Leading Yourself Before You Can Lead Others with Dene Stuart, Founder of The Exceptional Leader Academy

On the podcast this week we bring you the second part of our conversation with Dene Stuart, founder of The Exceptional Leader Academy. Hosted by Yiuwin Tsang, this episode looks at how learning to lead before leading others is essential because it lays the foundation for effective leadership. Leadership involves guiding and inspiring others, which requires a deep understanding of oneself, including strengths, weaknesses, values, and goals.

Leading oneself first enables leaders to set a positive example, make sound decisions, and effectively navigate challenges, ultimately earning the trust and respect necessary to lead others successfully.

Dene’s career and experiences make for fascinating and insightful listening. Tune in now to learn more about:

- Leadership development and effective decision-making
- Managing pressure in leadership roles
- Effective communication and leadership
- Leadership skills and delegation for business growth
- Intentional leadership development


About Dene Stuart

Dene Stuart has over 30 years of commercial, leadership, and management experience, having held director roles within major national and regional media companies.

Managing large teams in multi-site offices gave Dene the broadest possible range of employment, team, motivational, and performance issues to deal with and was the key to his interest in personal development and performance. 

Dene is a licensed behavioural analyst and has a BSc in Management Science from The University of Manchester, Institute of Science and Technology. He is the author of various books including ResourcefulMe and The Thinking Revolution.

Transcript

Disclaimer: The following transcript is the output of an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.   Every possible effort has been made to transcribe accurately. However, neither Beautiful Business nor The Wow Company shall be liable for any inaccuracies, errors, or omissions.

Yiuwin Tsang  

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of The Beautiful Business Podcast brought to you by The Wow Company. I'm your host Yiuwin Tsang, and this week we are joined by Dene Stuart. Dene is the founder of The Exceptional Leader Academy, which delivers leadership training, development and coaching to his clients. He also works as a senior consultant to One Performance, a consultancy working with global organisations. Dean has over 25 years experience of senior management within major national and regional media companies. As operational director of Trinity Mirror, he had direct profit responsibility for the Daily Mirror with revenue responsibility of 100 million, and as commercial director for Newsquest led a sales team of over 100. This experience was gained through a time of acute and rapid change in one of the most competitive and challenging marketplaces, both locally and nationally. His tenure as commercial director of digital startup yava, exposed him to the challenges of working with venture capitalists and shareholders. Since becoming a leadership coach in 2012, he has trained, coached and mentored over 500 people from C suite executives and large corporate clients, to individuals at the very start of their business journey. Dene is a three times published author, his books are about the practical application of the latest psychological theory to decision making, and leadership. He has a degree in Management Sciences from Manchester University, and he is also a certified personality profiling practitioner of Thomas International. In this interview, Dene spoke about how you need to develop yourself as a leader before you can really lead others. He also spoke about the differences between leading in your own company compared to within a corporate and how we all need to become more intentional in our leadership efforts. Let's jump straight in.

Yiuwin Tsang  

Let's start off with you giving us a background to you, what it is you do, and who it is you do it for.

Dene Stuart  

Sure. So a bit of background first. So I would love to be one of those people coming onto your program going, Yeah, I've had this stellar career. And I started from nothing, and I've made millions and whatever. But I can't tell that story. My story is a zigzag story. I have had success. But I've also had massive failure both personally and professionally. So I've had success in the corporate world. I guess the biggest element of that was my time in national newspapers. When I became the advertising director on the Daily Mirror. This was a few years ago now. And that was at a time when a certain Piers Morgan was the editor. So he and I used to do daily battle, he wanted to get all the advertising out. So he had more space for his editorial, I wanted to get his editorial out. So I had more space, my advertising, as you can imagine, that led to some fruity conversations, but it was a great time. And I learned a lot. And I had a lot of responsibility in terms of the revenue I was responsible for, but also the number of people I was responsible for. And that's when I really started to learn about leadership. But actually, I'm gonna amend that I actually didn't learn about leadership, I was in a leadership position, a senior leadership position, but I didn't actually have a single day of leadership training in my life. So I followed what I saw the other people in the business were doing, because that was the only guidance I had about how to lead. It was only when I got out of that business, and then started on a different track where me and my now ex wife, I always say there's a clue in that. We started our own business. And we tried to work together for a few years. And then I started to learn the difference between leading in the corporate world and leading your own business, where you've got your own employees. And when people ask me, What's the difference, the thing that I always tend to say is that when you work in the corporate world, and it comes to the end of the month, you have a list comes down from HR of all the people you're responsible for, and you tick off the salaries you take off if there's any bonuses, and then you send it back and someone else makes sure the money gets in the bank. When you run your own business, you're looking at the bank balance. As you pay out all of your staff, you're wondering whether you've got enough money to pay yourself so you can pay your mortgage at the end of the month, I'd always say until you've been through that situation. And I've never met a business owner who hasn't been in that situation. You actually don't know what it's really like to run a business. And so that's when I really started to learn. There was this thing called leadership and the experiences of running my own businesses were pretty traumatic one way or another. The marriage didn't survive that. That's why I say, you know, there's a clue in that. And my ex wife, I got back into the corporate world with another job, which was a senior media job, which then was at the start of 2008, the recession. So I joined as a commercial director believing I would be helping to grow a business and within like two months, I was making the first set of redundancies and over the course of the next four years, the team have a ended in 65, that I was leading had to be whittled down to about 95. And I did all of those redundancies myself. So for anyone that's been involved in a redundancy, they know the emotional content that goes into making somebody redundant on both sides of that conversation. And I learned and other aspects of leadership there. And then, of course, through that period, particularly in the newspaper world, things were getting very tough. So eventually, the redundancy knife was chopping up through the pyramid, and it reached me and I was made redundant for the second time in 2012. And that's when I made the decision to come on this path. And it was a bit of a leap into the dark, because I still hadn't had any leadership training at that point. I just had this sense that there was something that was needed, that we really came from a place of practical experience, rather than academic research. There's so many business schools around the world, you know, if you typed leadership into Google, there's millions and millions and millions of articles and courses and programmes and training. And a lot of them are from, you know, obviously very, very successful business people. But I always felt there was something that was just like for the, what I might call the normal leader, not they're like they're hyper successful person that's going to build this incredible billion dollar, unicorn business and all that sort of thing. You know, a lot of the leadership stuff is written around that. But just for the normal person working in a normal business, having to deal with a normal, difficult types of conversations, whether it's with a colleague, you know, whether it's with someone in your team, if you happen to be a team manager, you know, if you're a business owner, and you've taken that courageous leap to start taking on your first employees, you know, and people underestimate the courage it takes to make that decision and start employing people you know, and that you really learn at that point, there's a massive difference in mindset between you as the leader and the person that you're employing. Because if they had the same mindset, they'd probably be running their own business. And it's like navigating that which is really been what I have been working to achieve with the exceptional leader Academy. So I hope that's a little summary that explains where I've come from, and why I do what I do. 

Yiuwin Tsang  

That's fabulous. And really interesting, very kind of humble story as well, in terms of the journey that you've been on. I've worked in media as well, I know that it's a cutthroat industry. And it's also really interesting, the point that you made around the difference between leadership in the corporate world. And leadership, when you run your own business, when you've got skin in the game, the game changes quite dramatically. And that being said, though, I think there's probably I would imagine some of the good kind of leadership lessons that you've taken from the corporate world that you've then been able to apply into your businesses and help your clients with, because I know we're talking about being able to lead but through first leading yourself, but just again, from personal experience, when you're leading commercial teams, when you're leading the sales teams, it's a bit of a poison chalice in many senses, because you live or you die by your numbers, your success, ultimately, is measured by numbers. But the reality in practices is when you're trying to lead a team of salespeople or business development people, if you have business development people in your team, you have to look beyond those numbers, you have to lead beyond those numbers. 

Dene Stuart  

That makes absolute sense. And what it leads into is an absolute crucial aspect of leadership in any aspects, you know, whether in production or marketing, or finance, whatever, the principle is the same. And I think it exposes itself in sales more because of that focus on the numbers, you know, and if you're a sales director, which I was, and your team is not hitting the targets, obviously, you're in the firing line. And the question is, how do you handle being in that firing line. And you use the line though, which is, you know, you have to be able to lead yourself leading yourself first. And this is where a lot of leaders get exposed is in that time when they come under pressure, you know, and it could be from anywhere, it could be if you're not at the top of the leadership pyramid, you know, if you're somewhere down, you've got boss, or you might have bosses. And if they're putting you under pressure, how do you lead yourself when you're under that pressure, because the thing that gets exposed is the way you lead yourself. And if you're not setting an example, then the people that you're leading are going to see how you actually act and behave in those moments of pressure. And those will be the lessons that they take from you. But also, it will lead to the way in which you are respected or not respected as a leader. Because if what a lot of people do is they just pass that pressure down the line. So they get under pressure from their bosses and they pass that pressure down the line. It's very easy for the people who are on the receiving end of that to see what's going on. And then what happens is when you're in that sort of leadership role, if you behave in that way, you then get that dissonance between having the position of authority See, because you've got the title and you've got that authority role in the organisation. But what you don't have that goes with it is the respect or the truth. And when you own the trust, yeah, trust and respect, absolutely. And if you don't have trust and respect, then the only thing you're left with from an authority point of view is telling people what to do and demanding they do it. And when you get into that situation, then you're in real trouble as a leader.

Yiuwin Tsang  

A lot of us who as I said, a lot of our listeners who've had a career in corporate or in kind of in the middle of the line management pyramid, as you put it will have seen it before or experienced it themselves. And it's grim, isn't it when you're on the receiving end of that, because as you say, the trust goes out the window, the respect goes out the window. And I think just from we mentioned this a lot in this podcast around discretionary productivity within your team, there's this little pot of extra buzz of extra energy of extra productivity that is discretionary. You know, they'll tap into it when they want to when they feel like they can do what they want it and that part is completely closed off. If you don't have the respect or the trust of your team, they're not going to dig deep. They're not going to go the extra mile and all these other kinds of cliches that come with it. If you don't, as you say, manage your own kind of behaviour as a leader.

Dene Stuart  

Yeah, absolutely. It's such an interesting concept, that idea of that sort of extra pot of productivity, I tend to think of it almost from the reverse side of that coin in that, yes, in a way, it is like an optional extra that somebody can give you. But it's also something that they want to give. And actually what happens is, people get really, really frustrated when they don't feel safe to give it because actually, what you're talking about there is that optional extra effort, activity, energy, whatever you want to call it, however you want to describe it, creativity, innovative thinking comes with risk, you know, it's risky to put that extra energy in, because things can go wrong, you know, it might not work out exactly. Yeah, you might step on somebody's toes. When you're in the world of big corporates or even smaller corporates, people shy away from this word, but politics is at play. And you know, what I always say is, you can either pretend you don't play politics, and I use the word, pretend advisedly, because you can't be in an organisation and not play politics. Politics, in its truest sense, is actually the way in which we balance out different interests, and different motivations. That's really what politics is about. But of course, it's come to mean something very different in the modern day and age. And so this idea of discretionary extra effort, there's been lots of work done around this and what it takes to get it from people. And what happens if you don't get it from people, somebody who's done a lot of work in this space is guy called Dan Pink, who's got a very interesting, very successful TED talk is one of the most watched TED Talks. And his work was based on the work of a psychologist called Edmund detsky, in about the 1950s. And he was the one who really identified that if people don't have that sense of autonomy, meaning and purpose in their work, you don't get that extra effort. You know, there's a lot of work behind what you said there.

Yiuwin Tsang  

And I guess, in the, you know, moving into the owner, founder kind of space. So if you run like an agency or consultancy firm, or whatever kind of business it is that you've run in, as you say, you've taken the brave step of setting up and On you go. You mentioned earlier about how the pressure that comes from above when we're in the corporate space from our management directors from the board or whatever might be, if that then affects our behaviour, our demeanour, the way that we interact with our teams, that could be a quite a negative force, I imagine it could be quite a positive force as well. So firstly, how do you manage that pressure as a leader? And then again, go to that founder owner kind of space? Would that pressure from your bosses or were in the corporate space? How does that pressure manifests? Where does it come from as a founder and with your experience, and what the clients that you work with? Yeah, I mean, would it be those financial pressures? Would it be, you know, the reputational pressure of running a successful business, I guess, are a number of different factors come into play? But yeah, so firstly, how do you manage that? How do you kind of deal with that pressure in the corporate space? And then how does it manifest? And how do you deal with it in the owner space.

Dene Stuart  

This really gets right into that very practical approach that I was talking about when I did that little introduction about myself the difference between the sort of academic leadership programmes that are out there and how I'd go about working with my clients. And the way in which I suggest people deal with these sorts of pressures is to become very, very self aware of how those pressures affect them, to become aware of how it changes their emotional state, and to become very aware of how that emotional state changes their physical state. Now, this is something that a lot A lot of people in leadership roles don't like to think about, because it seems a bit touchy feely. But the reality is, we have emotions for a reason. And they are motivational forces, they're either motivations for us to do more of something because it feels good, or their motivations for us through less of something because it feels bad. That's a simple way of thinking about emotions, and they create physical feelings in your body to cause you to take the appropriate action. I don't know whether that's an idea that you've come across before you're in or not. But that's the way I sort of explain emotions. Now, if you aren't aware of how your emotional state then leads through to physical feelings, which then leads to the way in which you behave in the moment, you can't do anything about it. You're hostage to your emotions. That's the phrase I like to use. And this is what happens with most people, they become hostage to their emotions. So they react, they don't respond. And there's a fantastic quote by Viktor Frankl who wrote one of the most influential books on personal development, ever, he was captured and held in one of the concentration camps, the Nazi concentration camps, he became very interested in how some people mentally came through that, and some people didn't. And he wrote a book called Man's Search for Meaning. And in that, there's a quote, and he says, our freedom lies in that space between stimulus, and response. And when I came across this about about 10 years ago, now, it absolutely changed the way I thought about the way in which we interact with each other. Because if you stop and reflect on various situations, what you'll see, and what you realise is that most people never stopped to think. And it means they're just reacting from their emotional state. So that's a rather long winded answer to your question about how you deal with those pressures. But it's about understanding that you have to create the freedom for yourself to choose how you're going to respond, rather than be held hostage by your emotions, and then just react from that emotional state. So I hope that makes sense.

Yiuwin Tsang  

It does. It does, it reminds me a lot of is a transactional analysis where you've got that I always thought of it as you kind of articulate really well they've been around, you've got the stimulus that kind of comes in, you've got that processing point. And then there's the outward kind of communication that you make in the context of that, you know, if you're dealing with a member of staff, or you're dealing with shareholder, whatever it might be. I mean, I'm personally I find it absolutely fascinating when I was reading about that. And then it was interesting, then that could take a level up, I remember there was one of the chief executives I worked with, he would always pause before he responded to your questions. And it was like, it was quite interesting, because before I came across transaction analysis, I always thought it's quite odd how he does that. He deliberately slow the conversation down by just taking a moment, before he answers even on like, really mundane questions and simple ones. And there was only afterwards I realised, you know, what he's actually it's like a self discipline point where he's taking the moment to make sure that the answer that he gives is correct, not just in kind of factual terms, but also in terms of delivery in terms of what he wants to kind of achieve from it. And I was number one, firstly, super impressed by that. But secondly, thought really hard. It's really hard, especially when we talk about owners, founders of this, I mean, he was founder of that particular business, but for owners, founders, and you look at the kind of archetypical kind of founder kind of character or character traits in a spontaneous play kind of emotionally driven, play, kind of like, you know, decisions are made on gut feelings, so on and so forth. That's quite a difficult transition to make to do that, as you say, to be able to analyse, consider, and formulate your response and suppress that reactiveness and come forward in a more responsive way rather than a reactive way. 

Dene Stuart  

No, that's a great point. And I think the other thing that it speaks to, is, you know, we were talking earlier about trust and respect. If you actually take time to stop to think you're actually demonstrating to the person that you're talking to that you've listened to what they've said, you've heard them, and you're thinking about how to respond in a way that is going to be useful, helpful, respectful, you know, and that's a hugely powerful and positive empathy building approach to the way in which you work with people, because one of the most sort of demanded things that people have in the workplace, but it's not something that people will generally articulate. It is one of the things that lies under the surface of most conversations is that need for respect. And if you just react to what somebody said without taking that time to stop and think what you're really telling that person in a subconscious way is that you haven't respected what they've said. All you're doing is giving back to them, what you want them to think, based on your emotional state in that moment. So it's a very non empathetic way of having a conversation with somebody. And of course, you know, this is why a lot of this, what I do gets labelled as the pink and fluffy stuff, which really annoys me.

Yiuwin Tsang  

I bet it does. But the thing is, is it's so incredibly powerful. If you can crack this, I wonder if there is a correlation between the people who say it's pink and fluffy, with the people that have deep kind of like, insecurity is probably the wrong kind of way. But they've got deep reservations about actually tackling or taking on some of these kind of, because ultimately, it's an internal challenge. Dean has a way of interpreting it. It's like how you handle it's going back to the point how you lead yourself. It's not necessarily your presentation skills, or your articulation of things or vocabulary, or, you know, that outward sense of the communication is not, you know, once it comes out of your mouth has nothing to do with that. It's about what happens before. Yeah. And I wonder if there is a correlation between those, we'll say, that's all pink and fluffy. We don't need that. Yeah, we'll deal with it more.

Dene Stuart  

Yeah. And I think there's a lot in what you say there. And I think it comes from a number of different sort of places, really, if you think about what it takes to set up a business, it takes a lot of guts, it takes a lot of energy, it takes a lot of risk, you know, you've got to be the sort of person that can contemplate taking on risk. And of course, if you're going to come through that risk journey, you've got to take brave decisions. And that very often means that people that you're working with, will not have that same sense of bravery that you do. And this is one of the big challenges for a lot of entrepreneurial type leaders. They've got people in their team that don't have that same relationship with risk that they do as the person who set the business up, which goes back to what I said earlier, it's like if they did have that same sense of risk, and that same feeling that they wanted to take on that challenge, they would probably be entrepreneurs themselves.

Yiuwin Tsang  

Yeah, well, that applies, I guess, in terms of, you know, as the organisation grows as well, because one of my questions was around, you know, what happens, what changes when you go from a team of 2345 to 10, or 20. And I imagine that that sense of risk, the stakes that are involved, you know, having kind of skin in the game, that will still be apparent, if anything, I guess it gets amplified, because there are more layers. Typically, there might be more layers to an organisation, perhaps you know, you're recruiting, you've got capacity to recruit a more junior role in order to develop them as a talent rather than when you are a five to six size organisation, perhaps you are more likely to invest more in a more established more experience so that they can become more autonomous more quickly. But yeah, when an organiser can get to that point, how do you balance that because I feel like as you know, speaking to the business owner, to another business owner, that will always be there, that kind of element of risk, the cost benefit kind of payoff of every decision that you make will be rooted in, you know, Will this make the business go forward? Will it make the boat go factor, all those kinds of shows that are out there shall always be rooted in that. Whereas as you kind of move further down the hierarchy of the pyramid, as you put it, they don't have that kind of exposure, they don't have that kind of experience in one way. But as I say, they often don't have that kind of exposure.

Dene Stuart  

Sure. So the absolute big change that a leader has to be able to make, and I was looking with a guy who has a very entrepreneurial accountant, and he had this issue, in that he built his business, literally from scratch. He started it. He was the one that won the clients. He did all of the work that accountants do, got it to the point where he could start taking on his first employees. And he'd run it at that level for 20 odd years. But he'd also having this entrepreneurial streak, he'd started a couple of other businesses related to the accounting field. So it wasn't like he was doing stuff that wasn't related. They were absolutely related to what he was doing. It made sense. But of course, it meant he was working literally 24/7. And he was very lucky, is very lucky to have a very supportive wife who was willing to go with him on that journey. But he'd reached a point where he couldn't literally couldn't do everything. And his approach should always be to be the last point of call for his clients, sometimes the first point of call, which meant that the people that he had in his team weren't really coming through. And he was sort of realising this, which is why he engaged me. So one of the first things that I had to do, although he engaged me to develop his team, actually, one of the first things I had to do with him was to get him out the idea that he was in his business, I had to get him to start thinking of himself as the CEO of his business, and that his role was no longer to do the work that his clients wanted. But his role was to actually develop his people. So they could be the ones who held the client relationships. Now, that is a real leap for anybody that's built their own business, and particularly where it's service based, as opposed to product based or even if it's product based, you can still obviously be developing client relationships, if you've been the person that's built that business, and you've built client relationships, handing over those client relationships to members of your team can be very, very difficult. But it's the fundamental skill that you have to be able to develop. So obviously, you know, Its technical name is delegation. And it's probably the hardest thing that founders of businesses have to do. But if you can't learn and develop that skill within yourself, and delegation is a skill to be learned and developed. It's not just about saying, go away and do this. So I don't have to, you have to develop your people to be able to learn what it takes to handle those level of relationships.

Yiuwin Tsang  

And there's lots of really good resources out there on their dean in terms of delegation, and handover models and like frameworks and things of that, which is getting into the nitty gritty of the practical doing of it, and the handling of the tasks and the feedback and the checking in the quality assurance and stuff like this. But I wonder, what would you say leaders can do around that self preparation to handover that accountability, the responsibility and the accountability that has to go with that delegate the power of delegation, rather than the practical doing of it? But it's surrendering that power, isn't it? That's the scary bit. That's the bit that yeah, you know, even gonna speak about myself. But I think that I'm quite good at delegating, or certainly in terms of handling that stuff over, but I'm not gonna lie deep down inside, there's always that fear, you know, there's fear, what if that goes wrong? You know, what messes up? It's, again, it's that stakes thing. It's like, what's at risk here? And it's there? How do you deal with so what can you do?

Dene Stuart  

Well, the first thing is, you've got to get out of the idea that it's quicker for you to do it yourself. And it's better for you to do it yourself, because you trust you, right. And I'm not just when I say you, I don't just mean you, you and I mean, I'm using you in that sort of raw sense of everyone that's, you know, in that sort of business, you know, set up their own business show, right, you know, you can do the job the best. So, you've got to get out of the mindset that it's quicker and easier for you to do it rather than taking the time to train. So, you know, there's a great old, it's a little joke around leadership, where the finance director, I'm sure you've heard this one, right. But the finance director goes into the CEOs office and say, hey, look, we've got to cut some costs. I'm looking at the cost. And we're spending all this on training of people. Now, what if we spend all this money on the training, and then they go off, and they go and work for other businesses? And the CEO just looks at them? And says, Well, yeah, but what if we don't spend the money and they stay. And to me that it's a joke, right? But actually, it sums up the challenge of making that decision of training and development, right, because if you don't, you can't break out of the pattern of business that you're running right now. So if you want to scale a business, as a leader, you've got to make that transitional journey from being the person that does the business, to the person that builds a team that can do the business. And that means you've the key skill that you've got to develop is the skill of being able to handle complexity, because as you so rightly pointed out, what happens is, as your business grows, you've got more and more layers underneath. And so your role becomes more complex in terms of the number of people you're handling. So, you know, this is why becoming a, if you're going to build a scalable business, you've got to develop yourself as a leader. Because if you don't, when those complexities come into your business, to be frank, you're gonna find it really difficult to handle them.

Yiuwin Tsang  

And I think, again, a lot of our listeners will be in a similar boat, it's a complexity or not just the complexity of running bigger businesses and bigger teams, it's the pace at which these complexities come at you as well. So there's overall intensity increases, and all these different pressure points kind of land. I want to spend just to kind of close off this bit of the interview, just to speak a little bit about the intentional leadership inventory that you've developed, because I feel like that it almost gives you that kind of framework to deal with this complexity deal with this pace and the cadence of challenges that come at you, as a leader be that kind of division or within a team within an organisation or indeed, as I say, when you're the founder of a new owner of a business. You wanted to just give us a quick snapshot of what it is and Pinder? Sure.

Dene Stuart  

So I was talking earlier about my journey through leadership and having those years in a big leadership role, but having low leadership training, and what I came To realise when I was reflecting on that time, was that I had fallen into the trap that I would say 90 to 95% of people in leadership positions fall into. And that is, they end up having to manage the unintended consequences of their unintentional thinking. Yeah. So putting that back into the emotional content, so I was talking before when you're hostage to your emotions, you act unintentionally. Yeah. So the idea of the intentional leader inventory was to try and extract the steps, if you like, or the pillars of development, that you have to think about, from your personal perspective, if you're going to become the person that can handle the complexity of a scaling or a scaled organisation, if that's what you want to do, right? Because it's about being able to intentionally create the results you want. Now, if you think about this at different timescales, you'll see that some aspects of this are already in place in a lot of leadership programmes. So on the longer timescale, the language that you hear around this intentionality is about having a vision and a mission for your business. Right now, that might be a one year two year five year 10. Year, right, but it's on that longer scale. And there's some challenges around that, which are built into the intentional leader inventory. But my point around intentionality is, the shorter the timeframe, the harder it is to become intentional. So think about this, right? Think of a time when your phone is gone. You've looked at it and you've either recognise the number or the names come up. And your immediate reaction has been, oh, no, I didn't want this call. You know, this was a call I didn't want. Yeah, in that moment, what's the intention that you've unconsciously set about that conversation you're about to have? You've unconsciously already framed that conversation has been a difficult one that you don't want to have. And it's happened just through you seeing that name or number on the phone. So what I like to say about intentionality is the real skill of intentionality is being able to do it in the shortest and shortest of timeframes. So in that moment, when someone says something to you and you feel triggered, this is what brings it back to that being aware of your emotional state, and how it makes you feel physically. Because when you can capture that, you can become intentional, at shorter and shorter timescales. And when you can do that, that's when you really change the way you show up. Does that make sense? That's how you really become intentional.

Yiuwin Tsang  

It really does. But it still comes back to that point in where it's really, really hard. I mean, it is, as they say, it's subconscious as it is now. And I understand that being kind of like what's unaware, incompetent, and then become aware that you're incompetent, and then sort of support? So is there a similar sort of like process to go through from your own self leadership perspective?

Dene Stuart  

Yeah, absolutely. And it's like anything, you know, the analogy I give, it's like, I don't know, whether you're a runner or, or anything like that you're in. But, you know, if you're not a runner, would you go and enter a marathon and just go to that marathon and run that marathon without doing any prior training? No, you wouldn't. Right? So, you know, when you hear the stories of people who enter something like the London Marathon, you know, they do it two years in advance, they train and they build up and they build up their ability to run that marathon, right? Well, if you're going to be a leader of business, it's like running a marathon. But people don't see it in the same way. So they don't see that they need to build their skills, build their stamina, build their strength, in those leadership skills, so they just sort of go into it. And then they wonder why they fall down or why they get the equivalent of cramp or you know, their knee gives in or whatever it is, you know, whatever the equivalent might be from a business leadership setting. But if you actually recognise that these are skills that can be learned, can be developed. And as you learn and develop them, actually, what happens is you become then more confident in taking bigger, faster steps in your business. So it's, you will always be the limit of the business that you runs ability to grow. If you're the leader. It's how you see the vision of your business. It's the level of the limit of your thinking, that will be the cap on the level of your business.

Yiuwin Tsang  

A big thank you to Dene Stuart from The Exceptional Leader Academy for sharing his knowledge. And a big thank you to you, our listeners for listening to this week's Beautiful Business Podcast.