PNTV: Lead Yourself First by Raymond M. Kethledge and Michael S. Erwin

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another episode of Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we have another great book, Lead Yourself first by Raymond Kethledge. Michael Irwin. Lead Yourself First Subtitle Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude if you want to be an effective leader, you need to start by leading yourself first. The way to do that is via solitude. We'll talk about that in the first big Idea and then talk about why that's so important and what you get out of it in today's discussion. I got this book from Alexandra, who got it after she saw it on Brene Brown's reading list. It is phenomenal. Written by a U.S. court of Appeals 6th Circuit judge, which would be Raymond Kethledge, and a West Point professor of psychology and leadership, which would be Michael Irwin. Phenomenal. Our world needs leaders today, perhaps more than ever before, and we don't even realize the fact that we've lost important ingredient to being an effective leader, which is solitude. So fantastic book as always. We have philosopher's note, bunch of my favorite big ideas. Five of them we will talk about today. Let's start at the top. Solitude Inspiring Leadership Via Solitude the authors define solitude as basically you by yourself without distractions. So solitude equals you minus inputs. Now that might sound pretty obvious, and it is obvious that is solitude. But they make the point that this just used to be the default mode of all effective leaders and thinkers, and frankly, everyone. But these days they say the information age could be called the input age, and that we're drowning in a tsunami of inputs. And when you constantly have input after input after input after input, it's really tough to get clear on who you are, what your purpose is, what's important to you, and how you are going to lead yourself and others. And again, before, this just used to be the default. When you were walking from one place to another, you weren't looking down at your phone, you were contemplating things, you were reflecting on things. When you started your day, maybe you had a newspaper, but you weren't blowing yourself up first thing every day with your smartphone, etc. Etc. Emails, blah blah blah blah. Jim Collins wrote the foreword to this book and talked about the cacophony of inputs that are going on in our lives. And his introduction to the book I could have done a note on by itself. It was so good. So solitude. Super important. They make the point that we didn't even realize that we were giving it up as we embraced all of this Technology. We talk about this a lot more in our class conquering digital addiction 101. The attention economy is a 9 trillion by some estimates economy that's focused on hooking your attention as much as it possibly can, which is great for the people that are mining your attention. And again, technology is amazing, but we want to consciously engage with that technology and know when to unplug. So the question is, how are you doing with your inputs and what can you do to regulate it more today? As you do that, you want to think about what you get out of it. So the book is organized around four primary things that we get when we take the time to actually create solitude in our lives, which they say, again, is absolutely essential. Here are the four things. The first thing is clarity. You get a deeper sense of who you are, what's important to you. How are you going to lead anyone else if you aren't leading yourself and you don't know what's actually important? The second thing is creativity. Alright, so we get clarity and we perform at a higher level. From a creative perspective, this is kind of akin to our deep work conversation we have all the time. If you're constantly doing shallow work, right, as Cal Newport would say, you're acting more like a human router, just responding to emails all day, every day. You're not going deep and getting to the bottom of things rather than staying on the top of everything every single moment of every day. That's how you get creativity optimized, is via some more solitude. Our third idea here is emotional balance. Leaders use solitude as an opportunity to recalibrate and create emotional balance. We'll talk about that a little bit more when we talk about the heroes who engaged in solitude. Historically, the book is all about historical examples of how to engage in solitude and how some great leaders have done so. But one of the things you get when you're actually pursuing that which you have clarity on and you're engaging in the creative process of discovering how you'll bring that vision to life. You're going to get pushback, you're going to have failures, going to have challenges. How do you maintain your equanimity? How do you maintain your emotional balance? Solitude. Third benefit. The fourth one is perhaps the most important. Although you're not going to get to this point unless you engage in the prior ones, which is moral courage, ultimately you need to have the emotional balance and the equanimity to do the thing that you need to do. And again, you're going to have a really hard time tapping into that vein of the deepest sense of what's right and have the courage to do that which is right. If you're enervated by this constant state of input. Again, the solitude that we create for ourselves helps us lead ourselves such that we can actually lead others. So there's our four clarity, creativity, emotional balance, moral courage. As I said, the book is all about different heroes who have engaged in the practice of solitude in order to create these attributes and tap into these qualities such they can lead effectively. Examples they use include Dwight D. Eisenhower. He's planning for D Day. He had a ton of solitude. Took a ton of time by himself to. To map that out and to get intellectual clarity is how they described it. And analytical clarity, right? Think about that D Day invasion, the amount of complexity that went into and the planning that went into executing that as well as we possibly could. And Eisenhower in a leadership role and leadership capacity. Imagine him blowing himself up with input, input, input, input. There's no scenario where he could have had the clarity and the creativity and then the balance and then the courage to do what he felt was right if he didn't withdraw from that cacophony. Again, he was in. This is 1940s, right. So he didn't have the level of stimulation we have, but super important. Another example, Jane Goodall. They talk about how she discovered, made her discoveries studying chimpanzee behavior. She originally was with a group of people. They wouldn't let a woman go alone into the forest in the jungle, right? But finally she snuck away and she was alone. And she had an intuitive clarity that came to her in her solitude. And she realized, wow, she was approaching it wrong, literally. And how she was approaching the chimpanzees, and she needed to lay back and let them approach her. And that clarity came from solitude. Again, imagine Jane Goodall blowing herself up on Instagram and trying to understand what she came to understand and the insights that led to her creativity and commitment and contributions to our world. Another example, Martin Luther King. They use the example of him and just all the different challenges that he faced as a young pastor. Being called to his own leadership and greatness. Right? And leading a civil rights movement. He received a call one night, received many calls, but received a call threatening him that if he didn't quit and leave town, they were going to blow up his house and blow his brains out in the middle of the night. He receives his call. He's sitting there in the kitchen. What does he do? Again, he didn't have the stimuli we have now. But he prayed in solitude for the moral courage to do what he felt was right. And from that moment, in that solitude, he found that courage. And never again was he afraid. Now, three days later, and he was willing to give his life to the cause literally. And he created that sense of moral courage in the midst of solitude. Three days later, his house blew up. His family was nearly killed. Solitude is secret sauce to our hero ideal that we aspire to. I spelled it in the Greek Anglicized version of the Greek word heroes, as I've said a number of times. What is heroes mean etymologically? Right? Pop quiz. Do you know if you followed my work, you may know the word hero in Greek literally meant protector. A hero wasn't a killer of bad guys and a tough guy. A hero was a protector. And their secret weapon was love. They had the strength for two. If you want to have the strength for two, like some of those heroes we just talked about. Solitude is your key to inspiring leadership. Fourth big idea is fomo, the fear of missing out. The authors have a great perspective on this. They talk about what are leaders doing. If a leader responds to every input, every email they get within a minute or two, and the average response time is something insane. It's like less than a minute. Most people respond to an email or some crazy number. He says it makes you wonder what they're doing the rest of the day. How are they ever actually stepping back and getting clarity on what needs to get done if they're constantly responding to the inputs? And we have a fear of missing out, whether it's on the email that you think you need to respond to within seconds or the news piece that you need to be up to date on. And they say, look, okay, yeah, you will fall a little behind, but a few hours behind, is that going to be the end of the world? And they say that leaders, not only basically leaders, have a moral obligation to step back, such they can work on these elements and lead themselves effectively first. And as I say in the note, you should have a fear of missing out, but not on the nonsense. You should have a fear of missing out on you, expressing the heroic version of you, which will happen if we're constantly in that input state and never actually unplug long enough to figure out who we are and what we want to do. Which leads us to our fifth big idea, which is tied to the idea of being heroic Magnanimity, which I believe was our final idea in our episode on Aristotle's Ethics, right, We talked about having a great soul and they say if you want to be a truly great leader, and they use Winston Churchill as an example, you need to get your soul involved. This isn't just a superficial level thing. You've got to go deep, right? And as we talked about with Aristotle, the word magnanimity literally means great soul. Great soul. And Aristotle talks about it as a virtue where. And again, Churchill is the perfect demonstration where you actually believe and you see that you're capable of great things. And then you do the work to build the strength for two to be a protector, to be a hero, to be a great soul such that you can, in this context, lead effectively. But again, you can't do that when you're drowning in the tsunami of inputs. So all that to say we need you to lead yourself first. We need you to step up, be the great soul you're capable of being. I would say you're destined to be that you cannot be unless you embrace solitude, which is you minus inputs. Look at this big four and see how you're doing on your clarity, your creativity, your emotional balance, your moral courage. Do an inventory of your inputs, see how you can reduce it such that you can be heroic. Let go of your fear of missing out on the echo chamber news in the rat like impulse to respond to every email and text immediately and get healthfully afraid of missing out on your ultimate potential. Give us everything you got. We need your great soul. Lead yourself first. Lead us and make today another awesome day. There you go again. I highly recommend this book. It's phenomenal. Have an awesome day. See you.

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