Timothy Swords - Executive Coach and Certified Mindfulness Teacher

0:00 The topics and opinions expressed in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements radio show, programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicitor implies shall be extended to W four cy Radio or its employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. Churchill said, those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. Kevin Helenan believes that certainly applies to business. Welcome to Winning Business Radio here at W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com and now your host, Kevin Helena.

0:52 Thanks everybody for joining again today. I am Kevin Hallanan and welcome back to Winning Business TV and Radio on W four cy dot com. We're streaming live on Talk four tv dot com. In addition, we're on Facebook, and that's live on Facebook at Winning Business Radio. And after the live show, you're going to see us on all those platforms where you get your favorite podcasts. YouTube, iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple, et cetera, et cetera. The mission of Winning Business radio and TV, as regular viewers and listeners know, is to offer insights and advice, to help people avoid the mistakes of others, to learn best practices, the how tos, the what to's, the what not tos, and to be challenged, and I believe, hopefully to be inspired by the successes of others. Those are consultants, coaches, advisors, authors, founders and owners and entrepreneurs, people with expertise. But interestingly, every virtual excuse me, virtually every successful person I've ever talked to has had some form of failure in their lives and careers.

1:54 So while we all have to get our knee skin once in a while, I say it every week. I'm driven to keep those scrapes from needing major surgery. Let's endeavor to learn from history so we don't repeat it. I've spent the better part of my career equipping businesses to grow from solopreneurs to small and medium sized companies all the way up to the fortune fifty. I've seen some of those companies win into varying degrees. I've seen some fail I've had the opportunity to rub elbows with some of the highest performing people around and with some who probably should have found other professions. In my own businesses, I've had lots of success, but some failures too, and I like to think I've learned a lot from those experiences. So yeah, you'll hear from me my opinions and insights, but more importantly, you're going to hear from experts, coaches, advisors, etc.

2:35 And today is no exception. Timothy Sword's executive coach, certified mindfulness teacher, and principle of Mindful Leadership Executive Coaching. Here's his bio. Timothy recently transitioned his consultant practice to a new mindfulness meditation practice. As of twenty twenty four, Timothy is an executive coach and certified mindfulness teacher as principal of Hello Mindful Leadership Executive Coaching. He utilizes his decades of experience as a financial services executive CFO and management consultant with rigorous mindfulness training, including more than two thousand hours of meditation practice and study under world renowned teachers including Jack Cornfield, Sharon Salzburg, Joe cabot Zen, and Trudy Goodman. The end result is a bespoke, values driven approach that enables executives, business owners, and senior leaders to cultivate a self awareness, emotional resilience, and authenticity to lead with clarity and purpose.

3:32 Working in person and virtually, Timothy has worked with clients in the San Francisco Bay area, as well as with executives in Boston, Chicago, Houston, New York, and Phoenix. Drawing on his experience as a senior executive with Fidelity Investments, PwC, AN, MUFG, Union Bank, and consultants to clients including Merck Lam Research in Cisco, he combines traditional corporate executive coaching methodologies with scientifically proven mindfulness practice. This highly effective approach helps clients navigate the complexities of leadership with greater clarity, confidence, and purpose. Beyond teaching mindfulness meditations and techniques, Timothy touts the science behind mindfulness and mindfulness practice and helping practitioners make lasting change both behaviorally in this and in the both behaviorally excuse me, and in the psychology of one's brain. That science is backed up and we'll hear about it by researchers at Harvard Medical School, Mass General Hospital, and numerous other institutions. Timothy holds a BS in Accounting from Boston College, a Harvard MBA, and a graduate certificate in Executive Coaching from William James University. Timothy, Welcome to Winning Business Radio.

4:40 Thank you, Kevin. Great to be here. Yeah, it's good to have you. I appreciate it. I know that you're busy and appreciate you taking some time up. So a little bit of background. Where'd you grow up? I grew up on Long Island, about forty five minute Shane Rye from Manhattan, Okay. And what was it like to grow up there? Was it rural? Was it city? Was it suburb I'm definitely a suburban boy. It was definitely suburbia. It was fantastic growing up there. It was about a fifteen minute drive from the Atlantic Ocean. So swimming and surfing, which is kind of where my little logo is derived from. You can't stop the waves, but it can be enjoyed to surf them. And you know, if you know how to surf the emotions of your own mind. That's right. We'll get into that a little bit now. Growing up there was great. It was a very well resourced public school system. I went to so you know, I ran track, I played soccer. I played the French horn. You got all the uniforms.

5:43 Nice, nice. I played trumpet and played. I played one year of football, but I played the trumpet. That was second grade. I think I still play all right. From there, though, you made your way to Boston to attend Boston College. What was behind that decision? Well, I had wanted to study accounting, study business. I had studied a little bit of it before going there. And I was the first one, at least on my father's side of family, which is the side of family and do the best. No one had been in business for generations. They were ministers and missionaries, maures and so forth.

6:26 And when I started sing accounting, it was like this window into the business world. I had started working when I was twelve to start saving money for college, and wow, so I started running my own little business as a kid. But what was the business. Well, I had a paper route, I had a I worked at a beach club doing things like that. But I also wanted a liberal arts education. So that's how I got to Boston College. And the timing is probably doesn't worry as much, But when did you get your MBM. Why did you decide to go do that? Yeah? Gotcha. Yeah. So I I was at I graduate BC, I went into a national CPA firm. I was auditing banks mostly, and it just wasn't you know, that interesting to me?

7:15 Yeah. So I was think going back to school for psychology actually, and some friends of mine heard about this and they said, well, you know, while you're playing a graduate school, maybe you could do our accounting and bookkeeping and so forth. And I was like, I like a degree of bust college and accounting. I don't about book keeping. But I talked to some of their mentors, their CPA and another guy who was the president of a pretty well established consulting firm, and the oh, you could really learn something. You know, business is kind of is doing well. So I went to work for this little startup and that was making transparent rainbows. That was their biggest job. And one thing led to the next. We grew really fast. We were actually became an ink fast. This growing up your company and I kind of grew into being the CEO and CFO in my twenties and we got to a certain point of growing this business. We had no idea what we were doing well. Organizationally, you know, product wise, we were great. Sales we were great, and so we hired a consultant and this guy helped us make so much change in a few months that I was really inspired by that, and that's what I want to do. So that's so I went to business school.

8:30 I had a little similar experience in that I'd seen consultants at work and I'm thinking, well, these guys get paid pretty well. I know they work hard, they're really smart, but they you know, they're well respected, and very early on, you know, I thought I didn't think it would ever happen, but I thought, geez, I'd like to do that, and it, you know, eventually did. But I get you. I get you totally all right from the NBA experience. So I always like to ask, and I'll ask this a few times, what was your most important lesson learned from your MBA education? Well, it was an interesting education. So I've been in this tiny little business. Yeah, and uh, suddenly I was with you know, really like very high high performers and investment banking, which honestly, I didn't even know what that was.

9:21 That's when you invest in a bank, right right. Exactly, And so you know that was a bit of a humbling experience, you know, being with high performers, a lot from IVY League, which wasn't really my background, you know, and uh so it was a great uh learning about like how big corporations work, honestly because hard bhiscal it's a big class, a class. Oh, it's just being there. It's like being a large. Corporation with a lot of other high performers. As you said, all right, so just a little bit of a walk through career just because I've got a couple of questions.

10:01 PwC large consultancy. You sold and led delivery of organizational development, it says, talk a bit about what you took away from that experience. Again, PwC is like one of the you know, arguably top three call it what you want in consultancy, but really smart, really smart people, good performers. What would you say about that experience? Yeah, so I did a number of things there. I started in the strategy strategic planning group and the business process re engineering, so you know, helping companies become more efficient. Then of course you need to you know, it's part of implementing those things. You need to be able to understand organizational design and development, and I actually learned how to write it there.

10:52 Oh interesting, interesting, Yeah. We actually hired a woman, Barbara Minto. I still remember. She was the first female professional employee at Mackenzy Wow. And she actually developed their writing and how to present, how to write for presentations. And it was a great, great learning actually, And because what we would do is strategy consults in particular, we'd go out for like three months and just do all this research. We would have so much data and then we would have to distill it down for presentation for the executives of the client.

11:32 It's honestly, at first I didn't even know where to start. And imagine she taught this method of like what are your top seven messages? Right, and then I kind of learned to like trust my gut, like just write out like what you thought the executives needed to hear in seven bullets. And it actually cut through so much of like going through all the materials and thinking where do we start of them? So I just start at the simplest high level because you could always fill in the details, right, and we had tons of details. We had tons of data, tons of anecdotes, you know, tons of charts, but so it really helped me sort of trust my gut about, oh, I know what the story is. I've been immersing the data for three months. I don't need to try to share it all at once. There's a lot of sequence, and it was a great way to work with the team too, because you know, we'd all have different somewhere, different perspectives, and so we could get in a room and sort of debate what that storyline was. Then once that was agreed upon, then we could kind of delegate. Okay, you do you know the first part of the deck you did the ability of the underwork.

12:49 Were those presentations led by an executive? Were they led by the team. So in the consulting world, it's kind of an interesting arrangement. It's it's a fairly merit it's mostly a meritocracy, so that pretty much while you're putting these materials together, any voice, no matter what level, is welcome to be heard. But then when you go to the client, you know, typically the senior partner leads off intro and then who's ever running the project they lead the presentation. Usually that's how it goes because you know the data, the partner knows the highlights. Right, let's see, do you want to touch on CSC index or palladium. I do want to get to fidelity, But do you want to touch on either of those maybe some key lessons?

13:40 Yeah, sure. So while I was still it was actually the Cooper's side of PwC. Prior to Man, I had started in strategy, as I said Kevin, and you know, the Japanese were kind of kicking our butts with total quality and actually coming up with high quality products at a lower costs. And so a lot of the work switched to helping organizations catch up, if you will, and really be able to satisfy their customers better but out of lower costs. So Cooper's had really been leading the way in that area in their manufacturing practice. These guys had gone to Japan and seeing what they were doing at Toyota and Honda and so forth, and I worked with them on some strategy projects that they became implementation projects at big companies like AT and T. And then I actually led an effort to translate those learnings to white collar environments. So I did some of the first business re engineering projects for the mutual fund industry. Actually the back offices of Putnam Mutual Funds, Failing Investments, an ad agency that was really fascinating in Detroit. One of their clients was Chevrolet, which they'd had before General Motors existed, so this was like one hundred year customer potential. But they also had smaller clients and they didn't quite understand

15:10 why the approach with Chevy wasn't working, you know, with other clients. And so, you know, I had a blast like applying those kind of principles to these white collar, more service oriented environments. And they did things like literally like knockdown walls, you know, so people could all work together and things like that. It's very fun. So doing that work, I got recruited to CSC Index because they were really the pioneer in business process or engineering that Michael Hammer, you know, worked with them. He wrote the original articles and our Business Review and for MIT Review and so forth. New York Times. I landed New York Times as a client for them for the New York office, and then I got recruited to it was then called it was part of before it was acquired by Palladium.

16:06 It was the Balance Scorecard Collaborative was one of their names that they ran under and these were the guys who really had invented the balance scorecard concept. So Kaplan and the Heart Business School of Norton, who was really kind of a groundbreaker and originally like one of the first IT strategy guys, and they had come up with this concept because on that kind of re engineer when re engineering was the rage, you know, people who were gathering all this operational data, they kind of didn't know what to do with all of it. And so Kaplin norm put together this concept which on the faces it's fairly simple, which is, if you want to get great financial results, you need to get satisfy your customers. If you want to satisfy your customers, you need processes that work really well. If you want processes that work really well, need the people with the right skills as to the right information. Well, that concept, if you then say okay, what are the goals for those four areas and then how are we going to measure success, turn out to be hugely powerful for a successful strategy execution. So, for example, one of their early clients was Mobile Oil and they helped Mobile Oil swing from a negative cash flow of a half billion dollars to a positive cash flow of a half billion to agow in two years.

17:26 Two years. Yeah, now they had a new strategy and so forth, but this is what drove the implementation of it. So I use those I learned those principles with Kaplin and Norton and applied them in other industries. All right, we're going to take our first break right here. We'll be back everybody with Timothy Swartz in about one minute. You're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helene on W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com. Don't go away. More helpful information is coming right up right here on Winning Business Radio. Have you ever dreamt of being on the radio, Well, now it's your chance. Be a radio show guest on the number one ranked internet radio station and promote you and your business for free. Yes you heard it, Free business advertising right here on W four cy dot com.

18:21 Call five six one five zero six four zero three to one now to get booked on one of our shows. That's five six one five zero six four zero three one. Get your free advertising now. And now back to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helene, presenting exciting topics and expert guests with one goal in mind to help you succeed in business. Here once again, it's Kevin Helene. We are back with Timothy Sword. Uh, and I'm going to ask you, so, while you're doing this, while you're you're working in corporate world, were you starting to identify some of the areas that need the work that you're doing now? I mean, did you see any of that.

19:15 At that time? What do you mean by mindfulness, you know, executive development, et cetera. Yeah, great question. Yeah, thanks, so, yeah, of course, you know, I had We hadn't really talked about this, but I started. I taught myself how to meditate from a book when I was fifteen years old. I was going to ask that that's interesting. Yeah, because despite being smart, or maybe somewhat because I was too cocky, I had done okay in school without studying that hard. But that didn't really work in math class, and I was a very avid reader. So I had somehow tripped across the thing called meditation that you could do to calm your mind and feel less anxious. And so I started practicing that literally in math class, like breathing.

20:12 I literally breathed my way through tenth grade math. And I also did other things, you know, I went for extra help, you know, studied at night things like that, but it was super helpful. And then later in early college, I started doing trendsidental meditation every day twice a day for twenty minutes. And it was really amazed at like the states of mind you could. And you were in Boston. You weren't even in San Francisco at the time. Yeah. Actually, yeah, well in New York I grew up. There was a little humor there. Yeah, no, it's really true. And so I can talk more about that if you want to. We can talk about that later.

20:52 Yeah, we'll add that in in just a few minutes. Great, But yeah, what happened was after I was spent six years at Fideli Investments leading business transformation projects, was at a strategy for their broker's division, which is all their retail distribution plus back office platforms for retail brokers like that are at banks and so forth. Then I went out on my own and I was mostly I was doing consulting, mostly focused on strategy execution, as I was talking about a little bit earlier, but I was working really like shoulders shoulder with the leadership teams, showing them how to create strategy figure out strategy, show them how to execute. So they really owned it. I wasn't going off and doing researchs and coming back with a study that.

21:43 Might have noticed I noticed you started that in three ish. Yeah, and Union Bank comes after that, right, right, right? Yeah? Yeah. So while I was working with these leaders, they then started to ask me to coach them, and I kind of sort of knew what that was, but not really. So that's when I went to school at night for two years at a graduate school of psychology, well in James University, Yeah, then called the Massachusetts Professional School Psychology. Actually, yeah, right, I'm familiar with it. A great Yeah. So mostly they graduated PhDs in sids, but they had started this executive coaching program, so really grounded in, you know, a pretty rigorous approach, seeing a lot of three sixty assessments and other kinds of assessments that have real data on people's behavior and how they're being perceived versus how they're perceiving themselves. So yeah, I certainly started to see that in the people I was working with.

22:43 When and why not? When? When was. All right, so talk about your consulting practice, and then I'm going to ask you when and why you you started transition to mindfulness, to a mindfulness practice. Talk about the work that you did at T short, gotcha. Yeah, So I was doing a lot of strategy execution work and this range the clients range from like little tiny nonprofits you never heard of, to literally like the Global fifty you know of goals Land Research, which makes the equipment and make chips like intell right would be there in the video review. So these would be executives, senior leaders, maybe up and coming leaders and managers.

23:26 That's right. Yeah, So I was doing well when I was doing the strategy chution work that was with the leadership team either a company or a division. And I was certified as a coach by then, so I was also doing coaching and so I did that kind of doing, having my feet in both the consulting and the coaching camps, if you will. And then about fifteen years ago, people started to ask me to teach mindfulness classes in corporate settings, Like they heard I was doing this thing and they were curious about it, and it was becoming more in the press.

24:10 Yeah. I mean when you first, at least my experience, when you first hear it seems kind of out there. But then when you start to understand it. That's why I want to have you on. When people start to understand it, it really is so beneficial. Yeah, no, I mean just to jump to the present for a second. So there was an article recently in the Harvard Business Review, just like the bastion of capitalist media. Right on the title was something like self awareness is more important to a CEO's success in running his company or her company than an NBA. And this was a research base article. And so, my, you know, and why is that true? So self awareness is like the foundation of emotional intelligence, right, and mindfulness is all about awareness, self awareness and awareness of how you're impacting others. Right. So, so I'd been practicing mindfuls a long time. It was born in the press. People were curious about it wasn't didn't sound as crazy as when I first started, like went off and did a ten day center treat like that sounds like you're out of your mind.

25:21 Yeah, in are in Mexico or something, right, Yeah. So I started teaching in very corporate environments, like for the Young President's Organization, for the National Association of Corporate Directors, for the Private Directors Association, and then for nonprofits for asset management firms. And then when I was recruited to Union Bank after I moved to San Francisco, the head of HR and I had met and she was had some background of mindfulness and she asked me to help her roll it out across the bank. So we created a national program for the bank. All right, pause right there, let me ask what did she identify she did, You've probably validated it, But what did she identify as the needs that mindfulness would be the solution for?

26:10 Right, got it? So, I mean her personal experience which she shared. I'm not telling any stories because she had breast cancer. Wow, And she went to the mail clinic and part of her treatment was a mindfulness based stress reduction program that was developed by this guy, John Cabotzen, who I actually know very well. Used to live down the street for me, I think in Massachusetts, and he created his program after getting his PhD in microbiology at MIT. Right, So he's not a wu wu kind of guy. Yeah, And now that program has rolled out probably hospitals all over the world. But so she understood that how much mindfulness can help your emotional health, and how your emotional health healths everything else. Right, And so if you're or an executive, there's many things you can react to in a day. Right, there's a lot of stresses thrown at you.

27:08 It's internal and external, right. That's right, that's right, And most of the external ones you can't control, but you can control how you respond to them, and mindfulness kind of summon up the benefit. For one of the big benefits is that if you think about some external stimulus coming into your awareness and then at some point you respond to that, the mindfulness creates like an internal mental space, a bigger space of holding that stimulus and considering how you're going to respond to it. So instead of reacting, you respond if you will, so you can. When you react into things, it's often from like the fight or flight responds right, fear based often and you're the executive function of your brain just isn't like in year that much, so you're often making poor decisions. Like I'm sure everyone can relate to this in corporate America, which is, you know, have you ever gotten an email that you responded to and you know you probably copy twenty people and you do it right away, and you know it was irritating when you got it, and then you were like, oh my god, why did I send that email? Right? And that could either be

28:39 a little problem or a big problem. I have about a thirty second pause, I use the outlook function to delay the sin. Oh nice, yeah, yeah, because that's often the old Yeah. Often fifteen or thirty second is all you need. So it helps create a bigger space for when those you like come in that could be upsetting. You're more calm, Like it's not even like you have to recover, like, you're just more calm to begin with. And so you're coming from a wiser and hopefully more compassionate place. All right, we're gonna take our second break, second and final break right now, and we will be back in one more minute.

29:25 You're listening to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helene on W four CY Radio. That's W four cy dot com. Don't go away. More helpful information is coming right up right here on Winning Business Radio. The yp dot com website is your local search engine. If you're looking for a good restaurant, it can help you find the right one nearby with ratings and reviews. Or if your car breaks down, you can use the YP app to find the closest repair shop, or maybe you're just looking for something to do on a Friday night, Well it has great local coupons for all sorts of things in your area, no matter what, when or where. If you're looking for something, YP Local Search can help you find it. So go to yp dot com or download the app to search local, find local, and save local.

30:15 And now back to Winning Business Radio with Kevin Helene, presenting exciting topics and expert guests with one goal in mind to help you succeed in business. Here once again is Kevin Helena. We're back with Timothy Swords of Mindful Leadership Executive Coaching. So you may just have but I want the audience. I want the audience to be clear what exactly is mindfulness? Mindfulness is I mean, you can define it a few different ways. One is like a state of mind if you will, where you're aware. I mean, it's fundamentally awareness, but most of us are like either thinking about something in the past or planning something in the future, and mostly unconsciously. We're not really truly in the moment fully aware.

31:16 It's because we've been conditioned but through you know, millions of years of evolution to be like, oh my god, what we need to be on an alert. Of the threats and also this fallacy of multitasking even though it seems real. That's right, yeah, exactly, so, So mindfulness is it's an awareness, but I would call it like a lucid awareness where there's not a lot of judgment going on. You're just seeing things really as they are, so and there's an agency to it. It's not just just like passive I'm just going to accept whatever is coming along. It's really seeing things clearly so we can respond to them wisely and.

32:01 Compassionately or object more objectively, less emotionally. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So one of the characteristics of what I would call a mindful leader is they're not taking things so personally right, so they can respond more objectively. As you were saying, that's right. So it's actually interesting. I didn't make the parallel, and I'm just learning like the audiences are. But we actually when in coaching salespeople, we help them become self aware. We use assessments like you do, and we measure for the amount of emotional involvement they have because that impacts negatively they're selling often interesting well, their response right to objections, lack of responsiveness, et cetera.

32:47 You know, so interesting, that makes sense, that makes total sense. So there's a there's a science of how the brain is rewired. I read, and that's according to not just you, but Harvard Medical and Mass General and others. So talk about how the brain is actually rewired. Yeah, so yeah, no, there's thousands of research projects and articles that have been done now for the last forty or fifty years. So, I mean one of the main things is that when we're in this fight or flight mode or amigdalist so called hijacked. So because we're either like ready to fight, you know, or a frozen or a more modern day, we might be like you know, you know, fidgeting. But when where that worked up? Literally, as I mentioned a little earlier, the executive function of brain is not working. The logical part of our brain is not working. And so literally the practice of mindfulness what it is is when you're meditating, is your thoughts and emotions will keep coming up. Of course, it's not like your mind stops. The idea isn't to stop thinking, but to be aware of those thoughts and emotions. And so you can be aware of upsetting thoughts and emotions or other thoughts and emotions from this mindful place, and

34:21 you can actually label them like oh, anger, anger, or anxious anxious or joy joy right, And by engaging sort of both sides of the brain, if you will, actually calming the amignal up down, and if you do this enough, you restructure the brain permanently so it just doesn't get upset as much. So quick anecdote, I had a personally upsetting career thing happened to me in fidelity. I had an opportunity to meditate for a month, which I did at a retreat center, and I was pretty upset. So like, and you're meditating like ten twelve, fourteen hours day, there's a lot of opportunity to label anger anger. After those four weeks, I was never so upset about anything again in my life, Like I can't get off that still. Ye, yeah, but I'm sure my brain structure changed.

35:18 So what does a practical daily routine look like? Actually, let me ask that A and B. Sure, what does it look like for you? And what would it look like for someone starting out? Yeah? No, those are great questions. So I'd say there's two parts of the daily routine for me. When is the formal meditation practice, which I first thing in the morning for forty minutes and then during the day. You know, there's very practical applications of mindfulness or opportunities to practice, right. So I also walk for a mile before I do any work in the morning, and I try to be more aware of my surrounding then my so like feeling my feet on there on the ground as they as they take each step, and that's just like bringing myself back to the present, like a little practice. And I'm hearing the birds singing, I'm seeing the beautiful flowers. You know, I've been really enjoying it. It's not right, it's not a chore. I'm having a great time being aware of you know, the world and the earth and all the beauty.

36:21 And you're not on your phone almost tripping over the sidewalk, and you're not listening to a podcast right. Not usually and those are all good too, but ye, and I mean, it's a funny thing I was. I was noticing my mind a couple of days ago when I was taking my little morning walk. As I got within maybe three minutes from my house, I realized I'd taken the keys out of my pocket. Now I don't need us for another three minutes. Yeah, my mind is already in the future, right, And I just laughed at myself. I'm like, what are you doing? Like I do that a lot be here at this moment, you know, because you know, if you're not in this moment for like mundane things, then you're missing like being with your children, right, you're being enjoying your wife or your husband or you know, I hike a lot. So the beauty of a beautiful views like so for me, it's not just a way to be more effective, right, it's also a way to be happier.

37:23 Let's see some of the areas in which you please, oh yes, please please. So for people who are starting out. Oh yes, sorry, I wanted to. Mention that you don't need to sit forty minutes a day to benefit. There's been more recent research because a lot of the original research were on people who are sitting meditating a lodge and you know all these great benefits. But more recent reachar shows that if you do it's just like twenty minutes a day, but every day, you can get great benefits, like probably better than ninety five percent of people. And that applies to more than mindfulness. This applies that anything in. Life do you recommend morning doesn't matter?

38:07 I mean in the scheme of things. Yeah, in theory it doesn't matter. I say for me, and I think for a lot of people, it's hard to just pull out of the activities of the day. Yeah, so the. Mornings for me the easiest because nothing is started again. So I'm not pulling myself back. But all you know, right, but as long as you know, maybe right before dinner could work, or you know, I wouldn't do it right before you go to sleep because then you're tired, you probably will go to sleep unless you want help going to sleep. You know. Then I actually have a very short breathing routine and I do to help me go to sleep. And it's fool proof. I mean, I'm telling you, it's just that it's that really quick. Uh, some of people know what I mean by four seven eighth, Right, it's just it's quick.

38:50 It's easy, and I swear. But yeah, but some of the problems that you help people overcome could be worried, could be self doubt, could be burnout. Yeah, on the anxiety. There's so much anxiety today, right, are some of the go ahead, some of the other challenges. People and you know, in lots of different areas of challenges. So maybe they're and I'll give you a couple of examples to but maybe they're too emotionally reactive, right, or maybe they're recently promoted and they just need leadership skills, right, because you know, organizators have gotten flatter and flatters a lot of people getting from over they've been individual contributors and their organizations aren't giving them great management training or any So that's another area.

39:35 Might be. People with imposter syndrome or like anxiety, or just there's so much uncertainty right now, so how do you deal with that? Right? Mergers, restructuring, you. Know, tariffs, tariffs. Yeah, but a couple of. Quick case examples. So I was coaching CFO publicly health firm, and he had kind of come up through investment, banking and so forth. So he kind of been a lone wolf. He didn't really know like the nuances of corporate life, if you will. So he's a brilliant guy. He'd actually grown up very kind of blue collars. Mom wasn't around.

40:16 She was building a business. She could feed the kids. But he got himself into you know Ivy League school on a scholarship, a brilliant guy, but he was a scary guy in the room because he was coming across so intensely, and he was a good he wasn't like a mean guy. But yeah, yeah, he had these blinds. Out about the impact he was having. So what I called a gap between intention and impact was pretty big for this guy. So we actually did a lot of mindfulness training which really helped his self awareness. And so when we got the three sixty feedback and literally people said you're scary, he got it. And then he was became aware of, oh, what am I doing and what's behind what I'm doing, which was a lot of anxiety actually, so he was able to ground himself, Like I talked about my feet on the ground ice walking. So for him I recommended try noticing your feet, the feeling that the sensations of your feet on the ground or on the floor in a meeting, which he would do at the beginning of a meeting, and that would calm him down.

41:18 Then he'd be like, oh, I can respond without being so intest right. This is a not an easy question. To keep it as easy as you can. I mean, you could spend as much time talking about as you want. But how do you teach emotional intelligence? Ah, that's a great question. Well, the first thing I do. I do assessments, and I do a variety of assessments. Some are on like all sorts of leadership skills. Some are particularly around emotional intelligence. There's twelve competencies within emotional intelligence or emotional social intelligence, which is it's awareness of yourself, management of yourself. I'll give you the big four. Okay, awareness, self management, which is your emotions, managing your emotions, and then it's social awareness being aware of other people, and then social management, right, relationship measurement, how you manage the liships. Right, So how do you teach it? So first you I would do an assessment and say, you know these twelve competencies within those four big areas, Like one might be so what is positivity? Actually that's one of the one of the competencies. So you know, if someone's like a CFO, they can easily focus on the downside risk to every decision, right, worry right by worry and the training and you know, risk avoidance management, but they might get in the way

42:53 of what's the positive potential return? Right of an opportunity. So you know, I'm teaching very practical skills, right, I'm not teaching something. Esoteric, right. You know, So let's say the CFO is Joe, So Joe like, Okay, I get there's this downside risk, but think about the positive outcomes also, and like make sure you're asking people about those and understanding those, and you know, if you're part of leaving the strategy, then talk about those as much as the downside risks, right, don't just keep talking about the dispector. And then that applies to how they talk to their investors too, for a public health firm. So the way I mean, I sort of worked from the inside out a lot, if you will, like what's driving your behaviors, but at the end of the day, it's a behavior that's observable, so we focus on what are those observable behaviors.

43:58 This was a really interesting guy. I think it was your quote. The business world requires. If it wasn't, you can give credit, but the business world requires a level of toughness to succeed. The reality is that even in the C suite, where human beings with thoughts, feelings, and personal lives that can impact how you perform and lead. To me, I'm I'm thinking of, Yes, it takes a toughness and you know, a drive. And I also think of you know, Jim Collins level five leader, and that's the opposite of drive, it's really not. But so how do you balance that toughness with that we just talked about I'll use the word sensitivity awareness. Yeah, yeah, no, that's a that's a great question. So you have to make tough decisions of business, right, you have to hopefully optimize the you know, the best solution for the shareholders as well as your other stakeholders, right, your employees, your customers, right, and so forth. So sometimes those are tough trade offs. But how do you I mean, even let's take a you know, a pretty tough situation where you're there's a layoff, right, So now you're affecting a lot of people's lives. You know they've lost you know, big source of income. But how do you deliver that message? Right?

45:19 That makes a big difference actually to not only people who are leaving, but the people who are left right, the people who you've retained. So there's actually a very interesting article just came out this week. I saw it on Bloomberg through a Kkar, big private equity firm, and they're very data driven about their results, you can imagine. So they actually did a whole big study along with someone from Stanford University on the value of empathy on the bottom line, and I actually posted about it on LinkedIn because there's been articles over the years about you know, how important empathy is, you know, if you go with a Harbord Business Review or other journals like that. This is one of the first I've seen it. It was their data driven, so they'll have examples of like people coming in and having to lay people off, and how you deliver that message makes all the difference on how motivated the people are who stay, and also how the people feel who are leaving and what they feel about the firm, and you know what they might say about the firm going to wherever they're going, right, So, yeah, I think you need to be tough mind in terms of you know, at the end of the day, decisions are tough sometimes, but how you approach those and communicate around those, you know, will make all the difference in terms of employee engagement and employee retention, and of course employee engagement as I'm sure you know, impacts customer satisfaction often time.

46:44 Absolutely. Yeah. The biggest layoff that I was adjacent to it was a client and they went through a series of reductions in force, and to his credit, the CEO was extremely empathetic you know, I mean, had to make the decision him. He made the tough call, right, they were investors. But by and large, the people that were laid off appreciated. Him, right. They weren't mad. I mean, yeah, there might have been one or two, but in general, they were appreciative. They were they wished him well. They never spoke badly of the company as they were leaving, even those that were out of work for a bit, you know, most of them that I can see of landing on their feet.

47:27 This was a couple of years ago. But I credit him for that. I don't know if he's been through this, you know this understanding, but I do credit him with that, with that degree of compassion. All right, talk about we just have a couple of minutes. Talk about the offerings. So you work with executives, you work with with executive teams, talk about your various offerings. Sure, yeah, So I work with individuals from kind of mid level to the c suite leandership effectiveness. I also, particularly these days, they're interested in helping people in career transition. There's a lot of that going on right now. And what I found, a lot of times people going through career transitions are also dealing with difficult things in their home life, so they really a lot can really benefit from the support of a coach kind of particularly someone like myself and not saying I'm the only person does this, but kind of works inside out right as well. And then I also work with leadership teams. It's done a fair amount of the leadership team development. And then underlying all those things are assessments. So I can also do standalone assessments for people in just knowing where they are and you know where their strengthen one of their challenges.

48:41 That they at the individual level as well as a team level. Imagine I actually, yeah, I actually assessments at both levels. And then I also teach my friends and I also see so I'm actually giving some webinars on how to be common turbulent times. Well, last question I'll point out for the audience. Tim Timothy's information is in the crawl. It will be in a moment. Who should reach out to you from these audiences listening and viewing audiences and why so? I mean, I'm often contacted by either board members who want help for their CEO, or the members of the c suite that certainly the c suite, either for themselves or their teams or heads of HR of course, and anyone you know seeking to improve their leadership capabilities.

49:32 Excellent, listen, tim Timothy, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it. I know you're busy and I value your time, and I'm sure the audience got get some good value out of this as well. Great. Yeah, thanks for having me. I really appreciate your great questions. Kevin, no problem, I'll see you soon, and thanks everybody for watching and listening. As always, this is a show about business and business challenges. Often, if you've got concerns about the sales effectiveness of your company, whether your sales team as you or very smaller, it's very large, or anywhere in between, feel free to reach out to me, and that's on LinkedIn or Facebook. At Winning Business Radio you can drop me a note. One of my many email addresses is Kevin at Winning Businessradio dot com. Our company is Winning Incorporated. We're part of Sandler Training. We developed sales teams into high achievers and sales leaders into true coaches and mentors. Listen, We're not right for everybody, but hey, maybe we should have a conversation. Thank you as always to producer and engineer Onan for another job well done.

50:30 Thank you one. Be sure to join us next Monday, Monday May fifth, when my guests will be entrepreneur Greg Vetter, author of Undressed, the unfiltered story of my failed American dream and how it led to success. Until then, this is Kevin Helenan. You've been listening to Winning Business Radio with your host, Kevin Helena. If you missed any part of this episode, the podcast is available on Top four Podcasting and iHeartRadio. For more information and questions, go to the Winning businesessradio dot com or check us out on social media. Tune in again next week and every Monday at four pm Eastern Time to listen live to Winning Business Radio on W four CY Radio W four cy dot com. Until then, let's succeed where others have failed and win in business with Kevin Helenan and Winning Business Radio