Mike Cameron is a leadership coach and the author of the books, Effective Leader and The Emerging Leader.
Website:
https://www.strategically.com.au/
Highlights:
02:21 Introduction
05:51 Leadership
13:22 D.I.S.C
20:13 Delegating tasks
27:25 Goal planning
32:01 It’s okay to fail
39:42 Behavior and how it impacts others
47:23 Empathy vs sympathy
56:04 Leadership in recovery
1:01:57 The four attributes
1:11:24 Cultural diversity
1:21:36 Losing trust
Transcription:
Mike 0:00
The first thing I would say is you need to understand what triggers negative thoughts. Somebody says something and immediately it takes you back in time to when you were a little kiddie, and somebody criticized you or didn’t choose you for the football team.
Mike 0:16
So in my book I talk about the very first thing you need to do is to have a check process. As an example there is one that’s known to a lot of people called DISC Dominance, Influence, Stability and Compliance and where do you fit in that.
Mike 0:35
So if you’ve been a person who’s been a very dominant leader or a very dominant manager, and suddenly here you are lying helpless after a stroke, and people are taking control, part of you may be fighting anything that is they’re trying to help you.
Intro 0:56
This is the recovery after stroke podcast, with Bill Gasiamis, helping you navigate recovery after stroke.
Bill Gasiamis 1:09
Hello, and welcome to recovery after stroke a podcast full of answers, advice, and practical tools for stroke survivors to help you take back your life after a stroke and build a stronger future.
Bill Gasiamis 1:21
I’m your host three-time stroke survivor Bill Gasiamis. After my own life was turned upside down, and I went from being an active father to being stuck in hospital I knew if I wanted to get my life back after stroke, and back to the one I loved before my recovery was up to me.
Bill Gasiamis 1:37
After years of researching and discovering, learn how to heal my own brain and rebuild a healthier and happier life than I ever dreamed possible. And now I’ve made it my mission to empower others stroke survivors like you to recover faster achieve your goals and take back the freedom you deserve.
Bill Gasiamis 1:54
If you enjoyed this episode and want more resources, accessible training, and hands on support, check out my recovery after stroke membership community created especially for stroke survivors and caregivers.
Bill Gasiamis 2:05
This is your clear pathway to transform your symptoms, reduce your anxiety and navigate your journey to recovery with confidence, head to recoveryafterstroke.com To find out more after this episode. But for now let’s dive right into today’s show.
Introduction
Bill Gasiamis 2:21
This is episode 172. And my guest today is Mike Cameron, who is the author of the book Effective Leaders. In this episode, we apply the concept of corporate leadership to stroke recovery, for some useful insights that may help you in your recovery.
Bill Gasiamis 2:37
Now, just before we get started, if you’re enjoying these episodes, and this podcast and you believe that it is useful, please leave the show a review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts from.
Bill Gasiamis 2:49
And if you’re watching on YouTube, please give the show a thumbs up and share and tell me your thoughts by leaving a comment. I love reading them and interacting with the show actively rather than just listening passively will make a tremendous difference to how many other stroke survivors can find the show. Thanks so much. And please enjoy this episode. Mike Cameron, welcome to the podcast.
Mike 3:15
Well, thanks very much indeed Bill.
Bill Gasiamis 3:17
Thanks for being here. You’re the author of a couple of books that piqued my curiosity. And I figured there’s definitely a way to merge your area of expertise into stroke recovery. And your first book is The Emerging Leader. And your second book is effective leaders.
Bill Gasiamis 3:43
And I see leaders and leadership really merging with recovery because one of the things that I think a stroke survivor needs to do is do self leadership. If that’s such a thing, I don’t even know if it’s a term that’s commonly used, but it’s part of the task of taking responsibility for your own recovery.
Bill Gasiamis 4:05
And a lot of the responsibility in recovery from stroke or any serious ailment is outsourcing the responsibility for me getting better to somebody else. And that usually involves a doctor. And fair enough because they put themselves at the top of the pyramid of recovery, when you have something serious like stroke happen.
Bill Gasiamis 4:32
And for good reason because they are scientifically trained and proven to be able to improve outcomes for people who have a stroke. But then there’s this situation that occurs that we outsource all of that on them in some cases, and don’t take responsibility for our own recovery and then miss the opportunity to lead ourselves out of this really challenging and serious situation that we find ourselves in.
Bill Gasiamis 5:05
And it often creates a feeling for some stroke survivors, or for me, at least of not being in control of anything, and not being in a position to guide my own life and kind of feeling in somebody else’s hands, and they don’t really know how I want to structure my life going forward, or what I want to achieve, or what my challenges are coming into this and what I have to overcome. So can we talk a little bit about your definition of a leader? First, what you think a leader is? So that we can kind of frame the conversation going forward?
Leadership
Mike 5:51
Yes, I’d like to do that. I think firstly, the most important thing to understand and I think why you’re asking me to talk about ultimately leadership of self, you can’t actually lead other people until you know how to lead yourself.
Mike 6:11
So the importance, first of all, is to understand one, who you are, what you are, what you want to achieve, what your vision is, regardless of where you are in life, whether you’re a supervisory level, or whether you’re an executive level, whether you’ve come from university or so on.
Mike 6:32
At some stage, you will interact with other people. And how you interact with other people, ultimately, is, from a point of view of yourself first, how you think about yourself, how you’ve managed your development.
Mike 6:49
And what are the things that trigger the negative thoughts that go into your brain when other people communicate with you. So you asked me what is leadership? Leadership is the privilege that you are given to be able to guide people to an outcome, a group a team, it may be a very, very large organization that you have accountability for.
Mike 7:18
And one of my recent posts, there was a comment from Simon Sinek, that talked about being a leader was understanding that the team, other people create what your vision is, your job, therefore, is to allow them the space to do the job you want them to do. One because they want to do it for themselves. And two, they want to do for you and the company or the business, whatever.
Mike 7:51
So leadership is about giving up the doing of the job, finding the people who can do the job nurturing and supporting them, and allowing them to have the responsibility at the delivery of what you’ve communicated to them.
Mike 8:11
Now you’re accountable for choosing the right people. And you’re accountable to your manager for your selection of the outcome being achieved. So if you think about it, and you are allowing somebody else to do the job, sometimes you’re going to be a coach, sometimes you’re going to be a mentor.
Mike 8:32
Sometimes you’re going to be the subject matter expert, listen, John, I’ll show you how to do the job. But you’re not there to jump in and micromanage. And you’re not there to do more than support coach and monitor. That’s what I think a good manager is a good leader is and then we can start talking about self management. And what do I mean by all of the things that allow you to empower other people.
Bill Gasiamis 9:07
I love what you said there because I can automatically superimpose that on to recovery from stroke. So I in my 10 steps to recovery from stroke. I have one of the steps is creating a community of people that are going to help you in your recovery and move forward.
Bill Gasiamis 9:30
And part of that community includes the doctors. Part of that community includes family and friends. It includes allied health professionals. It includes masseurs, it includes coaches, counselors. It includes spiritual leaders, if that’s something that appeals to you.
Bill Gasiamis 9:52
It includes anybody that’s going to guide you whether they are involved in a way where you have specifically recruited them or pay them to bring you further along in your understanding of this situation that you find yourself in, or they just happen to be there. It’s this community that I put together that I chose, that I’m leading towards my vision of recovery.
Bill Gasiamis 10:26
But one of the things that I think I’ve missed is, what my vision of recovery was, I don’t think I ever actually reiterated that or even spoke about that once to any of the people in my group, or in my team, my recovery team. And I especially didn’t have a conversation with my doctors about what my vision for the future was, and therefore help inform them about how I wanted them to support me in my recovery.
Bill Gasiamis 10:59
And then from there helped me overcome the brain injury, and all the different things. So there was a key element that I think was missed there that, I think now looking back that if I had had that conversation, I think it would have decreased the amount of time that I was searching for purpose, and meaning and all those other things.
Bill Gasiamis 11:23
Because I hadn’t ever developed a vision for my life after stroke, because stroke was this thing that caught up with me suddenly. And I never really came to have the space to work out what was going on, I had to go into reaction mode to make myself not die, and then to get myself back into some kind of existence that I felt was meaningful.
Mike 11:56
Yeah. Let me ask you one other thing, just when you first realize that you’d had the stroke, and you’re starting to be supported, or you had doctors around you who were taking control of trying to get you back to being stable, and so on.
Mike 12:20
My thought process would be that you would have to really look internally to what you were trying to do. And that did is align with where other people were coming to try and support you. I’ve had two serious motorbike accidents in my life, very serious motorbike accidents.
Mike 12:44
And on both occasions, I have bullied by becoming the executive, I bullied the medical people to allow me to leave hospital before I should have left hospital. Because I was under so many drugs that were pain killing.
Mike 13:02
And yet the reality is my body was so badly damaged, that it wasn’t until I got home, and then started coming out of the pain killers that I realized just how painful life was. And in fact, on the last time, I couldn’t even move.
Leadership – D.I.S.C
Mike 13:22
So one of the things about leadership and knowing yourself is to know what sort of person you are. Because when you suddenly are in a situation where you need the help of somebody else, and support of somebody else are you feeling less yourself? Are you feeling fragile? Are you feeling fearful? Are you feeling lots of things that are negative to you accepting that person’s help?
Mike 14:01
So it will regardless of whether we’re talking about somebody facing a stroke situation or whatever, the first thing I would say is, you need to understand what triggers negative thoughts. Somebody says something and immediately it takes you back in time to when you were a little kiddie and somebody criticized you or didn’t choose you for the football team or whatever it might have been.
Mike 14:31
So in my book I talk about the very first thing you need to do is to have a check process there’s lots of models around I’m not particularly pushing any one model, but as an example there is one that’s known to a lot of people called D.I.S.C Dominance, Influence, Stability and Compliance.
Mike 14:59
And where do you Isn’t that so if you’ve been a person who’s been a very dominant leader or a very dominant manager, and suddenly here you are lying helpless after a stroke, and people are taking control, part of you may be fighting anything that is they’re trying to help you.
Mike 15:21
So yes, there’s certainly things we can talk about, about how do I manage those feelings, and why am I feeling them? And that gets us into emotional resilience, emotional agility, emotional intelligence. What do I mean by that?
Bill Gasiamis 15:41
One of the things that often impacts stroke survivors is obviously they’re in a state, most people who have a stroke are in a state where their mind doesn’t work, it doesn’t think it doesn’t operate the way that it was before the stroke. And that’s usually in the acute phase.
Bill Gasiamis 15:59
And then you kind of come out of that, and you start to get your thinking mind back, and it starts to settle down. And what I find that also gets in the way is the emotional resilience part of the recovery is a big barrier to people in stroke recovery.
Bill Gasiamis 16:19
So often, knowing yourself is something that generally seems to be missed by the people that I’ve interviewed on the podcast, the 170 odd people that I’ve interviewed so far, generally, they miss knowing themselves, because they haven’t had the time and space in their life, to get to know themselves, what they’ve done is they’ve become a parent, they’ve become a full-time employer, full time employee.
Bill Gasiamis 16:49
Whatever they’ve become, and they’ve not really given themselves opportunity to dive deep and know themselves and know where they sit in the world, and how the world needs to be organized around them so that they feel like they’re achieving an amazing experience in life right?
Bill Gasiamis 17:06
So they often then don’t know their visions and their values, because they’re running somebody else’s visions and values, you’re in a work environment, and you’re trying to achieve your company’s visions and values.
Bill Gasiamis 17:19
And then, because you have had these experiences from your life, when you were a kid, and you didn’t really understand what was happening when you weren’t getting picked up for the football team.
Bill Gasiamis 17:33
You developed the opposite of emotional resilience. And some people have gone into their adult life with the same behaviors and habits that they used. And were useful on the football field when you were 10 years old.
Bill Gasiamis 17:51
And haven’t realized that those emotional outbursts or behaviors, aren’t useful anymore in life, they’re not any more relevant when you’re a 30 year old. And you need to upgrade that level of your way of being or the way that you interact with people.
Bill Gasiamis 18:10
But they often don’t know how to, so they get stuck. So what I’m saying when I’m using the term, they I’m really speaking about me Mike, I’m describing myself. So when I found myself in stroke recovery, I had to contend with these three things that I wasn’t doing well.
Bill Gasiamis 18:31
And now I had to have this communication with my doctor’s, which I couldn’t possibly do effectively, because I was experiencing a bleed in the brain, which was impacting my ability to just think cognitively. But I was also lacking these other things that had already not developed enough of by the time I was 37 years old, because I never knew that they were important.
Mike 19:03
Yeah, believe it or not Bill, there are so many people who become leaders become senior managers, who are 37, 40, early 40s, whatever. And they still have not actually ended up knowing enough about themselves. And they fail and they fail because ultimately, they try to do things which they have no understanding of how to do and shouldn’t be doing anyway.
Mike 19:36
Or have difficulty in communication with other people in a way that asks a lot of questions for which they don’t have answers. In other words, how many managers do you know that are prepared to say we need to achieve so and so what are your thoughts?
Mike 19:59
How do you think we shouldn’t do that? Because the people they are asking are the people that actually are going to do the job. Now you might know, you might have even written the guidelines on how to do a particular job.
Delegating tasks – Mike Cameron
Mike 20:13
But the reality is you’re not going to be doing it, it’s going to be a team of people or an individual or whatever. And too many people who have not understood what a leadership role is, stay in command, rather than in fact, making sure that the people that the task is delegated to somebody in a smart way.
Mike 20:40
And by that, I mean, is the task I’m talking to you about specific? Is it measurable in a way that you know, when I want it delivered? At what quality level? At what standard? Is it actually achievable? Do you have the tools, the time the skills and all of the knowledge to be able to do that job in terms of resources and competencies?
Mike 21:12
The next one is it realistic. In other words, a lot of times we dump on people, rather than checking what their to do list is like, and how many tasks they have. And the final part of smart to me is the most important, tangible, and by tangible and what I mean by that is, what’s in it for the person doing the job?
Mike 21:37
Do they feel that in fact, it’s a valuable task they’re doing? Do they feel it’s part of the overall objective of what the company is looking for? Do they feel part of the deal? Or do they just feel they’re a cog in the wheel, and they’re being dumped on. And that’s how you allocate how you delegate a job.
Mike 22:05
And ultimately, empower the person to do it. And I suppose what I’m really trying to say in leadership until you get to the stage where you’re not fearful of delegating, fearful of empowering somebody who might in fact, become smarter than you and move on. You’re not going to become that real key leader.
Bill Gasiamis 22:31
Yeah, I love that analogy. Because the smart method of setting up goals and achieving goals and going into an outcome in goals is so applicable to rehabilitation. And again, these are conversations that I didn’t have with my therapists, but they did kind of skirt around these outcomes in a way that was almost specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound.
Bill Gasiamis 23:13
The one thing that I think shouldn’t apply to stroke recovery is time. Because it seems to be what trips a lot of people up, they put time on to the recovery process. And then when they don’t meet their goal, or their milestone, for some people, that seems to be a reason to get down in the dumps and depressed by that.
Bill Gasiamis 23:42
And it gives them a bit of a setback in their recovery. But I don’t know anyone that I’ve spoken to that specifically set out to create specific goals for recovery, that were measurable, where they were able to look back on those and see how far they’ve come that were also achievable.
Bill Gasiamis 24:08
And that were relevant, because most of the recovery is designed and implemented by people that didn’t have the stroke, that perhaps didn’t have enough time to consult with you about how you wanted to go about your recovery. And what’s missed in stroke recovery is that emotional, and psychological recovery.
Bill Gasiamis 24:35
There’s a massive focus on the physical recovery because that’s what your therapists can see. But there’s a very small amount of that. That’s focused on okay, if we managed to get that person walking again. What else do we need to do to help create a well rounded recovery or a full recovery and there isn’t much focus allocated to the emotional aspect of it and the psychological aspect of it, people seem to stumble their way around that.
Mike 25:11
Let me just throw one other thing into the melting pot before we move away from know yourself and goals.
Intro 25:20
If you’ve had a stroke, and you’re in recovery, you’ll know what a scary and confusing time it can be, you’re likely to have a lot of questions going through your mind. Like, how long will it take to recover? Will I actually recover? What things should I avoid? In case I make matters worse, doctors will explain things that obviously, you’ve never had a stroke before, you probably don’t know what questions to ask.
Intro 25:44
If this is you, you may be missing out on doing things that could help speed up your recovery. If you’re finding yourself in that situation, stop worrying, and head to recovery after stroke.com where you can download a guide that will help you it’s called a seven questions to ask your doctor about your stroke.
Intro 26:04
These seven questions are the ones Bill wished he’d asked when he was recovering from a stroke, they’ll not only help you better understand your condition, they’ll help you take a more active role in your recovery, head to the website. Now, recoveryafterstroke.com and download the guide. It’s free.
Mike 26:22
Sometimes when I’m consulting with somebody that’s been promoted up to an executive position, I will ask them, or if I’m talking to somebody who’s setting up a new business, they’ll leave in corporate life, they’re going to go off in their own way. The same questions fit into both categories.
Mike 26:45
The first thing you say is where am I now? Where am I? What’s happened to me? What have I done? Where am I now? And there’s lots of things around that that you can look at. The second is where do I want to go? And the third is, how do I get there? Now so those three questions, I think are absolutely critical for you as the stroke victim to try and understand and ask enough questions of people around you to support you is how do I get there?
Goal planning
Mike 27:25
Because I know, what I want to achieve is the recovery. Yeah. Now maybe it takes a while if you’re that, you know, in such a state and getting your brain working properly. But what I’m saying is, those are the three stages. Now let me just go back to the goal setting the goal planning.
Mike 27:48
The most important thing with goal planning, is to turn it into focus goals, something that you can achieve within 24 hours. Not what can I achieve in a week, what can I achieve in a month? What can I achieve? What do I need to do today, to move one step forward towards the bigger goal?
Mike 28:13
And to limit the number of those focus goals that you put on yourself, depending upon where you are with resources and your strength and your energy levels and so on. So, yeah, it’s goals are still smart, specific, measurable, achievable, attainable, realistic, I beg your pardon and timeframes. That’s the goal.
Mike 28:45
But what I am asking you to think about is break those down into something that is very achievable by the end of the day. And make certain that you put it onto a priority list, if you’ve got a number of things you’re getting to the stage of being in recovery.
Mike 29:06
And you’ve got lots of tasks, some of those can be missed. Some of them can’t, some of them are top priority, you need to finish that. So you need to prioritize you need to know at times what you can leave behind and what you can’t leave behind.
Bill Gasiamis 29:25
Yeah, I like that those small goals, those daily goals, those really easily achievable goals will make you feel like you’ve achieved something in reflecting back you’ll have a few quick wins on the scoreboard, and therefore you’ll be able to stack those wins up and you’ll be able to get some momentum towards achieving things.
Bill Gasiamis 29:50
And then when you have a setback, it won’t be such a bad thing that I had one setback, but I’ve actually had 10 wins already. So let’s just keep going for the next one. and focus on how to get that outcome the one where, what do I want? Where am I now? Where would I prefer to be? And then how do I get there?
Mike 30:12
Yeah. And that’s part of that emotional intelligence bill. And you’re absolutely right. Most of us if we’ve got a goal that we fail on, because we’ve made it so far away, or it’s so big, that it is very difficult to get there, we start making our mind think that we are failing when we have a setback.
Mike 30:39
Whereas if you have a focus goal, at the end of the day, I feel really good. If you end up at the end of a day, and you’ve missed one focus goal out of five or out of six focus goals, you miss one, what do you start thinking about now is what could I have done better?
Mike 30:57
What could I have done to have established was that goal, a little bit of a challenge a little bit beyond me? Had I communicated correctly with my doctor or my massage therapist, whatever it might have been, you aren’t blaming yourself, you actually are in a stage where you are now working, and you’re in a positive moving forward.
Mike 31:23
Now, I’m not a person that believes that life is all full of positivity. I’m not, that’s not where I come from. So there is a reality at times, life’s going to be tough. But if you break things down, and you know that you are going to come up, what’s my plan B?
Mike 31:45
How do I handle something? If I don’t achieve or I’m not achieving what I want to? Is it okay to go back to the drawing board? And redesign? How do I get to? And of course, it’s absolutely right.
It’s okay to fail
Bill Gasiamis 32:01
Yeah, it’s definitely okay to fail. It’s definitely okay for things not always be going good. Stroke really creates a lot of things that are not good. And they can be overwhelming the same time, I think it’s really important to focus on what is good. And if people that are going through some tough things, can stop themselves for a moment, it’s okay, what’s good about this situation?
Bill Gasiamis 32:27
Even if what’s good about it is I’m learning something new. Well, then that’s good enough to take you to that next level of curiosity for example, what else can I learn about this situation? What else can I learn about myself? What else can I learn about the thing that I didn’t achieve? Or what can I learn from applying what I’ve already achieved?
Bill Gasiamis 32:47
And how much further can I go? So I agree with you that there’s no such thing as just, you know, the positive mindset and the focused mindset on recovery all the time, there’s got to be that time for reassessing everything. And I think what helps you reassess and readjust your trajectory and work out your your path forward is those setbacks, I think that’s those setbacks are the ones that help you actually get more focused and better targeted, better aimed at the ultimate goal.
Bill Gasiamis 33:23
Which, for example, for me might have been, you know, just to get back to, you know, nice and big, broad goal at the beginning, just to get back to being a good father, and then everything else can come after that. But if I can be a good father, that’s pretty easy to achieve, even though I’m recovering from stroke, and everything is really difficult.
Bill Gasiamis 33:44
And perhaps I can’t go to the football field and play with my children and take them on that trip that I was planning to take them on and spend some time with them in this specific location or during this specific event.
Bill Gasiamis 33:58
Well, maybe I can just be a good father by telling them I love them or more and apologizing for the things that I’ve done in the past that, you know, maybe as a Dad, I miss treated them or, or didn’t give them the correct amount of encouragement or whatever. So I love that idea that actually part of the moving forward. Are those steps back.
Mike 34:25
Well, let’s just take because what you’ve talked through there is three forms of the emotional intelligence, family if you like. Emotional intelligence is understanding first of all, what is triggering things inside you? What are you hearing? What are you reacting to?
Mike 34:51
And the second part of that is, what is my strategy to manage what the impact of somebody doing something or my reaction to something? How do I manage that to stay comfortable within myself? Okay, so those are intrapersonal skills that you need to learn.
Mike 35:18
On top of that, to be an emotionally intelligent person, you have to have empathy for other people, you have to understand where you sit in a group of people, it can’t be all about you all the time. And you need to have effective communication, and understand your role in that team, environment, and so on.
Mike 35:43
That’s emotional intelligence. Now, emotional intelligence and what we’ve talked about so far, life isn’t just beautiful, even if you’ve got all these skills, every now and again, somebody is going to do something from left field that is going to annoy you, and you lose the plot for a moment, or you react in a way that actually wasn’t beneficial to you, the group or whatever.
Mike 36:11
And the or the other person may do that to you for no reason at all. Now, emotional resilience is being able to manage the situation of disappointment, of not getting what you expected of dealing with that, whilst you’re also dealing with those inter intrapersonal things of how, what’s my reaction to it? And what’s my strategy, so I don’t create a problem.
Mike 36:42
Now, in today’s world, we’ve moved one further step. And it’s a vital step. And I would say a vital step, probably when you are needing other people. And that is moving to what’s called Emotional agility. And that is realizing your place in a group of people. What’s the atmosphere you choose? What’s the environment you create?
Mike 37:12
You’re talking about sometimes you might feel that I need to talk to the kids in a way because I haven’t done particular things. Now in emotional agility, what you are actually also going to analyze is, am I doing it for the kids? Or am I doing it for myself? In other words, Am I doing it because I think I ought to do it. And I’m feeling a bit guilty.
Mike 37:39
So I’m going to have this emotional, loving, or say things. Now that’s all about you. It is not about the relationship or how you want the children to feel emotional agility has come from the space of am I seeing that the kids actually would love me to give them a cuddle, or would actually love me to ask them more about what they’ve been doing.
Mike 38:06
Because I haven’t been able to go out with them or whatever it might be. So those sorts of things bill are, in my view, and quite a lot of it’s in that first walk of emerging leaders is moving into that space, of understanding the basics of emotional intelligence, there’s really two keys, then move up to emotional resilience, and then move to the stage of emotional agility.
Mike 38:36
You know, I’ll give you a lovely little story. Can you imagine a boss who walks in talks to everyone one day, how are you going Bill and asked you a few things, eventually gets to his office and for the rest of the day, you don’t see him. Next day, he walks in, head down, he goes into his office, the door slams.
Mike 39:00
And then he comes out about three hours later. And he shouts at somebody to come into his office. Oh, how are you feeling about that particular boss? What’s gonna happen the next day? So you are in a situation where you are wondering about how that person lives if you like in the environment?
Mike 39:23
Is he consistent? Is he predictable? Or is he in an emotional imbalance for the group that he’s in? In other words, he really doesn’t understand the impact he’s having in the space in which he’s working.
Behavior and how it impacts others
Bill Gasiamis 39:41
Not only I can I imagine a boss like that? I’ve experienced a boss like that. But now that you mentioned that, and now that we’re kind of merging, leadership with stroke recovery and my desire to recover well and be better version of myself after the stroke. I can imagine I can remember times when I behaved like that at home, not only at work, but also at home.
Bill Gasiamis 40:11
And came home one day, all happy, cheerful and all that kind of stuff from work, and then came back home the next day, being completely shitty head down, angry, annoyed. And for all intents and purposes, everybody else around me is thinking that pretty much everything is the same.
Bill Gasiamis 40:35
And they don’t know what it was that caused me to, let’s call it misbehave or behave inappropriately, and then not communicate what my problems were. And therefore, create this barrier around me where people were walking on eggshells. And I suppose I became more aware that I was acting out or misbehaving after the stroke.
Bill Gasiamis 41:03
Because it became important to me to actually be aware of how my conversations were impacting my kids. And I didn’t want them to be impacting my kids in a negative way. And it was definitely about me, because I wanted to make sure that if I dropped off the planet, that they were going to at least have a decent experience with their Dad and remember me fondly more than the other.
Bill Gasiamis 41:03
But at the same time, I wanted to make it about them, so that they wouldn’t have to deal with stuff, for no reason that was actually not their fault. And then they and that would then hopefully minimize the scarring that I would create in their life, and therefore hopefully minimize the possibility that they would be dysfunctional in society at work with their relationships later on in life.
Mike 41:58
Yeah. Bill what good coaching is all about is for that awareness that you’ve just talked about isn’t unusual by the way. It happens lots and lots of times to lots of people. And ultimately, until you actually understand the impact it’s having on other people on your team, or whatever, it will also be having a huge impact on yourself.
Mike 42:31
Because until you understand it, and until you come up with a strategy. Now, when I’m talking to either a group, or I’m talking one on one will do it now. I ended up being very successful with ici in the explosives division of ici and running a group that looked after quarries and construction, and coming up with some new ideas and building teams. And sometimes I was really frustrated.
Mike 43:05
And sometimes I would go home at night. And I would want to and I would tell my wife all about the negative things and I would dump on her. Now, can you imagine what her view of life and what her view of the company and what her view of the team. And this is the early days of that whole development was, she had a view that there was some pretty nasty people in the company.
Mike 43:34
And the company wasn’t really looking after me. And I was dumping on hair with all the negativity whilst I was at work, being this open manager that was you know, all light and open and come up. I’ve got an open door policy. But I wasn’t living the truth. At the time, I was carrying a lot of stuff. And I had a heart attack at 54.
Mike 44:05
Because my body eventually said like inside you I was all tensed up. And the point I’m making that in leadership from emerging up to through those is to understand how many things you’ve done through your 20s your 30s your 40s that you’ve managed, but the reality is, they’re not doing you any good.
Mike 44:34
And you’re not actually becoming that effective leader. And you won’t until one you know it. And you’re honest about it and you say I really don’t handle it very well. There are times that my strategy isn’t working, dumping it on your wife, dumping it on your partner dumping it on your right hand man woman in the office is not the way to be a good team leader.
Mike 45:00
It’s actually have strategies that work and support you and move forward. And ultimately allow you to talk up in the right way. And ask for the support you need or the resources you need. And give enough empowerment for things to be done in little in the way that they should be.
Bill Gasiamis 45:23
Yeah, you know, the empathetic relationships part of your model is a really interesting one, because it’s one thing, being empathetic to others. But also having self empathy is really important, isn’t it? Because if you’re constantly beating on yourself and saying, you know, I’m shit at this, or I’m terrible at that or, look at how you can’t do anything, well, this is not going to support an active recovery.
Bill Gasiamis 45:51
And it’s not going to support an active recovery mindset, it’s not going to align the person with the goals that they set that were measurable, and so on at the beginning of this whole process, you know, and I think that others, a lot of people have experienced a stroke and are so hard on themselves, simply because they experienced a stroke, they kind of allowed themselves to have a stroke, or they created the environment to have a stroke.
Bill Gasiamis 46:24
Now, I created the environment to make the stroke that happened to me more possible because I was born with a blood vessel that was faulty in my head, but then I created the perfect storm around it to give it the best opportunity to bleed. But if I was going to stay in that space, then this could have potentially been even more catastrophic.
Bill Gasiamis 46:54
Whereas it was important for me to let go of what I had done and take some responsibility for my actions, but then also change something so that I don’t continue to feel bad about what I’d previously done. And, and stop doing those things in the future, so that the shift could be moving me towards recovery, rather than staying in that space.
Empathy vs sympathy – Mike Cameron
Mike 47:24
Let me just go back to your word about empathy, because people quite often misunderstand the difference between empathy and sympathy. And there’s a huge difference. Empathy is I understand the pain. Now you might understand it, because you’ve actually dealt with, it might be adopted, seeing lots of people who are going through the stroke situation that you’ve experienced.
Mike 47:56
They can be empathetic about the pain, and the struggle, and the challenges you’re going through that it’s empathy. They haven’t experienced it, but they’ve experienced other people doing it, and how they manage it. Sympathy is where you’ve been a stroke victim, and here’s another stroke victim.
Mike 48:19
And you get into the mire of the feeling, and all of a sudden, you’re adding to the pain, because you’re starting to talk about your experience and all the things that didn’t quite go right for you in your recovery. And this person is only on the start of the journey. And there’s a lovely little cartoon that I saw many, many years ago about this person that had gone down into a big pit.
Mike 48:49
And there was a manhole at the top. And he was crying because he couldn’t find his way out and somebody was walking past. And he shouted down and say You okay, I can’t see my way out. I’m all lost, and he started crying out for help. Now the person who is sympathetic, immediately goes down the manhole because he can see the ladder at the top and off he goes.
Mike 49:18
And he goes to the voice, and he’s now as lost as the voice was because they’re in the darkness. Whereas the person who’s empathetic, looks up and says hang on a minute. He gets his mobile phone out. And he puts the camera light on, and he shines it down the walkway and says to the person down below, can you see the bottom of the ladder?
Mike 49:45
Yes, we’ll walk over to it. I’m up here to talk to you when you get up top. That’s empathy. I understand your problem. I’ll help you get out of it. But I’m not gonna climb in and wallow in the pain that you’re feeling.
Bill Gasiamis 50:06
Empathy sounds like it’s actually encouraging the person to, it’s actually teaching the person to fish, whereas sympathy is giving the person the fish.
Mike 50:18
Absolutely right spot on, spot on.
Bill Gasiamis 50:21
Right? It is a massive distinction, I love that I kind of understood the difference between the two. But that really paints a clear picture as to the difference between the two, and how one should behave. When you come across somebody who’s doing a tough or gone going through difficult times, it’s definitely better to teach them how to manage the difficult time on their own, rather than putting your hand on their shoulder and showing to them just come with me, I’ll get you out of this mess.
Mike 50:54
As quick questions like, next time this happens, how do you think you’ll manage it? What could you do different next time?
Bill Gasiamis 51:09
So how does motivation and teamwork come into your model of leadership? What is that about?
Mike 51:16
Okay there’s a very good example. First of all, you can have a carrot or a stick approach to creating motivation. Both of those are short term, if I give you lots of carrots, in other words, money to go and do a task. Ultimately, that task has no value other than the increased money I’ve given you. And you want more. Okay. I can get a big stick out saying if you don’t do it, well look for another job. Okay, so there’s the one or the other.
Mike 51:54
And the reason that they can’t work for me, as the boss me as the person trying to get that motivation with the group, in the long term, is it’s not personal. Personal comes from how do I give you? How do I create an environment where what you’ve wanted to achieve in your life, you’re being given the opportunity to do?
Mike 52:22
In other words, if I say to you, Bill, would you like to run this section of the of the office? Or would you like to be responsible for doing a particular thing? And give you the ability, the tools, the training, whatever it is, to do the job? Have I created an environment that becomes motivational for you to develop your own skills, your own way of doing something?
Mike 52:55
Do I need to tell you exactly how to do it? There will be sometimes I do from a safety and occupational health and safety viewpoint, yes. There might be in some processes a particular need to carry it out in a particular way. But apart from that, what I’m really saying is create the environment for motivation. Because it then becomes external, it becomes you doing it, it’s not me, forcing the issue.
Bill Gasiamis 53:28
Yeah, I like that. It’s about finding ways that are going to motivate people to move towards something that they want to achieve experience. And then layering all those things in and actually more importantly, realizing what’s missing from the group of things that are going to help motivation.
Bill Gasiamis 53:51
So for example, in my recovery, what would have been missing the most was the right surgeon. So initially, I began the process with having enough of an understanding of what I wanted in my recovery, what I wanted to know that the initial surgeon wasn’t the right surgeon, for me, the way that they were communicating the way that they were understanding my vision, the way that they were being empathetic to my situation didn’t suit me one bit, and I couldn’t have a conversation with them.
Bill Gasiamis 54:35
They were having conversations about me at the bed with other people and I wasn’t being involved in the conversation. So I felt out of the loop. So what I had to do was I had to find the right surgeon so that I could tick off another one of those things in my checklist for how I was going to go about my recovery and it had to start with the surgeon that was going to open my head.
Bill Gasiamis 54:58
Once I found that person then I was able to move forward to the next part of the decision, which was to actually decide to have the surgery. And it took me three years to decide to have the brain surgery. And that was three years of risk, where I had to risk the possibility of another bleed, and a more catastrophic version of a bleed, and therefore, more debilitating illnesses and all the stuff that goes along with a catastrophic bleed in the head.
Bill Gasiamis 55:26
So that part was how I motivated myself to actually get the surgery. constant communication, lots of empathy from that person really enabled me to become emotionally resilient, helped me achieve my vision and my values, and then kind of supported me to get to know myself in this situation in this recovery, so that I can trust in myself when I was leading myself out of this deep hole that I had suddenly found myself in.
Leadership in recovery
Bill Gasiamis 56:04
And that brings me to the last part in your model is the trust in your leadership. And that is really interesting, because a lot of people will second guess, what they’re doing and how they’re going about their recovery, they’ll second guess, some aspects, some people will second guessed all aspects. And when they’re doing that, that really doesn’t support a really great outcome. So how do you build trust? Or does that actually emerge from putting all those other things in place?
Mike 56:38
Absolutely. And you gave a perfect example of trust in your leadership by you taking that three years. I’m not saying everyone should take three years. What I am saying is, if you go back to that first thing, where are we now? Where do I want to be? How do I get there?
Mike 56:59
Then the how do I get there is all of the stuff that we’ve been talking about know yourself, have enough understanding of your emotional capacity to deal with the challenges and the way that you can go through the fear and through what the walls that are coming up, the next thing is better and improve communication, so that you’re actually starting to work with people who you’re trusting.
Mike 57:35
Now, that’s actually leadership, because ultimately, the outcome you want is yours. In this particular case, it’s your own life and your own particular recovery from from stroke. But sometimes, I don’t want my bigger boss telling me how to then tell a whole pile of other people.
Mike 57:56
I have built an environment where my boss knows he can trust me to deliver what I’m going to do. So trust in my leadership is, Who am I going to delegate tasks to? How am I going to check that somebody has the skill, the tools, the understanding, the ability of what I wanted, you know, in your case, the things that you knew were a risk for you, of not having boxes ticked.
Mike 58:30
That was important. Now that ultimately in leadership terms is what’s called transformational leadership. The transactional stuff, how do you actually do a particular task can be easily done, somebody got a certificate tech, they should be able to ask some questions.
Mike 58:50
Yes, that doctor knew exactly what the next doctor or surgeon knew, tick tick. But what they didn’t have was an ability to communicate with you, that got you feeling that you were part of the equation, and were being understood and that that person was talking to you in a way that you felt, hey, it is all about a team thing. And I happen to be the, you know, very much a key of this whole thing.
Mike 59:22
So trust in your leadership is all of the other six things. Yeah, all of the other six characteristics. It’s knowing yourself, it’s having a vision for what you want to achieve, what’s the outcome I’m trying to achieve? It’s on the other side, it’s being able to communicate effectively.
Mike 59:46
It’s having the emotional intelligence to be able to have people sometimes come to you like like you were with a surgeon initially, and saying Hey, I’ve got some questions, and he doesn’t even understand why you should you’re just, you know, you’re not a surgeon, I really don’t have to explain it to you. Well, Whoa, hang on, I need to understand the process. I’ve got a brain and I need to let it be, you know, sorted out?
Bill Gasiamis 1:00:19
Yeah. Yep. I love that. I love that emerging trust that occurs when you put those other things in place. And that’s where I found myself, I did find myself really trusting my decision making, even though my head wasn’t really working properly, even I had cognitive issues, my decision making seemed to be working really well.
Bill Gasiamis 1:00:41
And I made the right decisions moving forward. And I never regretted any my decisions. They, it meant that I had to experience two more brain blades between the first one and then brain surgery. But it wasn’t the end of the world, the fact that I experienced those, and then had a lot of setbacks and a lot of fear and a lot of concern, and, obviously, the risk of dying from that, right.
Bill Gasiamis 1:01:07
But overall, we worked it out. Now, that model that we spoke about, has at the top of the model results and performance. And then in the middle of the model has another triangle that has trust, purpose, alignment, conversations and engagement. That model was the one that basically allowed you to write the book, The Emerging Leader.
Bill Gasiamis 1:01:35
And then you’ve added some stuff to the model that’s taken that model to the next level, which we’ll talk about now, which led to the book Effective Leaders. Let’s talk about now what takes the model to the next level? What are those four additional things that enhance that?
The four attributes
Mike 1:01:57
Okay, the four things is, well, first of all, one of the things, I put it into workplace engagement that you just mentioned in that triangle of the first model. And trust is absolutely a key. But it got lost if you like in the model, it’s fine when you’re just talking about the seven characteristics.
Mike 1:02:22
But if you look at it for effective leadership as a total goal, then it has to be the foundation. So first of all, we have to have trust, and trustworthiness between what I do and how, you know, I walk my talk, what I say I’m going to do I mean, if you think about what do I mean by trustworthiness, dependability, reliability, lack of self interest, consistency, they’re the things that are fundamental to trustworthiness.
Mike 1:03:05
I’m not manipulative, I don’t work in my communication, to get you to do something that really isn’t in your best interest. Okay, so there’s the foundation. Now on top of that, mainly because of I ended up with a lot of people coming back to me and saying, I really liked that first book, Mike, I really liked the book.
Mike 1:03:33
But you didn’t tell enough stories. Now, I told quite a few stories in the first book. But writing a book when you’ve never done one. One is quite a challenge. And two, I had a lot of things I wanted to get out as a guide. There’s four guidelines in the book, the first one.
Mike 1:03:55
And so there were things that I could have talked about, but it probably wasn’t the right time. Whereas people coming back to me and saying, oh, you know, have you ever experienced, you know, such and such? And I’d say yes, well, it really took courage to be able to do that.
Mike 1:04:17
And so I started thinking about to be able to actually do the seven things that are characteristics of good leaders actually took respect. By respect, what do I mean about respect? I’ve analyzed it in the second book The Effective Leaders by saying it covers diversity. It covers gender equality, gender equity, gender inclusion.
Mike 1:04:54
Why should a man get paid more than a woman to do exactly the same job with the same qualifications, there’s no reason other than equality. Why are some jobs which are virtually considered female jobs paid at a lower rate than really their value is. The other thing with respect is culture.
Mike 1:05:27
There’s lots of cultures in in Australia. And a lot of us don’t understand the culture. In fact, we get frightened about the fact that somebody wants to pray in the middle of the day, and somebody else wants to not work on a Saturday or whatever it might be. Everyone has the right in Australia, or should have the right to look at their culture.
Mike 1:05:56
The one thing that I can’t understand as a migrant from Scotland, to Australia, and I came out here in the late 70s was, I saw the places basically, a fair go until I’d been here for about a year and started realizing that there was some deep down division.
Mike 1:06:21
It was okay, if you had been an Irishman, it wasn’t quite the same if you were an Italian, it wasn’t quite the same. If you’re a slob or whatever. You play soccer rather than football, there must be something slightly wrong without understanding the different cultures.
Mike 1:06:42
Now, my brother’s actually married to an Aboriginal lady, who when I first came out here, I really didn’t understand what she was so passionate about. She’s now an elder in Tasmania. And so I decided in the book, to go to an Aboriginal elder and say, What would you if I gave you the space to put an article together.
Mike 1:07:12
What would you want politicians to actually understand about Aboriginal needs? Aboriginal culture, Aboriginal empowerment, rather than what is happening in Australia regarding that now, without becoming political, all I’m really flagging is there are questions that good leaders effective leaders need to understand that their vision of let’s say, an Anglo Saxon way of doing things is not necessarily the right way for other people in Australia, the color of your skin shouldn’t determine it.
Mike 1:07:53
The next real key takeaway of these four attributes, as I call them, is courage. It takes courage sometimes to say to a boss above you, I’m not happy with that, that does not align with what the company’s values are. I can’t ask the team to do that, because we haven’t got the right resources.
Mike 1:08:18
And I’d be putting the people at risk. I’m happy to ask the team to work for a certain length of time doing overtime, if they’ll do that. But to do it long term, is detrimental to their health, their well being and their safety overall. So I stand up for what I believe is right, what I’m responsible for, it takes courage.
Mike 1:08:45
It takes courage sometimes to bring somebody and empower them to do something and step away and give them the opportunity and not micromanage them. That takes courage. The next key attribute is integrity. Being transparent, being trustworthy, being aligned with what you say you will do.
Mike 1:09:16
And the final one is agility. Now, agility is a buzzword in today’s world, but what I mean by that is the ability to talk up and talk down and talk across in the language that people can understand. And it’s called style flexing so that you can communicate in a way that lets people understand what you want, where you’re coming from and so on. In leadership terms, that’s absolutely critical.
Mike 1:09:54
In emotional terms, emotional agility is having that ability. We talked about it earlier. On that ability to understand where you are in a bigger group of people. And finally, in terms of the agility in terms of the overall effective leadership, what parts of what we’re doing relative to the characteristics and so on?
Mike 1:10:22
Do I need to be agile in at times? So what I’m saying is, life is going to ball you up from time to time the difficult challenge of having to lay somebody off having a difficult conversation when things aren’t working? Do you throw that to somebody else, throw it to the HR department, or whatever?
Mike 1:10:48
Or do you have the courage and the leadership agility to be able to have those difficult conversations, and either rectify what the problem is, or communicate in a way that doesn’t go and throw the blame upwards or sideways, that actually the person moves on but realize is, you’ve done your best to make sure that they understand you’ve got their back, you’ve got put in place some support, as they move on to a different job, or whatever it might be.
Cultural diversity
Bill Gasiamis 1:11:24
Yeah, I feel like this second aspect of our conversation has shifted quite a lot from where I tried to merge your model of the Emerging Leader into self leadership and my recovery to now I think, I feel like this really fits really well with people who are supporting others to recover, especially the aspect of the diverse nature of the Australian community.
Bill Gasiamis 1:11:49
And when you’re trying to apply rehabilitation tools and services to, you know, this such diverse society, that if you have a model that’s not flexible, that’s not agile, that is unable to respect everybody’s differences, and is unable to be used by the entire community that it’s really going to fall over, it’s not really going to support the majority of stroke survivors to overcome the deficits and the challenges that they’ve experienced because of the stroke.
Bill Gasiamis 1:12:26
And I feel like it’s a beautiful model for people who are leading in those roles of supporting occupational therapists and personal therapists to understand the role that they play in having an open mind, and having a methodology that actually takes all these things into consideration.
Bill Gasiamis 1:12:56
And then when it doesn’t, and when you’ve spent some time implementing something that doesn’t work, or isn’t as inclusive, having the courage to recognize that, and then make changes where it’s appropriate. And even if that means it’s gonna take a lot of work and a lot of effort, what I can do is, we can still start that process by just acknowledging the fact that, hey, maybe the model is awesome for supporting the majority of the Christian population.
Bill Gasiamis 1:13:31
But there’s a portion of the Muslim population, who wouldn’t be comfortable with male personal therapists, for example, rehabilitating female stroke survivors. And maybe we need to allow for that and find a way to make that possible, by giving them a space within the facility that allows them a two be rehabilitated in privacy that serves their religious views.
Bill Gasiamis 1:14:02
Or their cultural views, and also allows them to not have to worry about this additional layer of I’m not going to go down this path of recovery because I can’t do it under your current model, and therefore that minimizes the possibility for them to have the most resources thrown at them for recovery.
Mike 1:14:37
Yeah, absolutely right. And in my view, there are going to be times when the courage side of that is absolutely critical. The person who is coming up with the plan has the courage to be able to say to the hospital, or to the group that they’re in, these are issues that need to be taken into account.
Mike 1:15:07
And when you know if you think about, I’m thinking of it from a leadership viewpoint, but minority groups, at times feel almost privileged that they’ve got a role job. And, and are almost at times prepared to give up what what another person would see as a given, it’s their right, the other person is I’m not going to go and rock the boat, because what might happen is, I might lose my job in the next round of looking at things or when it’s appropriate for the boss to get rid of some people.
Mike 1:15:51
I might be the first to go, because I challenged something, so what you’re looking at is in my view, the model for the second book, the end of the first part of the whole of the second book, is a lot of effective leaders who were moved by my first book, or were people who I knew from managing directors, right down to guys that are supervisors on inquiries.
Mike 1:16:27
So I’ve got somebody like Paul Constantino, who is now the chairman of or was the chairman of the quest service department group. But he founded that company, way back in the late 70s. And wrote as written a terrific article for my book on vision and values, and spells it out really well. So the first part of the book was lots of stories that reinforce the value of those seven core characteristics.
Mike 1:17:03
And then what I’ve done for the four attributes that underpin that model, is I got somebody to write somebody who was a real subject matter expert, on agility, somebody that would write on integrity, I got two people to write on integrity, I got people to write on courage.
Mike 1:17:31
And I got people that would write from an Aboriginal viewpoint on diversity, relative to culture. It’s so important Bill, in my view, and I think in this last 12 months, we’ve seen politicians struggling with open communication to Australians, about what’s important to us, what’s important to us as a community, and they’re still playing the politics, party wise, or whatever, of what they want to achieve, for reasons that aren’t necessarily what’s important to the community. And we’ve really got to get back to that.
Intro 1:18:18
I think the leadership has let us down a lot in every level of government, and regardless of which side of politics you vote for, and or don’t vote for. And it’s happened globally. And we seem to be following a similar path to what the United States is following by the amount of division that’s occurring.
Bill Gasiamis 1:18:40
And I think that everyone that I speak to, will be and again, regardless of which side of politics they’re on, feel really comfortable with agreeing the fact that division has never been more so than it is now. And what we need is less division, we need to find where our similarities are, and come together.
Bill Gasiamis 1:19:04
And some of the challenges that I think I’ve overcome by interviewing now 170 odd people around this podcast about stroke recovery is that each and every one of them wants the exact same outcome for their life, they want to live comfortably, safely, you know, fed with a roof over their head dry, with as little ill health as possible.
Bill Gasiamis 1:19:38
And they all had a stroke. But the reason for it was all different. And each and every one of those people comes from a different background, a different part of the world, a different upbringing. But really, it’s not a lot that we want that’s different. Everyone wants exactly the same things.
Bill Gasiamis 1:20:01
So knowing where were the same should be the focus. And yet what we’re doing is focusing on where, where we’re different. And I think that leadership is lacking for self, because our leaders leading us at state or country level, are really not true leaders, they seem to me to be pseudo leaders, they’re in a role that should be occupied by a leader.
Bill Gasiamis 1:20:38
But they don’t actually have all the attributes necessary to make, in my opinion, a true leader, a real leader, and therefore, they are the unfortunate example of how we need to lead people, but then also how we lead ourselves. And we’re getting caught up in this whole situation, that seems to be solving problems on the short term basis, but isn’t solving problems on a long term basis.
Bill Gasiamis 1:21:11
And what we’re doing is putting out fires, and not realizing that every fire we’re putting out we’re lighting two more, and we’re doing that to our personal lives, we’re doing that to our work lives, we’re doing that to our business lives. And we’re doing that, whilst trying to recover from the complexity of a stroke.
Losing trust
Mike 1:21:36
If you think about the other, take the model, the whole effective leaders model, the foundation being trust, and what you’ve just talked about, is we’ve lost trust. We actually don’t trust politicians, we don’t trust a lot of people that write stuff on all the papers, newspapers, and so on. That’s the real big challenge we’ve got, once we’ve actually done that the politics of how we have communication comes from leaders that are able to accept there can be several views about a particular subject.
Mike 1:22:19
But it’s worthy of having open discussion about it. And in the case that you were talking about you taking three years to decide what you wanted to sign off on, because it was your life. And you felt that you needed to feel aligned with the person that was going to put your life at risk, really understand that they had your not just your best interest.
Mike 1:22:49
Because probably the first guy had your best interest, but he didn’t know how to end up creating that bond with you. I think that’s what I challenge. That’s why I’m writing these three books as a trilogy, and then I will peacefully retire and just be me and ride my motorbike.
Bill Gasiamis 1:23:10
That’s perfect man, I am definitely comes down to trust at the end. That’s what I think. I’ve realized just now when we spoke about that is I did not trust that previous surgeon with that approach. I did trust the actual surgeon who did open my head, you know, Professor, Kate Drummond.
Bill Gasiamis 1:23:31
And she just made it all about me. She was the expertise in the process. And she had the team that was going to deliver the outcome for me, which was to remove this faulty blood vessel so that it doesn’t bleed again. And they were going to take all measures to minimize risk to my outcome.
Bill Gasiamis 1:23:56
And therefore, I just felt like, I could completely trust her and I literally put my life in her hands. And I didn’t feel like I can do that. With too many people when you’re going through this. And to be able to do that means that I go into that surgery feeling a lot calmer, a lot more relaxed.
Bill Gasiamis 1:24:20
And I create a better version of myself so that they are dealing with a patient that’s more likely to have a good outcome. And then we we get a better result overall. So I love how we’ve merged your business books of in on the topic of leadership into recovery and stroke recovery, and then also into the rehabilitation side of it with the second book.
Bill Gasiamis 1:24:47
Because I thought it was going to be a challenge but in fact, it’s quite easy to merge. The two topics the people that are listening to this have been led by people are leading themselves have been In misled by people and have misled themselves. So hopefully they get a lot out of that they’ve worked in corporations, they’ve worked for bosses.
Bill Gasiamis 1:25:08
And they’ve been bosses. So hopefully, they see that these things that they’ve learned in the past are applicable to their recovery. And that they can continue investigating how they can apply corporate leadership, effective corporate leadership, into an effective recovery after something as serious as a stroke.
Mike 1:25:32
Now, can I say one other thing, I’m in the sales mode at the moment, but I’ve got a special on up to as a launch for the book. But it’s going to run until the 19th of December. So if you like a Christmas special, you can buy both the books. And if you’re in the Melbourne area, I will have them delivered for you, it gives me an opportunity to jump on the back of the motorbike and take them out around Melbourne.
Mike 1:26:06
I will deliver totally the two book deal free of charge for delivery. And I’ve got the two books going out for $61. And it was then $9 to deliver them but $60. And I will deliver them free. Or you can go on to Amazon and buy the Kindle version if you want to read it. And I think that’s $10
Bill Gasiamis 1:26:40
Yep, fabulous. And if you’re listening from overseas, people can go to strategically.com.au. And they can head to the page where the books are located. And they can click the Buy Now button. And they can get a bit of an intro into Mike and his work. And they can pick up both books there and have them delivered as well. Is that right, Mike?
Mike 1:27:06
That’s exactly right. Now the other thing is, well, Bill, for anyone that’s listening to this and they go into that website, you’ve just given them strategically.com.au and go into my books. There’s lots of downloadable, free downloadables there are videos, there are people who’ve written articles and allowed me to use them. And all of the references that are made in the first book are there for you to have, there’s no cost to any of that. They’re totally free. downloadables.
Bill Gasiamis 1:27:46
Fantastic Mike. Thanks so much for being on the podcast.
Mike 1:27:49
No, I loved it. Thanks very much indeed, Bill. And good luck to you and your continuing health recovery.
Bill Gasiamis 1:27:57
Well, thanks for listening. Do you ever wish there was just one place to go for resources, advice and support in your stroke recovery? Whether you’ve been navigating your journey for weeks, months or years, I know firsthand how difficult it can be to get the answers you need.
Bill Gasiamis 1:28:12
This road is both physically and mentally challenging. From reclaiming your independence to getting back to work to rebuilding your confidence in more. You symptoms don’t follow a rulebook and as soon as you leave the hospital you no longer have medical professionals on tap. I know for me it felt as if I was teaching myself a new language from scratch with no native speaker inside.
Bill Gasiamis 1:28:32
If this sounds like you, I’m here to tell you that you’re not alone and there is a better way to navigate your recovery and build a fulfilling life that you love. I’ve created an inclusive, supportive and accessible membership community called recovery after stroke.
Bill Gasiamis 1:28:46
This all in one support and Resource Program is designed to help you take your health into your own hands. This is your guidebook through every step in your journey from reducing fatigue, to strengthening your brain health to overcoming anxiety and more. To find out more and to join the community just head to recoveryafterstroke.com Thanks for listening and see you on the next episode.
Intro 1:29:07
Importantly, we present many podcasts designed to give you an insight and understanding into the experiences of other individuals opinions and treatment protocols discussed during any podcast are the individual’s own experience and we do not necessarily share the same opinion nor do we recommend any treatment protocol discussed.
Intro 1:29:24
All content on this website at any linked blog, podcast or video material controlled this website or content is created and produced for informational purposes only and is largely based on the personal experience of Bill Gasiamis the content is intended to complement your medical treatment and support healing.
Intro 1:29:41
It is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on as health advice. The information is general and may not be suitable for your personal injuries, circumstances or health objectives did not use our content as a standalone resource to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease for therapeutic purposes or is this substitute for the advice of a health professional.
Intro 1:30:02
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Intro 1:30:24
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