Welcome back, everybody, Professor Paul here. Congratulations. You've made it to the advanced skills of a powerful and effective leader. We've got some great tools, strategies and techniques here for you that can revolutionize the way you practice leadership. So the first strategy is that the wise leader understands themselves so they can understand others. What does this mean?

It means that self awareness creates other awareness. If you understand why you do the things you do, and the mental structures of why you do them, literally how you think you will have deeper insights into why other people do these things. I remember when I first started doing addiction counseling, I was considered what they call one of the normies. I hadn't had a previous addiction problem. So I wanted to understand what addicts were going through. And I remember sitting in a group where they talked about addiction as the great unifier.

They said everybody's addicted to something. With addicts, it just happens to be alcohol and drugs with other people. It's sex, it's gambling, it's exercise, it's relationships. It's overeating, all these types of things. So what I did is I picked out something that was difficult for me, which was maintaining my weight. So I said, Okay, I'm addicted to food.

Now food you can't even abstain from the way an adequate abstain from a drink or a drug. So theoretically, it's actually harder to do. Just like it's harder to treat an anorexic because they can't avoid food. They have to eat some. It's hard to help somebody lose weight because they can't stop eating. You can't avoid the thing that triggers your reactions.

So I said, Boy, this will be perfect. Then I noticed all the mental gymnastics I used and the Lies denial, I used to tell myself why it was okay to eat something, I would say things like, well, you got to eat a little bit through the day, or you'll slow down your metabolism or treat once in a while won't hurt. Or this is an orange or fruit or vegetable, so it really doesn't count as calories. Oranges have a ton of calories. They're a sugar based, natural organic form of sugar. So even though it's very healthy for you, it has a lot of calories.

So I was fooling myself. I would say, well, you got to eat three meals a day. No, not if you want to lose weight. Right now I eat one sensible meal a day. I have a small tiny tiny snack maybe 100 calories during the day. I sip on coffee during the day to keep my urges down because it reduces appetite.

And I have some very low calorie snacks at night all very healthy, all very low calorie when I watch TV and that's it if I eat too three meals a day, I'd be big as a house. So I had to work through all these different denial systems and deal with the cravings and deal with the emotions, and deal with how I fooled myself out of accomplishing my own goal. helped me understand the addict helped me understand myself better, and help me in multiple areas of my life. Because we don't just kid ourselves in the area of food. We use these exact same logic flaws I call them, or pseudo logic near logic, looks okay until you examine it then turns out to be a lie. So what do we do?

We don't look too close. helps us do what we were going to do anyways. This hurts us in virtually every area of our life. So by understanding this, I made quantum leaps in my ability to counsel addicts and quantum leaps in my life and it hit every area, hit work it hit relationships, it hit health, it hit everything because I was learning so universal truths about the human condition. How by understanding myself first, that's how you understand the other person. You're in a school called life.

It is constantly trying to teach you things about yourself. That if you use the acronym I told you the how acronym honesty, openness, willingness, honesty is allowing this information about yourself to come in. Openness is the willingness to accept that information, to look at it, to examine it, to learn from it. And the willingness is the ability to take action based on this new understanding. So if you practice how within yourself, you understand yourself, you'll understand others better, and you'll be able to lead them better, help them better. And not only will this help you in leadership, in work in promotions, it will help you in every single area of your life.

This is a major key skill. This is why it's in the advanced section. Even if you say yeah, yeah, yeah, Mr. Paul, I understand This now until you've done it until you've experimented with it until you've utilized it in your life. You do not understand this concept. You can't understand it by listening to me, you have to apply it. It's like I can't teach you intellectually, how to do a backflip, you have to get out on the mat and do it over and over again, have the experience of it, and then you can learn how to do a backflip, there's no other way to do it.

So no, you do not understand this concept yet. You do not even understand the full benefits of it yet, because I can describe it as wonderfully as I like. And you still don't understand how powerful this is, until you've done it yourself. Let's jump into the next tip. Now here's another tip that goes right back to the one thing that you can control in life, yourself. You are the source of all your success and conversely all your failures So the wise leader knows that they need to learn how to control themselves, so that they can shape others.

And this is an old Zen expression. If you can't control yourself, you will control nothing else. You are the center, you have to learn how to control you. In the last tip, we talked about how to use denial and what I call mental gymnastics different ways that you fool yourself into believing things that aren't true. That's a lack of mental control and a lack of awareness. You're not slowing down, you're not being still you're not listening to yourself.

That's how this denial these lies get by. This is what creates a lack of awareness. You need to settle down, quiet down and learn how to control yourself. People say what is self discipline is the disciplining of the self. It's learning to consider your own discomfort as relatively unimportant, to be willing to go inside yourself. To learn about yourself, and once you've learned about yourself, now you can control yourself until you learn about yourself, which was the last tip.

You cannot control yourself because you don't know the tricks that you use on yourself. So what you'll try to do to control yourself is use willpower. No, you need to understand how you trick yourself how you fool yourself, how you self sabotage yourself. One of the dirty secrets of psycho psychology is that we fool ourselves. We are the source and the solution to 98% of our problems. We create the problems and then we say, Oh my goodness, I had this horrible problem.

Like it was done to you. No, you're doing it to you. And you're doing it on a daily basis. How do you stop by learning to control yourself? Now once you're centered and you have control of yourself, you can also begin to what control others you can help to shape them in mold them. Why?

Because all of your flaws, all of your biases are out of the way. You've also learned so much about yourself both personal knowledge and control, that you can now share these distinctions, this new knowledge with other people to help shape them into mold them. Again, this is a process you can only truly know by doing it. So get out there, practice it, do it. I've actually got a great training on Zen that can help you with some of this. Now, the very next tip goes along with the other two.

The wise leader knows that stillness creates clarity, insight, creativity, and strength. And I put a nice quote down here. If you're taking notes, go ahead and put this in your notes. How can you hear yourself when you're not listening? Good question. Right?

You're having thoughts within your mind. It's a continual stream of thoughts. You need to be alone in a room by yourself very quiet. So you can hear what's going on. What is that going to give you? It's gonna slow down your thoughts, slow down your thinking, give you clarity, in that clarity where your thoughts have slowed down, where you're looking at them.

We're analyzing them that will give you what insight that insight will help you come up with new solutions. And it'll give you creativity. Because when you calm the mind and you have new insights, creative ideas pop up, they come to the surface, great new ideas that can transform your life in any area and certainly in business. It also gives you strength. in stillness, and clarity, in this calmness and the serenity. You recharge your batteries.

You're also learning Do things about yourself in the stillness. As you learn new things, you're able to eliminate weaknesses and accentuate or build new strengths. Monks will always tell you that doing nothing is one of the best activities you can ever do. Why? Because they're doing that how acronym that honesty, openness and willingness. It looks like they're sitting there doing nothing.

Oh, no, they have it. massive action going on in their mind. There's this whole psychic landscape that they're going through where they're doing the real work of thinking. And remember, we said the difference between managers and line people is managers will make the decision and they do the hard work of thinking. That's what somebody is doing when they're meditating. It's slow, clear, focused, insightful thinking.

They're learning they're learning From themselves. There's an old quote that says a man alone in a room by himself can solve most any problem. Put that in your notes. That's it for your tips for today and I'll see you in the very next section.