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S2 / E2 - Eric Pratum: On Third Thought
31 Plays3 months ago
Host: Jess Villegas, ACUITY Business Consulting
In this episode we address an often-overlooked idea: how we think is deeply influenced by the environments we move through, the people we interact with, and the stories we tell ourselves afterward.
My guest today is Eric Pratum. Eric is the host of the Unfolding Thought podcast, where he explores how individuals and groups think, how meaning forms over time, and how our interpretations — not just our experiences — shape the actions we take in the world.
A unifying thread throughout our conversation is that meaning is not fixed at the moment something happens. It unfolds, and it changes as we revisit experiences, connect them to new information, and begin to see patterns that weren’t visible before.
My hope is that as you listen, you’ll find yourself having at least one of those moments where you think, “I hadn’t considered it that way before.”Not because you need to agree with everything you hear — but because noticing new angles is often the first step toward navigating work, relationships, and leadership with greater clarity.
A Note on the Podcast: Season 1 of The Leader’s Commute Podcast® was produced in partnership with Business RadioX and explored the early foundations of these ideas. Season 2 stands on its own. However, if you are interested in those episodes, you can access those here: The Leader’s Commute Podcast Archives - Business RadioX ®
ERIC PRATUM LINKS:
Inbound & Agile: https://inboundandagile.com/
Unfolding Thought Podcast: https://unfoldingthought.com/
Pratum LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericpratum/
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Transcript
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to the Leaders Commute Podcast. I'm Justin Yages. Today's episode is titled, On Third Thought. My guest today is Eric Pradham. Eric is the host of the Unfolding Thought podcast, where he explores how individuals and groups think, how meaning forms over time, and how our interpretations, not just experiences, shape the actions we take in the world.
00:00:30
Speaker
His work sits at the intersection of strategy, coaching, language, and human behavior, But more than that, Eric has a way of noticing patterns that most of us experience without ever naming.
00:00:43
Speaker
That is the space I want to open up today. What makes this conversation particularly meaningful for me is that Eric and I didn't meet through a transactional introduction or a formal business context.
00:00:55
Speaker
We've had multiple conversations over time. We've appeared on each other's podcasts. And when we both look back, we realize we were among each other's earliest interviews.
00:01:06
Speaker
That shared history matters, not because it's nostalgic, but because it shaped how this conversation unfolded. You'll hear us return again and again to a simple but often overlooked idea.
00:01:19
Speaker
how we think is deeply influenced by the environments we move through, the people we interact with, and the stories we tell ourselves afterwards. Reflection, in this sense, isn't just an internal exercise.
00:01:32
Speaker
It's relational, social, and something that develops over time. If there's a unifying thread here, it's this. Meaning is not fixed at the moment something happens.
00:01:44
Speaker
It unfolds and it changes as we revisit experiences, connect them to new information, and begin to see patterns that weren't visible before. This is not a conversation built around tips, frameworks, or definitive answers.
00:01:59
Speaker
Instead, it's an exploration of how small interactions, the quick conversations, the moments between meetings, the experiences we initially misinterpret, quietly shape trust, culture, and leadership far more than formal processes ever could.
00:02:16
Speaker
My hope is that as you listen, you'll find yourself having at least one of those moments where you think, I hadn't considered it that way before. Not because you need to agree with everything you hear, but because noticing new angles is often the first step towards navigating work, relationships, and leadership with greater clarity.
00:02:35
Speaker
With that, please enjoy, and thank you for listening.
00:02:55
Speaker
Eric, thanks for joining me. how you doing today? I'm doing well, and thanks for having me, Jess. I appreciate it Yeah, looking forward to it. As I mentioned in the intro, we've got a little bit of history now. In a relatively short period of time, we've had a lot of conversations, which I've appreciated.
00:03:10
Speaker
i think you pointed out that I was one of the first people you were interviewing for Unfolding Thought. And when I went back and looked at some of my episodes, you were actually one of my first or second interviews in my podcast, so there must be some synergy somewhere in that little observation.
00:03:26
Speaker
I'll just open up by stating that one of the things that I find compelling is the idea that you learn from having a level of awareness that goes beyond just what did you hear and what did you react to? It's what did you hear and how are you going to react to it more intentionally and consciously.
00:03:43
Speaker
The Unfolding Podcast trailer does a really nice job of making that point, of sending that message. Tell us about your podcast and maybe how you came to developing it. And I'm looking forward hearing what you have to say about that.
00:03:57
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Thank you for asking. So the brief description and where the podcast came from is that one, I have been interested for a long time in why individuals and groups think in the ways that they do. I think plenty of us are interested at one level or another. in why it is that other people think how they do. And even if you don't dig into it, I think all of us have been in a situation where we're just completely surprised that someone would act in the way that they do or that they would think that X, Y or Z is a an understandable or a rational way of thinking or acting.
00:04:43
Speaker
so to the extent that we all have looked at another person and really sort of asked ourselves, why is it that they're like that, that they're thinking like that, that they're acting like that, then I believe that we're all interested.
00:05:00
Speaker
And then beyond that, I would say that I am also interested in not just how people think and why it is that individuals and groups think in the ways that they do,
00:05:12
Speaker
but how that causes them to act in one way or another in the world. So Jess, I'm sure you are well acquainted with the fact that you could have a really awesome vacation, but if the end of the vacation is really kind of a letdown, when I ask you six or 12 weeks later, how was your vacation?
00:05:33
Speaker
More than likely, you'll say, that was all right. even though you had an awesome vacation until maybe the last 10 hours. And so in the podcast, I am really interested in exploring, well, when you tell me it was just okay, how does that impact your decision to take another vacation or to work in a certain way or behave in a certain way towards your family, towards your coworkers, towards whatever?
00:06:00
Speaker
And all of those actions, change the world. They change your company, your family dynamics, whatever it is. So I'm curious about those things. And am also, as I get time, working on an accompanying product that really the podcast kind of supports the general idea of that. And then if we go even further back, I used to have a somewhat popular blog and I had a fairly large following in social media a long, long time ago. And I walked away from all of that. And the podcast gets me back to that, even though my focus nowadays is a little different.
00:06:41
Speaker
We do have some similar mindsets about business and how executives and people who need help can become more effective. And as I was thinking about the genesis of how I think about things, I can trace it back to maybe one or two very specific events many, many years ago.
00:07:00
Speaker
And at some point I could share those with you. But I guess my question to you is, In looking back, just because you've been at this for quite a while, was there particular event or set of events that set you on this path of how you like to particularly think about the world's challenges and business challenges? Is there something that just really sets you off down the road?
00:07:22
Speaker
Right now, I'm not sure if there were specific events. However, I will say that i I'm not much of a ruminator.
00:07:33
Speaker
you know I'm not the kind of person that will go through some sort of experience and then spend a lot of time thinking about well, was that really, was was I really funny?
00:07:46
Speaker
Or what did they really mean when they said that or anything of that nature? But at the same time, I spend a lot of time thinking about, am i communicating the right message when I talk to people?
00:08:03
Speaker
And am I remembering the things that are important to them? And I frankly do a really terrible job in the moment asking the right questions or saying the right things.
00:08:15
Speaker
But Jess, after you and I talk, I will remember, oh yeah, you mentioned that you're going to be doing this or that thing for the holidays. So then I'll send you an email or a text and I will, because I couldn't do it well in the moment, I will at least let you know that I cared enough to pay attention.
00:08:36
Speaker
And so I've always been the sort of person that really thinks a lot about other people and how they're feeling. And are we on the same page? Are we friends or are we not friends or who knows what?
00:08:50
Speaker
But then on top of that, I was always really drawn to talking to people when I was a kid. So just as one example of that, I took three years of German when I was in high school, but also I had some friends that were exchange students from Brazil. I think there were three of them all in one year.
00:09:11
Speaker
So they could all speak Brazilian Portuguese to one another. And I just spent a lot of time with them. doing my best to pick up some colloquial Portuguese. And I wasn't great, but I was good enough that I could figure out what was going on.
00:09:25
Speaker
I went to college to study German. So I was doing a lot of talking to people, at least to the extent that you can when you're studying a language it's a at the bachelor's level.
00:09:36
Speaker
And I also took French. I took Spanish. I lived in Germany twice. I moved to Sweden. And so had a lot of practice. talking to people and trying to figure out, even when I didn't know exactly the words that they were saying, what do they actually mean?
00:09:53
Speaker
And so whether there was one experience or another, I'm not sure. But I do think that kind of my natural interest in showing you that I care and really just kind of thinking about you after this conversation,
00:10:08
Speaker
led to or worked very well with that interest in language. And with language, you get in situations where you just have to infer what's going on. So you end up being really sensitive to all the nonverbal communication.
00:10:23
Speaker
And through my career, I ended up in marketing and I've done a lot of management. And you can see how, or I suspect you can see how a number of these things end up being quite related.
00:10:35
Speaker
I think you make an interesting point. I think this has started to come to me in the last few years, but you bring it home with one of your comments. I used to view being reflective as a positive thing. I think generally most people would say it's good to be reflective.
00:10:51
Speaker
It's not easy, but it's good. But for many years, I saw it as, okay, I need to be reflective, and then that makes me a better leader, a better listener, et cetera. And then what I came to understand is that When I'm being reflective, I am really not just being reflective about what I think, but what the other person thinks.
00:11:13
Speaker
And now that's the interaction, that's communication you're talking about. It almost seems like the more reflective I become, instead of treating it as an asset or a gift somehow that I have that's going to make great decisions, has actually taught me to be more in tune to individuals when I talk to them.
00:11:28
Speaker
That doubles the effectiveness of the reflection, right? Because now you've got things that you can internalize. And just as you're saying that, I think that if you read plenty of management books in particular, but also certain parenting books or relationship books,
00:11:46
Speaker
things will be sort of simplified down to, well, you just need to ask questions or you really need to listen, you know, active listening or whatever. And there are lots of those behaviors that are very important.
00:11:59
Speaker
But I will say that yeah I am very interested in mindfulness, not necessarily mindfulness meditation, but mindfulness is, you know, being mindful rather than being mindless.
00:12:12
Speaker
And yet at the same time, I will get so wrapped up in conversations that I won't notice sometimes that I i not asking any questions. so I'm just talking about myself. Or you said something and I thought to myself, I really don't know what he means, but I didn't know how to handle it in the moment.
00:12:33
Speaker
I feel like I've just learned over time that even though I'm not the best mentally on my feet in these conversations, that I can recognize the challenges that are just natural for me. You know, they're parts of my behavior, or my disposition.
00:12:52
Speaker
I can recognize those things faster. And you and I might have a conversation. i might not truly be listening to you. And Maybe instead of waiting until afterwards and basically having the experience of, oh, I should have said this.
00:13:09
Speaker
Instead, i might get to the last five minutes of the conversation and say, hey, Jess, you know, that thing you said earlier, i was thinking about it. And so I say that because I still recognize that there are a lot of these things, you know, reflecting or whatever else that I'm not very good at in the moment, but I still am very interested in them.
00:13:37
Speaker
I'm wondering if, Eric, there's something that's happening in the background where when you're thinking about how to respond to someone and maybe things don't come out quite the way you intend.
00:13:51
Speaker
that the individual that you're interacting with likely already has a good feel about your intentions. And what's doing a lot of the heavy lifting is that I know what your intentions are. And so I can infer, and it's not a random inference. I can infer something just because I understand where you coming from with your mindset and those previous conversations, but all those things require some level of linkage and reflection that people just don't normally do.
00:14:15
Speaker
Jesse, you make a really good point there because one, I think that that point stands on its own, but also I think that there's a lot of that that is lost with a lot of the potential to understand the person or how make some assumptions about their intentions when we have low fidelity communication, like texting, for example, when we lose some body language on virtual meetings, but also if we want to talk even more broadly about society or whatever.
00:14:50
Speaker
You or I probably don't go down to the corner store or the local coffee shop or the local bar where you run into people from your own neighborhood anymore. Instead, are you get in the car and you drive to your Costco or Big Kroger or something of that nature, and you run into people that you've never seen before.
00:15:11
Speaker
So not having a history of interactions or being a part of something together like a neighborhood, it's hard to make assumptions that are things like just trust from the start because i trust too many people that turn out to be untrustworthy. Eventually, I'm going to get into a position of assuming that this person does not necessarily care about me or pay attention or whatever else.
00:15:37
Speaker
But for you and I, Jess, as you talked about, Having known each other for, it's probably been three years now, maybe longer. We've had enough interactions, even virtually, that it becomes much easier to infer positive intent, let's say, even when I'm not necessarily demonstrating that.
00:15:58
Speaker
Yeah, doesn't that point to the obvious, right? Like even if all of my interaction was driving down to ah a market or a Costco and I go every other Wednesday at 3 p.m. and I happen to see two or three of those people and then do we exchange some words and then two weeks later we do it again and Now you're building a little bit of that relationship.
00:16:22
Speaker
And then eventually after 10 Costco visits, perhaps you've got a level of trust with those individuals. But at its core, none of it starts unless somebody just starts talking to other people. I don't know that I had a very strong feeling about all of the remote work that's happened since COVID.
00:16:37
Speaker
I kind of thought people need to live their life the way it works for them, and they've got to interact with their job in a way that makes sense for the circumstances. And I would usually be not indifferent but ambivalent.
00:16:51
Speaker
Like if people need to work or remote, they need to do it. Or if they don't like it, fine. If they like it, fine. I'm not trying to make a political statement, but I feel that there's really something lost when you can't be face-to-face with people.
00:17:03
Speaker
And I'm finding more and more now I'm that sort of old guy who has an opinion about, well, I think people need to go to work. And of course, I'm not the one with children and childcare and all those things I got to worry about. So of course it makes sense to me.
00:17:15
Speaker
But a lot of it has to do with what kinds of connections can be made, I think, on these different levels of communication styles. And fundamentally, what it comes down to is communication is always better when there's trust involved.
00:17:29
Speaker
And I feel like that's part of your message. Yes, I agree 100%. There are so many things that we could analyze about this. But one example or just thought is that when you're on a virtual meeting,
00:17:47
Speaker
One, you almost only ever have a Zoom or whatever meeting when there is an expressed purpose. You know, we're having a weekly check-in or if you're lucky with your boss, maybe you have a really well-run one-on-one or status meeting or who knows what.
00:18:05
Speaker
But we have a purpose. And because we have an expressed purpose, then anything that is not serving that purpose is more than likely going to be treated as a distraction.
00:18:18
Speaker
So if we have a one hour meeting and we spend five minutes talking about your weekend or whatever, we're probably okay. But in a lot of groups, you get to 10 minutes, maybe more.
00:18:31
Speaker
And now all of a sudden we're not getting our jobs done. And if we use Slack or Microsoft Teams or whatever, and I send to you a message, almost always that message is, I want something.
00:18:44
Speaker
you know, where is that report? Or can you tell me how to get into XYZ system? But when you are physically present with people, then yeah, of course you can waste time in meetings, quote unquote, wasting time.
00:19:00
Speaker
But there is so much more interaction time, walking in and out of rooms, bumping into one another, whatever, where you don't just get that nonverbal communication, but also you do have time to ask in the one minute between meetings, how was your weekend?
00:19:18
Speaker
How are your kids doing? Whatever else. So you have the opportunity to know someone in a much richer, deeper way. But then when you're in a room, it's so much easier to have a really dynamic conversation.
00:19:32
Speaker
Jess, you're a podcaster, so I'm sure you've experienced this. When you're in a room with someone, the conversation flips from one person to another talking much faster than it does on a podcast because it is a little awkward to break in what ends up being the middle of someone talking during a podcast because almost always you talk over one another and then you end up not getting to finish your statement and really i just talk straight over you you I start my statement, you finally stop talking, and then I say, well, what up what what ended up up but i what I wanted to say is, and so there's a lot to say, but with not being in person with people, I will say that there is it's very much like a tragedy of the commons.
00:20:19
Speaker
where just if you throw your Burger King wrapper or whatever it is out the window, you actually benefit from that because you don't need to recycle or or dispose of in one way or another your garbage.
00:20:31
Speaker
But everybody else is harmed by that. And with remote work, I'm a big fan. I mean, I work from home and I have... I think 12 out of the last 13 years or whatever the number is. But for a good portion of that, I traveled a lot.
00:20:45
Speaker
And I was getting in the room with my clients and my colleagues and so on. And I think being able to be physically present helps to build up those things that you just don't notice are lost when you throw one wrapper out the window and the next person throws another wrapper.
00:21:02
Speaker
And they're saying, well, it's if I don't have to commute 20 minutes each direction, that's better for me, isn't it? It probably is in the short term, but in the long term, at some point, there's a line that we all lose out because we're not willing to sacrifice 20 minutes or 40 minutes now and then to get those collective benefits.
00:21:25
Speaker
yeah I'd like to amplify that a little bit just in terms of those quick interactions and how valuable they can be. Oftentimes I might be coaching a guy who's thinking that he understands what the company needs in gross margin when he really is only thinking about what he needs in terms of commission payouts, right?
00:21:44
Speaker
And if I want to do a session of saying, listen, let me explain gross margin to you. Let's get on a Zoom call and I need you listen to me for 10 minutes. What that doesn't do is give me the ability to say, look, we just got a Zoom call, but you guys are in the same building.
00:22:00
Speaker
Once the controller's over at the water cooler, you need to walk by and just listen to what she's saying, because she's going to say something like she's having difficulty collecting from a particular customer. And if it's your customer and they don't pay, you're not going to get paid.
00:22:14
Speaker
And that's just something that you won't pick off just listening to me for 10 minutes on a Zoom call. So there's almost more value in having someone pick up that little nuance that they never thought about than they got from 10 minutes of me lecturing where they were spending nine minutes of it trying to just tune me out.
00:22:32
Speaker
So I think those small interactions are not only building trust in relationships, but they're actually providing just as much critical information, I think, as any direct conversation. I agree. I mean, I think that you hear these things between couples, whether you're watching a romantic, a Hallmark movie, let's say, or she or he would always say, i love you, but never once when they laid down in bed at night, did they say good night or never once did they ask me, how was your day?
00:23:08
Speaker
And there are little things that are easy to lose because maybe you're busy or it never occurred to you or who knows what. But if, I don't know,
00:23:21
Speaker
If your spouse always leaves their towel on the bathroom floor, should they pick it up more than likely? It depends on your circumstances and all that. But I'm guessing that 99% of us would say, yeah, you should pick it up. Like, don't leave your towel on the floor.
00:23:35
Speaker
Does it hurt you that much to just pick it up and put it in a laundry basket or something without saying anything? It really probably doesn't hurt you. But, you know, Jess, if it's me, I cannot stop myself from saying something.
00:23:48
Speaker
And so my wife and I have to deal with that challenge, of course. But the thing is that you might hit on the most important things like getting the job done.
00:23:59
Speaker
Maybe it is that you bring in the salary and it pays for the mortgage or you do make sure to say I love you, but you miss out on the small things like building relationships with your colleagues and just all those little things that build relationships and you get to know one another as real rounded people, not the two-dimensional image that's on the screen.
00:24:20
Speaker
And you miss out on not just saying I love you, but showing that you love your spouse or partner whatever it is. And over time, all of those little things do kind of erode the foundation of what could be a culture or a group of people that, as I said earlier, infer positive intent, even when I'm not necessarily demonstrating it in an individual conversation.
00:24:49
Speaker
That makes me think of a book that I've read several times. It's called Leadership and Self-Deception, which by the Arborger Institute. And the basic premise there is that when an individual betrays themself in terms of something they could have done better, but instead of saying, I need to do better, they start demonizing the individual to whom you were intending a good intent, but didn't do that way. So the real problem is that you have to demonize the individual you're talking to in order to feel good about what you didn't do.
00:25:16
Speaker
I agree with you a hundred percent. Well, listen, if you don't but I'm going to refer back to our discussion in my podcast. Early on, I said you were one of the first individuals I interviewed, which I really enjoyed.
00:25:29
Speaker
But the story arc in that podcast, High Noon, Full Moon, And it was my realization that I'd spent a lot of time training for a very arduous hike, six months, and then I got hurt.
00:25:40
Speaker
And then I figured out how to survive it. But the reason I got hurt is because I took the hiking trip and I took the hiking trip because I got in shape to take the hiking trip.
00:25:51
Speaker
And I realized, well, what caused the injury? me falling over the rock or all of the preparation I did to get to that point. And if you look at it holistically, I never make it out of that hiking problem if I wasn't in the kind of shape I was in, but then I never take the hike if I don't get in that kind of shape.
00:26:07
Speaker
And so you're trying to see what is the origin of the issue. And what it implies is the origin is very difficult to spot. And so what you really are left with was how do you navigate the circumstances that you're in? And then if you can take a step back and take a bigger view of it, you realize there's bigger lessons. And so for me, that lesson of it was things happen, they're interconnected, and there isn't an absolute good or bad. There's just a circumstance that evolves.
00:26:33
Speaker
And like the Stoics say, it's not what goes wrong or right, it's what you think about that. That was an epiphany for me. I was wondering if you have anything like that in your past that somehow has shaped how you think about things happening in your life.
00:26:48
Speaker
Yeah, so there are definitely things that have happened in my career that I think it was not a great experience. I can think of joining the education tech startup and the CEO and i were like oil and water.
00:27:05
Speaker
And i don't think that I ever thought of the CEO as a bad person. But after six or eight months, I knew that either i was going to get fired or I was just going to finally burn out, so to speak. I was going to give up and quit.
00:27:24
Speaker
And so it was six or eight months and then I was let go and no severance or anything, even though I had moved across the country on my own dime. And I could throw in any number of other things that...
00:27:39
Speaker
can demonstrate to you how terrible of a situation I was in and how I was wronged and whatever else. But I just use that as an example.
00:27:50
Speaker
There are so many things that have happened in my life since then. that I think would not have happened if the CEO and I had not been like oil and water.
00:28:03
Speaker
I think it was about three years after that experience that my wife and I, we were already married, but we then had our first child and we would have had our first child eventually.
00:28:16
Speaker
But maybe the timing would have been different. You know, I went through the single best growth experience of my career within about a year after that. And I worked for the best boss that I've ever had, probably the best mentor that I have ever had.
00:28:36
Speaker
And I would not have. if not for the fact that I left the company that I was at, I joined the startup, I knew from the start that something is wrong.
00:28:48
Speaker
And like i said, I don't think I ever thought of this person as being a bad person. It was just a really bad experience. And yet the further I get from that time,
00:29:01
Speaker
the more that I think about it as, you know, we're just very different people. There are things that both of us could have done to foresee that we would run into problems.
00:29:12
Speaker
But you know what? If we had done those things, if we had avoided one another, then I wouldn't have a lot of the good things that have come out of my career since then.
00:29:25
Speaker
And so you've talked about this before, and I think you're sort of implying it, though I don't recall that you said it exactly. that you often have this memory, this story that you tell yourself right sort of in the moment of and an experience, often formative or you know major experiences.
00:29:45
Speaker
You have a story that you're going tell yourself when you've thought about it a little bit more, a year later or decade later. And then you're going to have a story or a lesson or whatever it is when you think not just about the experience, but now you also think about your later interpretation of the experience.
00:30:04
Speaker
And a lot of us benefit from age because we just have more time to think. But I feel like there have been those experiences that it would have been so easy for me to just continually tell myself that was a bad person or this is just a bad experience when the reality is that I'm where I am And I feel fortunate to be where I am because I had to have those things, those bad experiences along with the good experiences in order to end up here.
00:30:34
Speaker
I appreciate you referencing that. i was actually using a term in several of my earlier podcasts called involving contact. And you hit on most of what the intent was was there, which is you experienced something.
00:30:46
Speaker
You decide how you feel about it. Maybe it's a more mature thought in the moment or it's less mature, but nevertheless, just an initial thought. And then years later, you realize, well, I can put a better frame to it. And now things could be worse, could be better.
00:31:00
Speaker
And that was called phase number two. And then phase number three would be where I could draw a lesson from it that had nothing to do with that story itself. It's a lesson that just holds true.
00:31:11
Speaker
across all the different ways you manage yourself. And then you start realizing, okay, the world doesn't evolve around me. The world revolves and you are working within it. You're evolving with it. You're unfolding within it. You're emerging within it.
00:31:26
Speaker
And I think that even now I will find it's very difficult for me to feel doom and gloom about any particular thing because I've just been alive long enough to know that it's going to be something different. different Hopefully it'll be better.
00:31:41
Speaker
And I think the fundamental idea, the unfolding thought, the evolving context, all these are around emergence. You know, it's a theme. And I think in what you're talking to about, especially with the podcast, because you that is a heavy theme for you. I'm wondering, you've done many podcasts, but Now, having had the benefit of going this far with your mission, which is to help raise that awareness, what have you found in those 60 or 70 podcasts that you didn't maybe appreciate when you started that journey?
00:32:12
Speaker
I think that one of the things that I'm most conscious of is before we even get to action in the world, that I get a very strong feeling from people that I talk to, them having done a lot of work on their own,
00:32:32
Speaker
having learned a lot or researched a lot or just spent a lot of time thinking, I get a much stronger feeling of that when as simple as it is to say and as perhaps judgmental as it might come across, when I get a much stronger sense that the person is contemplative and they put in a lot of individual work and they've Considered all options. The more that that person reads, the much stronger sense that I get from them.
00:33:04
Speaker
I had this gentleman on the podcast, Rob Gallaher, who runs a couple of companies. He was one of the most interesting people to talk to. And he said this quote, leaders are readers.
00:33:17
Speaker
I recently recorded an episode with this gentleman, Matthew Powell, who that episode will get released in early January. if I recall correctly.
00:33:27
Speaker
And he runs, I think he's third or fourth generation in his business. And they're a nine figure, essentially security business. And behind him in the recording are maybe hundreds of books.
00:33:43
Speaker
And the more that I talk to people that aren't just really smart or aren't just really great thinkers, but that they spend time with other people's thoughts and in a medium that usually requires a lot more effort.
00:34:01
Speaker
than YouTube or tweets or something of that nature. And I should say, and I'm getting more experience with that because of the podcast, because I meet a lot of new people.
00:34:13
Speaker
Jess, I think I recall you had an episode talking about how your son went from being, I think it was sort of middle of the pack high school runner or something like that, to having just a real spectacular race. And then that kind of ah changed a lot for him.
00:34:31
Speaker
And I don't know that this is your son's case, but let's just say that your son had been born very physically gifted. He's just a great runner.
00:34:43
Speaker
I think you and i know There are plenty of athletes, there are plenty of musicians, there are plenty of philosophically leaning people who can be very smart or be very deep thinkers.
00:34:57
Speaker
But if you don't put in the effort, the hard work, the deliberate practice, as I think came out of, you know, the whole 10,000 hours thing and the talent code book and talent is not enough, it's a talent is overrated, is another book.
00:35:11
Speaker
If you're not really deliberate about your practice, then all of those natural abilities are only going to get you so far. So in the podcast, I'm really fortunate to get to meet a lot of new people, even if we only ever talk for an hour or two.
00:35:28
Speaker
But again, as judgmental as this might seem, or as much as I'm sort of othering non-readers here, Really, the people that I talk to that are willing to put in that time to, you know, read a book and they might give up after 50 pages because it's not for them, but then they're going to go to the next book and the next book.
00:35:49
Speaker
Those people I get so much more out of and I get not just recommendations for books, but also because I do read a lot. I read about 150 books a year, but also what I get typically is something that is really well thought out.
00:36:05
Speaker
You know, when I ask a question or when they're telling me something, I get something that's not so at nearly as much of a reaction, but it's sort of like the culmination of all of that thinking that they've done up until that time.
00:36:20
Speaker
And more often than not, it's not just thinking in their own head like a lonely philosopher. but rather it is the synthesis of everyone else's thinking that they have spent a lot of time mulling over. You know, I empathize with the potential trap of othering. I think that's a great word, othering sort of model readers, because it feels like now we're in an environment where almost seems to be trivialized to maybe not to not read necessarily, but to not figure out how to get more informed.
00:36:51
Speaker
I wouldn't say get smarter because you have to pick the right things to read. And I imagine of everything I've ever read, half of it was nothing particularly helpful. But I know that the mental work involved with just trying to read things and understand them is additive to our sort of mental capacity. And so I've always tried to encourage my kids to read and they are readers today. And I think that rounds them out. When I was putting bed at night, I was reading books I liked, but somehow they thought I was reading them.
00:37:19
Speaker
But in any case, they seem to grow up with a love for it, but it's a difficult place to be, right? Because otherwise it sounds like you're being judgmental. I've used this language in other contexts where I give book recommendations, but not a lot of books because it feels a little passive aggressive.
00:37:34
Speaker
When you say that, you remind me of, I forget if it was Seinfeld or someone there, I feel like it was a comedian though, who said something like they really hate a book as a gift because it's kind of like saying, here, or do some work. Right. It's like you're giving an assignment. So it's a, it's an interesting dilemma, but I think if you're going to fall on one side or the other, of the equation, I think it's just better to become more informed than and to read. And i have found myself expanding my ability to read about things that I just didn't know much about before.
00:38:06
Speaker
Well, along with this, There, there's more than one study, but there's a study that have a link to and, and I come back to fairly often because I reference it.
00:38:18
Speaker
But if I recall correctly, fairly conclusive that, um, People who read fiction are much more empathetic than people that do not read fiction.
00:38:29
Speaker
And, you know, i interviewed this very accomplished agency leader, writer, speaker, any number of other things, Mitch Jewell.
00:38:41
Speaker
And Mitch said in our conversation that he's actually... questioning if one of the best ways to learn to think, so to speak, is by reading fiction.
00:38:54
Speaker
And one of the reasons you're more empathetic is because you get exposure to the inner thoughts of another person, even if they're fictitious. But you and i have to infer some intent.
00:39:08
Speaker
We have to wonder what's he actually thinking or what did he mean? But you get practice with actually hearing those thoughts when you read fiction. And so it's too easy to fall into these sort of broad categories of like, you know, you hear these things, people say like, I don't watch TV.
00:39:26
Speaker
Well, okay, but do you watch YouTube videos? Do you watch things on Netflix? You know, what are we defining as TV here, right? And maybe they mean that they literally don't watch video or whatever it is. But very often when business folks like us are talking about reading, it's easy to assume, but I think it's also fair to assume that we're talking about reading.
00:39:49
Speaker
whatever the business books are. And those are great. I pretty much exclusively read nonfiction. But I would argue that just because that's my preference does not mean that that's actually the best way to become a real deep and valuable, not just thinker, but also conversation partner.
00:40:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's valid. The way I might equate that is when you talk about, I'm going to get these references incorrect, but individuals who go after an MBA, and they become highly competent in areas of business.
00:40:20
Speaker
And then you'll read some articles saying some of the people who are focusing on liberal arts made some of the best CEOs just because they had a wider breadth of material that they would get into, and they were reading about humanities and things like that, and it was rounding them out as a leader.
00:40:35
Speaker
And I believe that. I'm not a big fiction reader. as a matter of fact, I'm such a poor fiction reader that I can probably count 10 fiction books that I read in 50 years, and I know they were all really good. I enjoyed them, but somehow I thought maybe I was cheating myself if I was reading fiction versus nonfiction.
00:40:56
Speaker
But I think the whole idea of continuous learning of just it, maybe for its own sake, just to kind of learn more things. And one more layer about the reading. and I think you're making a point of, okay, if you're not watching TV or you're watching video, okay, if you're not reading a hard book, are you reading a Kindle or are you listening?
00:41:14
Speaker
That's a whole nother level of, is that the right way to be listening? I was talking to someone once who reads a lot of books like I do, i you know, over a hundred books a year.
00:41:25
Speaker
And i was talking about that my wife has said things before, well, you're not really reading, quote unquote, you're listening the book. That's not the same because I do mostly get my books through audio.
00:41:40
Speaker
I remember this woman said, our ancestors went through tens of thousands of years of only being able to share stories through talking. I'm pretty sure we'll be okay with audio books.
00:41:53
Speaker
I think, I think you're right. Let me go back to a little bit of a different subject, because this is one of the things I find interesting in terms of how to evaluate where to intervene in an organization.
00:42:05
Speaker
I know that you've assisted organizations with strategies and think you're certified coach. And I want to ask you, what is your either methodology or process or how is it that you approach when you're in business?
00:42:18
Speaker
an organization, and trying to figure out where the levers are in terms of where want to make the biggest impact. I know that one of the things that I can suffer from is putting a lot more emphasis on quantitative information versus qualitative.
00:42:33
Speaker
Now, I think I do enough qualitative to be effective, but I don't think it's my natural default. So I'm wondering if one of those is your natural default, but where do you find yourself trying to intervene in a system where you think you're going the greatest impact?
00:42:48
Speaker
I have a sort of natural disposition to long-term thinking, and that has really grown over recent years as I've worked with Elliot Frick at Big Wide Sky, now also my former colleague, Jeremy Newlick, who you know is running his own consultancy now. And these guys and several other people that I worked with are very passionate long-term, big picture, out-of-the-box thinkers. So my disposition, my predisposition for long-term thinking has really grown.
00:43:25
Speaker
But even before that, I very often, not too rigid or not too narrow of a thinker. Jess, I know that you've mentioned systems thinking.
00:43:35
Speaker
And so fortunately, in systems thinking, You're not often so narrowly focused on the way that things are supposed to be done or specific set of operations or whatever. But, you know, there's this stereotype of whether it's accountants or certain kinds of lawyers or certain operations people or project managers or whatever that like they're really only interested in just follow the steps.
00:44:03
Speaker
and not in, well, are we actually accomplishing whatever the goal is? Now, I say stereotype because I think there are a lot of people who do want to just do whatever is right.
00:44:15
Speaker
You know, they do project managers or accountants or whatever it is. Maybe they do like things that are neat and organized. But at the end of the day, if you ask them, well, would you rather get the job done or would you rather follow the checklist? Probably going to say, I want to get the job done.
00:44:31
Speaker
But I've always been much less of a, well, let's start from just following the checklist and much more of a, what are we trying to do here sort of person?
00:44:43
Speaker
And then that sometimes risks that I spent some time rebuilding or reengineering the wheel.
00:44:53
Speaker
you know, reinventing the wheel when we had some appropriate processes already. But all of that said, when i go in and I'm trying to figure out what levers can I really pull to move things here or to change things, I do very often look at, well, okay, your leadership has talked about where you want to go over the next year or the next three years.
00:45:19
Speaker
But are they even really thinking about what things might be like in 25 years and not necessarily predicting the future, but thinking about what might be? And if this or that or ah one other scenario was to occur, what might that mean we should be doing today?
00:45:34
Speaker
And so I do tend to look at things like that and ask those questions. But you know what? Really, when it comes down to trying to move the needle, I find that the biggest thing is doing whatever work I need to be doing.
00:45:48
Speaker
Let's say I did some sort of market research report for a client. do the work. I go through it like as if i'm you're getting in shape and you do the all the work of lifting those weights and doing your running and whatever else.
00:46:02
Speaker
But if you never do the final prep work to get ready for, i don't know, bodybuilding competition, you know, you don't cut the fat in your diet and get down and get lean.
00:46:12
Speaker
If you just do all the weightlifting and then you show up to the bodybuilding meet and you're not lean like everybody else is, you actually missed a key step. And in my client work, very often, it's not so much.
00:46:26
Speaker
Do I understand the market? Do I understand their goals? Did I put together a strategy? the The biggest thing very often is, did i overlook any questions that my client is going to ask that I need to answer in advance?
00:46:44
Speaker
And Jess, i I don't recall that this is in one of our recorded conversations. Maybe it is, but I remember talking to you just one-on-one and you talking about that was always something that helped you. You were almost always the most prepared person. You know you would think about Well, if somebody asks this, I'm going to need to have an answer. If somebody asks that, I'm going to need to have an answer and so on.
00:47:06
Speaker
And I have found more and more often that i do a PowerPoint deck or whatever it happens to be. And I could be done. But taking the time to step back and say, am I accomplishing the goal really here?
00:47:22
Speaker
And if I'm not, what do I need to do so that when my client receives it They will actually understand. They'll know what to do. They'll know what I'm recommending because that is what's going accomplish the goal. Not just delivering the final product and saying, I'm done because I spent eight hours on this. No, I'm not done until they feel like they know what to do next, typically.
00:47:46
Speaker
think that preparation is a key. I think it's divining the fine line between preparation by knowing more things as opposed to preparation by being more agile.
00:47:57
Speaker
Often I've said to businesses, don't build a strategy and then put it on the bookshelf. If you build a strategy, you should use it. Well, that doesn't quite hit the mark either, right? Because you could have built a poor strategy.
00:48:08
Speaker
But on the assumption that a good strategy was built and that you house it somehow, not in a binder, but you house it within the culture, that you can find that the strategy will do a lot of heavy lifting for you because you put all that time and energy on And six months later, everyone's playing to their own music again and forgetting, wait a minute, we have values.
00:48:29
Speaker
We have all these things that we worked on. Don't restart every conversation with an employee. Start the conversation with, you know what our strategy is, you know where our culture is, you know what our values are. And then you can get to the key issues. What are the points we need to address that are specific to the situation that we're in?
00:48:45
Speaker
And I've been guilty of this early in my career of starting over almost every single time. And what I realized is I was frustrating people the way I would have bosses frustrate me. Every time I'd have a conversation, I felt like I was having to recap the last conversation every single time.
00:49:03
Speaker
I felt disrespected, but I also started growing some resentment thinking, why do I have to reconnect these things? We did this work last time, let's build from there. It's too inefficient to start over.
00:49:14
Speaker
So I think there's a lot to be said for knowing where the issues are going to arise and how to address them without having every specific answer, but at least be the catalyst for being able to navigate uncertainty, which is which you have in every single organization.
00:49:30
Speaker
I want to just go back to your podcast for a minute. You released a lot of episodes, and I've heard a good bit of them, and I enjoy them very much. I just want to say... that I think it's excellent. And I just feel that I've picked up some things that either augment what I thought I knew, or maybe had me consider some different things.
00:49:49
Speaker
So let me just ask you, in your podcast, you've done quite a few. Are there three or four that really stood out where you just thought to yourself, listen, if someone's only going to listen to four of my several podcasts, these are the three or four they might want listen to. I don't mean to put you on the spot, but are there some you can name there?
00:50:05
Speaker
Yeah. So i think it certainly depends on what someone is interested in because i have people like my parents who will listen to my podcast and I appreciate that. And I hope that they find it interesting, but they're probably going to find it interesting for reasons other than what you might, Jess. And so Knowing that everybody has their own interests, I would say some that stick out in my mind are I interviewed in, I think it was episode 20, maybe 24, something like that.
00:50:47
Speaker
Gentleman named Alan Fine, who is generally considered to be one of the developers of what's called the grow model. And GROW is an acronym that stands for goals, reality, options, and depending on whom you're asking is either way forward or might be willingness.
00:51:11
Speaker
And it's really just a tool to facilitate conversations. But I got certified in the GROW model. I think Alan Fine's book, You Already Know How to Be Great is really ah a very good book. If you're interested in management, I think it can help a lot with parenting as well.
00:51:33
Speaker
It could probably help with teaching and any number of other things. And I felt very lucky that he said yes to talk to me. Alan's been a coach for Ryder Cup, Davis Cup,
00:51:46
Speaker
I think Olympic athletes have been quite a ah few things for over 50 years, if recall correctly. So that was an episode that really stuck out to me. I'm not saying that the episode in and of itself is maybe the most intriguing or whatever, but I felt very lucky.
00:52:03
Speaker
to be able to talk to someone like that. And it I think it comes across that he's a great listener. He's a great coach. Another one that comes to mind at the moment is at the time of this recording, think it was a week and a half ago.
00:52:18
Speaker
or so, I released an episode with a gentleman named Steve Kozell. And Steve is a brilliant person, first and foremost, but also strategist and deep thinker.
00:52:31
Speaker
And he not only works in marketing, but At the end of the day, if you get only one thing done, you need to get this done. He's an SVP of marketing and analytics or something like that at a big Marcom firm.
00:52:46
Speaker
So not only is he a great thinker in marketing, but also he really pushes a lot on questioning corporate culture and standards. and the way that society is moving, let's say.
00:53:01
Speaker
And I think the conversation with him, whether it comes across to the listener or not, is at least for me as a host and a conversation partner, a great example of what I hope to get out of every episode, which is just, I love the feeling of talking to someone or reading a book or whatever it is and thinking, I never thought about that.
00:53:28
Speaker
Forgive me, I will try and keep this story short, but in recent decades, Jess, there's been all this news and controversy about the Ten Commandments being at different state capitals around the United States.
00:53:40
Speaker
And no matter how you or anybody else feels about that, I want to share this just as a matter of understanding history. I could have made the assumption that the Ten Commandments were at these state capitals because of the religious history, ah you know, Christian sort of history of the United States or Judeo-Christian or however you want to describe it.
00:54:01
Speaker
But it turns out that the reason that the Ten Commandments are at all of these state capitals is because I'm going to forget some of the names, but when the movie The Ten Commandments was being produced and was about to be marketed. You know, this was in the 1950s.
00:54:18
Speaker
You didn't have celebrities traveling all over the country doing press junkets or whatever else it was. And media was not nearly as big back then.
00:54:29
Speaker
The producer, and it's a very well-known name, and I'm forgetting who it was, heard about this guy who was, I believe he was a former state judge, something like that, in, I think it was Minnesota.
00:54:42
Speaker
And this guy had a a man in his court who had committed it some crime and The prosecutor was trying to show that this guy knew that what he did was wrong. And he asked him a question about like something like, well, you know, in the Ten Commandments that it says thou shalt not steal, something of that nature.
00:55:01
Speaker
And the guy said, no. and And the prosecutor said, well, you know what the Ten Commandments are, right? And the guy said, no. And now you can have whatever position you want on Christianity or the Ten Commandments or whatever.
00:55:16
Speaker
But just as a matter of history, this judge, he thought to himself, if there are people nowadays who increasingly are not being exposed to what I, as a judge, believe are just general ideas about being a decent human being, then what is the future going to be like?
00:55:36
Speaker
And so he printed up tens of thousands of copies of the Ten Commandments and he traveled all over the place and he mailed them and whatever and got them up in schools and post offices and so on. Well, this guy had been doing that, and the producers of the Ten Commandments heard about this. They got, I'm blanking on who it was, I think it was like the Fraternal Order of the Eagles, something like that, to put up the money to make, think it was 38 granite copies of the Ten Commandments.
00:56:03
Speaker
And ah what would happen is that they, and there was another organization who was involved, I forget who it was, they said that they would finance not just making these little monuments, but also having Charlton Heston and Yule Brenner travel around the country to the unveiling of these monuments, these installations.
00:56:26
Speaker
And the cities and the states agreed to have the Ten Commandments placed on their property because you can imagine in Tulsa or some, you know, the middle of nowhere in the country, they these people in the 50s had never seen a celebrity.
00:56:43
Speaker
And so this was going to be a big draw. They were going to bring a lot of people into one community or another. And so they agreed to have the Ten Commandments placed on state or federal or whatever it was property.
00:56:54
Speaker
And I think it was mostly state property. So it was a big success in the marketing campaign. The movie was a big success. There were lots of people who supposedly never even heard of the Ten Commandments and were exposed to it as a result of all of these things going on.
00:57:09
Speaker
The movie apparently never paid for any of that marketing. Well, fast forward 50-ish years, and then for one reason or another, we start having more and more court cases about whether or not the Ten Commandments should be on federal property or on state property.
00:57:26
Speaker
Well, again, I could make whatever assumption that I want about why they're there. But the truth, I think, is way more interesting. And so when you share something that I've never even thought about it, or just you even share something and it just causes me to see something in a new way. I love that feeling.
00:57:44
Speaker
I never thought about that. And forgive me for going off for five minutes on this story, but my conversation with Steve Cozell was, at least for me as the host, a great encapsulation of what I'm trying to do with every episode. i As much as possible, I want a listener to think, I never thought about that.
00:58:04
Speaker
Now, hopefully they go and do something about it. But even if not, that feeling to me is a great feeling. Well, there's a compounding effect, right? I mean, individuals who love to feel that way is because they're seeking to feel that way.
00:58:18
Speaker
Whereas all good part of the society is looking to do the exact opposite. Here less and less things and solidify more and more what they already think. but I appreciate that because I've never heard that version.
00:58:28
Speaker
As you were speaking, i was thinking, well, at least eight of those Ten Commandments, without calling them commandments, I'm sure I've said those at the dinner table to my kids. You shouldn't steal. but You shouldn't kill anyone. I mean, I don't think there's anything too controversial about that.
00:58:43
Speaker
Eric, I think we're getting close to the end here, but I would like to do one more thing before sign off. You've been podcasting for a while, and I'm curious about where it's headed for you. What do you see for the a very prolific amount of podcasts that you're doing? I imagine you're going to continue to do that.
00:59:01
Speaker
What's the direction of the podcast or anything you're doing related to the podcast, anything that you're trying to line yourself up? for the future So having had a fairly popular blog and a decent following in social media a long time ago and and then walking away from that, I really didn't realize for a long time I like to put something out in the world like media or whatever, you know, thought piece and get that validation that there are other people who find it interesting.
00:59:31
Speaker
And I have no interest in, you know, going on TV or whatever, like that type of media. But I had forgotten that that was a part of me. And I started the podcast actually to take advantage of that or get back to it. But also i am when I have time.
00:59:46
Speaker
working on an app that helps to expose people to new ideas and not just expose you to new ideas, but allow you to exercise those ideas. So different from listening to a podcast or a YouTube video or whatever, where even when you go to a conference presentation, it's all one way.
01:00:04
Speaker
You know, very rarely do you get to talk back and very rarely do you get to practice whatever it is that you're learning. You read a book, it's one direction. You know, Jess, you probably read those books where they tell you to do this step and do that step. And you probably don't do it.
01:00:18
Speaker
Probably just read straight through, you know. But when I have time, I'm building this application that will not just introduce you to the idea, but in 10 to 15 minutes a day, actually let you practice it so that you know if you want to go further and I would have loved to have the beta, the private beta live already, but I'm delayed because fortunately my work with Inbound and Agile keeps me very, very busy. That's a good problem to have.
01:00:47
Speaker
But in the coming months, I will hopefully have that app live. And the podcast is complimentary, but also hopefully building a little bit of an audience that will be ready when I release that.
01:01:00
Speaker
If someone wants to reach out to Eric, what's the best way for them to do that? So Eric at Inbound and Agile is my email address. My website is inboundandagile.com or for the podcast, there's unfoldingthought.com.
01:01:17
Speaker
And the place that I and most active, I guess you might say, is LinkedIn. And so it's Eric with a C, P as in Peter, R-A-T as in Thomas, U-M as in mother, P-R-A-T-U-M.
01:01:30
Speaker
And I love to talk to people, as you know, Jess. So I'd be happy for people to reach out to me. All right, Eric. Well, I appreciated the time. We've had many great conversations and this is just another one. So I'll look forward to interacting with you more in the future. and i appreciate you giving me your time for this podcast.
01:01:50
Speaker
Thank you, Jess.
01:02:09
Speaker
As I listened back to this conversation with Eric, what stood out to me wasn't a single insight or takeaway. It was a pattern that shows up repeatedly in how we work, how we relate to one another, and how we make sense of our own experiences.
01:02:23
Speaker
That pattern is that most of what shapes our behavior doesn't happen in the moments we think are important. It happens in the spaces between them. We tend to focus on the obvious events such as the meeting, the decision, the conflict, the promotion, and the failure.
01:02:39
Speaker
But what Eric kept pointing to is that meaning is rarely formed in those moments alone. It is formed through the accumulation of small interactions, repeated exposure, and the stories we tell ourselves afterwards.
01:02:53
Speaker
We often talk about trust as something that is either present or absent, as if it's flipped on by a single interaction. But trust is far more incremental than that. It's built through repetition, familiarity, and through small, low stakes moments where we begin to understand not just what someone says, but how they think and what they intend.
01:03:15
Speaker
that's why eric's examples about everyday interactions matter so much those moments rarely show up on the calendar they are not measured or optimized but over time they create shared context that allows us to infer positive intent even when communication is imperfect This is where the conversation around remote work becomes especially interesting.
01:03:38
Speaker
What Eric described isn't an argument against flexibility or autonomy. It's a systems observation. When we optimize individual convenience, such as fewer commutes, interruptions, and informal interactions, we may unintentionally degrade the collective conditions that may trust,
01:03:56
Speaker
learning, and culture possible. In systems terms, this could be framed as a tragedy of the commons. Each individual decision makes sense on its own, but taken together, those decisions can erode something we didn't realize we were relying on until it's gone.
01:04:13
Speaker
The informal infrastructure of human condition. Eric was candid about the fact that he's not always great in the moment. He doesn't always ask the right question at the right time.
01:04:25
Speaker
But what matters is his awareness of that limitation and his willingness to return, to follow up, and signal care after the fact. That's an important reframing for many of us who feel pressured to be perfectly articulate or emotionally fluent in real time.
01:04:41
Speaker
It suggests that leadership and relationship building aren't about flawless execution. They're about repair, reflection, and continuity. In this respect, Eric's Unfolding Thought podcast and my references to the dynamic of the evolving context share a kinship and inspired the title of today's episode, On Third Thought.
01:05:03
Speaker
Getting past our initial interpretations of an event so that we realize the full benefit of our reflection requires intentionality and work. This doesn't mean we romanticize hardship or deny real pain.
01:05:16
Speaker
It means we recognize that causality is complex and outcomes emerge from the interconnected versus isolated events. It means that over time we often gain the distance needed to reframe what something actually meant.
01:05:31
Speaker
And perhaps that's the most useful way to think about leadership, especially for what I often refer to as the rest of us. Leadership doesn't always come from having answers. It can come from creating conditions where better questions can emerge, where meaning is allowed to unfold over time instead of being forced into a conclusion too quickly.
01:05:52
Speaker
Before we close, I want to take a moment to honor Eric, not just for the time he shared, but for the way he approaches thinking, conversation, and learning. Eric displays a genuine curiosity about how other people see the world not as something to correct, but as something to understand.
01:06:09
Speaker
That's a rare quality, especially in environments that reward speed, certainty, and performance. There's also something worth acknowledging about the generosity of his thinking. Eric is clearly less interested in being right and far more interested in helping others see more clearly.
01:06:26
Speaker
Eric, thank you for the way you invite others into deeper consideration. And to you listening, thank you for taking the time to engage thoughtfully. The Leaders Commute podcast was produced and distributed by Acuity Business Consulting.
01:06:43
Speaker
We partner with executive teams who recognize that their most persistent challenges are rarely technical alone. Strategy, structure, and execution matter, but lasting performance is shaped by how leaders think, how they interpret feedback, and how they respond when conditions change.
01:07:00
Speaker
My role is to help teams slow their thinking just enough to see the forces at work beneath the surface so they can act with greater intention and alignment. You can catch a new episode every month wherever you enjoy your favorite podcast.
01:07:14
Speaker
Until next time, I'm Jess Villegas, and you have been listening to the Leaders Commute Podcast.