Getting in touch with your natural intelligence for leadership with Rosie Tomkins

Hey, everybody. Drew here. You know, we are always looking for more ways to be helpful and meet you wherever you’re at to help you grow your agency. It’s one of the reasons why we’ve produced this podcast for so long, and I’m super grateful that you listen as often as you do. However, there are some topics that are better suited for quick hyper-focused answers in under 10 minutes. That’s where our YouTube channel really comes in. For quick doses of inspiration, best practices, tips and tricks, head over to youtube.com/the at sign Agency Management institute. Again, that’s youtube.com/the at sign or symbol.

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Welcome to the Agency Management Institute community, where you’ll learn how to grow and scale your business, attract and retain the best talent, make more money, and keep more of the money you make. The Build a Better Agency Podcast, presented by a White Label IQ is packed with insights on how small to mid-size agencies are getting things done, bringing his 25 years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant. Please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Hey everybody. Drew McLellan here with another episode of Build a Better Agency. Super excited to be with you today. Have a great guest that I think is gonna get you thinking in a whole new direction. But before I tell you about our guest, let me just remind you that in a blink of an eye, I know it feels like spring is far away for many of us as we’re enduring winter. But in the blink of an eye, it’s gonna be time for the Build A Better Agency Summit here in Denver, May 21st and 22nd. And if you are a member, of course there’s Family Day or Member Day on May 20th. But one of the speakers at the summit is a guy that I think you’re gonna find fascinating.

His name is Casey Mehan. And Casey owned his own agency, a content driven agency for 10 or 15 years, was doing very well, was super successful, had niched down, was really crushing it, and started noticing as people started talking more about AI and machine learning, started thinking about how that was gonna impact his business. And so he ended up pivoting, and now he consults with agencies to figure out how to leverage AI and machine learning inside their business. So both for client facing things, but also for internal things. So he’s gonna be one of the speakers talking about how he’s helping agencies.

He’s gonna give you very specific tool sets and cheat sheets and guidelines for how you can start leveraging the power of AI in your agency. He’s just one of the speakers. We have an amazing lineup. So if you know you wanna join us and you want to buy your ticket before they get more expensive, ’cause you know how conferences are closer, you get to the conference, the more it costs. So grab your ticket now. Give this to yourself as a 20 happy 2020 fourth gift. Head over to the agency management institute.com website, right in the upper left corner, it says BABA summit. You can click on that and go to the registration page and grab your ticket. Again, if you’re a member, you absolutely wanna join us for member day.

We have member only content for the last half of the day, and then we’re all gonna go out to dinner together. So we’d love to have you either join us for all three days or the two days, but grab your ticket now. All right, enough of that. So our guest today is a woman named Rosie Tompkins, and Rosie is a serial entrepreneur. She’s owned and sold several businesses and has been in the, in the business for over 30 years. And she recently wrote a brand new book called Let Nature Be Your Compass. And, and Rosie talks about this idea of natural intelligence. So we’ve, we all know about intelligence, we know about emotional intelligence, so we know about IQ, we know about EQ, but Rosie’s gonna talk to us today about NQ.

So this idea of how we can draw insight and intelligence from ourselves is baked inside of us, but a lot of times we don’t listen to it or we may not even notice that we’re hearing it or getting a sense of it. So it’s gonna, it’s a, it is a wild ranging conversation. We’re gonna talk about grizzly bears, we’re gonna talk about horses, but mostly we’re gonna talk about how to be better leaders. And so I think you’re gonna really enjoy the conversation. So I am excited to introduce you to Rosie and the idea of natural intelligence. All right, let’s do it. Rosie, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

My pleasure. Lovely to be here.

So tell the listeners a little bit about your background and your expertise and the whole notion you have around leadership.

So my background is very entrepreneurial. I’ve had four different companies I’ve taken from, literally from my kitchen table and then grown them. And I was very lucky to be able to sell my company to a PLC, a public limited company. And basically I landed myself in a boardroom at quite a young age and had to survive the way that the corporate environment is. IE the tur, the politics, the all the stress areas, you’re in corporate life. And the learning was very, very fast for me, from running my own business to then being inside a corporate organization.

And one of the things I really learned was that it, it’s very easy to work on people’s failure. So the 360 degree feedback forms, or we look at what you’re doing wrong. And my view was that really we should be celebrating strength within an organization. And if I was to ever go into training, I would turn the idea of looking at what we are not doing well to what we’re actually doing really, really well, and then kind of celebrating that. So that’s really where my idea started. I’d say four companies later, I happened to come across some training with courses. I realized that there’s an awful lot of learning out there for us in the world around us in nature, and I could see how I could apply that into the boardroom.

And the learnings would be very interesting for everybody and give people hope and a sense of real knowing. So what I looked at was how we, we organized business, we look at our IQ, everyone knows that IQ is necessary to run a business. You need the skills and expertise. Many of you’ll know about EQ emotional intelligence. Yeah, you need that. We run teams. Some of you will know about IQ, sorry, SQ, which is spiritual intelligence. But not many of you will have heard the term NQ. For me, that’s called natural intelligence. And the natural intelligence that I see is like a, a positive use of your instinct, insights, and perfection that where you can make a decision at speed from a place of knowing.

And as an owner of a business, you’re going to need that

For sure. So that all, that all then translated into the book, right?

Yes. So the book is, the latest book is called Let Nature Be Your Compass. I tried to write a business book from my heart rather than a technical book. So it explores some case studies, some ideas, and really to challenge the status quo and to really make you think in a different way about leadership and how leadership works in nature.

So talk, give, give us an example of how NQ works. Like give us, give us a sense of sort of what that would look like in a practical application.

Yes. I’m sure most of your listeners will have heard of the Hudson River Landing, right? Amazing Captain who, as you know, put the, put the plane down on the Hudson River. But before he did that, he was in a situation where he had to make a decision at speed. He told by LaGuardia to turn the plane round and land back at the airport, but with his wisdom and say the IQ, his EQ, his SQ. And for me, he kind of made a decision based on his experience and his gut feel that the right thing to do was to land the plane on the Hudson River. And he made that decision at speed with, from this place of deep knowing and saved 240 lives, I think, in the process.

So it’s not saying that you don’t need intelligence, that you need all of them, but whereas, you know, we tend to always think about IQ and EQ and SQ. The, the third, fourth one for me is that actual knowing from a deep place, which we all have, it’s within all of us. And when you are leading a business or an organization, sometimes you just have to make that decision at speed from that place of deep knowing. So my job really is with the book and the work I do, is to give confidence to people to actually act on that.

So if it’s something we all have, do we dismiss it? Do we not know how to recognize it? How, why is it that today we aren’t using it at the level we could or should? Is it we don’t hear it, we ignore it, we don’t trust it. What, what gets in the way of us using it?

We, we tend to, it’s a politically correct environment at the moment. So we tend to, for everyone to make a judgment for all of us to be on the same page. And that’s what I call collaborative leadership, which has its place, obviously, but at certain times you just have to act. And if you are in business, then the competition is hot on your heels. Not everyone is going to agree with your decision making process, but you need to come from this place of real inner belief and what I call internal validation, which says this is the right way to go and I’m going to do it.

So how do I tune in or turn up the volume if, if I have not been a leader that sort of pays attention to that or gives credence to that sense of knowing, like, how, how do I recognize that’s what I’m feeling or thinking or ’cause it feels like it’s, it sounds to me like it’s, it, it’s not quite so cerebral. It’s more sort of almost guttural, right? It comes from within. So how do I, how do I recognize it?

So I think one of the hidden agenda, I call it a hidden agenda for most people in business, is that sometimes you secretly feel like you, you haven’t got the ability to lead, you’ve lost your confidence in your own ability to lead. And of course you can’t share that with anybody. So we all have it at times and we all have to, you know, find a way through. And my view is that you’ve got to do a huge amount of work on yourself. You’ve got to know yourself before you in, you know, inflict yourself on other people, I call it, right? What are your tendencies? What are your, the way you are under pressure, you need to know how you’re going to show up and you, and by doing that, you can then understand yourself better.

And very more importantly than anything is, you know, need to know how other people see you. And that is rare because what other, most of the courses we go on, you know, and the books we read, you can never actually see how people show up. And that’s why working with nature is such a brilliant idea because when you work with animals, and especially horses, they take you as you are and you show up and you can’t, you can’t in any way try to fake it in any way, right? They know you are being congruent. And from that position, you can then start to add confidence.

And my way of adding confidence, as you’ll see in the book, is to look to what happens in nature in difficult situations, because they have to show up in a different way. They can’t voice it, they’ve got to use energy behavior. The way that I’m sure you, you’re, you’re familiar with body posture and all of that kind of thing, right?

Right.

That’s really important as well.

So how do I gain insight in how both, how I, how do I gain insight about myself in terms of how I, as you said, how I show up, how I act under pressure, and how do I gain insight from the others, my team, my peers? So I have that, I have that perspective as well.

Yeah. So I mean, obviously you have to start working on self, right? And that the most important place is to read a book. As I say, my book would be great, but obviously lots of books on self-development. And I know that in the US you have lots of places where you can go and work with horses, for example, or in the outdoors doing out kind of bound just to get to know who you really are. Because when we’re in running a business, we’re so focused on the bottom line and how we can move it to speed and how we increase in everything that we forget about ourselves. And if we’re not balanced, it shows Yeah. Con over, you know, you, you just can’t see how others are seeing you and that stress levels will impact on the whole team.

Yeah, it’s interesting to me that, that horses are your sort of go-to, so I grew up, my dad and I had horses, and I grew up training horses and, and riding horses. And I think one of the things you learn when you are a rider is that you are not actually in control of the gate or the movement that you actually have to move with the horse, right? And, and the horse, you, you get to, you get to set the direction of where we’re going with the bridal and all of that, but the way the horse’s body moves, you have to sort of, sort of meld into that. And then the ride is smooth and easy. But when you try and control the gate or the cadence of the ride, you know that that’s a miserable experience, I’m sure for the horse, but it certainly is a miserable experience for you and your body.

So, so I can see how that experience would, I never thought about it in terms of leadership or team leading or whatever, but now that you’re saying it, I can see how that idea of sort of surrendering yourself to sort of the natural gate of the horse and figuring out how to use that to your advantage to get where you want to go. Makes perfect sense.

Okay. So, you know, not, so, so there are lots of kind of different leadership styles that I, I, I look at round the horse, for example. But one of the things that’s really, really important is to know what energy you bring to a situation. So when you work with horses on the ground, not so much riding, I mean, I get your point on that completely. The, the energy when you are on the ground is really important. And again, energy in a boardroom is really, really important.

Yes. Right?

We talk about all the time about communication being 90% nonverbal, and yet we concentrate all the time on that 10% verbal. So the whole learning experience of being around horses is, you know, how they see us, how they react to us, what kind of energy we are bringing. And my job is to give the leader a new set of tools that they can dig into when they need to. So when it’s appropriate. So one of those tools, for example, is knowing yourself and what kind of leadership you have, what’s your innate leadership style? However, is the business in that place to use that style, or do you need another style? So I call it rotational leadership.

So in a herd of horses, you have rotational leadership going on. There are individuals within the herd that know what they’re doing for the alpha male, the alpha female, but most of the time they’re doing it for the good of the whole, right? They’re bringing in order for the whole of the herd to survive. And that’s the kind of metaphor analogy that you can use in business. What can I bring that will help everybody to be the best they can be? And, and for the good of the whole, what do I need to do? Do I need to change my style? Do I need to look at what season we’re in? Do we need to look at a different perspective in the business? But being open to that and being open to rotating, to listen to others and their opinions.

So assuming that some of the listeners are not in a position to go hang out with a herd of horses, how, how does someone, how does someone begin to assess this for themselves and how do they begin to observe it in their team so they can nurture and coach this kind of leadership out of their, their, their leadership team of their employees?

So there’s, there’s lots of examples, and I agree with you totally. Not most, not many people can hang out with a herd of horses.

They should all, they should all get to do that. But if they can’t,

Yeah. But realistically, nature is everywhere. Yeah. You outside window at constancy learning opportunity for us that the constancy of nature, you know, the fact that spring comes around again, it’s gonna be dark and then the sun will start. Yeah. That gives a reassurance that all will be, well, there’s no doubt about that. On top of that, you have to look at tiny little things that around us all the time. Like a spider’s web, for example. You know, we brush a spider’s web away, we think, you know, it’s in the way bush, right? That little, that little spider has to show incredible resilience to come back and repeat that web, right?

And that’s where we need to learn, you know, business isn’t easy. We need to be resilient, we need to have tenacity. Another great story that some of your listeners might really relate to is that I was in a lucky position to go to Colorado myself with my son a few weeks. And I heard this wonderful story about some of the, you will have heard of dude ranches and yes. Particular ranger was a, a female ranger, and she was given a very big horse to ride called tonk. And her job was to take out the guests for a ride in the morning, and there was a string of eights and went out on the horses, and suddenly from nowhere, a deer ran into the side of her horse.

Oh, wow. Which is a very unusual thing for any deer to do, right? And the rider realized why the deer had run into the horse, because behind the door, behind the deer was a grizzly bear. Okay? So the grizzly bear scared the horses, all the horses bolted, the riders were thrown. And there’s one particular little boy who had fallen off, and the grizzly turned his attention to the little boy, the rider on this big horse called tonk, who was still on her horse as a ranger, rode into the kind of prey and basically used the cutting horse to kind of fend off this grizzly bear.

And the tenacity that the rider and the horse showed in this incredibly unusual situation was mind blowing and saved the little boy’s life. So again, you know, to understand that that horse in a natural situation would not have, it would’ve run away, but the tenacity of ride around horse to overcome the difficulty, and of course it became a national treasure. They were airlifted into various news rooms around Colorado and further afield, I think, to celebrate this incredible tenacity. So these are kind of storied metaphors that when we are feeling under pressure, we can relate to everywhere.

So, you know, like a cheetah, a cheetah doesn’t run, run, run, run, run, right? It has to be something in the tank. So we have to learn to really understand energy and capacity in business, otherwise we burn out and that doesn’t help anybody. Right. So, you know, all these amazing metaphors that I, I use in the book and in my work, you know, on my website, all of these things are there, out there for all of us to, to learn from every day.

So why do you think, I mean, it sounds like this is baked into all of us, and, and by the way, I’m not sure the grizzly bear story is gonna encourage anyone to want to hang out with a horse anytime soon, but this is baked inside of us. So why do you think we don’t tap into this natural spring of wisdom more often? What, what, what prompts us to ignore it?

So I would say we need to get out of our heads and into our senses, and we’re in our heads as human beings far too much. We, you know, we talk about fights and flight in all sorts of situations, but actually there’s another, there’s another area which of course freeze, which nature uses to survive. So again, we are so on it all the time. We’re, you know, as we know, relentless, we need to take time out to make it more creative, to really able to listen to what’s really going on and to basically return to basics, just to give ourselves the capacity to just be for a while.

And it’s very difficult yeah. As we make that time, but unless we do, we’re, we’re losing that opportunity for insight and, you know, a deeper learning.

Well, and as you say, we stay in our head and, and so our leadership style and our decisions are very cerebral, but they’re not necessarily, I I I find that many agency owners, they have a gut instinct and they talk themselves out of Trusting it. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And then later they’ll come back and say, oh, I knew I should have done this, or I shouldn’t have done that, or whatever, but I did this or I didn’t do anything or, and so they sort of chastise themselves for not Trusting their gut.

Absolutely. Because we’re a fear of judgment, you know? Right. Look what happened to the, the Captain Berger, you know, he went through Helen High Water after he made that,

Even after he saved everybody. Right. You would think that would be, that would be like, okay, good call. Right?

Absolutely. And that’s the fear that we are, if we get it wrong, we’re gonna be judged. Right? And so we tend to, you know, sit, sit on our hands, as I say, tend to be politically correct, and that doesn’t serve anyone. Of course, there are times when you have to be politically correct. Yeah, sure. But, but you’ve got to be able to rotate through different styles of leadership for what’s appropriate in the time at that time, just as animals do in the wild, you know, what’s appropriate right now, you know, sometimes you see at a watering hole, the lion’s running, the, you know, walking alongside of zebra. It’s a different situation to when the lion is hungry and the right the way.

And again, being flexible in leadership and adapting instead of staying in one particular role, you know, I am the CEO, I’m the, I make the decisions. It’s about rotational. It’s dropping the ego and making sure that everybody is heard in your team, rightly or wrongly for that, you know, whatever they, you think it could be the wrong thing or not, but take away the judgment from it. Let people try. And that creative creativity will surprise you.

Yeah. Yeah. I, I wanna ask you some more, but I wanna turn the lens a little bit and ask about how you coach and teach people and how we can coach and teach our team to tap into this intelligence. Let’s take a quick break and then we’ll come back and talk about that. Hey, everybody, just wanna remind you before we get back to the show, that we have a very engaged Facebook group. It’s a private group just for podcast listeners and agency owners that are in the AAMI community. And to find it, if you’re not a member, head over to facebook.com/groups/ba a podcast. So again, facebook.com/groups/ba podcast.

All you have to do is answer a few questions to make sure that you are an actual agency owner or leader. And we will let you right in and you can join over 1700 other agency owners and leaders. And I’m telling you, there’s probably 10 or 15 conversations that are started every day that are gonna be of value to you. So come join us. All right. We are back with Rosie Tompkins, and we’re talking about natural intelligence and how we as leaders can tap into it. But where, where I kind of wanna turn our focus is how do we encourage our team members to recognize it, to use it, to learn from it. So I’m curious, in your work with leaders, are there some exercises or tools or encouragement or something that we can sort of expose our team members to this idea and then help them learn how to tap into this?

Because again, it feels like when we ignore this, we’re only using part of all of the tools in front of us to make good decisions, or to be a good leader as opposed to taking advantage of all aspects of our intelligence to be the best leader we can be.

Yes. So I’ve developed models that are my own models around nature. And as we know in any kind of training organization, we do tend to use models in the boardroom. We can’t always be outside, right? So important to be able to bring it in. So one of the models is in my book, it’s called the pro Predator Model. It looks at an unusual, it’s an unusual model in the sense that it’s not a PowerPoint, it’s actually on a slide. So there are like trapeze across it. So you can actually move figures along the model, which obviously in the book is, it’s not like that, right? But basically it’s to show that leadership has, you know, positives and shadow sides to it.

And you need to know what your positives are and what your shadow sides are. And you need to know the same about your team members. So this particular model will identify whether you at the moment are what I call a predator, a prey animal. Or you are in freeze, or you are in flock. Hmm. And you, on this model, you can ask yourself, where am I on this board? And where do I want to get to? So for example, at the moment, most people, if they’re in startup mode, will have to be in the predator section. They have to be very, very focused. They have to have courage, they need to be tenacious. All those a a aspects of leadership are really, really important because you’re starting up a business and you know, it’s, it’s, you’ve gotta push it at high speed, right?

But above that is what I call predator. And, sorry, prey. And prey animal has positives. It’s very fast moving. It sees, it’s really, really say fast. It’s furious. It sees things from a distance that other people don’t see, but it might spot the competition on the horizon, et cetera, right? It’s agile, it’s, as I say, fast moving. It gets to the end quickly and, and it works leaping over all sorts of obstacles in its path. So incredibly important is a, a prey animal. But alongside that, we’ve got the freeze model, which I use the hair image. So if anyone knows about a hair, a hair in nature does not have a burrow.

Does not have a nest, it relies on dropping flat on the ground, it stops its kind of life support systems when it’s in something’s chasing it, and it crues down until the dangers path, and that’s freeze. So in that position, we’ve just all been in freeze. We’ve all been like the hair because we’ve been through covid. And the positive side of that, if you look at freeze, is a time to take stock to time to really understand, to nourish yourself, to look at the future, reflect to have time. The shadow side can be that you be, feel like you are caged and you know you can’t move, right?

You’re, you’re struggling, et cetera. And the final one is flock. And flock is all about collaborative leadership. What do birds do in, you know, in, in nature, right? We all know the symbol of the flying, et cetera. What can I, where am I on this board and where do I want to be? Do I want to be a collaborative leader? Do I want to be a predator? Do I wanna be a prey? Or do I want other people in my organization to have those skills? Because you can’t have them all. Not one person can. All these,

I was just gonna ask you, do we have all of those in us and we use different ones at different times? Or is there sort of a, there’s a natural and maybe, you know, you have, you’re mostly a this, you’re mostly a predator, and on occasion you’re a flock.

Yes. You have to obviously know who innately who you, you rec you know who you feel naturally in which sector or which access you feel. But also you have to push yourself into an area that maybe you don’t want to go during a, you know, when, when it’s appropriate for the business. So, for example, to give you an example of myself, I’m entrepreneurial, have four different businesses. I know that I am naturally a predator, right? You know, I go for it. I don’t look back, I take decisions. I go for it. And I, I literally, I’m kind of quite tired of that now after four different businesses. Yeah. I know that I now want to move more into flock.

I want to be more collaborative. That’s why I’ve written the book. That’s why I’m reaching out to people on this call to collaborate is really important. And I know that that’s where I want to move to. So as a leader, you need to know where you are and where you want to go, and also where you want the business to go. So when you’ve been in business for many years and everything’s going well, you might feel very happy moving into something like as a safe freeze mode where you take time out from the top position and give someone else a chance to take over the reins for a bit in order for you to have some time in that wonderful place of taking stop processing, nourishing yourself, recharging and evaluating, because that’s just as important as that kind of 19%, you know, 90 mile an hour drive that we tend to have.

So I’m curious about two things. One, do we move from our natural tendency to something different when we are feeling under threat or under pressure? So, you know, am I normally a flock leader, but I moved a predator or prey when I’m under pressure, or I’m afraid or I’m worried? And two, do we change over time? ’cause what you said was, I’ve been a predator my whole life, but now I’m, I’m kind of weary of being the predator. So I’m consciously or unconsciously shifting to a more collaborative type of leader. So I guess, let’s take this one at a time.

Number one, do we stay consistent in our leadership, our natural leadership style, or using that natural intelligence, no matter what situation we’re in? So let’s, let me just stop there.

Okay. So again, what’s very interesting when I work with the horses is that under pressure, animals come together. So normal herd of horses scattered on the prairie, as soon as there’s a, a danger on the horizon, what do the horses do? They move tightly together. Humans don’t, when we get into a pressure situation, especially in the corporate world, we hide in our offices, we get away from people, we’ve kind of got it upside down in a way. Yeah. ’cause we withdraw, we go into isolation, whereas animals don’t do that.

So for me, it’s identifying, like you say, under pressure, what is my tendency and everybody’s different, and what do I need to change about that if I do need to change it? So, for example, going into your office and hiding is not, in my opinion, the best way to resolve problems. So again, to have the courage to say, I know we’re all under pressure at the moment. I know that this is difficult, but right now we need to move together. We need to go into block mode so that we can sort this out as a group.

So in, in this exa in this example, I’m ignoring my natural instincts and what I am sort of hardwired to do in terms of my own natural intelligence. And I’m having to artificially choose a different kind of leadership because it’s more appropriate. So if I don’t understand all of this, and I just go into my natural pray, so pray I am hiding, right? Then what you’re saying is I have to understand these different intelligences enough to recognize that although every, every instinct in me is saying, go hide in my office, what I really have to do is I have to flock everybody together and we have to solve this problem together or weather the storm together.

Is that what you’re saying?

Absolutely. No, what’s appropriate for the business right now is not what appropriate for you. It’s the same with energy, you know, energetically you have as a leader need to be able to use energy to motivate and to bring people together and know when to drop energy so that others can feel that you can step in. So all these tools, like you’re saying, is it’s about what’s appropriate for my business right now, not knowing who I’m, but how can I rotate or choose something different as you’re saying, to help the business move forward.

Yeah. Okay. So second question was we are naturally wired to be something. What would trigger a shift in that? So that we are naturally wired to be something different. Using your example, you’ve been a predator your whole life, but now you’re like, I’m kind of over the predator thing. Yeah. So is that like hardwired in you or is that a conscious choice where you’re like, you know what, I need to ratchet back the predator because I’m at a point in my career, in my life, physically eight chronologically, emotionally, whatever it is. So I’m going to consciously choose to move myself into a different sort of lead natural intelligence, or does it just happen?

It’s, it’s also to do with capacity, like you say. And again, with animals, they recognize the capacity. So again, when the alpha female who is the oldest, normally the oldest mayor feels like she, it is time for her to move across. She’s wise, she’s got all the knowledge, but very quickly she will take herself into another role because she recognizes that she no longer has the capacity for the cut and thrust at the front end. And that you are wanting to choose something different. It can be a legacy piece, for example, why am I not, I’ve made my money, I’ve sold my agency, I’ve done extremely well.

So now I want to go into a legacy piece and I need to choose change the way I come across as a predator. Not to change who I’m, but just to recognize that something different is needed. I’m not saying you should fake who you are. I’m saying that you are aware that, as I say, you might want to take a freeze moment, you might want to be a prey animal, just much more kind of in the moment. But all of those are for you to choose rather than you, it happening to you. Yeah. You have the decision to make.

So I I, in our work, I see a lot of agency owners who’ve been doing this for 20 or 30 years, and I see exactly what you’re saying, which is they were hard driving 80 hours a week, never. No mountain was too tall. They were ready to climb it. And, and what I have seen of late is that a subset of them, great recession of oh eight COID, the great resignation, the, you know, current economic status that all of those things and their age and where they are in their life has sort of made them say, you know what? I, I don’t have the same energy.

They talk about it being gas in the tank, but, but I don’t think that’s what it is. It’s really like my energy has shifted into something different and it’s harder for me to go into predator mode, to go into chase the big goal mode because I, I’m not feeling that anymore the way I used to. So it sounds like sometimes it’s a conscious choice like you’ve made, but I think sometimes it also is what you’re saying is there are influences that sort of pepper someone and make them sort of say, you know what? I, even if they don’t, they can’t articulate it. I’m feeling this shift in energy and I really get more pleasure or satisfaction or am more effective for my organization in more of a mentor role or in more of a something else role than driving like the sales or something that I used to do.

Yeah. And again, you know, I use the model where leadership is, is a rotational piece with the horses, but one of the positions is leading from behind. So this is empowerment. So if we look at what we do with horses, especially in the old days, plowing fields, you know, field riding into the battle with canons and goodness knows what horse and carriage we are, the horses are actually leading us and we’re leading our leadership positions at the back. We still have our hands on the reign. Yeah. We’re still important. We still have wisdom and experience that we can impart, but we’re empowering others and we are losing ego attached to that.

So we’re passing that over to newcomers. I always say, you know, with doctors and surgeons, they have to at some stage step back and let those junior surgeons take over and make their mistakes, but they still there in the background, making sure that everything’s safe and they can step in at any time to take, you know, back control. And that’s, I say, a difficult thing to do when you’ve always been a predator at the front end running for your life, you know, diving, ducking and, and you know, right. So thinking about moving slightly backwards to say what I call a leading from behind position could be a huge relief.

It’s like taking a holiday from the business, but still having everything there. And you know, if you, if they need you

Well, and tapping into a different kind of energy than what got you to be the business owner, agency leader now, now it is more the wisdom piece of it and the encouragement piece as opposed to being the hard driver.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah. And there’s probably times throughout our career where we, as you say, we have to rotate through that, which is different than sort of choosing a different sort of core style, right? I mean, it’s, it’s, so I I’m sure throughout your career you weren’t always just the predator, you shifted enrolled as, as there were demands, but now you’re consciously deciding to make this shift. Right? And, and I’m seeing a lot of our clients kind of wrestling with that right now. And, and, and what I think is really interesting and value valuable about this part of our conversation is that it’s natural. So I think they feel bad or guilty that they can’t get up for the fight anymore.

And what you’re saying is, if you look at nature, there’s always a point in time where the leader of the pack, whatever the pack or the herd or whatever it is, recognizes that there’s actually someone else in the herd or pack who could do a better job being out front chasing the big, the big thing, whatever it is. And that their role now is to be the, the sage that’s either in the herd or pack or maybe even the back back that’s kind of guiding from behind, right?

Absolutely. Yeah. You know, and I say that’s difficult because it does, you know, as you say, you know, we’re used to leading and it can be quite hard to maintain that position. I worked recently with the, well even the rugby team actually, so elite sports people, and again, a lot of sports people when they’ve given up their, you know, their, their life or their career, it’s a short life in whatever sport, and then they often become a coach, right? And so that, you know, it’s very difficult to move from being one of the crowd into a position of loneliness. Again, it takes some learning to understand that you don’t serve anybody if you can’t move to a different position.

And the more you try to hold on to being one of the boys and always in the, you know, the fray doesn’t as say, serve anybody.

Yeah, that’s really a great insight for us as business people, right? That we, rather than feeling bad or that we are somehow deficient because we can’t play the same position on the team. Recognizing that there are moments in time when you have to shift and be in a different position, otherwise you actually diminish your value.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah. Rosie, this has been really fascinating. This has, this has been fascinating. So thank you so much for being here and, and for this has been, I love these kind of topics that we can just kind of chew on and then, you know, this is gonna bang around in people’s heads and they’re gonna think about it and they’re gonna start recognizing and connecting dots that they didn’t connect before. So this is, this is one of those sort of seed and weave the ideas in and let them sort of ferment for a while. So this has been a great conversation. So thank you so much for being here with us. If people want to find the book, learn about your coaching, access, some of the resources you have, what’s the best way for them to plug into all the things that you do?

Okay, so first of all, my book came out last Tuesday. Okay? Let nature be your Compass. It’s on Amazon, on usa, Amazon, and Kindle. Secondly, you can have a look at my website, which is n com. And thirdly, please connect with me on LinkedIn. That’s a really good, keep in touch, especially across the water. Love to hear from you guys. I’m here as a resource, so please, any questions, please contact me on LinkedIn and I will try and answer them.

That’s awesome. So, all right everybody, so we’ll make sure that we put a link to the book, a link to Rosie’s LinkedIn profile and a and a link to our website in the show notes. So if you’re on the subway or riding a horse or whatever you’re doing that you can’t write all this stuff down, don’t worry about it. It’s in the show notes. So just come and grab them there. But I, I highly recommend that you grab the book. This is fascinating. I can’t wait to dig into this some more. Grab the book. And again, this is a great conversation to have with your leadership team. You know, helping them sort of explore this idea, helping them identify sort of what their natural tendencies are. And to start recognizing when you all show up in sort of these different modalities, sort of calling it out by name and saying, you know what, you guys, we gotta get into flock mode here.

We have to get into, you know, predator mode or whatever it is. Helping them by giving them this language to recognize what’s already happening inside them. But they may not have the, they might have the, the vocabulary to Label it and understand it. And you can be a great leader by helping them sort of wrap their head around this. So, you know, as Rosie says, we all have this in us. So now that job for us as leaders is how do I, this is an untapped resource that we can tap into. So how do we do that better? By understanding it. As you know, I’m a firm believer that we learn best when we teach. So by teaching it to our team and by sort of teaching it to ourselves, and by the way, I suspect this shows up not just in business, but I suspect it shows up in our family and our friend groups.

So understanding it just in how it shows up in your life is, I suspect will be super valuable. So this is an action packed, I gotta think about it for a while, but I know actions are gonna come out of it for me and I suspect for you as well. So Rosie, thank you so much for being with us. Super grateful.

My pleasure. Thank you so much.

Alright guys, this wraps up the episode before I let you go. Huge shout out and thanks to our friends at White. Label IQ, as you know, because I tell you every week how grateful I am for those folks. They’re the presenting sponsor of the podcast. They provide white Label, design dev and PPC to agencies all over the world. And they are born out of an agency so they understand exactly how to work with agencies, how to help you be profitable, and they have dialed in how to do this and deliver amazing results for your clients. So check them out at White Label IQ dot com slash aami ’cause they have a special deal just for you as a podcast listener. And guess what, I’m gonna be back next week with another guest and we’re gonna be thinking, and we’re gonna be talking and we’re gonna be exploring how we can do our jobs even better, how we can love our jobs even more.

How we can make our businesses more stable and profitable and how we can show up as better leaders. So I’m excited to come back. I hope you are too. I will see you next week. Thanks for listening.

That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of Build Better Agency. Visit agency management institute.com to check out our workshops, coaching and consulting packages, and all the other ways we serve agencies just like yours. Thanks for listening.