Rick Elias survived the US Airways flight that landed on the Hudson River with all 155 passengers safe. The near-death experience shifted him from chasing results to practicing self-forgiveness and extending grace to others. Simon Sinek explores how leaders can respond to struggle with empathy instead of punishment.
Questions this video answers
About 90 seconds.
100% of the people walked away just fine.
18 years.
Chapters
I think offering grace is it's a practice. And when I say it's a practice, meaning it takes practice. My friend Rick Elias is a remarkable human being.
Rick, do you remember the US Airways flight that landed on the Hudson? Rick was on that plane.
And.
He, he talks about it in, in remarkable terms because he said he got the most experience, greatest experience of his life, because he got to have that near death experience where it was 90 seconds, which is just long enough. He says.
Too much, not too much, not too little, just long enough. And he talks about how he got to have that near death experience where he got to have all the lessons that people talk about in near death experience without any survivor's guilt. No one was hurt, no one died, nothing. 100% of the people walked away just fine. And so it was this perfect microcosm of a life lesson. And one of the things he walked away from, and just as a quick aside.
Rick thought of himself as this high flying executive. He spent 18 years building a remarkable company. And he built it to something like, I think it was $80 million or something, $100 million, you know, most of his life to build his company. He has this near death experience. It profoundly changes the way he leads. He built a $6 billion business since Red Ventures is the name of the company. And so one of the things he learned was he had to learn to forgive himself. And he says holding grudges or maintain or having, or having anger or.
Labeling people, he says that all it did was distract him. All it did was hold him back. And he said he, he wasn't even good at forgiving others until he could learn to forgive himself. It's okay. It's okay. You screwed up. It's okay. And asking for forgiveness, I think is a big one as well. And, and if we can learn to give ourselves grace, but more important to give those around us grace. And by the way, we're practiced at this because when we first went into lockdown, it was kind of amazing, if you remember, which is a lot of leaders, whether they were effective or ineffective. Prior to Covid, every single one of them picked up the phone and called their people and said, are you okay? And we had tremendous grace for people, you know, that their kids were running in the backgrounds and their pets were jumping through the screen and somebody would be slow at hitting a deadline. And we sort of were okay with it because we understood the pressures because we were sharing in those pressures. And I think very often we don't give grace to people because we don't assume that they have anything else going on in their lives except the work they should be doing for us.
One person agrees.
And I think grace and empathy go together as well. And I'll give you a real life example of what grace looks like in business. So here's a fairly normal scenario. You walk into someone's office and say, hey, your numbers are down for the third quarter in a row. We've had this conversation before. If you don't pick up your numbers in the fourth quarter, I don't know what's going to happen. It's fairly normal. I think what that conversation sounds like with Grace is, hey, your numbers are down for the third quarter in a row. We've had this conversation before. Are you okay? What's going on? I'm worried about you. And you think about that person who receives grace, how they go home and talk to their kids and talk to their spouse, or how they talk to their colleagues, and then think about how those people then talk to their friends and talk to their colleagues. And the ripple goes, and before you know it, there's a lot more people offering grace simply because we went first.
