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What should leaders keep in mind in the time of crisis to make an impact?

My keynote at RMIT Webinar: “Leadership Mindset In Difficult Times” on 20 May, 2020.

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Hello everyone,

 

Thanks RMIT for inviting me to share with the young talents. 

I will start my sharing about mindset by telling 4 stories which reflect mindset messages.  

1. A choice is always available for you (Bế Thị Băng)

 

Born as a normal girl in the highland, she grows up like other normal kids. Then she got an accident. The container truck hit the back of her motorbike, the wheel clamped on the motorbike and her right leg and dragged her along the road. Waking up after surgery, Bang was shocked to learn that one of her legs had been cut. 

At that time, Bang was only 24 years old. Just got a job. The skype seems to fall in front of her eyes. 

Last year, she was the winner of crescent moon contest by her impressive dance performance. (You can watch here). What else can she do? She can swim and she is a dentist and married a German professor

Talking about her disadvantage, Bang expressed: “I tell myself that whether we are disabled or healthy, we have the right to equality and to live and be confident with ourselves.”

 Similarly, it’s not your fault if you were born poor or some accidents happen to your life or prone to mental illness. But it is your responsibility to figure out how to deal with your situation.

No one else can heal your emotional wounds but you. No one else can fix your toxic relationship with money but you. No one else can make you stop addicting to social media/phone but you. 

That isn’t to say you have to do it all by yourself. You should seek out help if you need  a coach/mentor and get financial help when your luck is down. But for better or worse, at the end of the day, it’s all on you.

 

2. No one will believe in you unless you do (Ritesh Agarwal)

Ritesh Agarwal was born in Rayagada, India – a city where most people  make no more than 10 dollars a day. He grew up very poor and he struggled for 18 years. He did not go to the university and he had no career according to his neighbor. At some point, he was kicked out of his own apartment with 50 cents in his banking account 

He knows that his life is hard and well aware of it. He did not chase money but try to solve the issue that made his life and other lives better. He observed that the hotel owner did not make a lot of money so he took the biggest risk of his life to promise to bring more customers to the hotel. Then he came to the hotel to change the lightbulb, bed and put water and painting to increase the standard of the hotel and then took pictures to put one on the internet and Change the name OyO hotel. Finally,  more customers came to the hotel and OyO became the largest hotel chain in the world 

He received a Thiel Fellowship that paid him $100,000 over two years to create a startup.

He raised $25 million (Rupees 150 crore) from San Francisco-based Greenoaks Capital and existing investors Sequoia, DSG Consumer Partners and LightSpeed Ventures. 

He became the youngest billionaire in India with a hard childhood thanks to an elegant solution to the problem with the guts and fortitude to build.

There are enough people who tell us that we are not good enough, why do we want to tell ourselves that negative thought?  Your thoughts are a catalyst for self-perpetuating cycles. What you think directly influences your feelings and behaviors . So if you think you’re a failure, you’ll feel like a failure. Then, you’ll act like a failure, which reinforces your belief that you must be a failure.

Listen to what you believe and do your best to bring solutions to the issues that you discover. 

Consistently learn and improve until you get it. When you can do it once, you can do it again and again. No one will believe in you unless you believe in yourself.

3. See the world as it is, not as you wish it would be (Boyan Slat)

Boyan Slat is a Dutch inventor and the CEO of The Ocean Cleanup.

In 2011, at the age of 16, while Slat dive in Greece, he found there were more plastic than fish in the ocean. Instead of complaining and being angry, he decided to devote a high school project for deeper investigation into ocean plastic pollution and why it was considered impossible to clean up. He later came up with the idea to build a passive system which uses the circulating ocean currents to his advantage. Then he presented at a TEDx talk in Delft in 2012.

Slat discontinued his aerospace engineering studies at TU Delft to devote his time to developing his idea. He founded The Ocean Cleanup in 2013, and shortly after, his TEDx talk went viral after being shared on several news websites.

Then he received all of the awards you can think of such as the Champions of the Earth award of the United Nations Environment Programme, Forbes “30 under 30” list In 2016, a Thiel Fellowship receiver, European of the Year,  Dutchman of the Year 2017.

 In 2018, Slat was awarded the Leonardo da Vinci International Art Award and Euronews award “European Entrepreneur of the Year”.

If he just showed his judgment on everyone else with rage  for throwing trash in the ocean—well, no one would have listened to him. Then the ocean will appear with more trash and plastic and other waste and hundreds of species in the ocean will disappear.

It is easy for us to judge, criticise and comment behind the screen with the air conditioner but it takes guts, hearts and brains to act like the problem solver.  

Action speaks louder than words and when you see the real ugly world as it is, not as you wish it would be, you come up with a solution which gradually influences others with the actions. 

4. Lead by example then people will follow

 

This is the last story that I want to share today. 

As an entrepreneur, I suffer a lot from Coronavirus pandemic. However, instead staying at home and crying, I chose to be different and meaningful to my life and others.

I want to build a stronger culture, improve myself and others who go with me as this pandemic is just one of the worst events that happens to our life and we have more unexpected events in life. 

I started a plank challenge in my company to encourage people to exercise and lose weight ;and daily meditation to help our team mind stronger and focus their concentration on things that matter the most. 

The Result was great, my team works better and faster online even though we suffer a lot from the beginning. I lost 5 kg and gained more muscles. At first, it is weird that my team will meditate with me in the morning, now that is the first thing they do in the morning with me.  

Secondly, when I saw the old man crying on the street with the lottery ticket. I feel really bad, I also want to help him and many miserable lives on the street But my resources and capacity are limited.  

Therefore, I want to initiate a project or platform that helps not only the youth but also the less fortunate one with automatic mechanisms. That’s why GIVE IT BACK was born to support the youth to accomplish more via mentoring 1 on 1 models as well as give a chance for them to give it back and share the difficulties with those less fortunate with their capacity. You can see the value cycle in this project and the youth know that they are lucky and impactful at the same time. 

I ,as a founder, invest my time and money to execute the project but mentors give their free valuable time to mentees. Mentees help the poor via their real action (money).

I can do nothing to support these people and be fine but I chose to act to help my people and the youth. Thanks to that, people follow me, support me and achieve more with me.

The question for you is what are you willing to suffer to make your life and other lives better?

Whether we like it or not, life is hard to predict and happen as we wish. What we can control is our thoughts and actions we have. Therefore, Choose wisely what mindset you should have and avoid 

 

“I believe when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade…and try to find someone whose life has given them vodka/whiskey, and then we can have a party.”

 

Thank you

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Listen with empathy to be the leader

Let’s emphasize straightforwardly in this case.

What do people react when receiving information in both working environment and social relationship?

They prefer to be a passive hearer or an active listener. That’s your choice. It is clear that hearing is simply a natural ability of human, while listening is definitely a learned skill in order to transform information into meaningful messages. Someone has rightly said that “Hearing is through ears, but listening is through the mind”.

Why is it important to possess good listening skills?

Let me tell you a story about two energetic staffs. When being assigned the same task, they perform in two different ways which embody two different types of the level of listening ability. Candace always shows her comprehensive listening skills. As I saw that she always concentrates and pays attention to whenever we have a meeting for our next campaign. She prepares to actively listen and learn, and then thinking about this topic critically. She takes note carefully the key point after meeting and carries out effectively. Moreover, information selection is one of her strengths. Mainly because she thinks that the key concepts are much more important than the whole of argument in the meeting to answer the questions of What, Who, When, Where, Why and How.

On the other hand, Simon is quite different from Candace. He is a kind of passive listener. An active listener is the one that receives message from speakers, then analyses and responds to strengthen the mutual understanding. A passive one is different because he receives information without analysing, and stops at receiving information but keeping asking many times. It is reasonable that asking questions is a measure to make sure the instructions are understood and be clear,however, without taking note drives him to be difficult to remember the guidance delivered before.

Conversation with Consul General of France Vincent Floreani

When it comes to listening skills in social relationship, there are two ways that people are going to react when their friends tell them a story on a day hanging out. One of which is that people tend to dig deep into the storytelling to figure out the problem when their friend is confronting. They analyse the issue together and help the friend overcome feelings of pressure. Otherwise, people are not interested in that story, as a result, they show their no inspiration to continue the conversation. Somehow they still respect their friend’s story, but they do not react or do not respond anything, just only “Oh!”, “Really?”,  “Seriously?” for example.

Derived from two situations conveyed above, who do you think that they possess a good listening skills? So to review how to be a comprehensive listener, I am going to list these levels of listening to enhance your skills effectively and efficiently. There are five levels of listening that need to be considered.

Ignoring

Ignoring is the lowest stage of listening – not listening at all. It means that people usually interject a remark into the conversation with someone when they are speaking to others. They do not listen to at all with this person, then starting a new conversation with other one.

Pretend Listening

Pretend listening is easily explained in face-to-face talk. People may nod their head or other gesture to portray that they are listening, but they are not giving their full attention to the conversation. They are able to hear what others say but they do not show their impression.

Selective Listening

This stage is a beginning level of an active listener. People tend to pay attention to the speakers when they discuss about aspects that they are interested in; however, not all. They are probably the one that says “So, what’s your point?”. They are more likely to go straightforward to the thing that is important to them and interrupt the conservation when they realize that thing is not amusing anymore.

Attentive Listening

An attentive listener spend their time and attention on listening to other people. They have a tendency to respond according to their own experience. Instead of putting themselves in others’ situation, they listen and explain with their own perspective.

Empathic Listening

This is the top level of listening because those who are empathic listening are more likely to pay their full attention to gain the information and respond to develop the understanding in a conservation. It can be referred as the hardest to accomplish this level. However, to give a truly listening is not complicated.

Regarding to Clinical psychologist Kevin Gilliland, to practice to be a skilled listeners, people should following suggests:

Be curious: you’re more favor in listening to what the other says, rather than formulating your response.

Ask good questions: avoid asking yes/no type questions, which are closed-ended. You need to concentrate on questions that invite people to elaborate.

Don’t jump into a conversation too quickly: you should consider easing into the conversation when speaking to someone.

Anchor yourself to the subject and don’t get distracted: you should avoid unrelated topics to distract from the subject.

Stop making up stories: a  lot of information which is missing is not a good idea for those who want to listen to your stories.

Don’t make a big deal out of being wrong: If you’re good at admitting fault, this should be a fairly easy tip for you.

Dalai Lama once said:

“When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new.”

In order to be the leader, we not only need a vision to inspire the team but also need the great ears of listening with empathy to feel the pain and recognize what is not shared on the vocal conversation.  

The world will be more peaceful when we stop talking about each other, start listening to each other and collaborate with empathy thanks to listening.