And that takes me to the question of, are we picking talent using the past as opposed to the future?

Yes, most of the criteria we have.

Tell us a little bit about that.

Most of the criteria that you hear people talk about and that make people comfortable is a picture of the past, not a picture of the future.

Most psychological inventories are pictures of the past, not the future.

I jumped all over the place, but just to finish up on the psychometrics, I am a Star Wars fan.

We were gonna get onto that as well.

So what is the best message to leaders right now to just try and be the best they can be for the people that they lead in an ever-changing world?

But is this a problem or is this, I don't know whether this is a very British thing, but is this a problem where people feel uncomfortable talking about what they're good at?

Yeah, in the same way that somebody's almost get fired for not being told that thing because it was uncomfortable.

Yeah.

Nobody's following you if they don't know that you've got some compelling stuff about you.

So leadership is primarily about who is willing to follow you.

No longer, I know that lots of certainly men in leadership still think it's if they bark loud enough and are frightening enough and threaten people's jobs enough, they'll follow them over the top and they will not anymore.

I talked to the commandant of Sandhurst and I had very... mistaken views about how leadership was happening there.

Really?

You know I always want to bring in someone who can go to a deeper level on these episodes, so I spoke to psychologist John Amaechi about this exact tension between effort and transformation, and I asked him why so many ambitious people do all the right things on paper and still feel like their life hasn't fundamentally shifted.

So one of the reasons that people who are ambitious always feel like their life hasn't fundamentally changed is because ambitious people always reframe the bar for themselves.

They reach a level of competence or a level of success, and immediately it starts to feel dissatisfying because the bar has already been reset.

They've already looked around and thought, "Ooh, if I did one more thing, I could be one more thing better." And that means that success, instead of feeling rewarding, feels like a relentless journey.

And then you start asking yourself questions like, "Why don't I enjoy all the success I'm having? It must be I, I'm somehow fundamentally broken." So I think there's a part of this where very ambitious people, they do do many of the right things, but one of the things they don't do is to really sit and enjoy their moments of success and then evaluate how they must have changed at least their behaviors, if not their mindsets, in order to achieve what they've already achieved.

If they did that for a moment, people, I think, would find that, yeah, my life has shifted in some ways that are really important.

But as most people who are successful know, sometimes the way that your life changes is deeply mundane, quite ordinary on reflection, but it's the fact that you do it consistently that makes you successful.

[laughs]

Apart from that.

But the experience of being in public with other people is painful.

It's really painful because you-- although it, this will feel fragile to lots of people, we are impacted by how we see other people see us, and I know when I leave my house that I'm a monster, and I know this because of how other people react to me, and they react to me like I'm a monster.

When I walk into a lift and they are going to walk into a lift with me, they might take the next lift, and I can't explain that unless I'm a monsterWhen I walk into a space with people and they take their belongings, their valuables, and hold them closer to themselves.

I can't explain that unless they see a monster.

When I round a corner, this happened to me when I lived in my old house last year, I rounded a corner and a couple were walking towards me with coffees.

I would love to hear how you use your identity, your body, your height, et cetera, as something that helps you in your professional life.

Mm-hmm

... deterrence based.

Uh, I, I don't trust you, um, so I'm simply going to behave in ways that mean you are least likely to harm me.

Avoidance type behaviors.

And then there's low trust environments, which is what a lot of businesses and workplaces are, which is calculus based.

This is like I'm suspicious, but the benefits of tr- but I will examine the benefits of trust in every single moment.

It's why these kind of organizations operate so slowly because in every meeting, in every moment, with every delegation, with every decision, people decide, is this trustworthy or not, which slows everything down.

One thing I always wondered is, is it's a bit of a side thing, and I'll get back to the, the, the questions I have in mind, but can you give power to someone or must they take it for it to be real power?

Mm.

In the context of me, you can't be a part-time man of principle.

And I say certain things are important, and it's not about, um, loyalty because I don't really believe in it as a, as a thing.

It feels a bit quid pro quo.

But this was about me and what I thought was the thing that was most resonant with who I am.

And the thing that was most resonant was saying, "I'm gonna take a ridiculously small, in the context of the other opportunity-

Sure

... amount of money to stay with a team, and more importantly, stay with a coach that had given me the opportunity in the first place," because that felt resonant with who I am.

So do you think, hmm, do you think that it's innate in the human condition in psychology to have that within most people, but most people's circumstances aren't desperate? Or does the immigrant who tries to do it, or the John Amaechi type, are they already exceptional and in a way pre-chosen?

Well, I think people who choose to move away from their home to go to a foreign place, it's not...

I don't know if the exception is the right word, but they have characteristics and qualities that mark them different because not everyone's an explorer.

You know this in America herself, right? The idea that many Americans never get a passport, they don't travel.

And it, it's, it...

I think it's reductive to suggest that it's about a closed-mindedness alone, but it is the fact that people's sense of adventure is limited to the very vast space that you have, and their sense of the worthiness of other places is limited too because of the sense of American exceptionalism.

Whereas even Britain who was, let's face it, one of the most, um, one of the country's most interested in suggesting that we're exceptional as we import ourselves and export ourselves across the world, we have a sense that there might be something valuable on offer somewhere else.

But if you were born in the years between 1980 and 1990, the technology you're familiar with will be different than if you're a net native.

Speaking of growing and scaling back, what's the first cultural crack you tend to see when a business grows too quickly?

I do have a sense that the grow-too-quick narrative is not the heart of the problem.

One of the things that we experience, and I promise I will answer the question, one of the things that we experience is that people come to us telling us what they want to fix.

And what they want to fix is a symptom.

So it's like they've come into the doctors and they say, I've got a rash on my arm.

Give me some cream for this rash.

But the rash is caused by something.

They

So in the end, if you'd taken the money, it would, you'd end up in the same place.

Yeah.

I was penniless, and I ended up living in my sister's, uh, front room for a while.

This is after being an athlete.

Actually, I think this is the first time I've mentioned it ever.

But as most people imagine this transition that was amazing, I remember I was in, I was, uh, one of the three athletes chosen, former athletes chosen to be an ambassador for the, uh, London 2012 Games, and I remember in the run-up to the games, I was living in my sister's front room, getting, uh, down to London on the train, arriving and being w- kind of tubing and walking.

But I had no money for anything else, and so here I was.

And-

Do you have a sense that right now there's this huge nostalgia for the music of Oasis in England? And it has to do in part with the sense that the 1990s, at least in perceptions, were a better, happier era than today.

Yeah.

Well, that, that is a, that is a fundamental delusion of our time right now.

Everybody hearkens back to a period of time that they believe is somehow better in numerous, if not all ways.

And these, every generation, you get, there's, there's really good research on this.

Every generation has a sense that there was a period of time that was right.

Every generation has a period, uh, has a sense that there has been a moral and substantively principled decline in society.

"Whew, I'm out of there."

Yeah.

"You went to school, you got a PhD, and now you just talk to people." But there is something about it, the access you get to people's lives, the, the credibility that you can quickly build with people that allows them to share stuff with you, and you just sit there as a reflective entity saying, "It's really interesting you said that.

Last week you said something quite different to that.

Which one, how do we reconcile those things?" And to me it's so exciting the idea that in, you know, 10 months' time working with, with, with, especially 'cause I get to work with very cool people at the peak of their careers often, but even those people who are just starting out, it's just incredibly exciting to know there's-

Hmm.

In the context of me, you can't be a part-time man of principle, and I say certain things are important, and it's not about loyalty 'cause I don't really believe in it as a, as a thing.

It feels a bit quid pro quo, but this was about me and what I thought was the thing that was most resonant with who I am, and the thing that was most resonant was saying, I'm gonna take a ridiculously small, in the context of the other opportunity, amount of money to stay with a team and, more importantly, stay with a coach that had given me the opportunity in the first place because that felt resonant with who I am.

It felt like that was aligned with my principles, and I knew that there was a good chance that their front office, at the earliest opportunity, whether it was Tim Duncan or some other bloke, would come along and kick me out of the team so far and so fast.

What's the best way of getting over that and becoming more self-aware?

Yeah, so there's two things.

For you as an individual, just acknowledge the fact that however self-aware you think you are, pick a percentage number and then take 25% off just to be, that's being generous, right? So if you think you're 95, you just take 25% right off that.

and know that you've got work to do and most of us would probably not you know especially after listening to this they would not say 95 so but whatever number you pick if it's 50 just take 25 off and realize that there is likely scenarios where you've no idea about stuff about you or the impact you have and then you start thinking about the moments that really agitate you or excite you and this can be bad or good right there are things that make you feel greatly I cry at a lot of films.

It's just a thing.

But examining what kinds of things make you cry and what kind of things might be equally sad but not make you cry is informative about who you are.

The fact that you cry at films is informative about who you are.

Mm-hmm.

How hard and how much fear was there involved with trying to get over here to, uh, to hold me in your bosom?

It's...

I tell you, the interesting part was a colleague of mine, uh, an academic at another university, um, recently found themselves, uh, stopped, held for 36 hours, and then, uh, gently ushered back to France.

Uh, so since that point, it has made me breathe deeply about coming into the country, and not...

Again, it, it's not anything about the people of the country, it's just about the, the process of going through the border.

And it's notable to me, I suppose, that I travel to the Middle East for work and, and places that others might imagine to be more hostile from a governmental point of view, and I feel less stressed than I felt coming in.

I've got global entry, right? So I'm, I've been double-checked.

Thoughts, Amichi?

No, uh, no.

All right, good. All right, good. I'm glad that you just looked like you were gonna, to say something and then didn't say anything. Uh, let's go to a Behind the Bit here as part of our 20-year celebration. Stump the Meach is always something that is popular. John Amaechi, one of our most popular guests, one of our smartest guests, can never tell what Stugots is saying.

Formul-

It's either formula, but having said that, I can't imagine a context in which Stugots would have to say that word. Formidable.