Overload.
Stress. Anxiety. Burnout.
Our guest today wants to help us understand these outcomes
and see how they don't have to happen.
You don't have to excuse me.
You don't want to overdraft your checking account.
And today we'll talk about how to avoid an emotional overdraft.
Welcome to another episode of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast,
where we are helping leaders grow personally and professionally
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And then I hope you will stay right where you are.
As I bring in my guest, Andy Brown,
who has me tell you a little about Andy before we dive in.
He has over 30 years experience as an award winning advisor
and coach in people based businesses.
He's also a podcast host and the author of the Amazon
number one bestseller, The Emotional Overdraft
ten Simple Changes for Balancing Business Success and Well-Being.
It's a book for entrepreneurs and leaders and founders that articulates
the often overlooked mental and physical costs of leadership.
If you're here, you've probably experienced some of those,
which is why I have Andy with me.
Andy Joy, thanks for joining us.
So glad that you're here.
Thanks for having me, Kevin, and to be on your podcast.
I was listening to one a while ago with Steve and forget his surname,
and he was talking about the transforming stress into hardiness.
That was I thought, that's my world, that this Kevin is in my world.
And at that point, I thought, I'm excited to talk to you.
And, by the way, I'd recommend that podcast.
It was a few, a few ago now, but,
really enjoyable.
So, delighted to be here.
I'm glad to have you.
And, we'll make sure that we. I'm not 100% sure.
I remember either, but I'll make sure that we have that in the
show notes for all of you so you can connect to that.
So you've written this great book, which really is
about this idea of an emotional overdraft.
I want to get to that.
But before we do that, I really want
to just have you tell us
a little bit more about the journey that gets you to this point.
Because you've been in business,
you've been advising leaders and all the sorts of things.
How do you end up talking about this,
and how do you end up writing a book about this?
So two very different questions in a way.
I ended up here.
I was, I started off life as a researcher.
Paid my way through university, doing that.
And, that led me into advertising and marketing.
I end up, on,
on the board of a advertising agency, set up my own business.
I bought, I was sold
two businesses once quite successfully and once very not successfully.
So I've experienced both sides of building and selling a business.
I, was on the board of of
the largest independent agency in the world
for a while, which is called essence before it got bought out.
And I've run my businesses, so I've, I've,
I've got a lot of experience running businesses,
relatively small businesses as sub sub 150 people, typically,
and I suppose it was ten years ago I was the MD,
managing director of, of a business
and a friend of mine said a coach friend of mine said, you know, you could
you could be doing consultancy rather than working one company at a time.
You could work with a handful of companies,
and then you kind of have more impact.
And it sort of got in my head.
And I thought about it over Christmas that year, and he introduced me
to someone, and I ended up working for a consulting firm,
mergers and acquisitions consulting firm, which was fascinating,
and I learned a lot, but M&A was primarily just about money.
It was just about how quickly can we get this business to to a sale,
and how quickly can we turn that into fee. And that wasn't
I wasn't what I was therefore really.
So I left it six years ago to set up my own business.
And I work with a handful of of really great communications
and research businesses to help them become more valuable.
And maybe they'll sell, maybe they won't.
Maybe they'll
acquire somebody else, maybe they'll raise funds, maybe it gives them options.
But if you become a more valuable business, then you have choices.
If you if you want to grow, to sell, then you can find
the market's moved around you.
So so my day job is advising companies on,
building a more successful and valuable business.
Okay, so. That's how I got here.
That's my sort of background I suppose. Right.
But in terms of emotional overdraft. Exactly.
I've been on boards since I've run businesses,
been a leader owned businesses for, I don't know,
maybe 35 since the 90s.
And I've been consulting with
multiple businesses for the last 7 or 8 years.
And what I was observing was,
I've got a business degree,
I've got I've done all those things, the classical stuff.
The control of a business was typically around what,
what my clients now would call the financials.
Every time we have a board meeting, we start with the financials.
And what I realized was that the financials were
actually the thing that we could measure.
There were lots of things going on that we couldn't measure.
But because it's difficult to measure, we don't talk.
We don't talk about those. We talk. We talk about how we.
Yeah, we can talk about profitability.
We can talk about revenue growth or decline.
We can talk about staff churn.
We can talk about retention rates.
We can talk about utilization.
All the stuff we talk about in the board meeting.
But there's some other stuff going on in businesses which isn't easy to measure.
And I started noticing it.
And what it was was I have now called an emotional overdraft.
And I can get to why I called it that in the end.
But this behavior,
I summarize it by saying is when people subsidize the success of their business
at their own personal, mental or physical cost, I'll say it again.
So you're subsidizing the success
of your business at your own mental or physical cost.
And most people are saying that to
take a moment, take a beat and then go,
oh God, yeah, yeah, I recognize that.
I recognize that
I did some research, of course, because I'm a researcher by training.
I spoke to to more than 50 businesses.
And all of them. Spoiler.
Sorry if you can. If you get a by the book, here's a spoiler alert.
Everyone has an emotional overdraft. Thank you for that, Kevin.
To some extent or another,
everyone has an emotional overdraft and that's what I call this things.
So with an overdraft, a financial overdraft,
it's it gives you the capacity to go beyond your,
the money you actually have
for the short.
For short, for short term.
To do something that you might really need to do.
So it might be to pay a big unexpected bill.
It might be to,
because you haven't really budgeted very well that month or whatever, but you,
you go into overdraft, you, you have the facility,
it cost you a lot of money, and then you go back out to the facility
because it's the stupidest borrowing you can.
You can have, you know,
if it was longer term for a car, you get some sort of structured financing,
you wouldn't buy a car and an overdraft, certainly in a long term.
And an emotional overdraft is the same thing.
You I am absolutely not saying that we shouldn't be committed
to our businesses, that we shouldn't go beyond
go above and beyond, work longer hours, be more committed, feel it more personally.
All those things that I've done myself.
But I am saying that if you stay in that state for any extended
period of time, it's too expensive either
physically and or mentally.
And where it can lead to is stress.
It can lead to, physical challenges, which you might not even recognize.
You might even notice, it can have impacts on your family.
It can have impacts on your community, your friends.
It ripples out everywhere.
So I thought it was a really good analogy for we understand that an overdraft is
is a good and necessary thing sometimes, but we don't stay in it.
And if you can go into your emotional overdraft, you can do what you need to do.
Really commit.
Double down work, long hours and then come out and pay it back.
Rest, recover.
Be kind to yourself. Be kind to those around you.
Then you've got a very sustainable business model.
And this is leadership or this is founders,
leaders, entrepreneurs have a very similar mentality.
When it comes to this.
I think the reality of emotional overdraft is that most of us
behave like this anyway, whether we're running a business or not.
There's a certain sense of self-sacrifice and if you swap out
subsidizing the success of your business with subsidizing the success
of your operation or your enterprise, it could be someone running a family.
I get I get mothers who read this book.
I mean, this is the utter joy of having put this book into the world.
Is that people some people read it, and
but I get people, I people come back to me and I know it's
I know it's having an effect, but I had a mother recently come back to me.
She said.
I read my friends the first chapter and they said, who is this?
And they were like, oh, this is you.
This is, you know, she's not really in company.
She's not a leader in the conventional sense,
but she's a a CEO of her family, and she's
she felt she was constantly subsidizing
everyone else's happiness and everyone else's success and her friends.
It would always be her that put herself out to do the thing.
And so she said, and it resonated with me.
So I think it's a fairly universal thing.
It's a very long answer, your question, so I apologize
if that's where it came from.
I'm glad you brought that up because, you know, you talked about
you work with founders,
you work with entrepreneurs, and certainly that is, a use for this.
But this this applies to all leaders, which is why you're here,
because our audience is right and all those things.
Right. So, in this.
So I get all I get books all the time, right?
People are pitching us to have to be on the show.
And so, you know, you look for patterns before you dive in and make decisions.
Right.
And so I read I pick up the book and it says emotional overdraft
on an angle, which is cool.
Changes for balancing business success and well-being.
So the first thing that comes into my head is this is a book about work
life balance.
See, that's why that's why I want to bring that up.
Because I want you.
Because you wrote this book to talk to me about what
you how you feel about that term work life balance.
I think you know how I feel about it.
Well, I've read the book. Yeah.
No one else listening has.
No, no, no, no, not nobody else.
Not nobody else. Maybe.
But yes, it's true. I'm going to read first right.
Where they are.
They are and I, I get it, I get it.
It's a really helpful expression.
Work life balance is a really helpful expression in that it
it raises the issue of not of not
being subsumed by your work.
So, so in that sense it's great.
But but it also sets up a dichotomy as a phrase.
It suggests that work and life are separate things, and you either work
or you live.
And you can't, you know,
almost can't wait for work to stop so you can carry on and do your life.
If you're an entrepreneur, if you're a leader,
if you're anyone who's committed to their career, you work isn't.
Work is just part of life.
Work is part of that continuum.
So if you call it work lifestyle balance,
maybe that's getting closer to something that's that's more useful because it's,
a balancing how I live and how I exist, and my role in my community and my role
in my family and everything else with my dedication and commitment to work.
Then probably I buy that.
But work life balance, I just think, sets up a
for for people like you and me
and for people listening who who are really dedicated to what they do.
They aren't separate things.
So it's just not a helpful it's not a helpful or useful thing to to describe.
So that's that's my view on work life balance.
It's and I but but but.
But I also understand you know my publisher would love to me
to put work life balance on the front of it.
And I refuse to do it
because it's a phrase that people do understand
and is it's it's helpful, but it's a helpful on the way to something.
I think it's in here.
It's just not what the book's about.
And the thing that I will say to it, because you've already hinted at this,
is that I always talk about work life balance,
is that people seem to think that there's a perfect place to be,
and the reality is that we're all in seasons,
whether it's seasons of life or seasons of the year or, you know, whatever.
Right?
Like, okay, I've got a new book coming out in a few months, few months.
Now, by the time you might be reading this, it might be very soon.
Like where my focus is, is different than it might be.
Might have been seven months. It. Well, seven months ago I was writing the book.
But my point is that where we are in our life
and in our work means that where we are on these things might be different.
Your comment earlier
and we're going to get into this about the overdraft for a second, is that
we might need to go to a different place for a while, but it's not sustainable.
We can't stay there.
And in that regard, if we think about work life balance that way,
then it's helpful.
But the way most
think about it, to your point, well stated, it's less than helpful.
It makes people think that there's a place they're supposed to get to,
and they don't ever feel like they're getting there.
Yeah, because a balanced state is, is a healthy thing.
You know, it's it's what you guys were wrestling for in your election recently
is, is, you know, it wasn't as simple as I prefer this person or that person.
It was it was.
How do we find some some balance in, in our politics
that gives us the opportunity to, to to succeed and to thrive.
And we've just had the election in the UK as well in the, in the summer.
And it was exactly the same challenge.
So balance guys are just smarter because you don't make it take as long
or cost as much.
I'm just going to say that about all that.
So let's just. Make it.
All of us and move on from there.
So why and you've hinted at this already, but why do we do it?
Like, why do we as leaders, maybe more,
but as leaders to the point of the show,
why do we go into overdraft?
Why do we go
to the perilous place?
And that's that's the question.
So when I first wrote
the book, I came up, I did the research, came up with the idea,
wrote it, submitted to the publisher, and the publisher went, and this is great.
We think this is really interesting.
Where's the rest of the book?
And I said, what do you mean, what's the rest of the book?
And they said, well, you know, okay, so we get the idea of overdraft.
What do we do about it?
What do we do about the overdraft?
So I had to write the second half of the book, which is that
you may have come across, but I felt a bit foolish.
But but I share the story.
So why do we get into overdraft?
What's
at the risk of making this sound
simple?
And I think it is simple, but it's not easy.
I think it is simple.
It's broadly because of habits.
And what I've identified in the research for the book is
there are ten broadly ten areas or ten habitual behaviors.
I call them drivers, but they are ten behaviors
or habits which which to a greater extent affect all of us.
And the profile is always different.
But the certainly this this combination of ten drivers
and we typically behave out of habit.
And the good thing about habit is if we don't notice it.
And the bad thing about habit is that we don't notice it.
So it's it's good that it helps us do things without thinking.
Well, especially if they're good.
They're useful at helpful things, right? Like breathing.
You know, you don't want to think about breathing all the time because that's not
it is. A good. Residual but it's reflex.
Deep breathing.
I that's my big conclusion in the book is keep breathing,
which is not a bad thing to do
with breathing exercises, but that's a different story.
So, yeah, the, the, the broadly ten behaviors
and they're universal to everybody is just the balance of
those behaviors is is different for almost everybody.
And for example,
a classic one
is what I call jft, which the publisher insists are called
just flipping do it is is a safety behavior is,
if you're a doer, I just get things done, I get things, I'm one of those people.
I get things done. That's why I'm a leader.
I pile in, I lead from the front.
So I make things happen, I get things done.
I'm not afraid to roll up my sleeves.
I'm ready to do it.
Yeah, and that's great.
And that's what's interesting about all these behaviors on
want like a Swot analysis that you what you did at college.
You know every strength is a weakness.
Every opportunity is a threat. This is the problem.
But it's not a bad thing to be a doer.
But when that doing mentality means that
the answer there's a problem
in your in your organization or your team and the answer is you.
You jump in and fix it, or you always have to get involved,
or you're the person that likes to lead from the front and show people
how to do it. And then you kind of hang around.
This is the sort of behavior that then, well, what happens?
I'll tell you what happens.
If you're a doer, you've got a team and they will,
try and solve a problem and you'll jump in and go,
like, let's do it this way and let's do that way.
And I wouldn't do that.
I do this, and you come in and tell them how to do it, and the team goes,
okay, well.
And he's going to come and fix that.
So what that and they get on with it.
And if you keep doing that, what happens is that team,
there's no such thing as bad dogs, just bad owners.
You know, you can you teach your team
to expect you to jump in and help.
And what happens is that over time they'll go, well, I'm a bit less engaged.
I'm a bit less,
I know, and he's going to jump in anyway, so I'm not going to commit as much effort
to this. It'll be wrong anyway because he he's always got the answer.
So he's going to jump in.
I'll just do a sort of draft and then and he can fix it.
And one day you're well.
Apparently that's what he and he wants.
So I would be because he keeps playing the game as it's been designed.
Precisely. Like it or not, that's the game.
That's the way we play it.
And then I wake up one morning
and I've got a team of people who are disengaged, unmotivated,
who do bad work, and I'm thinking, how come I'm the only person
in this company who is interested in standards, who's doing good work, who's
who's having good decisions, who's originating ideas.
How come I'm the only one?
Well, because, Andy, I don't I don't know how I end up talking about myself.
I should have, should have, Kevin.
But, you know, how come that's happened? What?
I've spent years probably teaching that team to respond that way.
And what happens is they're sitting back, they're less engaged.
They make less progress.
They, there's fewer promotions.
There's a very long cycle of behaviors that follow on behind that.
But what we do know is that you are going to have to spend more time.
You're going to be dragged into more things.
You're going to fail. You have to do more.
And then other behaviors start to come, come into play.
Like trust is a big one.
So very aligned with Jfrd is the trust behavior.
It's great to trust people.
It's great to trust your team and you should do that.
But lots and lots of leaders struggle to trust their team.
And imagine you've just been doing all this, Jay.
FDLE behavior.
And now I've started to doubt my team a bit.
I did I recruit good people or not.
How how did I get how do these people get through the recruitment process?
These people are pretty bang on average.
What's happened to them?
Well, I don't quite trust them anymore.
So what am I going to do? I'm going to start hiring some other people.
Maybe I'm going to find other teams.
I'm going to stop giving them work. They become demotivated.
They might leave. They might look for more fulfilling work
and so trust.
And that reinforces my feeling about trust because I go what?
I was right not to trust them.
And I've been in so many companies, particularly working with
smaller companies where where the leadership
kind of know everybody or, you know, 70, 80, 90, 100 and up to, you know,
mid hundreds, you kind of know who everybody is and the solution,
what you spot the behavior and ends up with them sacking people.
They release people and they say it's a shame you didn't quite work out.
You'd been here 2 or 3 years. We thought you were going to be great.
Didn't really work for us.
That's for all of us.
If you go, but thanks a lot.
And, you know, good luck in your career.
And it keeps happening.
And that's one of the really clear signals
that either you're recruiting very badly,
but probably the some of that, because everyone does
not everyone, almost everyone does or, or you're doing
something to turn people from good people into, into less good people.
And always in my career, I've hired for attitude.
I think you hire for attitude.
You can't teach attitude.
So hire people with amazing attitudes
and you can teach them what you need to teach them.
But even then I found myself because I'm not immune from this, believe me.
I found that I've hired people with great attitude.
So over time, I've just kind of become disengaged, become
less, less than I thought they would.
And I know that's down to me.
I had a I had a, a member of staff, an amazing bright lady
who's gone on to do incredible things.
And she once said to me in a meeting, she said, and I was mad at the time.
She said, Andy, one day you'll make a really good MD.
And I thought, well, I had an empty what do you what?
I've been an empty for about 15 years.
What are you talking about?
But her point was that I thought I was doing all the right things.
There's a brilliant book called the, multipliers by,
Liz Wiseman.
Liz Wiseman there you go.
Liz Wiseman and the Australian chap, his nickname of Cabot Multipliers.
Fantastic book. And I thought I was a multiplier.
I thought I was helping my team by doing all the right things and by.
But it turns out I was what Liz calls an accidental dementia.
I was actually doing all the right things, but it wasn't landing
as well as I thought.
And it's a very small difference, but it can have a huge impact on your people.
And that's what she meant
when she bought me the book and gave it to me, which is such a kind,
a kind and considerate.
I mean, clearly she thought I was a good leader,
but she didn't think I was having the impact I should be having.
And she she
she cared enough to buy me this book, which which is an outstanding book.
It is and Liz has been on the show.
We'll make sure that everybody.
Who hasn't seen this haven't seen that one.
As well.
So Liz Wiseman said outstanding.
I mean, you know, to be on the same podcast she's been on.
Hello tough.
There you go.
Well I think thank you I guess.
So here's here's the thing.
There are ten drivers we do not have time to talk about ten.
We have talked about two.
We've talked about Jfrd I, which is when I took your assessment
and will tell people how they can get to your assessment a little bit.
That came out as my highest or worst one.
I don't think in my case it's always and maybe this is just Kevin justifying,
that it's always that I feel like I have to, but I feel like I want to.
It is also partly about related to for me like and in fact,
if it's not a huge problem for me, at least in terms of the
the engagement of my team, it's because I think I'm really good.
And and your assessment says I'm in good shape on the trust one,
so I balance that one.
But here's the one that I think there's that at least for Kevin
sees a connection to J f FDI
and that's urgency.
Right I'm not I'm doing it to be helpful.
And I'm doing it just because we just need to get we just need to keep moving.
And so talk about this urge again we can't get to all of them so.
Well someone's written a book. What about the driver.
The agency.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead I'll just say someone's written a book with all the ten things in it.
So if you're interested, you can always grab a copy of that.
Thank you.
Kevin. Here it is.
Emotional Overdraft by Andy Brown.
That's who we're talking to.
So talk about this driver of urgency.
So urgency is really interesting.
And in the research it showed up as things like,
the comments would be
I asked people why why they ended up in this state
and they said things like, well, I was short of time.
I was acting on reflex.
I wasn't thinking, I just, I just jump in and get and sort of get it done.
So it feels important is it's very highly related to charity.
And that's the other thing is I've
artificially created the distinctions, but they they blur,
they, you know, they edge into each other a little bit.
And urgency is
really useful.
And if you're a team leader and you want to get things done
and you're, you're encouraging your team to do things really quickly, it's great.
I mean, that's a really good thing
at times.
Until it's not like in everyone's mind.
And then and so it's not right.
And and what's what's interesting is that
I look at urgency and go, well why is it urgent?
What has made this urgent.
It's it's a big one of the big drivers and lots of people have it.
So the question to ask yourself, if you if you keep find yourself
in urgent situations where you have to jump in,
you feel like you don't have a choice.
Other than to usually get involved.
And remember, if you're getting involved,
that means that you're not doing the things on your to do list.
You're not doing the important stuff of leadership.
You're not developing your teams.
All that stuff that can wait that doesn't seem to matter, will wait.
So urgency is really important to understand.
But if you find you're you're in, urgent situations,
ask yourself the question, why is this urgent?
What has made this become urgent?
And if you do that and you're honest about it, what you might discover
is that it could actually be,
something you could have anticipated.
And so I talk to people about this all the time,
or they'll say, yeah, but what if my client phones up?
Big cloud, biggest client phones up in the morning.
I've got my day planner. They phone up first thing in the morning.
They say it's all gone wrong and we need to get it fixed.
How could I have predicted that?
You know, that's that's urgent. And I couldn't predict it.
Well, that's not really true, is it?
Because unless that's the only time that's ever happened.
Yeah. That isn't
that's, you know, which is not never is, then it's actually predictable.
It's not predictable
exactly when it's going to happen, but it is predictable that it will happen.
And in my world, I'd say, and I've got to tell you,
the answer to lots of emotional overdraft is really boring stuff.
It's like process.
It's it's organization. It's delegation.
It's tracking and monitoring this, these are things.
But when you're when you're in emotional overdraft,
when you're absolutely, you know, when you're stressed,
when you're burning out, the last thing you feel you can do is stop
and organize stuff.
So what I hope we can come back to that.
Well, let me just make an observation
because it's an example in the book and I won't go to it.
Exactly. I mean, I get it perfect, but
and but it rung true for me about urgency.
We get in that moment.
There's the fire.
I need to go get the fire extinguisher.
Right now.
In the book, you talk about someone's, a client saying, I need this on Monday.
And they were getting ready to go away for the weekend.
Yeah.
And and if we don't stop,
we just take the laptop and power through it.
But if we do stop, we might ask
the customer, hey, I'm about ready to go for the weekend.
Is Monday. Would would Tuesday work.
And that six and if.
They say yes, awesome.
If they say no, you still at least no, right?
Or they say end of day Monday is fine,
which is the same, might be the same thing. It's Tuesday.
So my point is all we have to do is stop, take a breath.
Yeah.
And in many of these because because here's the thing.
You said it earlier and and there's a chapter at the end about habits here.
Right?
Is if we don't stop and we run on automatic, we run on our habit.
That's where we run the risk of any of these things,
any of the ten becoming an issue.
But if we'll stop, take a breath and say, what if?
Or is this serving me or whatever? Right.
So like Kevin Jfrd, I
well, let me just roll up my sleeves and help.
Okay.
Is that serving the situation?
Is it even seen as helpful by the team?
Even though if that's my entire intention.
Yeah, maybe.
Maybe not.
Maybe what they'd rather hear is.
Hey, I know you're really busy. What can I do for you?
Do you want me to order the pizza?
Like, maybe that's what they need.
And that. And you've nailed it.
The secret.
And the reason emotional overdraft is so important as a phrase
is because if you recognize that you are in those habits
and you're in your emotional overdraft for too long,
then take a second.
Just take a second and go.
What could I do differently?
What could I do differently now?
And that's often enough to break a habit.
It's it's often enough to make you recognize I.
Okay, so when I get running 2 or 3 times a week,
I have to put my trainers by the bedroom door.
If I don't, I know that I'm going to probably find an excuse.
There's two ways to cold it to sunny.
It's to whatever to Monday.
Well, wet and to to wet and to cold and most likely where you live.
I'm just going.
They are, they are. Yeah.
But I wanted to put it out but but if I put them by my bedroom door,
I know that by that I do have to get in the habit
of putting them by the bedroom door. So it reminds me.
That's the habit.
So that's well, that's. A good habit.
So that's how you flip it. Right?
I would say that's the routine,
you know, that helps you reinforce the habit that you want.
So there's loads of books about habit and but I'll just finish
that thing about the, about the urgency because it's important.
The first one was was a true story.
I had a head of a whole department, a brilliant, talented lady
who came to me and said,
you know, I've got to cancel my holiday because I'm going to.
The third time, I think it was, because I've got to get this thing done on Monday.
And I just said, have you asked the client if they really need it by Monday?
Because we all go.
Client wants it, client gets it, client wants it, client gets it.
That's
not always true because the client often they bring you answers, not questions.
And I often say to my teens, go and ask them a question.
Can I ask what?
Find out what's behind what they're telling you
because they're saying we need it by Mondays. An answer to something.
What actually did they need?
She went back and chatted to them and said, look,
I'm going on holiday this weekend.
I can get it done by Monday.
But if I if I go away, I just still get it done by Tuesday.
And the client went great. Have a lovely weekend.
Have a great holiday.
You know. And now just ask me.
And that was the habit that was to have it broken.
She went I'll take a beat.
I recognize what I'm doing.
I'll actually ask the client.
So it's so important it gives you the chance to stop, but also the urgency.
I was talking about the one where,
where
a client ask you to do something really quickly.
Actually, if that happens more than once, it does happen more than once.
There's probably something happening in the background
that is leading to the client to asking for it.
So it could be that every time a client asks for something, you guys say yes.
So why would they stop asking why?
Why wouldn't they?
They'll just keep taking. They'll keep taking.
And that's what clients do. That's almost the definition of them.
So they're going to go I expect it tomorrow.
They're not going to say,
well maybe could you do it by the end of the week,
or could you do it in two weeks time
that they're not thinking about what you're doing?
They're just going, well, they always get it to me by, you know, in 24 hours.
So I'll ask for. 24 hours.
So we train the client to expect that.
So but so that's what I'm saying behind that urgency
as a leader it's critical for me that you go hang on.
Maybe the team have to respond really quickly on this occasion,
but let's just step back and have a look at this and go,
have we taught our client to behave that way or
if it happens regularly?
And so I used to have a business where,
we were a media agency
and we had to place ads on a particular day.
And, you know, that day,
you know, you got to place an ad on a Wednesday,
it's got to appear on a Wednesday,
and we get the ad supplied to us by a creative agency.
And often they'd be very late.
And my team were fantastic.
And they would make up
a day or two shortfall and they'd find a way to get those ads live.
But occasionally it would go wrong and the ads wouldn't show up.
And then the client would give my team brief
and I said, have you ever told the client what the process is
and why we say we need them four days before the media booking?
And they said, no, we never told them.
I said, why don't we?
Because we get lots of clients doing this.
Why don't we make a little animation?
That just explains it very simply,
and then we can use that, and then we can say to them,
and when your creative agency supplies with two days notice and we're really
we need for we're not being difficult.
There's these processes we're.
Trying to make.
Eagle and compliance. Make it happen.
Is it so any other.
And it changed. It changed.
The media buying department with the clients
because suddenly their clients were educated to understand
all those emergency slowed down.
They'd start giving their creative agencies the pressure rather than my team.
The pressure.
I mean, that was in
a in a period when we doubled in size in 18 months.
So we were under pressure anyway.
We were doing amazing things, but that sort of thinking.
So there's an urgency,
it's urgent but might not have been as urgent
if we'd done something else differently, if we had better processes.
You know, if it's urgent because we made a mistake
till we had better quality assurance or checking or
it's almost always something so, so urgency.
Yes. It's great.
You can jump in and fix it is great that you can do really well with it, but
a lot of urgency can be mitigated by better planning and better organization.
And and so committed we are.
We were talking with Andy Brown, the author of The Emotional Overdraft.
And and the richness that we've had in this conversation
is about a very small part of the book, which is why you make sure you go
buy your copy more about how to do that in a second.
But I have a couple other questions.
Andy, before we finish.
And, because here's the thing.
You know, normally the show is about 30 minutes.
We're already over that. And. Sorry.
And all that means is that this was a good conversation.
But what it also means is that we're we're we're starting to dive into what
other people might have said, that, hey, this is more time that I spend with Kevin.
So I want to be aware of that,
but I do have a couple of other questions before we go.
Number one is I want to know, Andy, what you do for fun,
because one of the things we need to do
to get back out of our emotional overdraft is to make sure we're not missing
on those things that bring us joy and rejuvenation.
And so what are those things for you?
Well, I,
I exercise well, I mean, I'm coming three.
Days a week if you put the fuze out there, are you already doing well?
If I do well I and I go to the gym two days a week as well. And,
my published is a really good example of this.
She's run every day consecutively for over six years,
and she does that by,
her definition of run is anything a two kilometers or more.
So it doesn't have to be miles.
It can just be a mile.
But every day she's committed and she's struggling originally to do it.
And she changed the mindset and changed it from, I tried to run every day
to I am someone who runs every day,
and she now recognizes herself as someone who runs every day.
I'm a. Runner.
And that's not someone who tries
to run every day, because if you try, you've got permission not to run.
She's someone who runs every day and she identifies with that.
And I only share that because I do love running quite long distances. But
if you're listening to this and going back
and you don't have time, I'm too busy and I hear it all the time.
I stop going to the gym.
You know, I don't play five a side anymore.
I, I've stopped playing sports.
These things are so easy to let go when you think you're busy.
These are the things you have to plug into this.
The physicality this morning is it was a beautiful sunny day in the UK.
It's a rare thing but a beautiful day.
And I made time this morning.
I moved a couple of things and I went for a walk.
I love walking, I love working quite long distances, rambling.
That's one of my my big hobbies.
The other thing is I support, a football team.
Football is actually football. I think you call it soccer.
And, I go and support them.
And as a 59 year old man, I can stand on the terrace with lots of other
balding men and shout abuse that people are never see again in my life.
So for 90 minutes, it's
just an amazing release and a sense of community being in this.
And I don't support a very good team.
So there's always this shared sense of angst,
angst and depression and yeah, but but it's a it's a glorious thing.
And, and it doesn't feel very grown up.
And that's also probably a very good thing as well.
So that's what I do to.
But I make the time to do it.
I plan it into my diary and I make the time to do it.
We make choices and we make the choice to do that.
And I don't have to run.
I choose to run.
I get to run.
I'm a runner, right?
I love that, what are you reading or or.
Andy, what's something that you've read recently?
I do read a lot.
But right now I'm rereading a book which is called connect
by Carol Robin.
And connect is, is,
I think it's Harvard, but the carol runs the most oversubscribed Scribd course
on the Harvard MBA course, and it's known universally as the touchy feely course.
And it's so there's the MBA and there's all that kind of series.
You we talked about finances earlier
and how you interpret panel and all those things.
But the touchy feely course is how do you connect with other people.
And it is the single most oversubscribed.
You have to justify getting onto that course.
It's very hard to get on to.
And Carol and her colleagues have written this book called Connect,
and it's it's a series of stories they follow through the book.
It's really beautifully written
about how people connect with each other in a business setting,
and it's so fascinating.
And it's probably 3 or 4 years since I read it, so I pulled it.
I was talking to some of the other day about that.
I pulled it off the shelf, and it's by my book, by my bed right now.
And it's, a fabulous book.
It's a book I wish I'd written. I'm in minds.
Okay. I'm really pleased with it.
But yeah, it's a cracking book.
Well, you know, that's,
that's high praise from any author for someone to say about the other person.
I wish I'd written that.
And there's some of those that I have read, and in some
I've had the chance to tell those people those things.
And so
and we will have that in the show notes, as well as the podcast
that we've mentioned throughout our conversation.
It's it's actually weirdly, connect is a very good audio book.
Sometimes business books.
And I don't think mine's a business book.
I think mine is a self-development book more than anything else, but
it is about business.
But but this particular book works really well as an audiobook.
So if you feel you haven't got time to pick a book up and read it, give it a go.
And audio is is really worth trying.
It's a different, different way of consuming content.
And if people are listening to this podcast, they're already auditory focused.
So why not do that as well?
We we haven't talked with you, Andy,
and I'm going to hold up the book for those who are watching on video, while
you tell people where they can reach you, where do you want to point people?
And if they want a copy of the emotional draft, where do they go?
Just. I'll let you do that for a second. Right now.
Okay? I'm sure most people know where to buy a book.
Amazon, of course, but, local.
Support your local bookstores if you can.
They can definitely get hold of a copy.
It's available universally and, the website.
So emotional overdraft.com.
You can do the self-assessment yourself that we've been talking about.
So you can do that. That's free of charge on there.
Download your own your own results, which might be interesting.
There's also my podcast and lots of I write lots of articles about this
and I speak to lots of people about it.
It's you are not alone.
Everyone deals with this to a greater or lesser extent.
You can do something about it.
You can reverse your emotional overdraft really quickly, but it takes
it takes some. Being deliberate says take a pause.
Take a moment,
reflect on emotional overdraft and if the website helps, emotional overdraft.
Com give it a try.
I hope you'll do that. And before we go,
every
episode I ask you as a listener or viewer of this question
now what what action will you take as a result of this?
And, and
while that is always an important thing, I think from this particular conversation,
there should be plenty for you to think about.
And if all you got was that last point, which was take a breath
and stop and think and make a conscious choice, rather than leaning
into or just relying on whatever your habits are doing to you.
Maybe in some cases, even if it's unintentional.
But whatever it is that you took from this,
my hope is that you will take action and not just
listen and say, oh, that was pretty good.
But rather you say, this is the Andy Brown of all the Andy Browns
on the planet that I want to get to know better.
I need to get a copy of their emotional overdraft
and I and and if you found this useful, which I hope you did,
I also hope that you will share it with someone else, that you will, subscribe
wherever you're getting this content from so you don't miss future episodes.
Andy, thanks so much for being here.
It was a pleasure to have you. You're welcome.
And everybody,
you should subscribe and you should like it.
It depending on where you happen to be listening to it from.
Because we'll be back next week and we hope that you'll be with us
to another episode of the Remarkable Leadership Podcast.