Chad Silverstein speaks directly about the hard but necessary role of 'agitating' people you care about—calling them out and giving honest feedback when it will help them improve. He emphasizes leaders' responsibility to speak truth (in work, family, and friendships), the importance of timing and trust, and using creativity when direct confrontation may be resisted. Examples include urging someone with health issues to act and telling underperforming employees the consequences. The segment frames agitation as coaching: surfacing what people are purposefully ignoring and prompting action.
Chapters
It's hard to call people out, especially people you care about, when it's something, you know, they need to hear, but they may not be open to hearing it. And to be the irritant to be the one who's going to agitate someone that you care about because you care about them, it's just a hard thing to do. Sort of counterproductive. You think that would make sense. If you care about someone, you want to see them get better. But you know, there is, there is a piece of this that they have to be open to hearing it. You know, if someone is going to be completely clouded and they, you know that they're going to fight and they're not going to want to hear it. You know, maybe you don't have the trust with them. Maybe for whatever reason, they're just not open to hearing what, what you have to say, then you have to, you have to have some awareness of that. Sometimes less is more. And sometimes you have to be creative with how you agitate, how you shove someone's faith in something, right? And if you're a leader, you can't just kind of ignore that, especially if it's a loved one in your personal life or a close friend. And what you should probably start thinking about is, would you want it done to you? Meaning if you have a health issue, if you're overweight and you need someone to push you, do you want them to call you out? And if your answer is yes, then not to say that everyone should be thinking the way you're thinking, but then you have an obligation. If you have a close friend who, you know is working on this, you know, and they're asking for feedback, sometimes you got to hit people with the truth. Again, it's not to hurt people's feelings, and it's not to, like, shove their face in something bad. It's something that they need to hear. If someone has, like we have in the day of the book, you know, a heart issue and they need to get up and start walking, then you need to be the irritant in their life to get them up off their ass to start walking because no one else will. No one else is scared to tell the person if it's at work because someone is constantly not on the phones, they're not hitting their numbers, and you know, it's because they're, they're lazy or they're doing something they shouldn't be doing, then you owe it to the person to tell them. Tell them, if you're a leader, tell them this is what gets you fired. You know, you, they deserve to hear that from you and just to ignore it because it's easier to not go near it. It's, it's such the opposite of leadership. It's such the root of people being scared to say something that someone's not going to want to hear. If you're going to lead, you're going to have to tell people things and tell them the truth about things. And timing has a lot to do with this, but you're going to have to step into a situation with your kids, with a friend. People who kind of cross the boundaries they don't know how to keep, you know, you know, they, they, they, they kind of. They step over the line and you have to put them in place. Sometimes you got to do that. You know, sometimes that might be in your family, and sometimes it might be on your team. Whatever the case is, if you're a leader in life and you're one of the becoming built to lead, then you have to be able to say things that sometimes someone's going to not like to hear. And that's what we do as coaches at Built Elite is where we agitate because we bubble things up that people are purposely ignoring. So what is it that you're ignoring? That's what we're trying to bubble up. It's hard to do that in a book like this. But more importantly, where does it show up in your life with other people that you're leading? And where are you not saying something and not getting involved and not engaging and injecting when you should be? And you just have to be the judge of that yourself. Sometimes you say yes, sometimes you say no. But you're looking for the ones where you should and you haven't and go do something about it.
