Okay, the next tool, the next strategy is that the wise leader is an exceptional student. I know we've talked about this a couple of times in a couple of different ways. Why? Because it's absolutely crucial. You have to always keep learning. So you can always keep teaching.

Let me ask you a question. Your child comes up to you and says, Hey, Dad, can I borrow 10 bucks? And you go into your wallet, and there's only $5 there? Can you give them $10? No. Why?

Well, that's simple. You can't give them anything you don't have. Think of your knowledge base like your wallet. If you fill it up, and people ask you for some of it, you can give it back out. This is a constantly replenishing supply, but I think you get the analogy. You can't give to your team, to your staff.

Anything that you yourself, don't have You've got to keep going, you've got to keep learning. And you do this for a couple of reasons. One, you want to get smarter, you want to get better, you want to get ahead, too, you do it because your staff, now you can train your staff, you can teach them new things. And three, and we haven't talked about this yet, is that reading, learning training gives you great new ideas that you would never find anyplace else. Here's why. When you go to a training and you're listening to a speaker like me, you're hearing new thoughts, new ideas, new belief systems, the only way you can get those new thoughts and new belief systems inside your head is to get them from somebody that's not you.

So what's that training? So I'm teaching you philosophies and beliefs that in some ways may seem obvious to you. Or they may seem like it's an aha lightbulb moment. That's genius. You never heard it before. Doesn't matter.

I'm teaching As a way of thinking that isn't yours. Now you have two ways of thinking. In some ways you've doubled your intelligence. Because intelligence one definition of intelligence is the number of ways in which you can think. Let me give you an analogy of that. Your young child, you're learning about trees and your teacher shows you a picture of a tree.

They say, look at this, Johnny, it's a tree. Then you hold up the picture and you say, what's this Johnny and Johnny jumps up all excited and says tree teacher says very good, Johnny, you're very smart child. You now have one unit of knowledge about trees. If I say Johnny, trees are alive, they actually breathe and they they eat vitamins and minerals, and they drink water, just like you and me. They're alive. Now Johnny knows two things.

Johnny is actually twice as smart in the area of trees as he was a few minutes ago. I say Johnny, did you know trees are part of a group. The group is called a forest. Well, now Johnny knows three things about trees. He's three times smarter than when he started the day. That's a huge leap.

If I say, Johnny, do you know trees are part of an ecosystem, they make oxygen so you can breathe it and other animals can breathe it, the world would be lost without trees. They're part of this big thing called planet Earth. They're part of the ecosystem. They're like a cell in your body. Well, now, Johnny's four times smarter than he was. We can't just keep thinking in our heads and trying to come up with better ideas.

We need to get outside sources that stimulate our thinking and teach us new ways of thinking. So we can only do that through trainings like this. And through reading is the other great way to do it. And if you don't want to read go ahead and get it on tape, listen to it in the cars you go back and forth. Yeah, go ahead and get it on mp3 or CD or something you can listen to on your phone or in your car. That's a great way to boost your learning.

I used to do a ton of learning. It was literally hundreds and hundreds of hours. hours per year, just driving 2030 minutes to work. 2030 minutes back, instead of listening to the radio, I always had educational tapes, CDs, mp3 is going, I put stuff on my phone. So I have Kindle books and I've got mp3 is on there. So I can listen to the audio or read a book.

Anytime I got a couple extra minutes I could be learning something. So I got a huge amount of education over a five to 10 year period. And 90% of that time, wasn't me setting time aside, I would set aside maybe 15 minutes to an hour, half an hour a day to learn new things. But in that downtime, I would gain almost another hour, hour and a half every single day. That would have just been wasted time, driving back and forth to work waiting in line, waiting for meetings to start waiting for a phone call listening to stuff during my lunch break while I'm walking the dog mowing the lawn, running errands, waiting for a doctor's appointment. All this downtime became learning time.

And I became very well educated. I would gain about a year's worth of college every single year just by studying this stuff in my downtime. It's how I became a great educator, great therapist, and ultimately what a great leader. great leaders, wise leaders also know that gentleness melts defenses. Now I call this the puppy dog approach. What you're doing is you're being kind, gentle.

This is literally the soft and soft skills. You're making sure that people feel okay with things. Why so they don't get defensive. In the very last set of tips, we talked about ego trying to win an argument. Well, when it becomes about ego about their self image, they will defend that to the death and they will never hear your argument. How do you reduce that?

Don't let them see You as attacking them. That's the key. Look at the puppy dog. Do you think this little puppy dogs gonna attack you? It's not a pitbull. Let's just have a phobia about dogs.

Very kind, very gentle. You never worry that this dogs gonna overpower you or try to attack you. They may lick your face and give you love but they're not going to overpower you. So gentleness mounts, defenses. When people get defensive, be more gentle with them. say things like you know, I'm only mentioning this because I care about you.

I was worried about Jessie only reason I brought it up. I'm a little bit worried about you. How are you doing today? That kind of gentleness can really help to melt the defenses and let people hear you. let people be led. When I don't feel like I'm being coerced, then I go along with things.

A lot of times, when I'm asking somebody to do something, even though I'm the boss, I'll use gentleness. I'll use the puppy dog approach. I'll say Hey, I got a buddy. Can you help me out with this? And what I'll do is I'll start the project with them. And then I walk away and let them finish.

I just kind of show them what i what i need done. I roll up my sleeves, I do a little bit of it with them, and I let them finish it up. The quote unquote, buddy project is a great term. It's a soft, gentle way of saying, hey, I need you to do this. My dad taught me this when I was working in the store. He never told our assistant Gladys to do anything.

He said, Gladys, could you help me, Gladys? Could you do me a favor? Gladys, it would be a huge help to me if you could do this. Gladys, we really need Gladys, would you be so kind as to? Could you do me a favor Gladys? So always use that kind of language.

That's gentleness. Now, obviously, people know you're the boss and they're going to do this. But that language shows that you're not trying to be above them. You're using gentleness you're showing appreciation Hey Gladys, can you do me a favor? That's a nice thing to say. Even though if Gladys didn't do that, well, we probably got to fire Gladys.

So, use the puppy dog approach, softer, gentler language and you will make out absolutely fantastic. Here's another interesting tip for you. The wise leader knows you cannot injure a person without hurting the team. Think of it this way. Everybody comes within a structure comes within a family. They have friends, and they have friends and they have friends.

Think of it like two kids on a playground. And they get into a fight or they get into an argument. Let's say they're having a really knockout drag out argument. Well, they think well, I'm just fighting with this one person. So there's me and there's them. There's two people involved.

Absolutely not. teacher might get involved. The principal might get involved. They've got 10 Friends, you've got 10 friends, you've got three or four siblings, they've got three or four siblings, you both got, you know, two parents. And by the time you get done, there's 30 4050 people involved, and you thought it was just you and this other person. That's why you can't injure your person without hurting the team.

Also, you've got a lot of onlookers. What if you're going up one side of your employee and down the other and you're being really mean to them, everybody on the team is going to find out about that. And they're no longer going to be friends with you, they're no longer going to connect with you. They're no longer going to be loyal with you. So you can't injure somebody without hurting the whole team. So I want you to know that for you as a leader, but I also want you to be thinking about this with your staff too.

So when somebody is being negative towards somebody else in a staff meeting, you want to pull them aside, teach them this philosophy of how many people are involved in this and how It's hurting them with all the bystanders, all the people that are seeing this, that they're not being perceived, well, sometimes you got to take employee aside and say, how do you think you did during that meeting? And they'll tell you, I thought I did good or this or that, or I thought I made my points. And I say, Well, let me give you a second perspective. A lot of people thought you were very aggressive. A lot of people thought you were mean to somebody. A lot of people thought you were egotistical.

Now I know better. But it looked that way. I'm telling you this because I don't want you to get hurt with all these different people, because these are people that can help promote your career. See how important it is for you to know both from a leadership perspective and employee perspective, which means you're increasing your value within the company and to help your staff increase their value within the company. Certainly not detract from it. Yeah, other tip is to fire all the backstage If this isn't a one time incident, or they didn't really know how they were being perceived, like we just talked about, they're just people that go around and stab everybody in the back.

You want to get rid of them fast. These people are so negative, they're going to end up hurting everybody in the team. People are going to start quitting because of them. productivity is going to go down. It's just there's no upside. When I find out somebody is a backstabber, they love to talk behind people's backs and do these types of things.

I fire them as quick as I can, and I rehire somebody better. That's it. I'm excited for you in the very next section, we're going to jump in to the advanced skills. I'll see you there.