Leadership Language: Using Authentic Communication to Drive Results with Chris Westfall

Inside each of us is a vision of how things could be. Yet most people remain frustrated by a lack of impact, unable to connect and inspire the people they care about the most. Why?

There’s a language we understand but rarely use. A language that’s sincere. Powerful. Compelling. A language of words—and actions—that can’t be denied.

Leadership Language will help you to peel back the ineffective “business speak”, so you can change the conversation. And change your results. Imagine what could happen when you replace frustration with an irresistible vision—for yourself, your team and your organization.

Today’s leaders face so many challenges—employee retention, operational efficiency, culture, collaboration, leading across generations, and more—but communication is at the heart of every one of those issues. A clear message with a powerful delivery gets you halfway home. Honing in on your next conversation can drive more impact, better relationships, and greater overall effectiveness. For yourself. Your career. Your company.

They say there’s nothing that can stop an idea whose time has come. So, take the lead. It’s time for you to create what’s missing. And Leadership Language will show you how.

  • Get clear on your vision, get aligned with your story, and get others engaged with your message
  • Connect with the people that matter most, in a way that invites innovation and new outcomes
  • Find the courage to move forward, conquer change, and create a powerful impact—while you help others do the same

From student leaders to the C-suite, there is only one way for a leader to make an impact: communication. Leadership Language is your personal guide to mastering critical skills and unveiling your authentic potential. 

Links mentioned during the show:

Stanley Anderson, the man who hits a 266 mph fastball: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o_vCPJpPOs

Murray Willcocks interview: https://westfallonline.com/decision-making-wave/

New online group coaching program, just introduced: http://chriswestfall.net

Low Man on the Totem Pole: Stop Begging for a Promotion, Start Selling Your Genius with Heather MacArthur

For many of us, the thought of work brings to mind a daily nine-to-five grind, reporting to disinterested supervisors, and ”working for the weekend.” You probably enter the office feeling disenchanted, counting down the minutes until 5 p.m. Whether this approach to work is due to feeling unrecognised for your work, being a cog in a corporate machine, or the influence of apathetic coworkers, there is something you likely forgot along the way, YOU, you are the one in the driver’s seat of your career.

Making the switch from a passive passenger to being the driver isn’t easy and there are no one-size-fits-all means of achieving this. Today’s episode offers various groundbreaking strategies to get more out of your work–including viewing yourself as a business owner and your place of work as the client.

Whether you are a front-line employee or a manager, today’s episode offers something for everyone trying to find meaning in their work.

We are joined by business consultant and author of “Low Man on the Totem Pole: Stop Begging for a Promotion, Start Selling Your Genius” Heather MacArthur

Heather shares:

The two of the biggest issues facing the workplace today:

  • We have been told not to believe in our greatness
  • Business structure relies on people managers who have no clue how to develop people
  • The 3 mindsets of the workplace
  • The Pyramid of Purpose
  • Challengers and Nemeses
  • Weaving Webs v Climbing Ladders
  • Networking v Building Relationships
  • The first steps to change

You can find out more about Heather here:

www.lowmanonthetotempole.com/buy-the-book/

Collaborative Advantage: How collaboration beats competition as a strategy for success with Paul Skinner

Our guest today argues that we have now reached a turning point in history from which creating Competitive Advantage may no longer be in the best interests of an organisation.

He presents today’s business and social challenges through a new strategic lens and offers this book as a practical guide to help you create Collaborative Advantage, transform your business and change the world.

You will gain access to world-leading techniques to enable you to:

Mobilise staff, partners, collaborators and customers around a common purpose that gets everyone you need firmly on your side. 


Foster improved innovation, reach more customers or beneficiaries, build greater loyalty, generate greater income and forge more ambitious partnerships. 


De-couple your potential for growth from the level of resource your organization controls.

This is an indispensable guide that will help you transform the growth of your business or the impact of your non-profit by bringing the fuller value-creating potential of the outside world inside your organization.

We welcome Strategic consultant, social entrepreneur and the author of “Collaborative Advantage: How collaboration beats competition as a strategy for success” – Paul Skinner

We talk:

  • The Death and History of Competitive Advantage
  • The Birth of Collaborative Advantage
  • The “Outside In” framework
  • Common purpose
  • Personal Purpose
  • Engaging the Ecosystem
  • The Circular Economy

More about Paul here:

https://www.theaof.com/

EP 151: The Change Maker's Playbook: How to Seek, Seed and Scale Innovation in Any Company with Amy Radin

Any leader in any size company, no matter the size or sector, feels the pressure to innovate, find new ideas and business models, and create enduring customer value. There is no one formula or set process to find and execute the ideas that achieve these goals; customers set moving targets, shareholders are unforgiving and demanding, and society expects companies to care about much more than the bottom line.

The answer to the dilemma every business faces today is that innovation is exhilarating, rewarding and even fun when it is approached as a unique challenge, but it can also be polarising, unpredictable, and scary. Success requires that leaders rethink how they lead innovation. Leaders know they must set aside preconceived notions of what works, and look to those who have already walked in their shoes.

Changemakers are few in number and are worthy of encouragement and support. They want to create and deliver value, bring together teams to solve big problems, seize opportunities, and make a difference. Treading water is not an option for them. They want to succeed for themselves, their communities, friends and loved ones, and for the broader stakeholder ecosystem. Theirs are hard-won achievements.

We welcome the author of the focus of today’s episode: The Change Maker’s Playbook: How to Seek, Seed and Scale Innovation in Any Company, Amy Radin, welcome to the show.

We talk about:

  • Changemaker Frameworks for Change
  • How to seek innovation
  • How to overcome resistance
  • How to seek support
  • Seeding
  • Scaling
  • How to embed change
  • Building Support
  • The Army of the Willing
  • Building an External Network
  • Intrapreneurship
  • Resourcefulness
  • Positioning 
  • Purpose
  • If established enterprise incubate and launch new business models

More about Amy here:

https://www.amyradin.com

EP 150: Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change with Greg Satell

If you could make a change—any change you wanted—what would it be? Would it be something in your organization or your industry? Maybe something it’s in your community or throughout society as a whole?

Creating true change is never easy. Most startups don’t survive. Most community groups never get beyond small local actions. Even when a spark catches fire and protesters swarm the streets, it often seems to fizzle out almost as fast as it started. The status quo is, almost by definition, well entrenched and never gives up without a fight.

In this groundbreaking book, one of today’s top innovation experts delivers a guide for driving transformational change. To truly change the world or even just your little corner of it, you don’t need a charismatic leader or a catchy slogan. What you need is a cascade: small groups that are loosely connected but united by a common purpose.

As individual entities, these groups may seem inconsequential, but when they synchronise their collective behaviour as networks, they become immensely powerful. Through the power of cascades, a company can be made anew, an industry disrupted, or even an entire society reshaped. As Satell takes us through past and present movements, he explains exactly why and how some succeed while others fail.

We welcome Bestselling Author, Keynote Speaker and Innovation Advisor Greg Satell welcome back to the show.

We talk:

  • “Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change”
  • Success v Failure and why
  • Boston v Silicon Valley
  • Debunk the Blockbuster v Netflix story
  • Occupy v Otpor, what worked and what did not
  • How to build a change network
  • Using a network to defeat a network
  • Changemakers
  • Nobody is an island
  • Genome of values

More about Greg here:

https://www.gregsatell.com/

His Ted Talk here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOt1dLVyHjQ

EP 149: The Gold Mine Effect with Rasmus Ankersen

We all want to discover our hidden talents and make an impact with them. But how? Our guest, an ex-footballer and performance specialist, quit his job and for six intense months lived with the world’s best athletes in an attempt to answer this question.

Why have the best middle distance runners grown up in the same Ethiopian village?

Why are the leading female golfers from South Korea?

How did one athletic club in Kingston, Jamaica, succeed in producing so many world-class sprinters?

Our guest presents his surprising conclusions in seven lessons on how anyone – or any business, organisation or team – can defy the many misconceptions of high performance and learn to build their own gold mine of real talent.

This book is not about sport, it’s about identifying and nurturing talent. In a knowledge economy, talent is a competitive advantage, but bus8ness leaders and coaches alike don’t often know how to identify talent, even when it’s right in front of them.

We welcome the author of The Gold Mine Effect Rasmus Ankersen

We discuss:

  • The Challenge of identifying talent
  • Why we overlook talent
  • The child prodigy problem
  • Traits of the best coaches
  • How to nurture talent
  • How parents should nurture talent
  • The balance of parent involvement

More about Rasmus here: https://www.rasmusankersen.com/

EP 148: “You Are Not So Smart” Biases, Heuristics and Fallacies with David McRaney

“You Are Not So Smart” Biases, Heuristics and Fallacies with David McRaney

How many of your Facebook friends do you think you know? Would you help a stranger in need? Do you know why you’re so in love with your new smartphone?

The truth is: you’re probably wrong.

This episode examines the assorted ways we mislead ourselves every single day, a psychology course with all the boring bits taken out.

Prepare for a whirlwind tour of some of the latest research, fused with a healthy dose of humour. You’ll discover just how irrational you really are, which delusions keep you sane, how to boost your productivity, and why you’ve never kept a New Year’s resolution. We welcome the author of “You Are Not So Smart: Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, Why You Have Too Many Friends On Facebook And 46 Other Ways You’re Deluding Yourself” and host of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, David McRaney

We discuss:

  • What are Biases, Heuristics and Fallacies
  • Why we create mental shortcuts
  • The ancient architecture of the brain
  • Priming
  • How Casinos Prime Us
  • Confabulation
  • Split-Brain patients and confabulation
  • Why our brains seek patterns
  • The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
  • The Availability Heuristic
  • The video mentioned during the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNmsVl4xkhg

More about David here: http://davidmcraney.com/ https://youarenotsosmart.com

EP 147: “Defining You: How to profile yourself and unlock your full potential” with author Fiona Murden

“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.” —Aldous Huxley

Have you ever wondered what a profiling session would tell you about yourself?

Our guest helps some of the most successful people in the world to understand their behaviour and improve their performance. Here she guides you through the professional profiling assessment process in private, to help you discover your strengths, understand what really drives you and learn which environments will help you to excel.

Our behaviour is at the core of what we do. This is your ultimate self-awareness toolkit to help you understand both your own and other’s behaviour and to positively influence it. Along the way you may even start to sleep better, think more clearly and have good moods more often.

More about Fiona here: https://fionamurden.com/

EP 146: Artificial Intelligence and the Two Singularities with Calum Chace

“Optimism, like pessimism, is a bias, and to be avoided. But summoning the determination to rise to a challenge and succeed is a virtue.” – Calum Chace

Today’s guest argues that in the course of this century, the exponential growth in the capability of AI is likely to bring about two “singularities” – points at which conditions are so extreme that the normal rules break down.

The first is the economic singularity, when machine skill reaches a level that renders many of us unemployable and requires an overhaul of our current economic and social systems.

The second is the technological singularity, when machine intelligence reaches and then surpasses the cognitive abilities of an adult human, relegating us to the second smartest species on the planet.

These singularities will present huge challenges, but this he argues that we can meet these challenges and overcome them. If we do, the rewards could be almost unimaginable.

Artificial intelligence can turn out to be the best thing ever to happen to humanity, making our future wonderful almost beyond imagination. But only if we address head-on the challenges that it will raise.

We welcome expert on artificial intelligence, and its likely future impact on society and bestselling author of many books including the focus of today’s show “Artificial Intelligence and the Two Singularities”, Calum Chace, welcome to the show

We discuss:

  • The Terminology
  • Technological Singularity
  • Economic Singularity
  • Exponential Change
  • Artificial General Intelligence
  • The AI race
  • Technological Joblessness
  • Universal Basic Income
  • Impact on Society
  • What is being done
  • The Gods and the Useless
  • Transhumanism
  • Augmented Humanity
  • Centaurs
  • Privacy Concerns

More about Calum here;

http://www.pandoras-brain.com/

and the book here:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0815368534/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i6

EP 145: The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations That Transform the World, David Deutsch,

The Beginning of Infinity, Explanations That Transform the World, David Deutsch,

A bold and all-embracing exploration of the nature and progress of knowledge from one of today’s great thinkers. 

Throughout history, mankind has struggled to understand life’s mysteries, from the mundane to the seemingly miraculous.

Our guest is a multiple award-winning pioneer in the field of quantum computation and argues that explanations have a fundamental place in the universe. They have unlimited scope and power to cause change, and the quest to improve them is the basic regulating principle not only of science but of all successful human endeavour.

This stream of ever improving explanations has infinite reach. We are subject only to the laws of physics, and they impose no upper boundary to what we can eventually understand, control, and achieve.

He applies that worldview to a wide range of issues and unsolved problems, from creativity and free will to the origin and future of the human species.

We welcome David Deutsch, Fellow of the Royal Society, a pioneer in quantum computing, visiting Professor of physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation at Oxford University, multiple TED Talker, optimist and author of The Beginning of Infinity,  Explanations That Transform the World.

We discuss:

  • What David calls good explanations.
  • Error as unavoidable in the growth of knowledge.
  • Fallibilism
  • Education
  • Creativity
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • The misconception that knowledge needs authority to be genuine or reliable
  • All scientific theories are testable conjectures
  • Every explanation begins with conjecture
  • The growth of knowledge consists of correcting misconceptions in our theories
  • The Principle of Mediocrity
  • The Spaceship Earth metaphor
  • We touch very lightly on the Multiverse

 

https://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk/

 

Positive SSL