Dr. TC North is a high-performance executive coach and keynote leadership speaker who accelerates individuals and organizations to become high-performers. For 26 years he has coached executives, entrepreneurs and sales leaders to create extraordinarily profitable organizations with high-performance cultures that people love to work for. Essentially, he accelerates individuals to achieve their dreams and organizations to attain their visions. He accelerates your individual success by helping you resolve your blocks to success and train your mind with the same discipline, focus and winning attitude of a world-class athlete. He catalyzes your organization’s success by developing a high-performance culture which yields improved top and bottom-line results.
Dr. Cathy Greenberg, PhD, Author, Speaker, Consultant and ICF Certified Coach has been named a worldwide authority on leadership and human behavior by all major business and financial news organizations, and by popular media outlets such as Fortune, Oprah Magazine and Working Mother. Named a “Top 100 Leadership Coach” by Executive Excellence Magazine, she is an engaging speaker and my co-host on Voice America: Leadership Development News.
Together they share the secrets of success in their new book, “Fearless Leaders™”, just one of the many titles in their forthcoming hardback and digital Fearless Book Series.
Dr. Nadler: You and Cathy are writing a book and speaking and training on Fearless Leaders. You have been working with this concept for a while; what is a Fearless Leader and how long have you been focusing on this?
Dr. TC North: I have been focusing on this for 25 years; my background was originally sports psychology and I started working with business leaders maybe 22 years ago and really translating what I learned in high performance psychology with athletes into business. In joining with Cathy, what we have come up with is really four basic pieces to what is a Fearless Leader. This is the leader of the future; there are leaders like this today, but what we need is more. The four pieces are:
- They act with inspiring courage.
- They react with resilience – which is the focus of the EI work Cathy is doing in that area.
- They think from a higher consciousness.
- They excel with an unrelenting fire.
It’s interesting that you said that only 25% of folks in business these days have passion. I think what people crave is leaders like this that can not only bring in business and good financial return, but they do it with morals, they do it with ethics and they do it with a consciousness of how it impacts the whole world not just the organization.
Dr. Relly Nadler: Cathy, maybe you could say a little bit about your interests and what is important now for leaders to be fearless.
Dr. Cathy Greenberg: Sure. About 10 or so years ago, when I was still very actively engaged in the consulting world, we often were interested in the ability of leaders to truly be fearless in the face of adversity, in the face of what we call growing economic challenges both as individuals and certainly as leaders.
Over the years I have been fortunate enough to work with you Relly, and learn about Emotional Intelligence. I’ve been fortunate to meet TC a couple of years ago. He did a program called Blast Through Fear and interviewed me as one of his role models for how we do that. I’m sure there are a lot of people out there who could give you their story about blasting through fear every day, but I was one of the fortunate people that TC chose to record for his program.
Based on that, we started talking about the idea that leaders need to continually feed their fearless mental model just like they feed energy in the science of happiness. Thinking about how we could take these concepts and build them into something that would be usable and applicable for folks, we actually have a Fearless series of books. The Fearless branded series will be coming out under the title Fearless Leaders™, but we have many, many more titles behind that.
Dr. Relly Nadler: TC you said, Act to Inspire, React with resilience, think from a higher level, and the fourth one was excel with unrelenting fire/passion. The first two are more common, what about thinking from a higher level; what does that look like?
Dr. TC North: Let me give you a couple of examples. In our work with leaders we are not limiting ourselves just to business leaders, what we have done is we are pulling from leaders from all areas; business, government, humanitarian, sports, spiritual leaders. One of the interesting things is the way leadership has changed over the last couple of decades. It is becoming more and more what I would call, psychologically feminine centered. It is collaborative, it’s communicative, it’s not the hard-driving, punch-you-between-the-eyes kind of style that we had decades ago. That served us well then, but it’s really more into psychologically what I call more of a feminine style; it fits the psychology of women leaders very well.
Some of the women leaders that have emerged in the last couple of years have just blown my mind with what they have done. The woman who essentially liberated Liberia started out with 10 dollars and seven women, her name is Leymah Gbowee. She won a Nobel Peace Prize because she took this group of seven women who are all Christian and then another group of Muslim women started; they joined forces and they literally ended a 14-year war by creating a protest with some very unusual tactics; they all stripped naked in front of the building and would not leave until the men settled this war.
That is such an act of courage; of course they were beaten down in the process and they were beaten up, and they were actually laughed at initially; how can seven women change a country and stop a war, but they did. That is the phenomenal acts of courage that we are seeing in the humanitarian world right now, a lot of them in Africa. Go back to Rebecca Lolosoli who we have interviewed for our book, who is another example of that with the Samburu tribe, essentially doing that same kind of thing with women; changing a whole culture. That takes an amazing amount of courage and they are all willing to die for their cause. It takes an amazing amount of resilience because they are constantly running into resistance for what they are doing.
Dr. Relly Nadler: Cathy, your comments on that, this idea of thinking from a higher level really is very strategic, different and unique, I’m sure you have caught people really off-guard on how to respond to that.
Dr. Cathy Greenberg: I take a similar view with my co-author on the book, TC North, however my view comes from a much, what I might call practical place, in working with working warriors. I’m working with military and paramilitary forces which is much different than the women that TC just described. The passion for their peacekeeping mission is just as strong. The distinction I would make with our working warriors is that they have training that specifically addresses both the conscious and the unconscious. As all three of us know, when we talk about leadership and we talk about behavior, we have a tendency to react to something in our environment even when our unconscious is giving us information about it to override that with conscious behavior and conscious action. One of the ways that we see successful working warriors, whether they are policemen, Special Ops, military professionals in a theatre of war, is the distinction they are able to make with concerted effort, focus and practice on the unconscious and the conscious and then being able to determine which behaviors they will choose; most likely choosing emotional intelligence to react with and respond to because they are always the thermostat of their environment and have to be very careful about how others view them and their behavior.
While we both see the powerful results of the behaviors both described by TC North with these women in Africa and in government humanitarian movements, we see the same behaviors handled however, extremely differently in our military and paramilitary forces.
Learn more about the strategies to go from what’s unconscious to what’s conscious, learn about threat assessment and more, and get tips and tools to tune up your performance by listening to the complete recording above, without commercials.
Thanks,
Relly
