Book Launch Live: The Leadership Skill Nobody Taught You

Hello everyone. I'm gonna take a minute here just to make sure that this is streaming. Let's wait a couple of seconds. Please do come on in. This is the book launch. All right, all right. Well, hello everyone. Before I say anything, I just want to be clear for today. This is not a normal episode of the NeuroLeadership Edge podcast. Today is launch day. Today, my second book, The Leadership Skill Nobody Taught You, is out. And this episode, this conversation is happening live combined with the launch event stream. So if you are watching live right now, welcome, welcome. And if you're catching the replay or listening on a podcast feed afterward, well, welcome too. It's going to be the same conversation either way. This is very unusual, but it's a big day. This is a work in progress. It's been a work in progress for 2 years. 2 years of research, 2 years of digging deep, 2 years digging deep within myself. And today we might have an audience here joining and there might be some questions in the chat. Please do put your questions in the chat. I want this to be interactive. And so bear with me. This is going to be fun. This is going to be a very, very interesting one. It's the first time I do an actual book launch live and a book launch, period, in all humbleness, humility, right? So this is very new to me, although I've done a gazillion episodes on the podcast. There's this nervous energy. And interestingly enough, the subtitle of the book is called Calm Under Fire in the Age of Disruption. Well, calm under fire is basically the state I need to be in right now. And I have practiced it just before I go live. So I think we're good. All right. So quick little preview. Here's the book. In case you haven't gotten your copy, please do get your copy. It launched today. I have a QR code here on the bottom— sorry, on top. You could scan the code. And I'm also going to take a second here before I start and share with you the code right at the bottom of the screen. It's very important that you get a copy. Why? Because we want to hit bestseller. I want this to have a big impact. I want this to get to every single leader, every single person that is tired of pressure running them and pretty much making peace with pressure and using pressure as a tool in order to grow, in order to practice calm authority, in order to Help them stay aligned and focused despite the pressure caving in, right? This is my goal. This is my impact. This is why I wrote this book. I wrote this book as much as I did for myself and for others because I needed the help as well. And we all do to a certain extent. And this is what the conversation is about today. Now, I don't want to— I do want to stay structured today because there's so much I want to tell you. But But I do have a little pacing and I really want to try to follow it as much as possible because I want to be mindful of your time. We have about 30 minutes together. And so, here we are. This is the book. It's out. Scan the code. Get your copy. We want to hit bestseller. Please write a review. The idea is to reach as many people as possible. And with your help, we could do it. Let's make it happen. This is officially episode 4. Of the Calm Under Fire series, and and might be the. And it's just so you also in case you haven't listened to the previous episodes, do rewind back. So three months ago, I told you pressure had become. So constant that you stopped noticing it. 2 months ago, I told you that the patterns you built to survive that pressure had quietly become your identity. And last month, these are the solo episodes, by the way. And last month, I talked about the cost. I talked about what is the hidden cost of pressure and those numbers that nobody really tracks. So today, I am telling you there is hope. There is another way. Hence, the title of the book, The Leadership Skill That Nobody Taught You. There is a skill. Basically, this is what I'm trying to tell you. There is a way. And so, and I really wanted to dive into one of the chapters today. If you're all up to it, I would love to to do that. Let me just go to the chat here and and see what's happening quickly. So do please do write to me in the chat, and for some reason it doesn't want to open. Speaking of calm under pressure and under fire, here we are. But yes, it for some reason it doesn't want to open. So if you are writing to me right now, I'll get to it in a second. So let's let's keep the pacing going. All right, and let's take a deep breath. All right, today I want to tell you there is another way. And so I picked a chapter, one of the chapters of the book, that where I take you back to a night I have never fully told and talked about on this podcast. It was a leadership event and There's thousands of people in a big, big hall. I'm not going to name the event. And it really ran late into the night. And at some point, basically during the day, okay, they were really prepping us and conditioning us, our mindset, rewiring our brain to the event. Which was they announced that we gonna walk on coals. Yes, walk on fire, walk on coals. So the whole day was prepping us to do that in the evening. This is this was an event happening if I remember correctly over two to three three days. So that one morning the announcement was made and we had that day to basically. Prep for it. Okay, so I'm gonna tell you this story, um, not just from memory. I really want to read it to you straight from the book because I do want you to hear it exactly, um, as it is, as it lives on these pages. And, um, it's gonna be about a 3 to 4 minute reading. Okay. And this is a book launch after all. All right, here we go. Chapter 7, There Is Another Way. Nobody told me I was about to walk on fire. That is the part people always expect to hear differently. They imagine a buildup, a decision point, a moment of visible courage. What actually happened was quieter and stranger than that. I was at a leadership event, thousands of people in a hall that ran late into the night. That morning, as the day began, it was announced, by the end of today, we walk on coals. Then the day went on and they kept bringing us back to it again and again, training us for that moment. Because the day was enormous, keynote speakers, breakthroughs in the hall, people on their feet cheering at the same moment, It was a motivational conference and a business conference and genuinely liberating experience all at once. And mixed through all of it, from the stage and between the energy and the music and in the spaces between the speakers, they kept returning to one thing: the power of the mind. How the nervous system operates under perceived threat, how intention can redirect a system that would otherwise Run toward survival. How the second before you step onto something that frightens you is the second that decides everything and how you can train that second in advance. Walk with purpose, head up, eyes on the far edge, one steady step at a time, keep moving. And as we walk, they gave us words to carry, a deliberate redirection Away from the heat and toward the other side. They also kept telling us again and again that nobody was required to do this. Every person could step aside and watch. The choice stayed open all the way to the last second. I had doubts throughout the whole day. They were real doubts, and I held them alongside everything else. By the end of the evening, the fear had drained out of me. Hour by hour, without my noticing it go, the doubts had dissolved gradually and completely. A system had been installed thoroughly enough that my nervous system stopped debating and simply knew. I was ready. More than ready. I was excited. What was involved? A set of cold beds outside, and people were talking, processing the day, sharing what had moved through them. The conversation around me was easy and alive, nothing to do with fear, all of it to do with the openness that comes after hours of genuine inspiration. I was part of something much larger than myself, and that mattered more than I realized at the time. And then, mid-sentence, mid-thought, I was there, right at the edge of the coal bed. The crowd had carried me to the edge, and the coal bed was just there, with no dramatic pause and no time to overthink. Click. The system that had been installed across the entire day fired, And I walked four of four or five steps. One, two, three, four, five. Done. What I felt beneath my feet was texture—the surface of what I was crossing. The temperature was somewhere at the far edge of my awareness. My eyes were on the other side. The words were moving through me quietly. The signal running through my body was about forward motion. About arriving. When I stepped off onto the concrete, someone was waiting with a hose. Cold water hit my feet, and that was the sensation that broke through most completely. The cold, sharp and immediate, more present than anything the coals had offered. I kept moving because the crowd kept moving, and as I walked away, I realized what was on my right side. Stretching out in the dark, parallel bed after bed of still glowing coals, red and real, each one confirming as I passed it that yes, this had happened. Yes, my feet had crossed. Me as I walked away was full body disstep returning as each bed of coals passed on my on my right. I could see them; they were glowing. I had walked across that. The night I called that night, I called a friend. He is a professional firewalker, someone I had known for years without ever really discussing that particular part of his life in detail. I needed someone who had lived this to confirm that what I had experienced was real. He listened to the whole story and then he said, yes, that is exactly how it is. When you are trained and ready, when the system is running and your focus is entirely on where you are going, you have already moved through the obstacle before your body has finished crossing it. He said, you walked on fire with calm and focus and intention. He said, congratulations, you did it. What he said mattered more than the praise because what he was telling me was that the state I had been in was real and trainable and available, and that it had been built by a day of preparation rather than born. From some exceptional quality I happen to possess. For a long time after that night, I kept asking myself the same question: if a single day of deliberate work could redirect a nervous system enough to walk through fire, what might the right preparation do for the fires that leadership asks us to cross every single day? The question found its first answer gradually through living rather than thinking. I'm gonna stop here. I was gonna read another page, but I'll let you finish it. This is chapter, um, 7. I hope you enjoyed that. Let me keep going. Um, I really— I'm so sorry, I'm, I'm not sure why I can't access the chat, but for some reason I can't. Let me try one more time. Let's see. It's here. It's here. So if you are joining here right now and listening, please do leave a message. Say hello. Tell me where you're joining me from. Give me a sign that you're alive. I avoided coffee this morning, but I was nervous. I have to say, I really took a couple of deep breaths. I did a little bit of a reset and I practiced what I preach. I said it out loud. I did the whole say it out loud rule that I talk about in my TEDx. And I primed myself. I got this. This is the moment you're waiting for. Celebrate. You got this. Breathe one little step at a time. And it worked. There I am. Here I am. So I hope you enjoyed this passage that I just read. And this actually did happen, you know, obviously. And the whole thing that I talk about, you know, what happened underneath the training, the nervous system learning in advance what it would do when the moment came. That is the whole entire subject of this book. Showing up with calm authority, focus, alignment, even when the pressure is caving in and there's no time to breathe, there's no, there's no place to breathe, there's no space to breathe. You are, you're able, and we are all able to train a skill In order to help us make some room in the midst of the chaos, in the midst of that pressure, you know, pushing on us, make that room and walk right just enough room so we can feel the pressure is still there, but we can walk right through it with alignment, focus, and calm authority. It's a trainable skill, and if I was able to walk on coals being trained and primed for the whole day, I think we can all get a hold of pressure and use pressure to our advantage and not be run by pressure. Tell me if you agree. Put it in the chat. And hi, Natalie. Thanks for joining. Montreal. Yay, hometown. Thank you so much for the congrats. Thank you so much, Natalie. I appreciate it. Anybody else? Please don't be shy. Put it in the chat. It's really nice to hear from you. I feel like I'm not alone. And it warms my heart to know that you're all listening and you're here celebrating this moment with me. I think this is a big moment for leadership as well. Again, in all humility, I say this, and I wish I learned this skill. I learned this 30 years ago when I first started my career as a junior engineer. It would've changed everything. But you know what they say, Everything happens for a reason. And I think if had I not lived and gone through that, and by the way, a lot of us, probably many of you, probably gone through worse when it comes to pressure. This is just one story that is highlighted in the book and my personal story. And this is why I really wanted to interview more. I actually interviewed more than 60 senior leaders for this book because I didn't want this just to be personal. I wanted to go get the proof. I'm like, am I the only one feeling this way? Am I the only one feeling that pressure is kind of running the show here? And why? And how does that work? And I wanted not only to interview senior leaders and find that common thread, which I did. You need to read the book for that. I didn't even want it to be culturally driven. So, I made sure that I interviewed leaders across 6 continents. So, there's no bias. And the voices from the research are in the book. They're anonymous. And some of them were kind enough and I shouldn't say kind enough. I should say just comfortable because either way is good. And I totally respect anonymity. They agreed to be in the voices from the research section of the book. And I asked one question actually to every single leader that I interviewed. I asked them, under pressure, the leaders who hold it together are the ones who— finish the phrase. And I'm gonna read one from each. There's about like 4 categories that I basically that I segmented it so it makes sense. This one's from Jillian Music, Managing Director at Masterfund. The leaders who hold it together are the ones who separate themselves from the situations— that situation at hand. They can look at the situation as a separate entity, and they have the capacity to listen to all the information coming in and recognize what they're still missing and ask for it. Those are the ones who actually get the full playing field. They see the whole chessboard. I see that the time is flying. Let me read one from— let me see here. We got clarity and vision. This one from Stephen Peters, COO of Multimedia. The ones that hold it together are the ones who can articulate what they are Actually trying to achieve and not just start spinning. If you can keep your eye on what you are trying to achieve, there is always a solution. Here's one from Paul Allen Thompson, actually, who I interviewed on the podcast. He was here as a guest. They're the ones who act even with incomplete information, even without consensus. The leader has to own the decision and keep things moving. Indecision is its own cost. CFO, Integro Bank. Here's another one on team and communication from Scott Floyd, Senior Director, People and Communities at Cisco Systems. The leaders who hold it together are the ones who value people and truly connect with them to create a strong context and meaning as they work on something impactful together. All right, all right, all right. Like I said, we have about 5 minutes left. So I basically just wanted to read a couple of things here for you and make sure that you connect a little bit with the book in case you weren't part of the Advanced Reader Club. And a few pages later in the same chapter that I read For you, where I walk on coal, I tell you about the first time I gave this work away to someone else. Her name in the book is Sarah. She's a litigation attorney, brilliant, precise, and quietly exhausted from performing steadiness she did not always feel. And watching what happened in her is when I understood something I had assembled for myself could actually be handed to someone else. It's a system. It's a learnable, installable, solid system. And the system has a name, Pressure Proof Leadership. And it is what I actually built in me first, then in her, then in every leader I have worked with since. Page 83 if you want to find it later tonight, if you want to read it. All right. Let me wrap up. I really want to ask you something right now live. Think about The last time pressure hit you and you did not fully understand your own reaction or even recognize it. What I want you to kind of drop in the chat or just maybe just reflect about it. What does your nervous system do first when you're under pressure? Do you control more? Do you get quiet? Do you speed up? Do you just say yes, yes and comply? Because you just want to rally everyone? Or do you just collapse? You either procrastinate or just disappear. Do put it in the chat. I really want to hear from you. And if you're watching the replay, you can still comment. I'm very, very curious. And I just want— while you're doing that, I just want to tell you that the book, one promise of the book is, I can tell you this in one sentence, that pressure did not break you. It actually built you. And it has also quietly, unfortunately, probably been running you. And this book is what it looks like to take the running back. That's the solution. And keep in mind, calm is not the absence of feeling pressure. I Calm is the calm under fire that I'm talking about, is being, having, developing the skill and the ability to move through it. That is true resilience. And, um, I guess to wrap up here, you know, 20 years ago I would have told you pressure was just how I was built to function. That was my belief then. I do not believe that anymore. And I have spent the better part of a decade proving it. That is not true. And to myself. And now I want to do that for everyone else. Pressure can either break your leadership or it could really sharpen your edge. And the difference is whether anyone ever showed you how. Nobody taught you this skill. This is the whole title of the book, The Leadership Skill Nobody Taught You. And it is the truest sentence in it. And today, that changes because you'll get to find out. Here's what I would like to ask you as I wrap up. Please do scan the code. Let me just put that code again here for you. Scan the code. Get your copy today. You can also go to clairehayek.com/leadership. Book to get your copy. And the, the idea is to hit bestseller. If we hit bestseller, when we hit bestseller, and if you put a review or when you put your review, it makes sure that this book can be found easily by so many others. And so we, we cause that ripple effect. We caught— we, we caused that impact, that big impact. And this is why I want to drive this to bestseller. And that's my motivation. That's always been my motivation in writing this book. And I really thank you for, for being here, for tagging along. Thank you so much for all the reviews that were actually shared before even the book was released from the advanced reader group. And if you've been waiting on the Kindle edition, it is live. This is for the for the next three to four days. The Kindle edition will be at $299 US dollars, four dollars something in Canadian. So this will be a reduced pricing for the first next four days only. So go get it, get it now, and share, share, share. Talk about it, and as always, stay human, stay kind. And, and make sure to sharpen your edge. Turn every single challenge into a gift. I thank you for being here. Thank you for helping me with this book. You know who you are. And thank you for, for your, for your support throughout. I hope this book serves you as I truly think It will. And please do reach, reach out and tell me what you think and how that helped you. Thank you. Thank you.