Owen Eastwood Recap: The Key to Great Culture

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Welcome back. The last episode we had, the incredible Owen Eastwood. In fact, I would go as far to call him the inimitable Owen Eastwood. He's incredible. Owen is a performance coach. Originally from New Zealand. He has worked with some of the most elite teams and groups in the world, including Gareth Southgate's England football team, the command group of NATO, the South African cricket team, corporate leadership teams, elite ballet and the British Olympic team. Whakapapa is a Maori idea which embodies our universal human need to belong. It represents a powerful spiritual belief that each of us is part of an unbroken and unbreakable chain of people who share a sacred identity and culture. Owen places this concept at the core of his methods to maximize a team's performance. In his best selling book, Belonging, he reveals for the first time the ethos that has made him one of the most in demand performance coaches in the world. Look, I want to share with you some key takeaways from our interview, but please go back and listen to the full episode. It was truly gold. Here's the first takeaway. So to Owen, leadership means two things. To take care of the people and then feed the village. What does the community need to achieve and then drive the community towards achieving those things? And he had so many examples when we talked about what that meant. And leadership is not about leading self, about title, about money. It's about taking care of the well being of your tribe. Now that tribe could be your family, could be your community, could be your organization or your team and learning how do we help them feed themselves. That's true leadership. What does leadership look like to you? That's my question. Is it about being right all the time? Is it about hitting targets consistently? I want to challenge your thinking around leadership and ask could you be a bit more focused on taking care of your people and feeding the village?

Next takeaway was this. Rangatira, to weave a group of people together. Rangatira is a Maori word. And raranga to weave. And tira, a group of people. So when you are a leader that you're literally bringing people together and interweaving them so that they become stronger, they look after each other, they grow, they become sustainable. Owen believed that our ancestors were much clearer on leadership than we are. Isn't that true though? Think about it. Think of some of the leadership you see around you and it's very capitalistic, it's very selfish, it's very KPI driven. You know, leadership should be so Much more than that. It's about inspiration. It's about true care and empathy. And it's interesting. Owen says he feels like the narrative has shifted from we to me. It's all about the individual. And you know, we can see this ego driven frenzy in the leadership of our academic institutions, of our sporting teams, of our corporates. Now, I'm not talking about all of them, but a huge amount of them. It's very me driven. Now Owen said, look, belonging is a deep seated human need. If you're lonely and don't belong somewhere, you are four times more likely to develop cardiovascular disease. Listen to that. If you feel like you don't belong somewhere with people or a community, you're four times more likely to develop cardiovascular disease and mental health problems. To me, that's an alarm bell. Like if you don't feel that you belong, whether it's at a place of work or within a family or Fanal, then that's, to me, should be one of your key goals is to ask yourself, where do I belong to? Who are my people? Now? We don't need 5,000 Facebook friends. We don't need a hundred people that we catch up with each month. If we have one or two beautiful people, humans that we trust and enjoy their company, that we get to see regularly, well, isn't that enough? It's really connection is not about quantity. It's all about quality.

Now Owen talked about trust, belonging, and how it can actually take years to strengthen and deepen. But we all know this, it can take seconds to destroy that trust and belonging. So it's really important if you have a leadership position as a parent, as a manager, as a CEO, as a coach, that you're constantly being really intentional around how you're leading, how you're speaking, how you're acting. Because this trust that you're building can be destroyed with one word, one angry response, one incongruent action. And I'm constantly asking myself, like, am I congruent with my values? I know very clearly what my values are. But at times I have to ask myself, was the thing that I just did or was just about to do, was that congruent? And if it's not, I guess for me it's okay, well then I should change my values or I should be really more value driven in my thinking and my behaving. So what are you doing right now, day to day or just right now, that's either congruent with your values or not. If one of your values is growth, then I want to Say, well done. You're listening to a podcast. You're challenging your mind, your mindset, your heart set. You're challenging those things to grow. Now, Owen said, every single one of us has Whaka, Papa. Think of it like all the different streams that flow together to create the river. And that's you. You learn all the stories about your heritage, and that helps you to distill it into your key values. Now, recently, my partner Caroline did 23andMe, so I got it for her birthday. And it's a genetics test that tells you all of the different parts of your DNA where you're from. And it was fascinating. She had parts of her DNA she didn't realize were there. In fact, she found a few that were in the very same region that I'm from in Northern Ireland. So we panicked a little. Are we closely related? Hopefully not. But for her, it was an opportunity to go, okay, who am I? What are all the different streams that flow together to create the river? Who is me? So I'd love you to think, you know, do you know the different streams of your whakapapa, of your lineage, your heritage? If you don't, I'm going to challenge you to go and try and find that out. Go to 23andMe, order yourself a kit. It'll be with you in days, and you'll know in weeks where all of your different DNA comes from. Look, just to wrap up, I want to just share one thing that Owen imparted with me, and he said, look, identity is thinking about who is the best version of us. That is what identity is. Who is the best version of us? Who is that for you? Who is that for your family? Who is that for your organization? What's the best version of us? What does it look like? What does it feel like? I want to leave that with you and think, if identity is about the best version of us, how can we create that? How can we be congruent with that? What might that mean for our community or our team or the results for everyone around us? Look, I know you're going to love our next guest coming up later in the week, so stay tuned. I just want to say a massive thank you for continuing to listen to, to lead on purpose. We are growing here in New Zealand. We're growing globally. We're hitting the top 20 in the top 10, even the top five charts on Apple podcasts in New Zealand, Australia, Great Britain, Ireland, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and the list goes on. So I just want to say a heartfelt thank you and I do this for the love of connecting with you amazing humans who are focused on leading on purpose. So please do me a favor, leave a quick review and five star rating if you like the show that is and that will really help me to continue to grow the show and help impact more leaders. And if you feel inclined, please share it. Copy the link and share the show with a friend. But for now, get out there and lead your life on purpose.

Sam.