you should go to Miami and go see it.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. I watched that movie with my dad and it was awkward. Just being honest. My dad and I watched that on vacation and we're like, maybe we shouldn't have watched that one together. But anyway. That's awesome. That's awesome. It's so great to have you on here. And like, I. I want to end here. Just if you could just briefly talk a little bit about your own personal journey. Because it's. It was a wine. It's been a winding road for you. It's not like, you know, poof, everything went so well for you your whole life. And then you became an executive coach, became the number one executive coach, and no struggles. It's been a little bit of a winding road for you, right?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I was in the nonprofit world. And then I went to business school thinking I wanted to focus on why people do, you know, things in service of the organization or sadly don't. In business school, you know, I got all turned around and I focused on finance and accounting and strategy. I ended up at PricewaterhouseCoopers in the so called five year track to partner. And I just woke up one day and I thought, this is not it. I hope I get the flu so I don't have to go to work tomorrow.

Yeah, right. Yeah.

And 18 hours later, I was rushed to the emergency room with the flu. Be careful.

Oh, my gosh.

What you ask for. Exactly. And then I was like, down for the count for. For two weeks. And I just thought, oh, God, washed up at 27. What am I going to do? I didn't know what to do because I just thought, like, this is not going to work for me and I'm not sure what to do. And I'm also sick with the flu, so I had to kind of put one foot in front of the other and figure out and seek around. And the only thing in my head was the music in my head, which was to make a difference, that the work of my hands matters. And that's when I met a coach, and that's when, like, violence played. Like, you know, that's what I want to do. And I followed her around the conference and I was like, that's what I want to do. And then, you know, I. I was felt I was too young to be an executive coach. I took coach training and I coached all my friends for free. And I ended up being the CFO of a startup and the head of the strategy of another startup. And when that all imploded in the 2000s, I just said, well, I'm going to become a coach now. And on Friday, I said, I'm going to become a coach. And on Monday, I became a coach. And it's been one foot in front of the other since then.

Oh, my gosh, that's awesome. Well, it's so great to have you on the show and there's so much we didn't talk about, you know, but I'm sure we can talk again someday. I hope so. Hope we can talk again someday.

I hope so.

I'll tell people. I'll tell people. Listening. One thing, just a little teaser for them, is that you have a really great script. You know, you actually have five scripts for having delicate conversations with people. That is super important. So I just want to direct people to www.a l I s a c o h n. I'll spell it out for people so they can just, you know, type it in easily.com a l I s a c o h n.com five scripts, the number five and then s C R I P T S. It's super helpful, especially around the holiday family table when the topic of politics comes up. I'm sure that's really important.

That's true.

Thank you. Thank you so much for being on this show and for all the great work you're doing.

Thank you so much for having me. It was great to be here.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion@the psychologypodcast.com or on our YouTube page, the Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show and tune in next time. Time for more on the mind, brain, behavior and creativity.