MBA1753 Guest Teacher – Peter Kozodoy – How To Use Brutal Strategic Honesty To Make Massive Changes In Your Life & Business

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Because your business is not going to build itself. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company started with my partner back in 2014 and today's episode is a guest teacher episode. On our guest teacher episodes I bring on an expert to teach their area of expertise. Today we have Peter Kazadoy and he's going to be teaching you how to use brutal strategic honesty to make massive changes in your life and in your business. Honesty with yourself and with others is really important if you want to build strong relationships, whether that's family, friends or of course, customers. That's why I brought on Peter to teach today's guest teacher lesson. He's going to show you what he calls brutal strategic honesty. He's going to walk you through the steps and walk you by the hand, get the most out of your relationships and be the leader you're looking to be. Be with this strategy. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

Gas, snacks, tolls.

This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a good mood.

What's your deal?

What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.

Text and data detour to Metro.

Get that more for your money feeling.

Only at Metro by T Mobile just bring your number $30 first month at $25 after with autop available if with Metro or T mobile in the past 180 days.

Today'S guest teacher, Peter Kazodoy is an Inc 5000 serial entrepreneur. He's a TEDx speaker and a business coach. He works with organizations and their leaders to help them overcome their self limiting bs. He has a Bachelor's in Economics and an MBA from Columbia Business School. He's been featured in Forbes Inc. Huffton post, you name it and he's here today to help you use what he calls brutal strategic honesty to improve your relationships in life and in business. I'm going to pass it on to Peter right now, but I'll be back with my own takeaways and to wrap up the episode. But for now, take it away Peter.

Hi everybody, my name is Peter Kozadoy. Thank you for joining me today. Today I'm going to be teaching you about the power of brutal honesty and how to use brutal strategic honesty to make massive changes in your life and in your business. So let's get down to it. The number one thing you want to do when it comes to being honest and using honesty to achieve outcomes is to be honest with yourself about who you are and what you want. This seems very simple, right? But of course it's not easy. I can't tell you how many entrepreneurs I coach that it becomes very clear they are building something that they don't even want in the first place and haven't stepped back to ask themselves, who am I really? How much do I understand my core values? So let me ask you, what are your core values? What do you stand for? I encourage you to not only dive into your core values and understand them, but to make what I call a values hierarchy. A values hierarchy is a listing of your values in order from most important to least important. And the reason this is super important to your life and your ability to achieve success is that you can often detect when you're going to have interpersonal problems and relationship issues. If you can understand both your core values and the core values of the person that you're engaging with, and that could be your spouse or partner, it can Be your kids or your clients, really anyone in your life. Most conflict comes down to core values. And if you don't understand how your core values are interacting with, with the core values of the people around you, you can get into situations where something has gone wrong, but you don't really understand why. And by the way, when you get honest about your core values, it's going to guide you to where you're trying to go in life. One of the things you have to understand is that we love to move past our old big dreams. We as humans love to accept a second best, to deny ourselves what makes us really happy. But I'm not a psychologist. I can't explain why. But I am someone who helps leaders achieve performance. And I can tell you that those dreams you have deep down inside, the ones that keep you up at night, that if I asked you, hey, what would honestly be ideal in your life? You would draw those out and tell me those are the things you never want to deny. Because when you deny who you really are and what you really want, then you're going to come into conflict. It's called being out of what I call honest alignment. Instead, get into honest alignment. Get clear on what your ideal lifestyle is and build a lifestyle first. If you're building a business, great. How does it fit within your lifestyle? Getting married, awesome. How does that fit within your lifestyle? Always come back to lifestyle. Because how we live our lives and spend our time, that honestly is what makes us happy. You know, that reminds me about interacting with other folks and building a group around you that really makes you a better person. One of the things we need to do better as a culture, as a society, is to ask better questions and be honest about how our questions can land in the wrong places in the minds of the people we're engaging with. Which is why I really want to encourage you to make a new rule in the way you speak, which is to always and only speak from the I. The opposite of that is speaking about you. You're saying things like, you should do this, you should do that. The last thing we want to do is assume incorrectly, dishonestly, that we understand what's going on in the mind of the person sitting across from us. When we say you should, we presume we know everything about that person and what they should and shouldn't do. And guess what? That's just bs. It's a lie we tell ourselves we don't know. So instead, we need to back up and learn to speak from the I.

We.

Not only that, not only I But listen and recap. I heard you say this. Can you tell me more about that? I think what I heard was that you're struggling with that. Do you mind explaining that a different way? If we get curious, if we use these kinds of reactions in our everyday interactions with people around us, it's remarkable how much we can learn by just stopping talking. Right. Instead, listen. This is part of the classification of what an honest leader is. An honest leader doesn't assume they know the best thing. They sit back, they ask better questions, they listen, they recap, they speak from the I Do you mind if I share an experience? I Right. Sounds like it would be related to ego, but in fact it's the removal of ego because we don't say you should. Now, when it comes to speaking with other people, you also want to pay attention to how you speak to yourself. We have all these damaging assumptions we walk around with in our head. And these assumptions come in many forms. We may assume how others around us are thinking and feeling. We may assume that our own thoughts, the thoughts we have in our own minds, are actually true when they are not. So I want you to get very good at asking two vital questions. And these questions apply whether you're watching the news and looking at a headline or or looking at a Facebook post from Great Aunt Betty or thinking something in your mind. And the questions are this. Number one, is that true? Number two, how do I know? If you just ask those two questions, is that true? How do I know? You can begin to challenge your assumptions to be much more honest about the damaging thoughts that you have that are recurring in your head and the damaging misinformation that may be coming at you that you used to take for face value, maybe it's just not true.

Now.

Many of the activities that we take that, you know, we put into our lives, those are also full of bs. They are things that are not important or urgent or valuable to building the honest lifestyle and getting into honest alignment, which we talked about before. And therefore, I want you to do something really, really valuable in your life, which is to cut out the damaging tasks from your to do list. And I want you to think in terms of which of these tasks are actually damaging to my time, damaging to my relationships, which am I fighting, that I really know in my heart I really do not want to do. I know they are honestly not what I'm supposed to do here on this earth. Guess what? Give yourself permission to either delegate it or stop doing it entirely. And if you think about your tasks in those Two terms, right? Either I'm going to do this because it's absolutely necessary and it's in honest alignment with who I am and what I want, or I'm going to delegate it or I'm going to cut it. You start to build a system in your life for how you behave, for how you spend your time, for how you classify the things you think you need to do, which in fact maybe you don't need to do at all. I want you to be more honest and more thoughtful about how you spend your time, which tasks you allow yourself to do and which you don't. Because guess what? The There's a lot we cannot control in this life. But one of the things we can is what we do, how we spend our time, how we think. This is what we must get honest about. Finally get honest about this one thing. All of this is very difficult. It is nearly impossible to do alone. Therefore, ask others to help you be more honest, to challenge your ego, to challenge your assumptions, to keep you honest to who you are and what you really want. Have your friends tell you when you've entered into your blind spot, which is a way of saying they are recognizing things about you that you are not willing to recognize about yourself. You know, maybe you think you're the most punctual person in the world and everyone else knows that you're never on time for anything. Be honest about those things. If you want to make change in your life, you need your friends, your family, your trusted advisors to help you to see yourself in an objective, honest way. Protect that inner circle. By the way, don't allow folks in your life who are damaging to you, who don't support you. Cut them out. Be honest about how others in your life influence you, positively or negatively. And again, be honest about what you can and can't control. And control your inner circle. These are all ways of getting out of your own way of making sure that your ego, your biases, your self limiting beliefs don't get in the way of what you are trying to do in life. Because guess what? Success in leadership happens right between your ears first. And if we lie to ourselves about that, if we lie to ourselves about who we are and what we want, if we lie to ourselves about the people around us or what's going on in society at any of those levels, all we are doing is beating our own success back, preventing ourselves from, from achieving the massive success that you and I both know that you want. All right everyone, my name is Peter Cozadoway. If you want to Continue learning about strategic honesty and learn more about how to implement this in your life. You can visit petercozzadoy.com k o z o d o y or honesttogreatness.com honest t o greatness.com where you can take the free 21 question honesty quiz that will tell you your Honesty profile. What kind of a leader are you when it comes to honesty? And that way I will send you a video. You can learn how to improve your score and improve your profile and use honesty to change your life. Thanks again for joining me today.

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Thank you Peter Kazadoy for that great lesson. If you want to get better at this, then Peter's actually giving us a free resource, a free 21 question honesty quiz. This quiz reveals your Honesty profile. Just go to peterkazadoy.com honesty that's Peter K O Z O-L Y.com honesty one of the things that really resonated in today's episode that I want to share with you is being honest and listening to your team. One of the things I have to do as a CEO of the company is to do company wide one on ones. That means I meet at least one once a year. This is outside of the regular evaluations, but just once a year the CEO meets with every team member and has a one on one. And this is not an evaluation. This is a chance for me to tap in and say, hey, what's going on? How are you liking your job? How's the experience working for a company and to get feedback from them? How is it being a team member? And most of the time when I'm on these calls, I focus on just listening. I just focus on hearing from them. What are their challenges?

What are their struggles?

What are the things they want to improve? What are the things they want to see happen in the company? And the more you allow people to talk, the more you listen, the more they're going to feel like they can be honest. Like you're not going to drop them, you're not going to get defensive. And I actually start the one on one by saying to them you're going to be doing most of the talking. This is your chance to give me feedback so we can improve. This is a chance for you to say what you want so I can consider it in the year. Moving forward. You got to fight the temptation to comment on anything they say. Just listen and if you want, ask them if it's okay to take notes. You may want to say, well, yeah, we actually tried to do that a few years ago but that didn't work out. Don't give explanations and don't try to justify why that doesn't happen already in your company. Just listen, take notes and if anything, if you want to just say something, just thank them for the feedback. Okay? If there's silence, I always just ask, is there anything else? Allow them to fill the silence with their own information, with their own opinions, with their own thoughts. Thanks so much for listening to the 100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, smash that subscribe button so you get the next episode automatically. Also, if you love this show, share it on social right now. Share it with your friends. Let them know why you love the $100 NBA show. Thank you in advance for doing that. Makes a huge difference in growing our podcast. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the things that's great about being honest with your team is that you can just kind of breathe a little bit. You're just putting the cards on the table. You're just telling people this is the situation, this is what I can do, this is what you signed up for. It makes for a less stressful leadership position for you as a leader of the company. Thanks so much for listening and I'll take you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Gas, snacks, tolls.

This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a good mood.

What's your deal?

What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.

Tuxt and data detour to Metro.

Get that more for your money feeling.

Only at Metro by T Mobile Just bring your number 31st month at $25 after with autopay not available. If with Metro or T Mobile in the past 180 days.