Transcripts
1. Introduction: There's a lot of
bosses in this world, but there's very few leaders. One of the greatest
mistakes you can make is to confuse a boss for a leader. Boss is simply a job position, while a leader is
a character trait. And this is a character
trait that a lot of people who are not giving themselves
credit can unlock. That's the purpose
of this class. But it was our modulatory, the founder of money
talks and media company, which helps engineers and entrepreneurs improve their
communication skills. Thus far, I've
worked with a lot of leaders since starting
our body talks. And there's a few primal
qualities that I see. Every single one of them. That's going to be the
purpose of this class. I'm not going to give you a
lot of convoluted methods on how you can do a lot of
these fancy strategies. Instead, we are going to communicate to the
primal sides of a human. In this class, you're going to understand what is leadership. You're going to understand how to compartmentalize
and dominate. You're going to
understand how to practice your leadership skills. And we're going to end with a final project which will allow you to test out your elegant
leadership capabilities. Sound interesting. If so, I look forward
to seeing you inside.
2. #1 Trait of a Leader: The number one trade of a leader is to give clarity at, well, your job is not to get on a table and start
jumping up and down, trying to give some sort
of rah, rah speech. Even though a lot
of the times when I just bring it up
leadership skills, the first thing that
the mind creates is an image of someone who's
being overly energetic. Get rid of that definition. Leadership is all about giving
someone clarity at well, when you give someone clarity, you give them confidence. And when you give
them confidence, you allow them to work
with more enthusiasm. I want to give you an
example of this in action. Those is one internship a
couple of years ago that I was doing and my
manager was great. He's only problem was
that he was always busy. So you would make
me do a bunch of these Excel sheets without
explaining why I was doing it. A few weeks in, I had done so many different Excel
sheets that I was bored. It felt like a headache
to even look at Excel. One day there was this lady named Jennifer who
came to my cube. She's like You are MAN. I said yes. She's like Come with me. So she takes me into her
office and she's like, I don't think you know how much you've been helping
me and the team? I had no clue she was
talking about and she could tell that I had no clue
or she was talking about. So she gets to whiteboard, she gets her marker
and she starts creating a whole bunch
of rectangle boxes. She puts my team's name
and one of the boxes and a whole bunch of the other
team names that look familiar. And eventually she starts linking these different
boxes together. And she's explaining why
she's linking them together. She's saying, well, this particular team
engages with this team, this team engages
with this team, this team engages
with this team, and so on and so on. Eventually it started to click. She was pretty much
using the same language that I was using in
the Excel sheets. That's when she said Armand. I don't know if you
know this, but we in the company deal with a
lot of people from overseas, which is why there's a lot of miscommunication
that goes on. Your Excel sheets has
standardized a lot of the process which
allows the different teams with a different time zones or the different languages to temporarily beyond
the same exact page. When I saw this
drawing and I saw how my tiny little Excel sheets were impacting the big picture. I started to feel a
flurry of emotions. I started to feel so enthusiastic and I
started to get clarity. Jennifer was a leader, chosen over here,
jumping up and down, trying to get me all hyped up. She wasn't giving
me more deadlines. Instead, she was just
giving me more knowledge. Not any kind of knowledge. Knowledge that was
relevant to me. That's what a leader does. A leader gives someone
clarity at well.
3. Leadership Mindset: Throughout the rest
of this course, we're gonna be talking about how to give someone clarity at well, but before we talk
about the process, what we want to talk about
right now are people, leaders have to deal with people in one way,
shape, or form. Sometimes it's going to be
through the digital format. Other times it's going to be through the in-person format. Bottom line, we're still
dealing with people. This is when the
fundamental belief of a leader is highly important. It's incorrect a leader to think that people are
going to make sense. Unfortunately, most
leaders think like that. When you try to envision
people too much with the logical lens starts to happen is that
you become enraged. You become so
freaking ****** when someone isn't
behaving logically. I mean, you told me
you are going to do the deadline at
such and such time, how come you didn't do it? This is the pore
fundamental beliefs that have much more better if the leader can
have the perception that other human beings are
not going to make sense. And be pleasantly
surprised if they do. The reason that this sort of fundamental belief
is much better. Because it allows the leader
to look around the corners. They're expecting for a
lot of things to go wrong. And great leaders are born from being pessimistic
every now and then. We don't want to be so
pessimistic to a point where we're over here making
other people feel sad. But we're pessimistic enough in order to engage
strategic creativity. We expected that this person was going to miss the deadline, so we had certain backup
plans in the mix. We expected that when we
were giving the meeting that at least one person was going to fall asleep and start snoring. We were prepared for that. When we expect people not to
make too much logical sense, we start to engage our
emotional understanding. Now, we start to
perceive reality from a different
lens. And guess what? We're not saying that humans
can never be logical, were pleasantly surprised when
they are behaving logical. The bottom line is that if we want to give someone
clarity at well, we must understand how to
communicate with humans. To communicate with humans, expect them not to be a sense. Be pleasantly
surprised if they do.
4. Compartmentalize and Dominate: Let's learn the
compartmentalize and dominate strategy is strategy that
all leaders should know. Let's start with
compartmentalize. This is when we are
picking the right group of people that are needed
for our message. For Jennifer. She didn't bring 50 other people
to the meeting. Instead, it was just me and her one-on-one for her to
get her message across. A lot of the times,
you as a leader, you don't need to be calling
in so many different people. And you'll be surprised how many corporations
get this wrong. They have so many of these
different town halls, so many of these
different meetings where there's unnecessary
teams that are invited for a
meeting that is not required for them to be present in, you know, what happens? Number one, your
message is reduced. And number two, these
people are over here, either dozing off or just talking for the
sake of talking, which is why the leader
needs to be able to compartmentalize
every now and then, speaking to one
person is much more effective than speaking
to five people. Every now and then, speaking
to one team is much more effective than
speaking to five teams. So for this, you
need to use context. You've got to understand
what your message is about and who it is cured for. The next part is dominated. For you to dominate, you have to assume that
people have this sticker on their forehead that writes,
what's in it for me. You could give all
these different talks, all these different
strategies, etc. The person is thinking,
wasn't it for me? Jennifer was not over
here talking about the history of her team and all these irrelevant
information. Instead, she was
pretty much giving me the information
strictly to make an impact for me
because she knew I had the sticker on my forehead
which wrote was enough for me. You as the leader, you need to compartmentalize and then
you need to dominate.
5. Give Direction: You've compartmentalize
correctly. You've either call them the
right person or the right team that is relevant
for your message. Now the question is, how
exactly do you dominate? Sure, you understand
the whole sticker that says what's in it for me. But what more? What we need to do is that we need to give someone direction. That's what clearly
pretty much means. In order to give
someone direction, we need two different variables. One, we need to understand
where they currently are. And two, we need to
understand where they are going to many leaders would they do is they
start off with number two. They started pounding
away deadlines, pounding away the final
output of the project, pounding away the kind of
training that this person needs to take in
order to progress. But they never assess where
this person currently is. If I just dropped you off in the middle of
nowhere and I said, go to Disney World, then sure. You know that you need
to go to Disney World, but you don't know
where you are, so you have no clue
where to look. Which is why, in
order to dominate, we need to articulate where
this person currently is. Once we articulated, we just
need to get a general feel. People assess value based
off of how well someone is articulating what their
experiences are like. Let's say you're over
here trying to lead a guy named Jonathan. Jonathan is an intern who has a lot of
specialized knowledge, but as of late, he
has been unmotivated. You're asking jonathan
a lot of questions. You don't just want
to say this is where you are without
asking any questions. What are you, some sort
of hypnotist? Know? You're a person, which means that you have
incomplete information. Which is why you want to get more and more
information out of them. Notice sudden changes
in their tonality. Ask without judgment. Listen without judgment. And eventually, you'll understand
that Jonathan is going through a tough time
because his dog just died. Yet, he has a whole bunch of fees that he needs to
cover for his parents. He needs to pay for
his dogs funeral. He's putting his
sister through school. He lacks fonts. So at this stage, you're starting to
get a clearer idea of where Jonathan currently is. Jonathan, you're
currently struggling with sadness from losing your dog and your
adult stage right now where you still
are ambitious. You still want to move
up in your company. Am I kinda understanding
what you're going through? Jonathan will give you
as much feedback as you need as long as he knows that you are
trying to help them out. That's another difference
between a boss and a leader. Or boss doesn't really care
if it helps you out or not, as long as the
deadlines are met. But the leader, The closer
and closer that you are to articulating
Jonathan's experiences and the feelings for them, the easier it's going to
be to give him direction. Listen, I know you're going through the tough
time right now. I've been through it myself. But you can still
get a promotion. You just need to do X, Y, and Z. How much more impactful
is your message going to be now versus you just saying, Hey Jonathan, come in my
office, do X, Y, and Z. Because you gave direction
by accomplishing both of the variables where
they currently are and where they are going.
6. How to Practice Leadership: There's going to be different people
watching this right now. You may have a team which is
gonna make it much easier for you to practice the
knowledge in this class. Or let's say you hope
to one day lead a team. The question is, how are
you exactly going to get leadership
experience right now? How are we going to practice? Listening? Practice opportunities
are all around you. There's a certain point
in our lives when we understand that a
child and an adult, these are just words
that we put on people. How often do you see an
adult acting like a child? Whenever conflict hits, most people don't
understand what to do. They get so freaking
emotional that their problem-solving
capabilities reduce. Their problem-solving
capabilities, reduce their vision is
starting to become blurry. What did we say
that a leader does? They give clarity at will? Observe your regular
day experiences and you'll see that
there are plenty of different opportunities
in your day-to-day life where you can give
someone clarity at, well, let's say
you have a pretty pop-in Instagram page
or a Twitter page. And people keep hopping in
your DMs asking you questions. This is the perfect
time for you to practice your leadership skills. Let's say you have
a little brother who's going through a
whole bunch of problems and unfortunately is not the best problem-solver at
this stage in his life. This is when you
practice giving advice. Let's say your width group of co-workers and
they're panicking. You guys all work for a guy named Matthew, who's your boss. But he's very disengaged.
At this point. You can assert yourself
as a leader for this particular environment
and give clarity at well, not necessarily just
going to become a great leader out
of the blue moon. That's like me saying
I'm gonna become a professional basketball
player tomorrow. No, it requires practice. And the only way that
we can practice is by spotting chaos all around us. And chaos is all around us. And us. As a leader, we're going to
turn that chaos into order. From that chaos into order, turns that chaos into order. And eventually, we will keep on mastering or
leadership skills.
7. Final Project: Now it's time for
the class project. For this class project, you're going to find
at least one person that you're pretty close to. Lets say you can't
find someone like that defined anyone that's willing
to participate with you. Once you've found your person, you're going to
have them role-play being a very difficult employee. They don't want to listen. They keep questioning
your authority. As of late, they've been
pretty sad and depressed. But you, as a leader, you still have
deadlines to meet. Your goal is to
compartmentalize, dominate, and give
this person direction. How exactly are you going
to get them from point a of chaos to point
B of clarity? Keep on interacting. That's why I said it's probably better if you know the person because they're going
to challenge you in ways that a stranger may not. But who knows, maybe even the strange rule of
challenge you as well. The more that your
big challenge, the more debt you're building flexibility in your
leadership skills, the more debt you are
building Verbal Judo. Once you are complete
with this exercise, I want you to create a report talking about your experience. How was it like? Were you able to give the
person direction? Are you able to make the person agree to completing
the deadline? How exactly did you do it? Be as detailed as you can. This is a creative exercise, so I don't want to give
you too many rules, but ultimately, gather your experiences,
analyze it, put it on a Word document, and post it on the final
project section right on below. I look forward to
hearing from you. If you enjoyed this
beginner's class on leadership skills
and you want to hear more from the
harmonic talks brand. Be sure to check out
our money talks.com. In this website, you'll be given access to a lot of my blogs, YouTube videos, podcasts, books, and much more that deal
with communication skills. Thank you very much for joining the leadership for
beginners class. And I look forward to
hearing more from you.
Arman Chowdhury, Confidence thru Communication
