As a CEO, I get approached all the time by people who want to help me with my leadership skills. What if they're barking up the wrong leadership tree and it's not about skills, but it's about movement or physiology or something else. It's not like something you need to learn and something you need to do. Anyway, we're going to dive into that on today's episode of the movement, the podcast where people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body starting feet first because those things are typically your foundation.
Usually they are. We break down the propaganda, the mythology and sometimes the outright lies that you may have been told about what it takes to run or walk or hike or play or to yoga or crossfitter, dance, dance, revolution, or ease in racing, whatever it is you like to do and do that enjoyably and efficiently and effectively. Can I say enjoy a link? Yes, it was a trick question because I know I did.
If you're not doing something that you enjoy, try something else because it's not fun. You're not going to keep up. I'm Stephen Sashan, your post of the movement movement podcast, CEO of Zero Shoes at www.searachus.com. Those are the things that are behind me.
We call it the movement movement because we're creating a movement. We're about that in a second, about natural movement. That's really, really simple. In fact, if you want to be part of this, go to www.jointhemovementmovement.com.
Nothing you need to do to join other than what you already do, which is check out the previous episodes and share and like and give us a thumbs up or hit the bell icon on YouTube, you know, all the drills about what you leave reviews and all the places you can leave reviews. In short, if you want to be part of the tribe, please subscribe. So let's just jump in. Cody, do me a favor.
Tell people who you are and what you do and maybe a little bit about why you're here and then we're going to go in and have some fun. Yeah, so my name is Cody de Kota-Wooten and I am the founder of the Leadership Guide where I work with entrepreneurs, C-suite individuals, business owners, yada, yada, and I work with them to help them improve their businesses essentially. Will our conversation be relevant for people who are not in one of those situations? Absolutely, absolutely because what works for leaders is going to work for everyone else.
And really, we can all be leaders in different facets of life, whether it's at home, in our community, or in a business. There's lots of ways to be a leader. And so just for transparency, Cody and I go back a number of years, we met in, was it a Turkish prison or Vietnamese? Probably Turkish.
It was a Turkish prison. And so we met Cody through zero shoes and he's been a big help for us at some events that we've done in Austin and I always really appreciate his work so I wanted to share it with you guys here. So this little teaser that was inspired by something you said that leadership is not about skills but could be about movement and or physiology. Obviously the first question I have to ask is not actually questions.
It's a command. Same or shall you? That was a question. Absolutely.
If I stopped it, same or it would have been a command and I turned it into a question because my brain wouldn't allow me to stop. It's all good. I have those moments too. You say what you want to say and then it comes out differently.
Hold on, here's a weird movement exercise. When you're having a conversation with someone, try to guess how you're going to end what you're going to say like five words in advance and you will find that you can't do it. So your brain is moving in a different way than the rest of you is. I barely know what I'm going to say in about one word.
So diving into skills versus movement and physiology then. Yes. So basically I started doing leadership development about six years ago now and things were going along pretty good but then I came across this what I found to be a really startling statistic and it's that leadership development only has a 20% success rate. So from my understanding it's they come in do the leadership program whatever that is and it one lands with the clients and two sticks with the clients afterwards.
So it's not they're not measuring something about increased revenue or but no like are people still doing whatever they learn some period of time later? Exactly. And overwhelmingly it's no. They're not doing it.
And so I thought that was really terrible. People are spending literally hundreds of billions of dollars. It's like a 325 billion dollar market plus or minus in leadership development and you're only getting a 20% return if you're lucky. And so that just seems like a waste of money and a waste of my time and efforts.
And so I wanted to figure out like how do I actually help people because that's why I got into the leadership world is I wanted to actually help people. And I started to notice this weird thing happen too is that you have some people who are in the leadership positions who don't have all those leadership skills that you're supposed to have and yet they're succeeding at really high levels. And then you have the opposite where you have people that have been through all the programs, they know all the things they can say all the same, you know, supposedly walk the walk but they're failing terribly as leaders. And what came to my mind is like what is this differentiator?
Like how is it these people can succeed and these other people who should be succeeding just aren't doing it. And as I research more and more I believe it really comes down to the physiology is what makes a huge difference in a lot of different facets. So before I ask you to describe what it is about physiology, I want to back up a little bit to the question about what some of these skills are. What are these things that people are learning or not learning or I don't want to get the gap between what the skill set seemingly is and to know what people may be doing that isn't working or not doing that is working.
Yeah, so your typical types of skills that you're going to be learning about in most leadership development programs, time management, people management, self management, a lot of these different things you might go into some mindfulness practices in general, but overwhelmingly they're just not really working. Communication skills, how you should supposedly talk to people, you know. Can you give me like one specific example of any one of those categories? Let's see.
So let's say communication as a classic one. There's a program called DISC, D-I-S-C, which is used overwhelmingly in the leadership world, which is designed to talk about how do you communicate with other people, recognize their types of communication patterns so that you can speak to them in their quote unquote language in vice versa. Figure out how to get them to talk to you in your language. That's the idea behind it.
I mean, ask if you can, and I know I'm putting on the spot, but can we dive in a little deeper in just that and give me one example of what that might look like in either how someone's being taught what to do or what that's supposed to look like in real life versus actual real life? Sure, absolutely. So like if I'm talking to you because I've trained in this method, the CVC behind my name is Certified Behavioral Consultant, which is revolved around the DISC method. So you know, sometimes those fun little acronyms behind names mean so much or so little depending on what it is.
You know, I have an MFA. I do not put it at the end of my name, nor do I insist on people calling me master, although that would be really fun. I mean, people, you know, you know, I mean, they can be an MD or PhD, many other things would be doctors. I feel like some people should call me master, just, you know, because you should just make them all clear.
Just just across your company tomorrow, do a statewide or a company-wide memo that says you will for now call me master. Yeah, that is going to happen. Look, in my company, if someone calls me boss, I smack them. So we're very non-hierarchical around here.
But anyway, back to how to talk. So like, for instance, if I'm speaking with you, you're somebody that's very much what would typically be called a D, which you're direct. You want to clarify that because there's other definitions for calling someone a D. I've been called as well.
I just didn't know where we were going with that. Yeah, direct or dominant, depending on who's dis you're speaking to. And so you tend to be very direct. You want answers.
You're like, I don't understand that redefine it for me. And you're not afraid to say it. That's very much along the D line of personality versus someone like me. I'm more closely into, well, technically, I'm an IS, which means I'm a mixture of liking to talk to a lot, talking to people, but I also like things to be stable.
So if things get chaotic, my goal is how do we stabilize it? So the game is when you know this, there's apparently other types of language or whatever that you're going to be talking to someone. So okay, I got it. Exactly.
And so you're certified and this is something that you're still doing? I still do it. Yeah, because I do believe there is purpose to it. But the question of where it fits into the puzzle.
And I think it's something that should come much later in a leader's life, basically, that there's other more important keys to understanding grasp first before you really dive into those things. Got it. So now that brings us back to the physiology question. So same more about what you mean when you say it's more about physiology than skills like understanding this communication strategy?
Absolutely. So there's a lot of components that go into it, especially because physiology itself is so dramatically influential in our lives. I mean, you're all about shoes and feet. That's what zero shoes is all about is the natural, how the foot is supposed to actually naturally move, which I love your products all the way.
Your shoes are the only shoes I ever wear. Shameless plug definitely zero shoes. But the way you stand has an influence in how you communicate with people, just as one example. And if your feet have gotten weak over time, you're not going to be able to stand as well.
When you're not able to stand as well, it has an impact on your nervous system. It has an impact on your own psychology as well. You start to begin to fear moving. I know from your backstory, your father was someone who had used the thick shoes all the time.
And I'm sure you noticed as he got older, movement was something he feared and he probably tried not to move. What did he shuffle because he just didn't have good balance. So he was basically keeping his feet loaded around all the time. And that led him to trip on a very small ledge like it was not even an inch high that led to him tripping, falling, breaking his hip and dying two weeks later.
Exactly. And all those components come together. Oh, sorry. And he asked, I'm only doing this because I had a few comments.
Some people are taken aback by how casually I tell that story. And I have to say it happened over seven years ago, time is fast. And so it's a story at this point and besides we didn't do long time. Well, but the biggest thing is, it's been seven years.
Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. So if you could just fix your posture, right?
There's so many dramatic benefits you can get from that alone or the ability to walk. There's a study that shows like 5,800 steps is the difference between depression and not having depression. So most of us live this sedentary lifestyle where we're sitting all the time and we come back to that impacts our health overall. And if you're in a depressed mode, it's very hard to lead people.
It's very hard to have success in anything. And if walking is the difference, why wouldn't you change that? You know, of course, it seems like just some for some people, just that first step is the critical part or to retranslate the Lao Tzu line, which has often been translated the journey about 1000 miles because of the single step. I asked a friend who had translated Lao Tzu things and translates from Chinese.
I said, I hear there's like 10 says don't work the same way in Chinese. So couldn't that be equally translated to the journey of a single of 1000 miles is a single step. Because that's the only one you can take is one. And he said, yeah, that's a good one.
So it is the dead language. That's more on the doctor still use that doctor still use Latin. Thank you. Don't you love when your brain doesn't work?
I don't know which I find more disturbing when I can't think of a word or when it pops in my brain hours later. That easily is that yeah. So yeah, so Latin in Latin, there's there's a phrase that's Carpe diem sees the day, but I have a mentor that says, you can't really seize a day. It doesn't really work.
So instead, he says Carpe punked them, sees the moment. Because that's really all you can do is this moment right here next right now. And then the next moment right here right now, the next moment right here right now, that's really all you can do at any one time. So I agree.
So back now, so one of our physiological examples about leader, we went on this little detour about depression and walking, which is interesting. You reminded me actually friend of mine is a big deal therapist was working with someone over the phone as many years ago. And this is someone who was exhibiting signs of depression and talking about that. And my therapist friend said, well, if you weren't depressed, what's the simplest thing you could do?
Like the simplest thing that you notice, there's a bunch of leaves on my front stoop. I'd get a broom and get rid of those. He goes, how long would that take? He says, I don't know, 20 seconds, he goes, I'd go do it.
I guess this is like when we're done with the call, he goes, no, right now, go do it. And he went out and used a broom and brushed the leaves off his soup and came back and went, I feel a whole lot better. He's all right. What's the next thing?
And they just that's how they kept working. It's like little movement based things to just deal with what was happening. Absolutely. And it's at the end of the day.
It's the smallest things that tend to make the biggest changes. So what else do we want to chat about physiology and leadership? Here's another fun one that I like to play out with people who are like, why physiology? When I say neuron, what is your first thought?
Synapse. Synapse. Okay. Second thought.
More synapses. Okay. What most people tend to say is the brain. Yeah.
Most people say the brain. That's their first thought. You're a different kind of person, which I totally respect that about you. That's one of my favorite things about you is that you're very different.
So I appreciate you in all of the different ways. But most people say the brain because they immediately think neurons are in the brain. However, you have neurons all over your body. I will confess after I said synapses, where I kept thinking it was motor neurons and I was going for bicep and arm.
Those are the images in my head. Absolutely. And you're probably a lot better red than most people when it comes to that. Could be more important.
Now you might know this outside of the brain, what are the next two body parts that have the highest density of neurons in the body? I'm thinking your gut is one. That's one. Of course, you know, your spinal cord is a whole other story.
I'm guessing heart. You are absolutely correct. Good. I was Steven is the winner.
Everyone can go home now. Now here's the fun thing with the heart specifically. Your body is able to create electromagnetic waves. Now the thing about the electromagnetic waves in the heart is they can actually be measured scientifically anywhere from three feet away from you up to potentially 15 feet away from you.
Hmm. That's my quizzical face. Yeah. So I know that what we're measuring often with something like an EKG is that we are measuring electrical impulses or electrical signals, which is electromagnetic.
It's the electrical part of the magnetic part. Although there's a magnetic component in that. The distance part, that's intriguing. I'm going to put my, okay, I'll let that slide thing on now because I'd want to see that and dive into that and take a look nonetheless fascinating.
But let's assume for the sake of argument, that's true. So we continue with what that means. So what that means is that our hearts have the ability to communicate back and forth with each other. Okay.
And the electromagnetic waves. All right. I'm putting on my skeptical pause there as well. Okay.
Because it's one thing to be creating or having. So what's happening with your heart? Is there electrical impulses that make it move? Those impulses are again, how far you can measure them from as one thing.
But the idea that there's a receiving thing that you're that would be powerful enough to influence what how your heart is functioning is where I'm going to again have my skeptical brain on. That's okay. No worries. There's a lot of these skeptics.
Yeah. Let's assume that that that's true for the sake of continuing with where we're going to see where it goes. Yeah. So they have the community, the ability to communicate back and forth with each other.
They also have the ability to become what's called entrained. Which means. No. No.
No. No. That one person's heart can over a period of time make someone else's heart rhythms match theirs. Okay.
All right. I'll again, I'm going with you. So the big way that you measure this is through heart rate variability, which is something you've probably heard of before. Well, so a different way to look at heart rate variability.
Yeah. So the typical way of looking at heart rate variability is when you inhale versus exhale, your heart rate will change. And it's supposed to. So, and in fact, I've got a very interesting heart rate variability story.
So I've a friend who developed a who's part of the company that developed the technology. There was the first product that was measuring real time biometric data. And so essentially it was a neoprene vest that had a palm pilot in it. There we go.
That was doing the real time recording and it was recording heart rate and respiratory rate and various other things. And so if you have limited heart rate variability or none, that means you're stressed out. And if, and you can see this with endurance athletes after a long training session where their heart rate variability, say the next morning will be lower. And the idea is there's some people have the idea that what you want to do is wait until you have your next training session when your heart rate variability gets back to what would otherwise be normal.
Well, anyway, the story about my friend and his company is they were testing this on one of the guys, I believe, in one of the guys in their company. And just in the middle of the day, no variability at all, zero. And they said, now we've never been able to measure this in real time before. But we're watching this and over the course of X amount of time that we've been together, no matter what's going on, whether you seem to be excited, not excited, whatever, your heart rate saying the same.
That's a bad sign. We read that in the hospital right now. He gets the hospital just in time for the heart attack that led to a quadruple bypass just in time. So all right.
So that's how heart rate variability is typically thought of. But what you're describing is is the communication between the heart and brain. Okay. So when the heart and brain are communicating back and forth really well, as you're tracking heart rate variability, you can watch these not nice little sinusoidal waves going up and down.
They're really pretty, really smooth looking that you're measuring those waves, measuring those waves where the heart usually on the ear. That's a typical device that I've used. But I mean, but you're measuring your measuring pulse or you're measuring something bring waves through the pulse. Okay.
Got it. So yeah. So the up and down, just the inhale, exhale, you're going to see your heart rate going up a little bit down a little bit, a little bit down a little bit. I think I got it.
And if the communication is going well, it's really smooth. However, if it's not well, it's all chaotic looking, you'll see like really jagged lines all over the place. It's kind of like the difference between driving a car and using your foot on the gas and then on the brake, and then on the gas and on the brake versus having both feet on both of the pedals at the same time and trying to hit them at the same time. So what do we do with this information?
So what we do with this information is if you were able to get the brain, the communication into that sinusoidal pathway, which tends to be calm where you're able to think more clearly all these nice things, you do have the potential to entrain other people into those same kind of patterns. And vice versa, if you have all sorts of chaotic things, you can entrain people into that. Can I throw out a possible alternative explanation? Sure.
So I'm imagining that if you're in, let's back up to what we're saying, even about standing. There's gonna be things in our physiology that when they're working well, allow things to function smoothly and vice versa, or not or the opposite, it's what I'm gonna say. And so if you're having that calmness, that sinusoidal wave that is indicative of some kind of calmness, I imagine there's gonna be other things happening in your body, other than just whatever's going on with your heart rate, that are equally, I don't want to use the word calm, but I want to use the word, I want to use some other word like not synchronized, something along those lines, something where basically you know, not out of whack, not you are right. Okay.
Then similarly, your breathing is going to be more calm. That's a perfect name. Again, a little more organized or orchestrated or, again, careful in the word, it'll pop in my brain, I will find that disturbing. But in the meantime, so I would then argue, bad word, but I would then contend that one of the things that human means are really good at is we do like to mirror other people in different ways.
And we are very sensitive to certain kinds of movement patterns on a totally unconscious level. And so if we see someone being very hyperactive, then we'll have a response to that. If we see someone just sitting very quietly, we'll have a different response to that. So I'm gonna just pause it for the fun of it, that independent of this whole electromagnetic piece that what's happening is like a derivative, I don't know where the cause of the heart rate variability change is, but whatever it is, there's gonna be other effects that other people will pick up on non-consciously and respond to those.
So it doesn't need an electromagnetic thing. It can be literally just seeing somebody from or seeing a picture of somebody or a film of somebody or whatever. And you're gonna have a similar response. Now we're still talking about physiology.
We're still talking about fundamentally about motor neurons and other ways that we perceive the world, which is all gonna be through our nervous system that have that effect. And so they're, I can imagine a kind of entrainment for a different reason. So I'm just playing with that for... No, absolutely.
And you're not wrong either. Like I said, the physiology is very complex, right? So there are those factors as well. We have a natural tendency that when we're starting to get along with somebody, we mirror them, physically mirror them.
And so you'll, you know, if someone has their arms crossed, you'll cross your arms too, or if they're nice and open, you'll get nice and open too. If they have one arm up, you'll typically end up finding yourself with one arm up as well. Or if they cross their legs, you'll cross your legs as well. So there is that as well.
And it's a crazy factor. But let's take it from like an experienced standpoint, right? Have you ever had someone walk into a room and you didn't really communicate with them yet? But they look like they're all together.
But you just got this feeling like something was not right. Oh, yes. Yes, is the easy answer. I'm not gonna dive into.
I'll give you a short version of a specific. This is actually not someone walking in a room, but someone teaching a class. And the first half hour, everything he was talking about had to do with sort of oneness and spaciousness. And we're all part of a big universal something.
Don't ask me what the class was. I was there because he was a friend of a friend. But the important part was that went on for like a half an hour. And during that whole half an hour, I was going, man, why do I want to punch this guy?
I mean, it was like the most it was the weirdest visceral experience I've ever had because I'm not a violent person. I've never punched anybody. And I wanted to deck the guy. And then after like a half an hour of, you know, we're all one, then it suddenly changed to we're all one, except for those elite Illuminati, whatever things we were controlling the universe.
And it's like, Oh, that's it. The first half hour he was just allowing a sack of crap. It was all just prelude to this. And I was just responding to that.
In retrospect, it occurred to me, I was responding to that discontinuity, if you will. Absolutely. Yes, I have had that experience. And so that's that's one of the things that these electromagnetic waves are able to pick up on that.
We don't understand why we're thinking that there's something off until, you know, we have that epiphany moment like, Oh, that's why, right? But that's what's happening is that your heart is picking up on something that is coming off of this other individual. And your logical mind hasn't yet put the pieces together to say that's the reason why I'm feeling that way. You know, I think there's a lot of things that we evolved to respond to and never evolved the necessity for being more discriminatory.
So the idea that like, you know, we're very peripheral vision is very, very fuzzy. But if someone's looking at us, if there's two eyes pointing at us and peripheral vision, we're really aware of that. And some people say that that's energetic. Like, look, we just evolved to know when there's two eyes pointing at you, you could be lunch.
And if you try to figure out if you're lunch or not, you could be lunch. And so, you know, we never had to get more clarity about that. We never needed to develop for a firm vision that was clear. We developed the ability to respond really quickly.
And that's, you know, that's a thing that saved us. I think, you know, what you're describing could be one of those many, many things where we never needed to figure out consciously what's going on, because what you really need to do in that moment is respond more quickly. Exactly. Exactly.
So how does this then relate to let's move this into the leadership game, since that's where we started. So what's our segue into that? So if there's any other physiological things you want to jump into before we move into how this applies in some way, two things, like we move into all the physiological things, but we wouldn't have time to go all day to do that. We'll give you one more then.
So just give me one. So another thing that's really simple to work on when this is actually stuff that comes from other individuals you've had on your podcast. Because I love listening to your podcast. Thank you.
You have really fascinating individuals that come on. And do you remember your interview with Tim Anderson? I don't remember what I had for breakfast. Fair enough.
I know what Tim does and I know what Tim does and I've talked to Tim often, but I don't remember what we talked about then. Absolutely. So Tim Anderson, founder of original strength. His whole program is going through the basic developmental patterns that babies go through in order to get to better movement pattern, basically.
One of the other things that his work goes into is the effects of those movements on the nervous system. So just as an example, if you get on your hands and knees and you just rock back and forth, this is a naturally calming thing to your body, which can calm the nervous system down. And we talked about all of these different programs that exist that are designed to supposedly try and make you calmer, try and make you less stress. And all you need to do is get on your hands and knees and rock.
And there's other ways to do that, too. Using your right hand to your left knee and going back and forth with that is also another way that you can work on calming your nervous system down as you align different parts of your brain. I think a lot of those are also that there's pattern interrupts. And so you're in a particular state, you do something that is either unusual or specifically coming in some way.
But some of those are just pattern interrupts to make you do something different and can lead you or snap you out of the initial experience. Absolutely. But then we look at this from the leadership perspective. If you're stressed out all the time, and if we go back to the heart, that chaotic pattern, that can get influence onto the people you lead to where they're stressed all the time.
And then what happens, they bring that home and then they're stressed with their wives and children all the time. And they come for us. And they come for us. I know you're not.
Just no, it's an easy one to do. But yes, you bring that home. Yeah, yeah, it becomes a vicious cycle. Exactly.
Then they come back to work, happens again, they bring it home and it's just back and forth. Right. Or you could be the leader that has that calm pattern. You use things like rocking or tapping your right hand to your left knee and vice versa to help calm your nervous system down.
You have great interactions with your people. Are they perfect interactions? Maybe not. But physiologically, you guys are reading each other, whether it's the heart or the eyes or the breathing, really, it doesn't matter at the end of the day.
You can work on all of these and they're all going to have beneficial aspects to your leadership. And then they can take that home to their family and they can have a better experience at home. And then they come back and they're ready for more. And when you look at statistics around people that aren't having a good time at work, it's something like 60% of people are disengaged at work and another 20% are actively disengaged at work, which means that those 20% of people are literally trying to make your life worse as their boss.
Yes. One in five people. Well, we are happily nothing close up. We have had one or two people who, well, I'll tell you this, actually, it wasn't that they were trying to make our life miserable.
But they thought they could do a better job than what Lain and I were doing. And eventually that relationship ended. And I will give the fun story that this one person called me a year later saying, you know, I tried to start my own thing. And while I was doing that, I kept finding myself asking, what would Stephen and Lain do in this situation?
And then I realized that what I was doing when I was working for you was trying to impose my history onto what you were doing rather than seeing what you were doing, which had nothing to do with my history. And this person wanted to apologize. I said, well, your apology is well taken. Sadly, it costs us a lot to extricate ourselves in that relationship.
Yeah, absolutely. But a lot of these things could be really avoided. Yeah. If you just start with our physiology.
That's really interesting. I want to take it in slightly different directions. So, you know, your, in a way, we're talking about the physiological something starting from the quote, leaders perspective. But what I didn't, what I never really did well enough, perhaps, in that relationship that I'm describing was recognize the stress that I was experiencing from that other person, or as a result of whatever they were doing in such a way that allowed me to come back with, but not take it home, not come back with more, but to nip it in the butt, if you will, with some physiological change on my end.
So rather than thinking of this as a little, everything starting from the leadership position, that part of the leadership position is also recognizing what's happening coming towards you, coming towards me in this case, and using those same kinds of techniques, if you will, I always use the word skills to respond better or be more appropriately responsive, which is interesting. So are there other things that we want to share with people just about other aspects? Let's use the leadership part rather than being the response apart. That's physiological version of what we want to attend to and play with, rather than just, you know, learning some communication skill thing.
So calming, calming, great idea, and I'm actually really curious how you would ask people or recommend people play with that and apply that. Absolutely. So let's take the scenario you're talking about, right? You have this person that's doing something that you don't like, and it's having an impact on you and vice versa to the point where you're not taking a moment to really analyze it and see how can I change this, right?
In the leadership skill world, what they would talk about is taking a pause, right, before you react. Something happens, take a pause, react. Good luck. Good luck, right?
Because most of us aren't very good at that. However, if you look at it from the physiological perspective, you can check in on your breath, right? Plus or minus, there are slight variations from person to person, and that applies to all parts of the physiology. But plus or minus, about a four second breath in with a one second pause and a five second breath out, plus or minus is an ideal breath.
For some people, it's a little bit more than that. For a couple people, it might be just a tad bit less than that. But if you hit that rhythm, you're going to be good for most people. So if you wait, right, and you focus on that breath, that four in pause, five out, you allow your body and you are talking about how the breath can impact the heart rate variability, right, which gives you the time to actually think about it.
Again, it seems like a pattern interrupt, which is a valuable thing. People don't think about that. The, I'm going to suggest actually even playing with that in a different order, because it's really common that we don't have the, I was going to say, luxury, the ability to take that pause. Even I like the idea of instead of just thinking pause of giving yourself something to attend to, namely the breath, but I have a line which is you can't be smart when you're stupid.
And so if you do find yourself reacting, you're in stupid mode and you know, trying to make yourself breathe differently will be challenging. But as you start to, as the dumb part of your brain calms down and the smart part comes, starts coming back online, you can do it sort of after the fact, which still has value as well and might actually paradoxically short circuit the initial part if it happens again, because you've got this sort of new pattern in your brain for how to respond. It's like, we have a dog, my wife and I just got a dog. It's our first dog ever.
And I find it very funny that one of the ways that we train the dog is by, in part, naming things that he's already done. And then when we name them, he'll then do them. So he's like learning something after the fact and then starts applying it before the fact later, which is a fascinating bit of learning that I never watched in real time before. Absolutely.
One of my favorite ones with the dog I used to have when I was younger was we would tell her circle. And that's, she would just do a little circle, almost like chasing the tail, but not quite as crazy. And then she would look and we would usually give her a treat for that. She really liked popcorn.
But when you're teaching the dog a trick, you take the popcorn and you're like, around in a little circle and they follow it and then you say circle and they begin to associate, oh, if I do this little thing, I get something. Right. But it's so funny the order of it. It's just, anyway, it's wild to see.
So, okay, so our paying attention to our breathing is another way of altering our physiology. Do we want to pick one more for the fun one walking is another great one. A big thing that has come up in different circles is walking meetings. Oh, interesting.
Because when you're walking, especially if you're walking with correct form, which is with barefoot shoes or literally bare feet, depending on the type of office you work in, you have the ability to calm the mind down. It's a movement pattern that is naturally calming, which gives you the ability to think and be able to actually be creative. It allows you to think of new possibilities as you're having the conversation with people. I like it.
So, this, I mean, in a way, just for the fun of it, and to be something, I mean, these are, in many ways, skills, except that they're so simple. They're so simple. Not something like simple. Yeah, it's not something of like trying to learn a new way of speaking to someone because they are a fill in the blank and then scaling away to speak to a different person because they're a different blank that needs to be filled in, etc, which could just, I imagine, could just be unbearable.
It can be horribly infuriating, especially depending on the letter that most people find themselves to be. D's in particular have a hard time doing that because they want things so direct so quickly. And so, changing who they are or anyone else just seems ridiculous. Yeah, what's your point?
I imagine other people have a similar response. So, this is very interesting. And when you're working with a client, and how do you then, how does someone find you to begin with? And do you find that they're interested in this idea and that's why they find you, or they find you, and then you're presenting this idea somewhat as a bit of a surprise, and I'm curious what that relationship is like and what the experiences you're hearing are?
Definitely. A lot of times it's actually the latter. People are more interested in the leadership skill perspective, because they've been trained for, that's what, like, 40, 50 years? Yeah.
That's what they need. Right. And they go from program to program, coach to coach, thinking that's what they need, and then it's not working, and they keep saying why is this not working for me? And then you come to them, and a lot of it is just literally reading what's going on with them.
So, I've been through quite a few different certification programs to be able to read just how people stand, how people move. So, you can just watch them. And without having to teach them everything, you can see what are some basic things you could go over with them to help them right now. So, like, breathing, for instance.
It's very easy to tell when someone's breathing into their chest, which happens a lot these days. Or if they're walking with their arms the same as their legs, like a team soldier, right? Like, these are very easy things you can read, and if you can help them through these little things and give them what they want the leadership skills as you're doing this, I find that you get dramatic increases in what they're able to do. I remember I was working with one individual who his entire team was like terrified of him.
And I remember sitting across from him, the entire time, he's like this, leaning back, arms crossed, like chest up. And I was like, how do you think you come off right now? He was like, what do you mean? I said, well, when I look at you, the air that you're giving me is that you don't care what I have to say.
You have something you want to say and you're not going to listen to anything, I say. So, why would I tell you anything? He goes, okay, like, I want you to try something. I want you to just put your arms down by your side and breathe a little bit, right?
His entire demeanor changed just on those two little things. Within the next three months, his communication with his team was completely different. People were opening up that he had never imagined would ever open up to him. By a very simple change in their physiology.
I love it. Really, really interesting. Yeah, this is clearly a whole different way of thinking about who is really more relationships. I mean, leadership is a word that I find so for all apparel anyway.
My favorite. Not wrong. There's, so in all fairness, I don't even call what I do any more leadership development. I call it legendary leadership.
Because when you talk about leadership development, the first thing you ask is what is leadership and there's literally over 100 definitions of leadership. So, which leadership are you talking about? And that's another challenge in the leadership development world is a lot of people aren't even talking about the same leadership styles when they're talking about what they believe is really important. And that may be really important for the specific type of leadership that they're looking at, but a different type of leadership could find no use for that.
Interesting. This is really fun, Cody. I mean, look, it's no surprise. I love discovering and playing with these little simple things that almost seem impossible to be making effect because they are so simple and little.
And yet that's those are the ones that make a big difference. I mean, you know, I'm not gonna talk about what we do about letting your body do what's natural is very simple, very little, really. But so I hope that people find this provocative in a number of ways, frankly. And I'm dying to hear in the comments.
If people want to find out more about what you're up to experience is more in a direct way in a personal way, how would they do that? Yeah. So the easiest way to find me is going to be going to my website, www.theleadership.guide.gid. There's no.com.
There's no.org. There's none of that nonsense. It's .guide. The leading.
Yeah, you can email me Cody at theleadership.guide by me just about anywhere. Cody Dakota Wooten. That's my name. And that's going to be the easiest way to find me.
Awesome. Well, I hope people do reach out. And I'm really looking forward to hearing what they experienced. So thank you.
Thank you. Absolutely. So for everybody else, again, thank you for being part of this reminder. Just head over to our website, www.jointhemovementmovement.com.
Leave reviews and all the places you can leave reviews for our podcast, find the previous episodes, and like and share and thumbs up, etc. And of course, if you have any questions or comments, or people that you think should be on the show, or whatever else you want to share, drop me an email, move. M-O-V-E at jointhemovementmovement.com. But most importantly, as always, go out, have fun, and live life-feet first.