The 3 Best Things You Can Adopt As A Leader | Kul Mahay | MMP Talks (31)

[00:00:00] My 30 people when we got them we saw all of these extremely angry people with one thing in mind to eliminate us and the fire service. Trust me, my emotions were running wild. So this is how emotions can be so critically powerful. They are powerful in martial arts and they are powerful in real life and they are powerful in nature.

[00:00:35] Bruce Lee once famously said, knowing is not enough we must apply. Willing is not enough we must do. I want to deconstruct that statement because around our lives the one inevitability that we have is challenge. We will all be challenged in some ways. You've heard some of the challenges that some of the previous speakers have had.

[00:01:04] Bruce Lee if I were to talk to any one of you right now and go through your life, I will hear of challenges. We will all have learnt something. We'll have read books. We'll have listened to podcasts. We'll have been to school, to college.

[00:01:19] Bruce Lee then.

[00:01:20] Bruce Lee when we got one of you right now.

[00:01:27] Bruce Lee forgets that this one of the popular things.

[00:01:39] Bruce Lee who described it for two years of the book, beside me.

[00:01:40] Bruce Lee wrote it for three years of the book.

[00:01:45] Bruce Lee mentioned, Lausse, The Older Book of Rehab.

[00:01:46] Bruce Lee is a book that's when we got one of them.

[00:01:49] Bruce Lee said that they were a few years old years ago.

[00:01:50] They aren't taking the action that is in parallel to their dreams and aspirations.

[00:01:59] So they spend all their lives lying down, willing, expecting, hoping for something to happen,

[00:02:06] but they're not taking the action that would allow things to happen.

[00:02:12] And what I'd like you to take away from this talk today is its very essence of what Bruce Lee said.

[00:02:22] Knowing is not enough. It is not enough for us to know things, to learn things,

[00:02:27] to pick up a book, to go to a dojo, to go to a university unless we apply it.

[00:02:34] That's where wisdom comes from.

[00:02:37] There is no hoping, no willing, no dreaming unless we are willing to do the action that is necessary.

[00:02:46] That is in essence what Bruce Lee was saying.

[00:02:50] This is from my father-in-law.

[00:02:53] And I repeat this quote and every time I repeat it, I will tell him and he's like really proud.

[00:02:59] And he once said to me over a cup of tea, he said, you know, you go to university, you pick up a book,

[00:03:07] he said, that is called knowledge.

[00:03:12] But when you apply it and then you make the mistake, that is called wisdom.

[00:03:17] You see, people have talked about failure.

[00:03:23] And for me, failure is a very important thing.

[00:03:26] I have failed a million times over and each time it is like the most expensive lesson that I could have had.

[00:03:35] We can spend thousands of pounds going to university to spend three years learning something.

[00:03:42] But sometimes we fail to learn from the things that don't go well in our lives.

[00:03:47] And yet those things can actually really set us up for life.

[00:03:52] I spend my entire life now, and I have done over the last three decades, impassioned by leadership.

[00:04:00] What is leadership?

[00:04:03] I'm not a martial artist.

[00:04:06] 48 years ago, I was doing the maths off stage.

[00:04:09] 48 years ago, I went to my first karate lessons.

[00:04:14] 46 years ago, I went to my first judo lesson.

[00:04:20] 44 years ago, I went to my first taijutsu lesson.

[00:04:26] That's as far as my martial arts goes.

[00:04:29] But the learning that I've had based on the learning that I took away 48, 46, 44 years ago,

[00:04:35] has set me up for life.

[00:04:37] So I want to talk about some of the philosophies that I've taken away from martial arts

[00:04:41] that have set me in good stead to everything that I do now.

[00:04:45] I spend my entire life over the last 10 years working with senior executive teams,

[00:04:50] large organizations, small organizations,

[00:04:54] working with teams that are breaking up to bring them back to cohesion,

[00:04:59] helping organizations with transformations.

[00:05:03] And each time, the philosophy that drives everything that I do is very simple.

[00:05:10] My number one passion in life when it comes to leadership is emotional intelligence.

[00:05:15] I work with emotional intelligence almost on a daily basis when I work with organizations.

[00:05:20] And everything comes back down to a few simple lessons.

[00:05:26] And I want to take three of these simple lessons to talk about today

[00:05:30] in the context of martial arts.

[00:05:35] And everything that I've learned and that I continue to learn in life.

[00:05:41] In Aikido, there is a concept called Mushin, which means no mind.

[00:05:49] Some of you will be more familiar with that than I am.

[00:05:53] But in essence, what it means is to have a state of mind

[00:06:00] where your emotions are recognized, but you're not acting on your emotions.

[00:06:08] In emotional intelligence, when I talk about it, I often talk about the limbic brain.

[00:06:15] The limbic brain is that section of our brain.

[00:06:18] Some people refer to it as the reptile brain because it's one of the oldest parts of our brain

[00:06:22] and also one of the fastest parts of our brains, incidentally.

[00:06:26] It's where all the five senses and sometimes even the sixth sense will travel up our brainstem

[00:06:31] and hit that first.

[00:06:33] And within the limbic brain, all our emotions sit.

[00:06:36] This is where we design our emotions.

[00:06:38] This is where we create our emotions.

[00:06:40] This is where we feel our emotions.

[00:06:43] But we have other things within there as well.

[00:06:45] We have two tiny little things called the amygdala.

[00:06:48] The word amygdala literally means almond because they are two almond-shaped pieces.

[00:06:54] And what these pieces of our brain are doing, sitting inside the amygdala,

[00:06:59] they will decide on what we need to be fearful of and what not.

[00:07:05] They're constantly like a little radar that's switched on inside our brains

[00:07:08] and analyzing the environment around us.

[00:07:12] Now, if you are in a dojo and you're in a competition maybe,

[00:07:17] then of course that fear receptor is needed.

[00:07:20] It has to be switched on all the time, right?

[00:07:24] But when you're generally walking around in life,

[00:07:27] especially in a country that's as safe as this country is really,

[00:07:32] when you compare it to so many other countries in the world,

[00:07:36] for some people that fear receptor is constantly whirring away.

[00:07:42] And when we don't feel safe, psychologically safe,

[00:07:45] we will behave exactly as we would do if we felt that we were in physical danger.

[00:07:51] Back to when we were like cavemen being chased by a saber-toothed tiger or a mammoth.

[00:07:57] We either want to run away.

[00:07:59] We either want to fight back.

[00:08:01] We either want to freeze and pretend that we're dead.

[00:08:04] Or we might want to flock together so that we look bigger to the animal or the thing that is hunting us.

[00:08:13] And what happens in this limbic brain, because we have these fear receptors

[00:08:19] that are sending off something like 26 million neutrons to different parts of our brain,

[00:08:24] we have different senses.

[00:08:27] The neurons in our brain might be telling us to get some more adrenaline inside our body.

[00:08:32] So we start shaking.

[00:08:33] We start tensing up.

[00:08:34] It might tell us to take away energy from different parts of our body,

[00:08:37] like the digestive system or the mouth.

[00:08:40] And the mouth goes dry, a bit like my mouth is going dry right now.

[00:08:44] Or we get into what we call focal vision.

[00:08:48] For many, many years, I was a senior police officer.

[00:08:51] And one of the responsibilities or the specialisms that I had,

[00:08:54] I was a firearms commander.

[00:08:56] I was also a commander for major incidents and critical incidents.

[00:08:59] So anything that was highly dangerous would come for me to make a decision.

[00:09:04] I was making life and death decisions all the time.

[00:09:07] I could be woken up at two or three o'clock in the morning,

[00:09:11] and within seconds I had to make a life-changing decision.

[00:09:17] How do I do that when my emotions are scattered?

[00:09:23] When I can see the ever-present danger of a man running around with a knife,

[00:09:29] threatening people, stabbing people.

[00:09:30] Or I can see that there's another person running around with a gun,

[00:09:34] intent on killing somebody.

[00:09:37] Or that there is a chemical factory in the middle of a housing estate

[00:09:41] that has accidentally mixed two chemicals together

[00:09:44] and created liquid bombs

[00:09:47] that could kill thousands of people.

[00:09:49] And trust me, every single one of these things have happened.

[00:09:53] And I'm thinking, how do I evacuate a whole housing estate?

[00:09:55] Where do I put them people?

[00:09:57] At two o'clock in the morning.

[00:09:58] Can you imagine how the emotions in my brain would be running wild?

[00:10:05] And can you imagine if I made decisions based upon the emotions in my brain,

[00:10:12] how they might not be the best decisions?

[00:10:15] And just put it into an everyday context.

[00:10:20] Think back to the last time one of your loved ones

[00:10:23] maybe sent you a text,

[00:10:25] or maybe they said something that just triggers you.

[00:10:29] So you end up responding to it without thinking too long and hard.

[00:10:33] You respond in kind.

[00:10:35] And before you know it, you're in a blazing argument.

[00:10:38] And I can see from a couple of smiles in the audience that that has happened.

[00:10:42] It certainly happened to me.

[00:10:45] So Mu Shin, this whole concept of no mind,

[00:10:49] is really about how do we calm the mind so that we make better decisions.

[00:10:56] Can you see how the context of martial arts philosophy can translate into leadership philosophy?

[00:11:04] How do we do that?

[00:11:05] Well, we have to get ourselves out of the limbic brain.

[00:11:08] We have to acknowledge the emotions that we might be going through.

[00:11:12] And I felt many emotions over time.

[00:11:16] I've been in the middle of riots.

[00:11:18] In 2001, I got called out at 10 o'clock at night,

[00:11:23] said, can you take up a whole unit from Derbyshire Police,

[00:11:25] which is where I was based,

[00:11:26] up the motorway to Bradford, West Yorkshire Police,

[00:11:30] where there was a riot ongoing.

[00:11:31] And it was one of the most serious riots that we'd had in a long, long time.

[00:11:36] Several thousand young men had hit the streets

[00:11:39] and they were throwing petrol bombs at the police and the fire service.

[00:11:42] When I got there, I was told,

[00:11:45] there is no briefing.

[00:11:46] You just have to go up that road.

[00:11:47] There's a BMW garage at the top of that road that is on fire.

[00:11:51] The fire service are pouring it out,

[00:11:52] but there's 2,000 men attacking them with petrol bombs.

[00:11:55] You need to protect them.

[00:11:57] I went with 30 people.

[00:12:00] And my 30 people, when we got there,

[00:12:03] we saw all of these extremely angry people

[00:12:06] with one thing in mind to eliminate us and the fire service.

[00:12:10] Trust me, my emotions were running wild.

[00:12:17] But the prefrontal cortex part of our brain, which is up here,

[00:12:21] is the part that allows us to make rational, good quality decisions.

[00:12:26] So I acknowledged the fear.

[00:12:28] I also acknowledged within myself, in that split second,

[00:12:31] I did so much.

[00:12:32] I acknowledged my own fear,

[00:12:34] but I also acknowledged that my 30 people would also be as scared as I was.

[00:12:40] But in that split second,

[00:12:41] I made the decision that I was going to rely upon the training that I'd had.

[00:12:45] I knew what I needed to do.

[00:12:47] And I wasn't going to be fazed by us being outnumbered like 10 to 1.

[00:12:53] I knew exactly what we need to do,

[00:12:55] and I needed to trust that it would work.

[00:12:59] So I lined all my staff up.

[00:13:01] I got the shields out.

[00:13:02] I put some in short shields, some in long shields.

[00:13:05] And then I did what we call a shield burst.

[00:13:07] So the short shields would run forward through gaps in the long shields,

[00:13:12] and we would get our battens and we would hit people to make them go back.

[00:13:16] And then we would keep doing that until we created a safe space.

[00:13:20] In an hour of fighting, that's all you can describe it as,

[00:13:24] we had cleared 20 meters of space,

[00:13:26] which allowed for reinforcement to come in.

[00:13:28] And we were able to clear that area of the public.

[00:13:32] Getting into the prefrontal cortex is where we make decisions based upon logic,

[00:13:38] the information that is available to us,

[00:13:40] the ability to look at the various options in, again, split seconds,

[00:13:44] to know what option might work, what option might not work,

[00:13:47] to understand why do I need to make this decision?

[00:13:50] What is the responsibility on me?

[00:13:52] I knew what my responsibilities were as a leader.

[00:13:55] My responsibilities were to keep the public safe,

[00:13:58] to keep my staff safe, and to keep the fire service safe,

[00:14:01] and actually to keep the people that were attacking us also safe.

[00:14:06] How I did that was relying upon my training.

[00:14:11] So this is how emotions can be so critically powerful.

[00:14:16] They are powerful in martial arts,

[00:14:17] and they are powerful in real life,

[00:14:19] and they are powerful in leadership.

[00:14:21] Another concept that hit me was Judo.

[00:14:26] Or rather, the Ju in Judo,

[00:14:29] which means yielding,

[00:14:32] and this ability to adapt to the changing circumstances.

[00:14:36] And let's face it,

[00:14:38] if there's one thing

[00:14:41] that we can say right now in the world,

[00:14:43] is that it's constantly changing.

[00:14:46] In fact, the world is changing now at a faster pace

[00:14:49] than I've ever known the world to change.

[00:14:52] And we can thank digitalization and social media for that,

[00:14:55] but it's changing at a faster pace.

[00:14:59] And if we don't adapt to those changing circumstances,

[00:15:03] then there's a danger that we're going to get left behind.

[00:15:06] And in all the research that I carry out

[00:15:09] for the leadership work that I do,

[00:15:11] I analyze a lot of what's happened in the past.

[00:15:15] And there are a lot of companies in the past,

[00:15:17] when we talk about them,

[00:15:19] will realize they actually failed

[00:15:20] because they failed to adapt.

[00:15:23] Think of things like,

[00:15:25] you know, companies like Blockbuster, for example.

[00:15:28] Blockbuster in 2004

[00:15:29] was a multi-billion pound organization.

[00:15:32] Along comes a little scrappy little company

[00:15:34] called Netflix and says to Blockbuster,

[00:15:36] hey, Blockbusters,

[00:15:37] why don't we get into a partnership?

[00:15:38] Why don't you give us all your DVDs?

[00:15:40] We'll put them onto our streaming platform

[00:15:41] and we'll both be successful.

[00:15:43] Blockbuster looked down and said,

[00:15:45] hey, we're multi-billion.

[00:15:46] You're like a couple of million.

[00:15:47] Why would we do that?

[00:15:49] It took eight years, I think it was,

[00:15:51] between that and 2012,

[00:15:53] where Blockbuster was no longer in existence

[00:15:56] and Netflix is one of the biggest companies in the world.

[00:16:00] That's just one story.

[00:16:02] There's so many stories.

[00:16:03] There's Woolworths.

[00:16:04] There's Debenhams.

[00:16:05] There are so many stories

[00:16:07] where leaders have failed to adapt

[00:16:09] and as a consequence, have failed.

[00:16:12] One other martial arts philosophy

[00:16:15] that I want to bring about

[00:16:16] and that's Zanshin from Kendo.

[00:16:19] And Zanshin is particularly interesting

[00:16:21] because it talks about the remaining mind.

[00:16:24] Now you have to really translate what that means,

[00:16:26] a remaining mind.

[00:16:27] In combat, what that would mean

[00:16:30] is once you've pinned your person to the floor,

[00:16:33] what do you do then?

[00:16:35] Do you hold that person down

[00:16:38] or do you take a step back

[00:16:40] and you look around you

[00:16:42] to see what other potential threats there are out there?

[00:16:45] When we came into that,

[00:16:47] it was a football match playing

[00:16:48] and it reminded me of another analogy.

[00:16:50] When you watch a football player,

[00:16:52] footballer with a football,

[00:16:54] they're running around

[00:16:55] and they're dribbling the football,

[00:16:57] halfway through you will see them

[00:16:58] either pause with a ball,

[00:17:01] call foot on the ball,

[00:17:02] or they will look around

[00:17:04] and say, what do I do next?

[00:17:07] That is for me Zanshin.

[00:17:09] And if we see what's happening in the world,

[00:17:12] this whole concept of situational awareness,

[00:17:16] which is what I would call it

[00:17:16] in the context of emotional intelligence,

[00:17:18] the ability to read other people's emotions,

[00:17:22] read other people's thoughts and their behavior,

[00:17:24] read the environment around you,

[00:17:26] will help you not to make mistakes.

[00:17:29] Now, there's a lot of bad stuff

[00:17:31] that's been happening in the world right now.

[00:17:33] There's wars in Eastern Europe.

[00:17:35] There is conflict over democracy in America.

[00:17:40] We've had our own conflict

[00:17:41] and challenges on democracy here

[00:17:43] from Brexit in 2016

[00:17:45] through to where we are right now,

[00:17:48] where we've had right-wing extremism

[00:17:49] and riots in the country.

[00:17:51] And if you think about it,

[00:17:53] most of the catalysts for that

[00:17:57] has been disinformation, misinformation.

[00:17:59] And if you look at where that disinformation,

[00:18:01] misinformation has come from,

[00:18:03] it's come from populist leaders,

[00:18:05] leaders who understand how the public think.

[00:18:09] And it's also come from technological leaders,

[00:18:13] the likes of Elon Musk

[00:18:15] and the likes of Mark Zuckerberg,

[00:18:17] the social media giants out there.

[00:18:20] They have the ability

[00:18:22] and they know they have the ability

[00:18:24] to influence people.

[00:18:25] Why?

[00:18:26] Because they have incredible situational awareness.

[00:18:30] Now, if we as leaders,

[00:18:31] because of course,

[00:18:32] we are all leaders here in this audience,

[00:18:34] I don't care how small you are,

[00:18:35] how young you are,

[00:18:36] or how old you are,

[00:18:37] if you are influencing people

[00:18:39] or you're influencing circumstances,

[00:18:41] you are a leader.

[00:18:43] So even you can influence people.

[00:18:46] Even you have that ability

[00:18:49] and that responsibility.

[00:18:51] Because what do they say?

[00:18:52] With great authority comes great responsibility.

[00:18:55] To have situational awareness,

[00:18:57] to understand how we might impact on people,

[00:19:02] to be able to read your environment,

[00:19:04] to read the room,

[00:19:05] is an incredible superpower to have.

[00:19:09] So in closing,

[00:19:11] what I want to say to everyone here is,

[00:19:13] I stand in the presence of

[00:19:16] incredible martial artists,

[00:19:18] but actually,

[00:19:20] your martial art

[00:19:21] is only a pathway to your journey

[00:19:24] to becoming an incredible leader.

[00:19:26] And to becoming an incredible leader,

[00:19:28] if you took the whole idea

[00:19:31] of understanding your emotions

[00:19:33] and have the impact on your decisions,

[00:19:35] to understand the need

[00:19:37] to be agile and adaptable

[00:19:38] in a constantly changing world,

[00:19:40] and to have incredible situational awareness,

[00:19:44] are probably the three best things

[00:19:46] that you could adopt as a leader.

[00:19:48] Thank you.