194. Empowering Leaders: Fear Management and the Truth about Quiet Quitting with Mick Spiers

💭 Ever wondered how fear and limiting beliefs can hold you back more than actual failures?

Join us on this episode of The Leadership Project podcast as we unpack these concepts with Dr. Benjamin Ritter, author of "Becoming Fearless." You'll discover how to redefine your relationship with fear and learn practical techniques like the Zeigarnik effect and Brendon Burchard's competence-confidence curve to push beyond your comfort zones. Together, we’ll reveal the untapped power of stepping into courage and incremental growth to build your confidence and competence.

We'll also tackle the rising trend of quiet quitting, a phenomenon that speaks volumes about leadership rather than the employees themselves. Find out how to foster a culture where every team member feels seen, heard, and valued. I'll share my own leadership reflections, discussing the significant impact of appreciation and recognizing the gaps where I can better support my team.

Finally, join Kristina Fussella as she shares her diverse career path to becoming a Chief of Staff, providing valuable insights for those aspiring to be well-rounded leaders. Don't miss this opportunity to elevate your leadership skills and inspire your team!

Chapters

• 0:00 Overcoming Fear and Quiet Quitting
• 10:06 Creating a Culture of Appreciation
• 16:47 Diverse Career Paths in Leadership

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:00

Why is fear holding you back and is quite quitting real? These are our topics for today's solocast on The Leadership Project podcast. We'll start with reflections from our great interview with Dr. Benjamin Ritter celebrating his new book becoming fearless. We'll then discuss some of the myths and conceptions about this concept called Quiet quitting. Is it real? And finally, I'll share my leadership reflections for the week, including where well intended actions can have unintended consequences. Sit back and enjoy the show. So let's start this week with my reflections on the interview with Dr. Benjamin Ritter earlier this week and celebrating his new book Becoming Fearless. Ben is a return guest on the show, and he always brings great value every time he comes. If you haven't caught the episode yet, I do recommend that you go back and listen to it. So what were my reflections? Well, fear and limiting beliefs kill more dreams than failure ever did. It is most often than not that inaction holds us back more than our actions. But here's a few challenging things. There is no such thing as fearless. We all have fear, but fear can be very different from one person to the next. The very definition of courage is to have the ability to act despite fear, not the absence of that fear. Another part that works against us is that we fear loss at a greater degree than we appreciate gain and the loss doesn't have to be financial. It can be our ego. It can be our identity. It's our fear of being judged. What will people think of me if I fail? The failure itself is often not the problem. It's the fear of failure and it's the fear of judgment. We often find ourselves walking around the city constantly pre judging ourselves more than people actually judge us. It could be that you're on the bus right now and you're worried about whether someone's judging you for the shoes that you wore today, and we play this inner narrative out in our head all the time. The reality is the other person's not thinking about you at all, or potentially they're they're only sitting there thinking whether you were judging them. So we have this fear of judgment, but often it's pre judging ourselves in our own mind and with all of these fears, as Seneca says, We suffer more in our mind than in reality. So what can we do with our fears? Well, the first thing we can do is redefine our relationship with fear. Fear is trying to alert us to something. It's giving us something we should pay attention to something that we may need to address. But it does not mean that we need to freeze we need to challenge ourselves by asking better questions. What is this fear? Why this fear? Why this fear? Now? Do I even know that to be true. Quite often, the fear that we're thinking about might not even be real. It's not something that's going to happen. We might ask ourselves, What is the worst that can happen? What is the probability that that will happen? And ultimately, am I catastrophizing? Am I playing this out over and over and over in my mind? But what is playing in my mind doesn't match the reality of the situation. So challenge yourself. Ask better questions about the fear, and then you can do something with it. The other technique is to redefine the fear as something that can work for you. Is this excitement? Is it exhilaration? Is it telling me that I just really care about this thing I'm about to do in the discussion with Ben, we spoke about public speaking, which is a common fear for most people. Do you really fear public speaking. Do you fear being judged, like I said before, or is it just that you really care about the presentation that you're about to do and you really want it to go well? So challenge it. Challenge the fear. Redefine the fear. Have it something that will get you excited and get you motivated, turn it into energy, rather than allowing it to take hold of you so that you don't act. So what are the techniques that we could use to overcome fear? The first one I want to introduce you to is the zygonic effect, and we've spoken about this before when it comes to things like procrast. Donation. The concept here is to get moving and to get the law of inertia to work for you, the law of inertia tells us that a body at rest tends to stay at rest, and a body in motion tends to stay in motion. So if we want to come overcome our fears, it's usually that very first step that is the most critical. And once we're moving, we can keep moving. The other technique I want to introduce you to comes from Brendan Burchard, and he calls it the competence confidence curve. If we want to try something new, something that we're a little bit daunted by, we should push ourselves just beyond our comfort zone, but not so far beyond our comfort zone that we capitulate. So if we're trying to climb that mountain, whatever it is, it could be public speaking, by the way, we're trying to climb that mountain, don't try to go to the summit in one go. Push yourself just beyond your comfort zone, but not so far that you don't try. If you try to climb that mountain in one go, you're either going to give up because it looks too daunting, or you may have a catastrophic failure that sends you backwards. So what if we break it down further and we go, Well, what do I need to do to start? How can I push myself just beyond my comfort zone where I do something that I can try and I can build my confidence by doing so, so I might try to get to the first level of whatever it is that I'm trying to do right now, and from doing so, I'm going to build confidence that I was able to do it. At the same time, I'm building my competence through the practice of doing it. And now what we start is this layering effect. Next time I do the activity, I'm going to push myself 10% further, and my competence is going to increase and my confidence is going to increase. So this competence confidence curve just keeps on building upon each other. It's like a cycle. You've heard me talk about tennis before. It's a really good analogy here. I love tennis, but I'm not going to turn around tomorrow and challenge Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal to a match, it's going to be too daunting. It's going to be too far beyond my comfort zone, and neither of us are going to enjoy that match. Novak would not enjoy it. I would not enjoy it. He would just destroy me. It would be, actually, it would be a bit of fun, but I wouldn't learn much from that. I'm a level four tennis player. When I want to get better, I play against level five tennis players, and I just push myself that little bit further. And the funny thing happens, I get better, I get more confidence, I get more competence, and it builds upon each other. So fear, address your fears, challenge your fears. Do you know them to be true? What's the worst that can happen? What's the probability that that will even happen? Challenge your inner narrative. What is it telling you? What is this fear? Why this fear? Why this fear? Now and then? Start redefining the fear of something that can work for you, and take steps the gigantic effect, get going and build that competence confidence cycle by pushing yourself just beyond your comfort zone. Okay, onto the topic of quiet quitting. This is a topic that keeps coming back in the media and in social media, on Tiktok and other platforms, where I'm seeing a lot of people are still not really understanding what it means. It's being misunderstood in multiple ways. First of all, we have people out there saying that it's about work hours, and they use data to try to show that quiet quitting doesn't exist. They'll show you that, in actual fact, the number of hours worked by people is not going down at all. But here's the thing, it was never about the work hours. It's not about whether people are clocking in and clocking out. It's about what they're doing when they're at work, it's about passion. It's about energy. It's about discretionary effort. We all know that when we're passionate about something, we try our best, we do our very best work when we care about the work that we're doing. So are people bringing their very best every single day, or are they just cruising through the day? And quiet quitting is when people are turning up and they're just cruising through the day. They're not being fully productive. They're not fully engaging in their work. They're not fully investing themselves in to their work. They're not putting that any. In they're not trying to strive harder and for more. They're just doing the bare minimum. The second trend that I see out there is people thinking that quiet quitting is a negative term about staff members. It's not the staff, it's not the staff. It never has been the staff. It's the leader. No one is blaming the staff around quiet quitting. So I'm seeing people like Ben Askins on Tiktok trying to defend staff and saying, it's it, you know, it's stop bashing them about quiet quitting. It's not the staff. It's the leader. No one ever blamed the staff. It's about the leader. Everything rises and falls with the leadership. Now, why is this coming about? Well, everyone wants to feel seen, everyone wants to feel heard, everyone wants to feel valued. They want to feel like they matter, and they want to feel like what they do matters, and if they're walking around the office feeling invisible, if they feel unappreciated that no one even notices them, then why would they do their very best work? If they've put hours and hours and hours into some work product, it could be a presentation or a report, and no one even notices or appreciates the effort that was put in. Of course, they're not going to try very hard next time. Equally, if they don't understand why they are doing what they are doing, they will soon lose the motivation and the energy to do their very best work. And when we talk about why, we talk about it at two levels, there's the macro, why? That's the big picture. What is the purpose that we're all working towards? What's the vision? What are we all trying to work together to achieve? And then there's the micro, why? Why is this particular task that I'm doing today important? What makes this task important? What does it unlock? What does it enable someone else to be able to do? And if I know what my big why is, and I know what my micro y is, why this task is important, then I'm going to stay motivated. I'm going to get it done. So in summary, people that keep on dismissing quiet quitting, I want to tell you that quiet quitting is very real. It is not about work hours, and it never has been. It is not the fault of the individual worker and never has been. It is about a feeling of a sense of purpose, feeling that I matter, that what I do matters, feeling appreciated, feeling valued, so that I work in an environment where I can do my very best work, where I strive to be the best version of me every day, and whatever I'm doing, whether it's a report, a presentation, some software, whatever the case may be, when I understand that it matters, when I understand that what I do is appreciated, I'm going to do my various best work. It's on the leader to create the environment where people feel seen, where they feel heard, where they feel valued, where they feel like what they do matters, where they feel that they matter, and then you're going to create the environment where people can do their very best work. Okay, time for my leadership self reflections for the week, for those that are new to the show, these are the same five questions that I've asked myself every day for the past 11 years. The five questions are, what went well today. What didn't go well? What would I do differently? What did I learn about myself and what did I learn about others? So a reflection of some of my learnings this week. What went well this week? Well, feeling appreciated by my own boss in my day job, we are having a very good year, and the appreciation has been made very clear. These words of appreciation from my boss made me feel very proud, but also makes me want to strive even harder every single day. So a little bit of appreciation some kind words go a long way to keep me motivated to do my very best work. What didn't go well? I've had a recent situation where a staff member has not felt supported by me individually, by the company, but by me individually. My actions to address the situation have been well intended, but have not landed, and in some cases, have had the opposite effect and made things worse, whether my intentions were well intended or not, the consequence is I have made someone feel unsupported and that I don't have their back. This is on me, and it doesn't matter. That I didn't mean it. It's on me to go out there and fix it. So a lesson for all leaders, it doesn't matter if your actions are well intended, what matters is the impact of your actions and how it feels to the other people. People may forget what you said, they may forget what you did, but they'll never forget how you made them feel and that's on us to address What would I do differently? I spent a lot of time trying different things to resolve the issue, but what I didn't do until yesterday is ask the person, what would solve this issue for them? If I had my time over again, I would ask this question much earlier. What would you like to see happen? Or what would resolve this issue to your full satisfaction without these questions? I've been fishing in the dark and hoping something would work, and in some cases, I've been making it worse. What did I learn about myself? Well, coming back to the appreciation that I need appreciation just like everyone else. So leaders need appreciation, not just followers. I need to take the time and always ask the right questions. So instead of striving and striving and striving to solve someone's problem for them, you need to take the time to ask the right questions. What would you like to see happen? What did I learn about others? We are all different in terms of what pleases us and what frustrates that. us, something that I would not worry about at all may be a huge issue for someone else and vice versa. So we need to stay curious. We need to ask the right questions. So that's it for this week. In the next episode of The Leadership Project, we'll be joined by Christina fasla, and I share an really interesting conversation with her about the unique role of what it means to be of Chief of Staff, and what unravels is an interesting conversation about career paths, and how you can take different paths in your career to head towards the same area. You can either become a deep, deep, deep expert, a vertical expert in your field, or you might become a generalist, where you go into different jobs and learn different things to become a very rounded individual. It's a really interesting conversation with a very bright young executive who's had a very interesting career. If you are finding our content valuable, we would love it. If you would leave us a rating and review on Apple podcast or your preferred podcast service. You can also subscribe to The Leadership Project YouTube channel, where we bring you weekly video podcasts, curated videos and our weekly live stream show. Thank you for listening to The Leadership Project mickspiers.com a huge call out to Faris Sedek for his video editing of all of our video content and to all of the team at TLP. Joan Gozon, Gerald Calibo and my amazing wife Sei Spiers, I could not do this show without you. Don't forget to subscribe to The Leadership Project YouTube channel where we bring you interesting videos each and every week, and you can follow us on social, particularly on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Now, in the meantime, please do take care, look out for each other and join us on this journey as we learn together and lead together.