[00:00:00] Speaker A: I think leaders, sometimes they spend too much time giving answers and not asking enough questions. I think the best leaders understand when they need to be authoritative and point with the entire hand and lead the team and manage chaos. But I think sadly and especially here in us, I see a lot of leaders who forget to get curious and ask their employees deep, meaningful questions to understand their true potential.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Today's guest was forever changed by two pivotal moments. A near death experience that taught him to live without fear and his son's diagnosis with autism which completely opened his eyes. As a three time CEO with successful exits in the tech industry. He now plugs that energy into Leaders Adapt. It's a program to develop leaders that can truly lead. Welcome to the show. Andreas Peterson.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: Excited about this conversation. Before we hit the record button, we're talking a little bit about some of these impactful stories of yours. And you know, I've had a number of incredible guests talking about various things and you know, a topic people don't really want to discuss or talk about all that often is the topic of death or talking about ourselves in the past tense, as it were. You know, around the circles I hang in, we talk about graduation day. That's how we discuss it. My mentor Nelson was big on when he graduates and moves on to the next phase of life. And so being faced with your own mortality is something that's a unique experience not many people have gone through. Walk us through what transpired to put you in that position.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: Yeah, so first of all, I believe that was immortal up to that point. I worked really hard running a startup and that specific day was just an ordinary day. Was a Sunday. We were at the pool, hanging out with the kids, having a good time. I got home, sit in the sofa and I feel like I'm sweating. Like, why am I sweating? I'm feeling warm. And then my apple watch goes off and it starts telling me my beats per minute is 180 beats per minute from sitting still.
And I remember just telling my wife like I think something is wrong, I think we should go to the hospital. And then I passed out quickly.
Long story short, we get into the car, a few minutes later, head to the er, come in there and they are absolutely like the first thing they do, they hook you up everywhere and you don't like it when doctors are freaking out, but they go, you're about to have a heart attack, you're about, your heart is about to collapse. And I'm, I'm still fairly clear headed at this Point. So I'm like, okay, what's going on? And my wife, she dropped me off at the ER and she's out parking the car and all of that. And more and more people come into the room and they hook me up with more and more things. You know, they start charging up that machine, the clear machine, and just waiting for my heart to collapse apparently, but I'm still clear headed. And in that moment when I think there are like 12, 13, 14 people in the room, I'm like, why is this such a big deal? I feel like I'm here, I'm feeling okay, but the heart rate is going crazy. And now it's getting closer to 200 and that's not very good.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: So I don't imagine having 12 or 13 people around you wondering what's going to happen is very good for your heart rate either.
[00:03:29] Speaker A: No. And I was freaking out. But long story short, in that moment, they have said, your heart's about to collapse. I don't want my wife and my three kids to come out or come in and see this. And I text them and I say, stay in the car. And I'm in here and something happens. And then they come in and they put something in me. I don't know what it is. I don't know if they took me under quickly or what happens, but I remember just grabbing my phone and texting my wife and just saying, I love you.
And then in that moment, like my heart, you know, when you have this machine, you have the beep going off all the time from the machine, it just goes silent.
Like it completely goes silent, my heart stops beating.
And in that moment I. And I'm still clear, I still get oxygen, right? So I'm, I'm just. I find a weird calm and I just, I had a good run at it. Like this was life, my life. My wife will be okay, my kids will be okay. And I find this weird inner peace. And I can't explain what happens then, but then a few seconds later, I pass out. So basically my vision just shrinks in. And I don't know exactly what they did. I think I know what they did, which is they take you under local anesthesia and they reset your heart. Basically they're stimulating your heart or shock it. But I wake up, the machine had been used and I apparently had such a high heart rate that then goes into a sinus pulse where my heart stops beating altogether. And then they restart it. And yeah, I remember waking up again, like almost like I passed out again, but that's what actually happened. I think what happened psychologically is when you have accepted that death is the outcome of life, you just live differently after that. And when you have let go, like I truly accepted that this was happening and I let go in that moment.
I wake up every morning, I'm happy to be alive. I have something happen to me in life. Business, family, it doesn't matter and it just doesn't get to me anymore. I can't explain it. Fear is redefined. Like I have fear, but it's not in the moment. And I really believe that you have this one magical opportunity to maximize and live your life to the best of your ability. But I see so many people not ceasing it. And I didn't understand this before that moment when this happened. That's when I realized that, okay, life is short, but you can make life long if you truly know how to use it. And in that moment and the moments after, I just made up my mind that if I get through this, I'm going to maximize my life and I'm going to die happy and I'm going to be curious for the rest of my life. I can't explain it was such a. I have even hard time putting words on it because I visually see this room and see my heart just go flower lining and passing out or whatever happened. But anyway, what it ended up being physically is it was an extreme episode of AFIB combined with tachycardia, combined with a sinus pulse.
So it wasn't a heart attack. It was just my electrical system got completely messed up. And in hindsight I kind of knew I was having a lot of electrical issues, but I didn't register it. And I for sure, sure knew after that moment.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: Did it take you a while after waking up over the preceding the following weeks to be able to start to look back at indicators that maybe you would have played a closer attention to in retrospect?
[00:07:48] Speaker A: Yeah, I should have paid a lot more attention to many things.
When I met my wife 10 years before this episode, she even pointed out, I remember one time we had been out partying one evening and we came home and she was just had her head here laying on the sofa on me. And she said, you, heart beats really weird. It's like it beats multiple times and then it's just quiet. I'm like, I'm just tired.
I noticed it where I had been in AFIB so many times where I'm like, I'm so frustrated and irritated and it feels like you're in this bubble and you can't really pay attention to what people are saying.
I should have realized that Safib sometimes my heart was just racing like crazy for two, three minutes. It could race and then it just went back to normal. And I just thought like that happens to everyone. Like I've lived my life that way the entire life. So what's different?
What they're saying is that a piece of my arterial node is a little bit different and it's the arthrital node is apparently where these signals are coming from.
But other than that I don't have. It shouldn't cause this big issue. So it's probably a combination of me working really hard, being entrepreneurial, having years where I slept four hours a night for a year, not exercising properly, not taking care of myself. So I probably accelerated my problem by not paying more attention to my body and heart.
[00:09:27] Speaker B: Well, when we talk more about leadership later, I imagine you'll have some stories of that, what you're seeing in entrepreneurs, that you serve as part of that process and maybe being able to recognize it in them early. Seeing some of your own warning signs.
[00:09:40] Speaker A: I guess in others a thousand percent.
I'll explain more of how I see it, but I think dopamine detox is a whole topic in itself and I think a lot of CEOs needs to be much better at practicing that. And also being hyper aware of their body and listening to the signals instead of ignoring them and just keep going forward.
[00:10:03] Speaker B: Yes, you don't need to wear the badge of honor of the fact that you can get everything done.
It makes me think of Dan Sullivan and the who, not how model. Of course.
Most of my life has been built around the how can I do it versus who can do this how for me type of questioning.
[00:10:20] Speaker A: Yeah, it's all about delegation and we can talk about that for a good hour or two. But in the end of the day it.
I think proper leadership starts with deep understanding of who you are and your mindset. And it doesn't matter if you learn a ton of things about leadership and tools and tricks if you don't truly understand yourself first. This specific event combined with my other life event, which was having an autistic son and I would have said that have made me extremely tolerant, but it also made me very aware of how to listen to myself and how to pay attention to other people and what their frame of mind is right now and how they're approaching a certain situations.
These two combined, I don't wish them on others, but I do really think that there are Life moments that define us. And the quicker they happen in your life, the better it is the first time your heart is broken, when you lose a parent, when you are experiencing not near death, but just health issues, when you have children, when you get married, like there are all these, or when you have your death sentence. I think these events are transformative to how you think about life and how you see everyone else and see yourself. And I hate to say it, it's a blessing that they happen earlier in life rather than later in life because if they happen on your deathbed, you don't have a chance to use that superpower to do good with it.
[00:12:06] Speaker B: Well, we're going to talk more about developing and unlocking some of those superpowers in a moment when we come back after this quick message. Are you looking for a great book to read? Turns out I have one for you. It's called Cash Follows the Leader. It's available anywhere books are sold, but if you want to get a free copy and you can download it right to your inbox, you can go to coachcanfield.com cash follows.
We are back hearing about the incredible recovery from a near death experience with Andreas. Amazing story. Andreas, this is something obviously major impact for you, your family, scary situation, a ton of amazing learning about this. Now. We're recording this at the beginning of 2025. We're a quarter century into this, this new environment. How far back was this that this transpired for you? This, this heart attack situation?
[00:12:58] Speaker A: Yeah. So the heart issues, they were 2018. I want to remember it.
And I think since then I have had two heart surgeries actually.
And I have also.
I did them about one and a half to two years in between. And then on top of that, I had to go in and reset my heart 10 plus times it. Now it's kind of easy. Now I know the signs. If you have, if it feels like you have a little goldfish in your chest and your watch is whining that you're having a very high heart rate, head to the er. And now that I come in, I'm like, okay, here are my issues. I have tachycardia. I have sinus pulses and I have afib. I need reset. And I call it reset. It's called a cardioversion.
And they now it's just like, have you done this before? Yeah, I have done this many times before. Okay, you know the procedure. I know the procedure. You go in, they take you under, they stimulate the heart to reset it. They get it. Reset. This the wrong word. They get it into the right rhythm, and then they wake you up again.
[00:14:15] Speaker B: So it's kind of like defragging a hard drive on a computer on a regular basis. To some degree.
[00:14:21] Speaker A: Yeah. And it doesn't bother me now. And I've also figured out, and this is something I did not know existed until maybe a year or so ago, there's something called the Valsea movement. So you can actually do something that sort of does the reset for yourself. And sometimes that actually works for me, I can do that at home. And you can also chemically reset it by eating certain medication. But since my heart rate is so low, normally I cannot eat the normal beta blockers that other people can do. But that event was 2019. In 2017, that's where my son was diagnosed with autism. And these two events for sure have shaped who I am, how I look at life, and how I interact with everyone, basically.
[00:15:08] Speaker B: Interesting. So the. So the situation with your son actually happened prior to. Roughly about a year in advance of this transpiring. And, you know, I mean, I likewise have a son. I think you said that your son is about 10 years old now. My son just turned 9. So we have a similar age child. And I can only imagine going through that experience. And so what were some of the signals and signs that you and your wife discovered before you were able to move through to be able to get that autistic diagnosis? Because I would imagine that didn't happen immediately. It was a few years into his life.
[00:15:44] Speaker A: Yeah. So what ended up happening here? And it's kind of a crazy story. It's the same day as the chairman calls me the evening before, we're having this meeting scheduled the day after. And at the time, I was not CEO of the company. And he goes, do you Want to become CEO? You have 24 hours to make up your mind. And then the day after, we actually had a meeting scheduled with a psychologist after going through multiple surveys, multiple meetings and so on.
So in the morning, I went and I officially became CEO. And in the afternoon, we had our son diagnosed. And the sign you asked me about, early signs, he didn't speak.
His development was regressing. So he was becoming more and more.
Like, even though he didn't speak, he could still nod his head or just shake his head and stuff like that, but he didn't even listen to his name anymore. And on top of that, he could have tantrums. Like, he could cry for four to six hours, and we could not do anything to calm him down. First we thought it was stomach Issues and whatnot. But he couldn't speak.
And we realized that, okay, something is off. And I think whenever you go through these things, and especially with your kids, you're in denial. Like, I was in heavy denial that something was wrong. My wife, even more in denial.
So when we sat down, I think that's where maybe a few weeks before, I had accepted it, my wife had not accepted it.
And I can tell you that started two years of absolute hell for us.
My son was diagnosed with moderate to severe autism. He had several things he was doing. For example, one of them, he flopped his head backwards to hit his back. He has stitch. Multiple stitches on the back of his head. And as a parent, you try to save it, but there are situations, you just can't control it. You can't monitor them. 24 7, and I was becoming CEO and all the requirements, that that was on me. And literally that evening when we got both of these things, my wife and I, we had first celebrated quickly, and then we had this conversation. But we decided to basically put our lives on pause or our relationship on pause. Not in that we are walking away from one another, but divide and conquer. So it was actually we decided that I focus on the CEO job and she focuses on doing whatever we can for our son.
But it was for those who listen to this afterwards who have an autistic son. You go through a lot of behavioral therapy. You go through a lot of different assessments, and it's really hard. For two years, my son was still not speaking. He could say a couple of words after a couple of or after a year, but no full sentences and not really paying attention to you. But you do all of this, and you have never heard your son say, I love you, and injuries, frustrations, tantrums for a full day.
Yeah, it was crazy. And at the same time, I was working like crazy.
In hindsight, maybe, and this is something I regret afterwards, but I think I fled a little bit. I used work as a way of sort of coping what was going on at home.
And we also.
When you have an autistic child, you try so many different things to just get them a little bit more better, responsive, whatever it is. And we were failing and failing and failing. We tried everything, basically.
And it was just that he was not mature for it. Plus, we were doing it the wrong way. Even though we had professional help, we read probably 50 books combined.
It wasn't until we actually found a community, a local community here in Orange county in California, that help other parents that have autistic children for Free that we sort of started seeing the light in the end of the tunnel where they went in. I was like, try this and have you tried try doing like this instead. And. And they actually one person, they even came to our house and arranged play dates and so on just so we could figure out how we could connect and truly help my son. So why am I telling you all of this? In the context of our discussions here about innovation and leadership and everything else, it has made me so extremely resilient to both have a son where you have, and by the way, I got three boys and he's the middle child.
But having a son where you have to really, really, really pay attention to them and what is triggering them and that curiosity builds massive resilience also in terms of your emotional resilience and the pain from it. And then having the heart experience, which also builds massive resilience. And as we said, even if I've been fairly okay after the heart incident, but just the way I look at life from these two events, but also how I can see people uniqueness and how I really can pick up on if people are struggling and why are they struggling. And everything within leadership is about helping other people elevate themselves as well. I believe that growing people create growing organizations and the opposite is also true. And it's leaders job to grow other people in the organization. And I think that these two experiences in my life combined with resilience makes me able to spot things I would say most people would miss in terms of behavior, leadership, business strategy, whatever it is. And when everyone else is panicking and freaking out in the room, I am hypercalm because I know that as soon as I start escalating, even in a work context, we're screwed. So being that grounded, stable force that just keeps going when everyone else freaks out, I think has also been possible because of these two events.
[00:22:41] Speaker B: Yeah, fascinating. And I can see just from the experience you identified with your son and all the trials and tribulations that are happening rapid fire every day, every minute, every hour, there's not a, a, there's not a break that gets created there for you or your wife and like for your other two children, I would imagine. But to be able to be around a community that was able to finally give you enough tools, enough ideas, enough different variations to practice and try before you started to find things that worked. And now I'm guessing, you know, you know, years later, you guys have probably developed some very good, I don't want to poor terminology with coping mechanisms. What I really mean is strategies, strategies that you can implement on a consistent basis to start to really see the dial turn on how you're able to incorporate leadership at the household level for the family in that environment.
[00:23:33] Speaker A: You're spot on. And not only that, it makes you, you don't have to have the short term reward. I was always looking for the short term good job or promotions or more salary or whatever it was. I don't need them anymore. Like I play the long game now. I can play a long game for years before I couldn't. And that patience is a key word there.
[00:23:57] Speaker B: Yeah, fantastic. Absolutely love that. Well, we're going to ask everyone to be patient because we're going to take a quick commercial break, but when we come back, we're going to talk more about importance of leadership and how to really excel under the right tutelage.
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We are back with Andreas talking about leadership and how can you spot the diamonds in the rough? Now you've got a number of incredible experiences exiting a business, leading teams, CEO. What is it about, you know, the people that you're seeking to mentor and lead and what are you looking for?
What are some of the things that you would describe that helps you identify? You know what, here's an individual that is at a place where they're nowhere near their potential and you see potential that you can draw out of them. What are some of the indicators that show up for you?
[00:25:32] Speaker A: First of all, integrity in general, the way they act when no one else is looking. But sometimes you can spot people who act without integrity when they think no one is looking, but they actually are.
Number two is they need to be curious. They need to have a passion for understanding things themselves. Others, other leaders.
I believe that the best and most capable diamonds in the roughs are people who want to lead leaders and elevate leaders. Everyone up.
I think I mentioned this before. Growing people create growing organizations and the opposite is also true. I think the ultimate role for a lot of leaders is to identify other leaders and make them better.
I think the third piece is that people that I usually identify and I don't know if this is A pattern or not. But I. It tends to be. A lot of people are insecure, overachievers.
And what I mean with that is that the best leaders I have been able to transform and help build, they are overachievers. They care about the results, they care about. They want to get there, but they're insecure of their ability to get there. And sometimes those people have been held back in at one career level for too long. Maybe they are a VP that's been stuck being a VP for too many years. And it's because they're insecure and they don't know how to. They don't want to risk their job, but at the same time they're not leaning into the fear that will make them get the next level.
And I think if that hasn't grown into too much of a resentment, but they have the curiosity, they have the integrity, and at the same time they are an overachiever. Then if you have the right mentor, the right person who spots you, those are the people who can become extremely successful very fast.
[00:27:44] Speaker B: So if you're walking into an organization, you're going to be actively looking for those types of characteristics. You talked about integrity, again, looking people doing the things when no one's looking. And so there's some areas where you can see that. And of course, it's when no one thinks that they're looking, but someone has to be looking in order to see it, I guess in order just to spot it. And then additionally, you mentioned curiosity several times repetitively. And I find that very interesting. I always encourage people to develop a mindset of Curious George because otherwise how will you discover anything in the world? And it reminds me of some mentors that I've had in the past and some of the things that I've heard from them about the importance of being able to just go out there and figure out how things work, how they operate, but more importantly, find out what problems there are that you can solve. There's something really fun and interesting about solving problems. If that wasn't the case, people wouldn't play games that are problem solving games. And that's what most. Whether a video game, a board game, a card game, a lot of them are all based around problem solving skills.
[00:28:48] Speaker A: Absolutely. And Curious George. I'll start using that right now. Or going forward.
What I do is I often ask them a lot of questions.
I usually don't care too much about the actual answer. I care about their understanding of themselves in the answer they're giving over the years. You know, how Some people collect quotes. Over the years I've been collecting hundreds of questions that are extremely revealing, yet they're not asked in a direct matter. So you don't get the guard up and protect yourself, but you ask around a specific topic.
I actually just started a LinkedIn series this year. Someone encouraged me like, you gotta start doing those. So this year I committed to putting out one of the question every single week with my interpretation of the question. So I just started doing that on LinkedIn for free. But I believe that leaders need to have themselves armed with very good questions. So a good question, for example, it sounds shallow at first, but the question of when were you last a hero?
And people who. And you can answer that many different ways, like, yeah, I opened a door for this person or I let someone go ahead of me in the queue. But a person that can tell a story for me or some other leader where they helped someone, but they never sought out to be thanked for it or get public recognition for it, that's a person, that's a true hero. And that's what I meant. Like that shows integrity.
Another question I love to ask people about curiosity is you don't ask, are you a curious person? Of course, everyone will say, of course I am. But you can ask them questions like when did your childhood end?
And then depending on how they answer that question, you can lead it in and sort of understand their level of curiosity. So when I help people, I often have these very probing questions that isn't really, like I said, there isn't a specific answer, but it's the reasoning that the person gives to the question that will make me understand how curious are they or what's their integrity and. Or are they an insecure overachiever, Are they a diamond in the rough? And I think leaders, sometimes they spend too much time giving answers and not asking enough questions. I think the best leaders understand when they need to be authoritative and point with the entire hand and lead the team and manage chaos. But I think sadly and especially here in us, I see a lot of leaders who forget to get curious and ask their employees deep, meaningful questions to understand their true potential and how they're wired and how they can help them. And they spend more time focusing on results rather than how to unlocking people.
[00:31:50] Speaker B: Very interesting. It kind of reminds me of Bob Berg's top 10 open ended questions which I often share with people just in the model by which you share it, but the concept by which you're asking them and your intent behind the questions I think is very unique. And you mentioned being a collector of questions. I'm a collector of personality assessments. So I store assessments of Myers Briggs Disc, Colby A indexes and Kairos cognition reports and strength finders. So I have a whole Rolodex of those of other people, people on my team, clients, people that I know. Because you never know when you're going to get into a conversation and be inspired to oh well, maybe we should take a look at that. I think I have a copy of that. Let's bring it up and let's take a look and see how that plays out in your life a little bit to a degree. And there's always an opportunity for a coaching moment or just a discovery that could take place when you have that information available.
[00:32:42] Speaker A: Yeah, I think combining so there are three things you can combine these deep meaningful questions combined with some form of personality assessment.
I will add one more. CliftonStrengths I kind of like that one. In addition to the ones you mentioned. And then you can also do 360 depending on what you're poking around on. I usually, when I work with people, these are things I usually do. I start with my questions, then I have them do some form of assessment depending on if they're a vp, a C level or a CEO, founder, entrepreneur.
And then the last thing is I love a good conversation about people's core values and the core values that they. Because if they have core values and they truly have spent the time thinking about these, they often also have a really good understanding of their personality and how their personality impacts or amplifies their core values.
[00:33:43] Speaker B: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And you can also start to see and develop trends I would imagine on that from what they've created in their life. But where there might be subtle, whether it's a habit adjustment or change that could be the, you know, could be the difference between, you know, moderate growth and a hockey stick moving the dial a little bit forward.
[00:34:04] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And but again it's you need the right person. I believe that you can grow yourself organically but if you want to grow with a hockey stick like you mentioned, you go use people that are certified in these assessments. Don't just take the assessment yourself, go through the reports, find your mentors, find your accountability group, find your peer group and then you have hyper growth. I don't believe I would ever have become a CEO. I was one of the youngest CEOs of a Canon owned company reporting all the way up to Mr. Mitterer. It's like reporting to Mark Zuckerberg and I would never have got there if it wasn't for being blessed with amazing mentors and experiencing life and life struggles. I would never have been able to keep that job for so many years and do a really good job at it at the same time.
[00:35:02] Speaker B: It's interesting about mentors. The curiosity that comes up for me is to what degree were the mentors in your life people that you found and created versus ones that found you?
[00:35:16] Speaker A: That is a very good question.
[00:35:18] Speaker B: You can add it to your list.
[00:35:19] Speaker A: I will add that to my list. I think that I've been fortunate to be assigned mentors, but I have also stumbled upon people that I have made them my mentor.
I think for me, I've tried to identify what my gaps are in my personality assessment, in my core values, in what I want to achieve in life. And then I went and I looked for those mentors.
But interestingly enough, I have so many people now because of social media and other things where I'm putting out all the things I'm doing. They're asking, where can I find a mentor? I can't afford you or I can't work with you now, where can I find another mentor? And I can't really point them anywhere. So actually this is a business idea. I might do this. I was thinking of starting just a free community where mentor matching because everyone that is out there, they always charge a bunch of money. And I believe you need like the entry level mentors. Like I already said, I work with very high up people, but in order. I grew up to that level through the use of mentors and finding them is hard sometimes. And I was thinking about maybe I can do some matchmaking and put some free tools out in that sort of community. Where I'm saying, here is how you do one on ones and here is how you mentor if you are looking for a mentor as well. Because I, I push back on a lot of leaders who don't take on pro bono mentees.
[00:36:55] Speaker B: Okay, Richard, I keep hearing about this thing called the Colby A Index. You talk about it all the time on the show. What is it? How do I get information about this thing and why is it so important?
When I first got my Colby done, it totally revolutionized everything for me. I finally felt like, oh, man, this is what I was looking for. All the things I've been doing that have been working for me and all the frustrations I'd had if I just understood this at an earlier age, boy, oh boy, would my life be different.
You can take that step if you Want to learn and understand how it can change things for you and the way you communicate with others. You can go to coachcanfield.com and download your free report.
[00:37:41] Speaker A: I think it's so important to give back. I give some of them for not doing that. And if they work with me, they will end up taking on a mentee themselves. Why? Because that's how you internalize your leadership lessons. So I've been thinking about how to make such a matchmaking. Maybe now someone listens to this and they take the idea and they turn it into a profitable business. But I've been thinking about doing that and I think that way I can serve more people without me being actively involved.
[00:38:07] Speaker B: Well, I do have a possible collaboration for you that I could suggest. A gentleman I interviewed on this program, Derek Notman, he developed a program called Coupler AI and its focus is to match make people looking for a financial advisor and financial advisors through a series of questioning that is created through the person looking for an advisor first. And they go through a prompted steps and it learns a little bit about what it is that they're looking for. Some geography, a variety of other items and then it produces a short adjusted list of individuals and it recommends based on matching. You know, it's kind of like described eharmony for financial advisors. And so I could see something very similar in model and adaptability, especially utilizing technology to create such an environment as you've described.
So there's a, you know, so it sounds like a great possibility there. And I think that, you know, there's lots of like communities, whether it's on Facebook or you know, various places, you can find groups. And those groups are generally interest driven or interest led or sometimes they're maybe age driven or led or industry driven in lead, but they're not really, you know, broad. And I find that, you know, when you think about mentorship, there's something to be said for getting involved with someone who is outside of the realm that you normally operate in because there's a whole fresh perspective created. Like as an example, you know, I'm in the life insurance industry, but meeting with someone who runs a concrete factory or a gentleman I've had on the program, Gary Motorshead, who runs a global supply chain business around rubber. The things that I can learn about him and how he's using technology and management and dealing with supply chain issues, they have no bearing on my business. However, the struggle or the challenge and its uniqueness can create an insight that I wouldn't otherwise conceptualize from a vantage point on how I could utilize.
[00:40:04] Speaker A: Diversity of thought is so powerful. Most mentors I have had have not been in high tech SaaS business space. They have been mentors from. One guy used to be very high up in Nova Nordisk, another one have been, anyway, high up in different companies, completely different sectors to what I have any experience in. I believe leadership is universal, and I believe that mentorship is also universal. So I love that idea. I actually would like to be connected with him because maybe I can pick up a few ideas. And already in my head, I've been building these questions of what I want to. How I actually create the match between people. And it's a combination of the three things I said, which is also personality, assessment, core values, and then obviously what it is that you're aspiring to do.
So. Yeah, that would be interesting.
[00:41:00] Speaker B: Well, and it's, it's interesting you talk about, you know, again, the assessments and, you know, being a Colby certified consultant, you know, it's, you know, assessment is an interesting term and it's. I think it's where people just kind of put everything into, like, one bucket. What's unique about Colby, of course, is that it's. It's not. It's not about.
[00:41:16] Speaker A: It's.
[00:41:16] Speaker B: It's not about personality, it's about instinct and how you do things. And so I have a very unique Colby identification, as do everyone else. And I'm a very outgoing individual, extrovert, as it were. And I know people who have almost identical Colby instinct. So the way we solve problems is the same, but personality wise, very different, very introverted, less likely to be kind of gregarious and out front on stage sort of a situation. So how we tackle problems and solve them is the same or very similar, but how we present ourselves or the things that we do in our given strengths might be very different. So there's a really great overlap of these types of items, and I find them fascinating when they work together, having that kind of knowledge. So as a mentor, like an advice that I would provide, I'm curious what advice you would provide for anyone seeking to be a mentor. You know, being able to have the knowledge base of some of those types of assessments and tools. If you're going to work with someone now, you're able to meet them where they're at versus where you're at. You're always going to be sharing from your own experience because it's all you have to understand. But if you can't relate it in such a way where it can be, they can develop the bite sized pieces to eat the elephant. They may not get the success steps you might want to leapfrog, but they might need that extra step in place based on how they're designed to operate.
[00:42:37] Speaker A: I think you need them. You have to incorporate them as part of the process.
Many mentors I meet though, they say they ask the mentee to take the assessment. I would argue both have to take it because if the mentee don't understand the mentor's mindset and how they problem solve, when the mentee has a problem they need help with, then their miscommunications happen anywhere anyway. I would even argue that they should seek out. If I match up two people, I would argue they should seek out someone like you who can help them do that assessment first, create the understanding and then start communication. Because yes, it takes a little while to get started, but they will go 10 times further and quicker after they have done that initially.
[00:43:23] Speaker B: Well, can I give you a real life example of that?
[00:43:26] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:43:27] Speaker B: So I have a new assistant. We're still getting hers updated. She has to update it here. But my, my previous assistant Lynn, who's now leveled up to another phase in our organization. Her and I have almost polar opposite Colby numbers and identifications. So I'm very simplification on the fact finder. She's very detail oriented, very sequential, whereas I'm much more random follow through. I'm the adaptability person, she's the everything. Every box needs to be checked off, but it's check off this box before you move on to the next one type of a situation you're explaining my wife right now and I desperately need a person like her in my life because there's areas that I'm just simply not designed to do and I'm really happy to not do those things. I want to be in my zone of genius and do that as much and as frequently as possible. Similarly, I'm very high on the quick start zone. So I'm designed to come up with ideas on the fly. New things innovate from that vantage point. And it's not that she won't or can't do those things, it's that she's designed to protect and preserve what's already built so that we don't break what's already in place. And then from the physical realm. The implementer, I'm highly tactile. I have a six implementer. I like to build things. I own a lot of tools. I've got drills on my desk. You would see there's gadgets quite literally everywhere. I'm standing on a treadmill, though. No one watching this television show will know that because I'm not moving on it right now. But I have all these physical elements around me that I need to have, whereas she's more visual minded and she doesn't even own a screwdriver. So we're very polar opposite on those things. And so one of the things that we've done and we learned early on in our meetings, number one, she needed to interrupt me every once in a while to ask questions rather than schedule it, because if everything was scheduled for me, I would eventually stop showing up to the meetings. And secondly, if she brought up a list of things that she had captured that she wanted to go over, the moment she brought up the list, my brain has immediately scanned the list and looked at all the things and I'm jumping immediately into solving the ones that I want to work on that we can knock off as fast as possible and eliminate.
And by the time she's even talking about the very first thing on the list, I've already tried to solve 10 of them right away. And so with the way we solved that says, here's our workaround. Anytime that we have this meeting, I'm going to turn off the screen, I'm going to put on my headphones and I'm going to go for a walking meeting. And you just tell me what's up next. If I can't see it, we can knock it out real fast. And we've created this really great working relationship because we understood those critical elements about how she needed to thrive and how I need to thrive.
[00:46:01] Speaker A: You just sold the reason why both got to do it because you wouldn't be able to understand one another otherwise if you didn't have those tips and tricks of these two assessments, these personalities and how to jive together.
When you were talking, I just gotta add this as well. You literally just explained my relationship with my wife. She is a hardcore CEO integrator. Get done, dot all the I's, cross all the T's. I'm the visionary. Let's go, let's roll the dice. What are we waiting for? And like you do, I also, I don't know about you, but I also have ADHD and I have to move all the time. I have to fidget all the time. Sometimes my wife's like, she wants to be home in front of her screen or multiple screens, have her notebooks, everything aligned. I'm like, I'm going for a drive. Call me and we can solve it.
It's so funny.
[00:46:59] Speaker B: You might find this very interesting, Andreas. I used to. Unfortunately I don't have the cellar. I live in the mountains, so the cell reception isn't sufficient enough. Otherwise I would go walk along a beautiful river and do all my meetings as a walking meeting. But I challenge myself because I had some poor Internet a few days and I ended up having to transition all my meetings to phone meetings. And I would just go out and pace in circles and get on a lot of steps and it was fantastic. But what I realized when I was talking with like clients and people on the phone is if I couldn't see them and they couldn't see me and I couldn't visually show them something on the screen on camera, you know, demonstrating with my hands physically or by drawing something on the screen, I had to say I had to come up with ways to get them to draw it out for themselves and walk them through how to draw something or walk them through a visual representation. And I couldn't see what they were doing. I was just describing it verbally. But the skill set to learn how to do that and the thought process that went into it was very different than what I'm able to do if we're just, you know, on a typical zoom conversation, as it were. So I found that that was a way to increase my own degree of curiosity about my own potential on how I can approach things. And so I actually have tried to schedule in more phone related meetings so I can activate that part of my brain different.
[00:48:16] Speaker A: Kudos to you. That's not an easy thing to do.
Not easy. Explaining how others like visually with words. Explain. Basically explaining a visualization with words.
I'm not good at that yet.
[00:48:31] Speaker B: Well, I'm not so sure if I'm good at it either. But I do know that the experience of doing it was particularly engaging and I found it, it really just opened up a pathway of thinking for me that was very different. And that's something that you've done for me today in this conversation by sharing your story, sharing your incredible life and death experience, dealing with your son and overcoming those challenges at very tumultuous times in your life. And now focusing all that effort and that clarity that you've created through those events towards really helping people create powerful leadership is so fantastic. What were one of your final thoughts and takeaways that you'd like to give our listening audience today?
[00:49:14] Speaker A: Life is long if you know how to use it.
I'm just going to let that one sink in and I'm going to say it again. Life is long if you know how to use it. If you walk around saying life is short, it means you're not curious enough. You're not trying to get most out of life and you're not as eager to learn and be the best version that you can be. You're a diamond in the rough then. But if you want to be a true valuable diamond, you got to reframe your mindset to saying life is long and you got to focus on the positive things. Avoid the drama. Avoid toxic people. Surround yourself with people that are driven, passionate, go getters. And you know if you're listening to this, you know who you need to cut out of your life. Don't wait to cut them out. Don't wait till you have a health episode or something bad happens to you where you're forced to do it. Do it now. Trust me, you will not regret doing so.
[00:50:13] Speaker B: Amazing. Thank you so much for being on the program today. We really appreciate it. And for those of you tuning in, make sure you stay tuned for next week's episode as we continue to unpack the major challenges that people are overcoming in their life and the innovations of tomorrow.
