You're at the Coaching Inn, 3D Coaching's virtual pub where we enjoy conversations with people who engage in the world of coaching. Hello and welcome to this week's edition of The Coaching In. I'm Claire Pedrick and today it's my absolute delight to be in company with Mark Galston, author of Just Listen and lots of other books and all-round lovely person. Hello, Mark. Hello, Claire. Tell us a bit about you and your coaching journey.
Well, something I have to get out of the way for our listeners and viewers. And I'm sure listeners and viewers, the good ones, will echo it. Claire and I spoke briefly last time, and we should have captured that. And I had a love at first sight experience with Claire. And it's not sexual. It's better than that. I had it with a mentor of mine named Warren Bennis, who's a great leadership person.
And what it was... connected to is when I find people who are exceedingly kind, thoughtful, curious, yet not Pollyanna's, who don't suffer fools gladly. I'll share an anecdote. Warren Bennis was a big leadership guru and one of my mentors. I remember He shared with me that he had a tribute to him on his 80th birthday that was led by CNN and political advisor David Gergen. And it had Jack Welsh there, had Tom Peters there, Howard Schultz from Starbucks, who Warren mentored, other people.
you know, Warren just had this wonderful way about him and we were there at lunch and he leans in and he looks to make sure no one overhears him and he says, I'm a little embarrassed by these things, but I really liked it. And what I said to him applies to you, Claire. I said, Claire, I said, Dwarne, what you don't realize is the thing that people feel more strongly than their respect for you is their love for you.
And it's because it was something I realized within a couple of minutes that I could trust you to never hurt me. wow is right, because he looks at me and he scratches his chin and says, you know, Mark, there's a lot of tributes being paid to me these days, and that's the third best thing I've ever heard about me, and I can't remember one and two. Well, thank you for your lovely, kind words, Mark. Well, I think it's true. you.
But we can get back to my coaching journey or anything else you'd care to... us to talk about. I'd love to know about your coaching journey and then I'd love to talk to you about listening. Okay, well I'll try and combine them. My background is I was a practicing psychiatrist for, you know, close to 45 years and one of my specialty areas was suicide prevention because one of my other mentors was a fellow named Dr. Ed Schneidman.
He was at UCLA and he was to suicide prevention, what Warren Bennis was to leadership. Ed would refer me all these highly suicidal people that a lot of other people didn't want to see. And it was my good fortune that as I came to the end of my training at UCLA, there was a fellowship I was supposed to go into, but it fell through. And so I figured, well, I'll just go out there and see if anybody comes to my office, see if anybody refers to me. And so Ed was one of my great referral sources.
And he, I'm just shutting off my phone, and he So he would refer me these suicidal people. And here's one of the things I learned, and it goes back to listening. So these were highly suicidal people. And when I was with them, I'd look into their eyes. fact, I'd listen into their eyes. And what they were telling me in their eyes, not words, is, you're checking boxes and I'm running out of time. So I had a choice to check boxes, which I would have needed to do if that fellowship happened.
I would have to follow the protocol. What did you do next? What did you do next? What did you do next? Yada, yada, yada. But I was freed to just go where their eyes took me. And their eyes took me into the dark night of the soul. So and I realized that when I was asking clinical questions, proper questions, I could feel that it was a safety barrier between me and them, but it kept them isolated.
So when I put away checking the boxes, I just dived into their eyes and I just let their eyes take me wherever it needed to go. And in All those years, none of my suicidal patients died by suicide. Wow. Because I think what happened is as their eyes took me where it needed to go, it took me into hopelessness, into despair. In fact, I've written extensively on this and something that I said in an article called Why? people kill themselves, it's not depression. It got 400,000 views in two weeks.
And I said, there's a lot of depressed people who don't kill themselves. You know, the majority of depressed people do not kill themselves. A lot of divorced people who don't kill themselves, a lot of people who lose a job don't kill themselves. It may contribute to it, and it may be the last straw. But one of the things that I discovered that nearly all suicidal patients had was despair.
And if you break the word despair into DES-PAIR, they feel unpaired, des-paired, unpaired with a future, hopeless, unpaired with the ability to get themselves out of this, helpless, useless, worthless, meaningless, purposeless, And when they all line up like in a slot machine, pointless. And they pair with death to take the pain away, just like the sirens would do with sailors. come and sail to the island. I'll take your pain away.
And so what I realized is they formed psychological adhesions to death as a way to take the pain away. And I will tell you, anyone who's been suicidal on more than a few occasions, they don't talk about it afterwards because they don't want to scare people, but they tuck it in their back pocket thinking worse comes to worse, I can always check out. So that's an adhesion. It's not an attachment. You can reason with an attachment. An adhesion is like when two organs stick together after surgery.
So I developed a process. I named the process that I was using surgical empathy, which means going in to their despair and causing them to feel felt and feeling felt is different than feeling understood. When someone feels felt, they start to cry with relief. because all they've ever felt is alone. Is it okay we're talking about this? Yeah, and you're talking about the deepest sense of connection, aren't you here? Yeah, people remember stories.
I have to share an anecdote which really changed everything. So Dr. Schneidman would refer me to these suicidal patients. And back then I used the moonlight, which meant once a month I would cover for a psychiatrist and doctors at a state hospital for 48 hours. And frequently I wouldn't sleep for 24 hours. And when you don't sleep, you can get a little dissociated in your head. And I was seeing a woman that I'll call Nancy, that's not her name. She'd made several suicide attempts.
I'd been seeing her for about six months. She'd been in the hospital several times a year. And back then you could be in the hospital for six weeks at a time. It's not that way anymore. Dr. Schneidman referred Nancy to me and I was seeing her for about six months and I didn't think I was making any progress. She rarely made eye contact, but that was the longest she'd gone without a hospitalization or a suicide attempt. And so, I'm seeing her on a Monday after I haven't slept for about 24 hours.
And she doesn't make eye contact. And as I'm there with her, all the color in the room turned to black and white. So I'm looking at the room and it's black and white and I get the chills. And I thought I was having a seizure. or a stroke. So I did a neurologic exam on myself. I'm a medical doctor. I'm, you know, I'm looking at my fingers to see if I have double vision. I'm tapping my knees, my elbows. It wasn't rude because she didn't look at me.
And then I had this crazy idea that I was looking out at the world and feeling the coldness. I was looking out at the world through her emotions. And because I was sleep deprived, I blurted something out that normally I wouldn't say. I said, Nancy, I didn't know it was so bad, and I can't help you kill yourself. But if you do, I will still think well of you. I'll miss you and maybe I'll understand why you needed to do it to get out of all the pain.
And I thought to myself, did I think that or did I just say it? I realized I just said it and I thought, I just gave her permission to kill herself. And then she, she, you know, she wasn't looking at me and she started, her face started shaking and then, and then she, and then she made eye contact. with me for the first time. Like she just grabbed onto my eyes. And I said, what are you thinking? Because I thought she was going to thank me for understanding and she was going to go do it.
And she looked at me grabbing onto my eyes and she said, if you can really understand why I might have to kill myself to get out of this pain, maybe I won't need to. then I grabbed onto her eyes and I said, I'll tell you what we're going to do. I'm not going to throw treatments at you that have been tried before that really didn't work unless you say, maybe we should try something. Would that be okay? And we're locking eyes like I'm locking with yours. And she went, uh-huh.
And then I locked under her eyes and I said, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to find you wherever you are. And I'm going to keep you company there. because you've been there alone too long. Would that be okay? and then she smiled and the room came back. The color came back, the coldness went away and she came back. So thank you for indulging me and letting me share that. It's such a great example, isn't it, of our need for that real deep sense of connection with another human.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's interesting. I'm the co-founder of the Deeper Coaching Institute and Deeper Coaching Certification at a company called On Global Leadership. So we work with multinational companies. Our main founder was a dean of a business school in America, and he was the head of leadership training for Apple in China. coached Tim Cook. And he's one of the leading authorities on China that's on global leadership.
He's now a professor at Thunderbird School of Business in Arizona, which is a big international business school. And I founded the coaching part of that because we mainly do advising and consulting. And the deeper coaching institute is for both clients and coaches. That's why we have the certification. Once they have some coaching or once they do some coaching, they want to go deeper.
So many clients will come in, and if you're not trained as a therapist or a psychiatrist to go deeper like I did with Nancy, you'll be happy to share with them. You have some limiting beliefs. You might want to correct those. Also, you might want to develop a little more emotional intelligence, really kind of get where you're coming from and get where other people are coming from.
And that's terrific, and that may be all that people want, but What we've discovered, and maybe you've discovered, is that when people enter coaching, they'll learn strategies and tactics and things that they hadn't thought of, but they'll also learn about themselves. And often what they find out about themselves is much more important than the strategies. They'll discover things about themselves and say, wow, that's That's what cost me a divorce. I lost a couple of businesses because of that.
And so, so this is really like elective surgery for people who want to go deeper, you know, who get a taste during the regular coaching of, I just realized that I'm kind of messed up. And for those, so it's, it's selective. It's not for everyone. But there may be people, especially if it's cost them two marriages, and they decided to stop blaming the other person. You know, I'd like to figure out how I messed up and if it's possible to fix it. So does that make sense?
Kind of describe coaching and what we do? Yeah, and what's really interesting me, Mark, is as a psychiatrist, What do you think is the difference between engaging with somebody at that level with your psychiatry lens versus engaging with them through your coaching lens? Or is it indeed not different? Well, because I'm a blend of both, I'll tell you something that I learned, not just from my suicidal patients, but from all my patients.
when I was practicing as a psychiatrist is, you know, we'd be speaking, you know, kind of what's going on in your life. And people say I have sort of an interesting presence, that it's not threatening, it's very deep. since we have a rapport, what I would say to the patients. And I now say to my coaching clients, there's something eating away at you. And it's starting to eat away at me and distract me from what we're talking about.
Now, if you prefer, I'll compartmentalize that and we can focus on coaching type things. Now with my patients, I didn't put it aside because what I would say to them is, and I will, say this to coaching clients, where does it hurt? How much does it hurt? Tell me about a time when it hurts so much you didn't know how you'd make it through. And here's an interesting thing, and I try to do this in coaching, and if you're in coaching, I suggest it.
When you can get a person to describe an incident so clearly that you see it with your eyes, they re-feel it. And then when they re-feel it, they're present with you. So I might say to someone, I remember one coaching client, I fired someone and They got drunk and drove into a tree and died. And so I remember saying to the person, where were you at the moment you heard that they And I just drill down. In that case, they started crying.
It's like, you know, I mean, the coaching client said, I got to fix something in me because to me, they were just the function that wasn't functioning. They were just a function, you know, and he got really down on himself. He said, they were an appliance to me. And when that happened, I realized they were a person, but they weren't a person to me. There's something really messed up about that.
Are you following kind of the—and it's not for everyone, you know, obviously that's why we call it elective. I remember one person I was seeing, he was a CEO, and he said, I'm in a golfing foursome. And, you know, we've been buddies for 20 years. And, you know, and we've been through some marriages together, we've been through some businesses together. And over the weekend, one of our foursome blew his brains out in his garage. And we didn't even know anything was wrong with him.
There's something incredibly messed up about that. So again, this is not for everyone, but you know, what I'm doing and what I'm teaching people to do, here's something else that I hope you'll chuckle at. And this is for coaches who want to go deeper. One of them was just so, so spot on. He said, you know, here's one of the problems for us coaches. Many of us were in the business world. We got burned out. So we need to do something, so we transitioned to coaching. And here's one of the issues.
To make a living, you've to get hired by the company, not by the individual. The company, you can write it off, and the company only cares about performance. The personal development, if we throw that in, they're okay with it. But if we do too much of it, our client should do it on their own pound or their own dime. We're there for performance.
And I remember this, one of the coaches who wanted to learn how to go deeper, they said, so essentially we left the business world because we got burned out. But in order to get paid, we get paid to help people. to perform better so that in 20 years they'll be burned up. And then they'll become the coaches of the future. And then they'll be coaches. I remember you laughed at me. says, I don't spend too much time on this because it's just the kind of the way of the world. You get burned out.
You have some skills. You can help people. But a lot of times. business world eats their young. I had Gary Ridge, who was the former CEO of WD-40. I'll introduce him. He'll be wonderful on your broadcast. And recently, one of the things he said, and he's just filled with these things, and he talks about toxic bosses. And he said the difference between a toxic boss and a good boss is with a toxic boss, their ego eats empathy, whereas with a good boss their empathy eats ego.
I, you more than like that, Claire. I loved it. It's that we don't talk enough about ego and humility and leadership, do we? Right, because because we've learned not to expect it from them. And they're under pressure. We have we have something on LinkedIn called 90 Second Mentor. So if you go to LinkedIn and look up 90 Second Mentor, We take excerpts from our podcast, a partner of mine, Mary Olson Menzel and I do a podcast.
I do a podcast, my wake-up call, you're gonna be on it clear, you'll be great because I'm gonna shut up and listen to you. And Gary, and we've had Ken Blanchard on, Gary, Daniel Pink, Daniel Goldman. Ken Blanchard, Susan Cain, and we're going to have Claron. And one of the things he also said that I thought was terrific, WD-40 has one of the highest engagement of employees of any company in the world. And part of that is because everybody loves WD-40 in America. Everybody has a can of WD-40.
You can use it on anything. Squeaks, can clean grease and everything. And so in another segment, a 90 second mentor, so we've had a few of them, he said, and he's from Australia, and he said, don't be a manager. People don't like to be managed. You manage inventory, you manage numbers, be a coach. And what a coach is, is you're on the sidelines, you believe in your people, you bring out the best in your people, you help them fulfill their potential, but you help them get better results.
But don't be a manager, be a coach. Interesting. organizations are using 90 Second Mentor because every Wednesday we drop one of these and it's about a minute and half. And there's maybe two paragraphs to explain it. And some large companies are using it to build culture because they'll do it either in person or asynchronously. And they'll just say, anybody wants to show up for a Wednesday for lunch, we'll play the 90 second mentor excerpt. And what do you all think about that?
What do you all think about being a coach versus a manager? And then it's also asynchronously because for companies that are international, they watch it and they share what they think. But what happens is people bond. in the culture. People talk about things not as appliances or functions. They talk about it as thoughtful people. And when you're discussing it with other thoughtful people, you bond with them. This is a great experience. So we're using it as a culture-building tool.
And it's not teaching, it? Ninety seconds. Ninety seconds is enough to stimulate the beginning of people making their own meaning. and therefore it's going to stick better. Absolutely. Yeah. we, so we'll take an excerpt from a podcast that where I'm interviewing someone. And I can't wait to interview you because we'll take some short excerpts. Right. And we'll have fun with that. Fantastic. Can I go back to something you said earlier about reliving the moment?
Because I'm aware that there's a risk in reliving the moment about re traumatizing people. Totally. So, where's the safety boundary there? Well, we do a little education. And I have an article up on global leadership. And if people go to ongloballeadership.com, they can find it. And you'll find it on the homepage. You have to scroll down and it's under DCI, which is the Deeper Coaching Institute. And the article is called Mental Toughness and Resilience.
What we talk about is—and so we'll educate people and say, this is why we're going deeper. When you go through a trauma, It's like an abscess in your psyche. and you do whatever you can to survive it. You know, if you're military, first responders, you push it aside, you know, because you have to survive it. And usually if you're in that category, first responders, military, you get an adrenaline rush from danger, as well as excitement, but adrenaline insulates you from pain.
You can play a soccer match with a fractured, you know, leg and play for another quarter, you know, because the adrenaline is so powerful. But when the adrenaline goes away and the danger goes away, what you pushed away comes back. So if you use the metaphor, when we educate people, if you can think of trauma as an abscess, that you sutured over because you didn't have time to drain it. And the point is, if you keep feeding into that abscess, it's going to burst and go septic.
And you're right, people are afraid if they relive the trauma, it'll be too much. And so that's why we educate people. And what we talk about is that And by the way, psychedelics, this is how psychedelics work, is they take away control from you. So you can be a control freak and you don't let go of control, but being a control freak is not working for you. In a small part of your life, it's working, but it's costing you a marriage, it's costing you your career, and it's costing too much.
when people use psychedelics, they have a shaman or a therapist. And something I talk about in the article, And was thinking, I'll probably turn it into an article instead of a book because it's a clumsy title is the AB reaction cure. And AB reaction, which most of your listeners or viewers don't know it's a clumsy term from psychiatry and psychology 40 years ago. And if you look it up, AB reaction is feeling your repressed feelings and expressing them.
but you need to express it into a safe, empathically attuned person. And that's why when people use psychedelics for therapeutic reasons, they have a shaman or a therapist that you share all these unrepressed feelings, you get these hallucinations, and they reassure you, no, it's okay to vomit. It's okay if you have diarrhea. You're just re-experiencing them, but you're not in any danger, happened a long time ago. And so we explain that, and we might give them a little taste of it.
And as a psychiatrist and someone who's worked in that realm, I have a way of taking, and we can teach people to do this, taking people back to the trauma And here's the interesting thing that we've discovered. If you can, we won't go through it with you, but if you can think of a traumatic time in your life, maybe in your teens or younger, we would have you remember it. It just happened. What's the expression on your face? And often it's horror. It's, I'm not going to survive this.
my God, I can't stand it. Most people can describe the expression on their face, you know, because they just went through something horrific. So one of the ways we safely go through it—and I've done this with myself because I've had such moments—is you're going to go back to that you, and you're going to see the expression on your face, you're going to tune in to it. you're going to say, what happened? What's scaring you now? What's horrifying you? What's making you want to panic or throw up?
So you talk about that, and then you say, Are you thinking you know how you're gonna get through it? Yeah. What if I were to tell you that this is what your future looks like? So I had a moment like that when I was 25 and I've gone back and I've said, after I talked to myself, let me tell you what happens in the next 50 years. And I can picture me at 25. That's not going to happen. I'm not going to survive this. And then I just list what happens in the next 50 years.
At that time, I was married and my first wife wanted to cut her losses because I was dropping out of medical school for the second time. And I can't blame her. I didn't know that I was dropping out, that I didn't know that I would finish medical school. I didn't know that I'd ever get married again. But when I tell that younger me what happened in the next 50 years, which to that 25-year-old was astonishing, I remember when I do the exercise, he looks at me and says, you're crazy.
And I looked at him after I've developed the rapport and said, no, I'm you. default. So there's various techniques and we can learn to walk people safely through that. Wow, so that's the Deeper Coaching Institute and we'll put a link in the show notes to that. There's something there I'm hearing as you're talking about it, Mark, about learning to be deeply compassionate to ourselves. I'll tell you something that I have trouble with.
So I had that I had that mentor in medical schools who sent me and educated me about the hurt in suicidal patients. My first mentor was the Dean of Students at my medical school who probably saved my life and he gave me the trifecta of hope. So the medical school wanted to kick me out because they were losing matching funds and I was dropping out for the second time for deep depression. And I met with the head of the school and I don't even remember that.
And he sent me over to the Dean of Students because he didn't want me to go off the deep end when the school told me we're kicking you out. And the Dean of Students gave me the trifecta of hope, which is something that I just paid forward for 40 years with suicidal patients. He said to me, you didn't mess up because you're passing everything, but you are messed up. But if you got un-messed up, this school would be glad they gave you a second chance. So I just started crying with the compassion.
What? They'd be glad they gave me a second chance? What are you, crazy? And then here was the trifecta of hope. The first one was unconditional love. He said, even if you don't get un-messed up, even if you don't become a doctor, even if you don't do anything with the rest of your life. And I came from a background that you're only worth what you can do. He said, even if all those things happen, I'd be proud to know you. and I'm really sobbing like, what?
And then he said, so the first leg was an unconditional, you don't have to do anything for me to be proud of you. The second leg is, I'd be proud to know you because you have something in you that the world needs more than you can imagine, and you won't know it till you're 35. So he saw a future for me that I didn't see. And then the third leg is but you have to make it to your 35.
You deserve to be on this planet and you're gonna let me help you." And he was a PhD and he stood up to the whole medical school and the dean and said, we're giving this one a second chance. it flipped the switch inside me. Unconditional love, future, going to bat for me at his own risk. And so I took a year off and I worked at a psychiatric institute that's still around called the Menninger Foundation in the middle of Topeka, Kansas.
And I grew up in Boston, but I could reach schizophrenic farm. youth. So apparently, he saw something in me that I didn't see. And so I finished that, came back, finished medical school, went on to train in psychiatry. But I kept with me the trifecta of hope. And I just paid it forward, you know, for 40 years. Wow. The power of human connection is immense, isn't it? I mean, it's kind of uncontainably immense. Yeah, and you're right, this is not for everyone.
Again, it's elective that we're offering it if people find out about it. Maybe some listeners or viewers in your show, hopefully, I'm not just speaking gobbly-gook here. mean, hopefully I'm making a little sense. But there may be some people that will say, I heard what you said, Dr. Goldstein. I not only want to go deeper, I need to go deeper because I keep messing up my life. and strategies aren't saving that. Here's an interesting tip. So, you know, we give some tips.
This is the killer tip for entrepreneurs who have troubled marriages as most of them do because their baby is their business. But that said, they don't want to get divorced. So here's the killer homework assignment. And this goes deeper and they go, whoa. I said, I'd like you to reach out to your spouse. that could be a female or a male. There's an increasing number of female entrepreneurs, but they're focused on their business. They're really alpha and driven.
And often their spouse is not a fellow entrepreneur, you know, because if you have two entrepreneurs and you have children, you better have a Mary Poppins to raise them. But if you have that marriage and it's not going well, the assignment is go to your spouse and say to them, have I ever made you feel that you weren't worth my undivided attention? or interest. your spouse is going to go, what? Yeah. Have I ever made you feel that you weren't worth my undivided attention and interest?
They're going to get a little choked up because you have. Second question goes back to reliving, you know, the incident. at my worst, tell me about an incident where I did that. and really hurt so much and angered you so much, you could barely stand it. then when they come up with an incident, you don't debate them. You may not even remember it because to you, your focus is on your business. Look into their eyes, and when they say it, you respond.
I say, look into the eyes of your spouse and remember them as the person you fell in love with and who fell in love with you and how in a moment in time you adored each other. When they share that incident, think about what you did to that person that you once adored. and then say to them, I did that. You deserve better. I'm going to fix it. And I'm sorry. Not bad advice. deep connection too, isn't it? That's reconnecting deeply. Thank you for tolerating my tangents. I love your tangents.
Listeners, you're not listening if you don't like tangents, are you? so what's… I want to share something because you mentioned something about self-compassion. I have trouble with that. I envy people who can… make positive statements about themselves and believe them and think they're great. But instead of that, I have the dead mentors society. I have eight mentors, they've all died. The last one was Larry King from CNN. Before that was Warren Bennis, big leadership guy.
And I can't believe what I would tell me, but I believe what they tell me. So sometimes when I'm on a podcast like this one, This could be funny. I'll wake up Larry King. I'll say, Larry, wake up. And he'll say, why'd you wake me up for a minute? I did it again. What'd you do? I was on a podcast. So what happened, Mark? I wish you'd go to one of the other dead mentors. I'm hardly cold. Larry, Larry, it'll work out okay. Larry, so what happened?
I was on this lovely podcast with Claire Pedrick, this wonderful host who I'm going to—I think I'm going to be lifelong friends with—and she'd ask a question and I'd go off in these tangents. I was amazed that I even got back to the question in any way. So what you think of it? wants me back. Mark, Mark, you woke me up for this. You're on this podcast. You're all over the place. She'd like you back. Could you put a sock in it, Mark, already? Let me go RIP already.
And what happens is I think of him telling me that. I feel grateful that he was in my life and gave me the gift of his time. And I miss him. you know, All that self-flagellation goes away. By the way, if I call him up after this, would you want to ever have me back? Of course. OK, Larry, rest in peace. But it's funny because we can look at things through the eyes of others. We do quite a lot of training of people to work in groups.
And, you know, sometimes somebody will leave a group or something will happen and that person won't be able to be in the group anymore. But the group gets the capacity, doesn't it, to say, actually, what would so-and-so say here? What's the wisdom they'd offer? What would they ask? We can look at our own lives through the lens of others if we stand in their shoes. Yeah, you know, I'm reminded, there's a book I've been reading recommending to people.
John Wooden was the most winning coach in college basketball. He was at UCLA and he has a book on the power of mentors. I forget the title of it, but you can look up Mentoring John Wooden. And he talks about his mentors and they don't even have to be people you've met. He talks about Abraham Lincoln, Mother Teresa, and then actual real people in his life. But in the book, there's also some of the people who went on to be huge NBA stars, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton, you know, these are huge.
And they talk about coach. And you get the feeling that if you were to ask those players, what was the highlight of your entire career? You get the feeling that they would say, when we played under coach. at UCLA. So that's the power that a mentor can give that that mentor can fill in some of the gaps that you didn't get, you know, because your parents, my parents did the best they could, but I needed that Dean of Students to reach in.
Because my parents, you know, would have tried to be helpful, but they wouldn't have known what to say or they would have say, well, actually, my father did say, well, if you're passing everything, you're not dropping out. Yeah, go ahead. There's a guy, I think he's in the UK, who's dying from cancer right now, and he's young entrepreneur. And he has a very young child, two and a half. It's been all over the newspapers.
And his dying wish has been to set up a charity that will provide mentoring to children who've whose parents who've had a mother or father die. So that when they get older and they're not able to access the mentorship that the parent might've been able to give them or the connections or whatever, that there will be people around them who can say, actually, if you want work experience in my kind of organization, this person will happily talk to you.
It's the most extraordinary program and what a legacy. that he's offering not only to his own daughter, but also to children around the world. I think they've set it up already in the States and they're just about to set it up in the UK. Refer me or introduce me to him because I won't go into details, but I'm dealing with my own mortality. I'll be around for a bunch of years, but I won't be around for a lot of years.
My kids are grown, they're launched, and mortality is really just the abstract concept until it happens to you. So I not only would love to meet this fellow, I need to meet him. I'll check it. I've only seen it on the news, but I'll look and I'll send you the name. It's unusual, but I can't remember what it is, so I'll check it out. I'll do a search. I'm still relatively with it. You're very with it. I'm aware that you have another appointment to go to after this.
We have time if you want to kick me to the curb, know, thinking I've had enough of this guy, you know. What's your hope for coaching? It's unrealistic, but I don't care. I hope that coaches can learn to be true to themselves so they can help their clients be true to themselves and see the power of how that gets performance out of their people. I'll share an interesting thing because you'll have them on your show. I'm mentoring the main founder of global leadership.
And I can talk about this because you'll find I'll tell you why I can talk about it. His name is Doug Guthrie. If you look up New York Times' Doug Guthrie, he was a whistleblower against Apple.
So he was thought to be the China scholar of his generation, wrote an amazing book when he was at the University of Chicago, went to become the Dean of the George Washington School of Business and was fired after three years, went to be the head of leadership learning and training in China because of his China background and coached Tim Cook. He shared with Tim Cook, you can't share customer information with the Chinese government. It goes against Apple.
Tim essentially said, if you want to do business in China, you just have to do that. So Doug resigned. But something else he has shared now publicly is he's bipolar too, meaning that when he has been manic, he's been brilliant and productive and didn't need any sleep and it could go for eight, nine months and produce amazing things. whenever he's been in a position, whatever he's blown the whistle on was true.
But if you're bipolar too, you can also get depressed and you can get suicidally depressed, more so than if you're bipolar one. Because if you're bipolar two, you're not psychotic when you're manic. You're often brilliant publicly. But then when you get depressed, you feel this incredible sense of humiliation that you can't live with. And because he has young children, that's been a reason why he wouldn't kill himself. And he's now a professor at the Thunderbird School in Arizona.
It's one of the top international business schools, and he's teaching a course on China, doing business with China and leadership. And he's just being totally honest, completely honest about his journey. And the reason he got fired is he said, I was arrogant. I thought I knew better than everyone because when you're manic, you feel that way. And I was a little grandiose thinking I knew better than Tim Cook. But when you go into the other direction, it's unlivable.
And fortunately, I have kids, so I'm going to stay around. And so in his course on leadership, and I also told him, I'm a psychiatrist, I said, You go down this path of opening up. Forget about Fortune 500 CEOs hiring you, even though you're brilliant, bipolar. And he's basically said, My journey and sharing it with people is much more important. What I've been through is much more important than helping another Fortune 500 CEO to be a little bit more successful.
And I said, once you go down this road, you can't go back. So he's doing it in his leadership course at Thunderbird, and he's like the Pied Piper. People are coming up to him and they're saying, I've never heard someone be so honest. said there was one person in the course, you know, his arms were crossed and he was former military—I think he was former military—and he comes up to him like this, a little bit uptight.
And he thought he was going to say, you know, how dare you, you talk about that, that's weakness. And this former military person looks at him and says, I need to hug you. So I love being on this journey. And so my wish for coaches is And I think it's going to turn out very well because there's this real hunger.
But a lot of coaches will say, you were right about what you said, that if corporations and CEOs hire us, they don't necessarily want who we're coaching to be authentic, and they don't particularly want us to be authentic if it gets in the way of performance. so what Doug and I and those of us that are on global leadership and hopefully at places like Thunderbird University, what we want to show the world is that you can empower people by your being that authentic.
Now, here's the key, something I learned from Marshall Goldsmith, who I'm about to interview in five minutes. One of the things he said, because we've had discussions about authenticity. He said, it's good to be authentic, but that doesn't mean you should just have full disclosure.
And think what he meant by that is if there's a lesson in your authenticity as opposed to seeking sympathy, that's okay to be authentic if there is a lesson and something that you learned that helped you to be a better person and more successful than go ahead. One of the members of Marshall's group is a fellow named Alan Mullally, and he went from Boeing to Ford, and he was with Ford during the Great Recession.
And he turned Ford around, and he is one of the most authentic, humble, genuine people. But he doesn't disclose anything, you know, but so you can be genuine and authentic if it's in the service of your mission. So, you know, I think that's worth thinking about. I'm still wrapping my head around it because I think authenticity is good, but you need to be careful about just disclosure that really doesn't serve anyone. Exactly.
One of the things we say in the book, in the new book, is being vulnerable and not leaky. Ooh, ooh. And the new book is coming out? November. human behind the coach, which is what you've just described in the last five minutes, which I love. And so, look, I don't often do a lot of repeats on my wake-up call. I mean, I've got 530 episodes without, with five repeats maybe, Ken Blanchard a couple times, and other people, Gary Ridge.
So we'll hold off till your book comes out and then we'll just blow it out. Fantastic. Thank you, Mark. Dr. Mark Galston, thank you for coming to the Coaching Inn. We hope you will come back. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thank you. Well, can I still be smitten with you? You can still be smitten with me. Thank you. Thank you for coming. Bye bye. Bye bye, everyone.
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