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Why do you think that leaders hide from funding their vision?

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And how can those leaders then lean into funding that vision?

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Well, what do you mean by funding their vision?

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That's a great question.

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A lot of times people answer funding as a little money that you can use.

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And a lot of times people answer it as the effort, energy, a lot of things you put to a commitment.

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You can answer whichever you feel like.

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Because I feel like both are important, both are necessary to scale, and both are also required if you want to survive.

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So you can answer whichever way you like.

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Well, thanks for that question, Harry, because I think what's interesting in that,

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my mind went immediately to the energy place.

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When we look at how leaders embrace adversity and the changes that come to their business,

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it is absolutely all about how they manage their energy and how they, as we talked last time in the last episode,

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how they ride that reality curve.

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So for me, if leaders are hiding from this funding of their vision, it may be because there's an inadequate amount of energy in their well-being batteries.

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And I know we talked a little bit about this last time, but the well-being batteries, there are four.

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And arguably some social scientists are now saying maybe there's a fifth well-being battery.

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We'll get to that in a minute.

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But the four key well-being batteries that leaders and all of us actually draw upon to live our most authentic and resilient lives

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are a physical battery, an emotional battery, a mental battery, and a spiritual battery.

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And the arguable fifth battery is maybe a social battery of how we are all connected.

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So when leaders are saying, hey, I'm not so sure, or I'm not sure I want to invest in this funding of my vision,

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we also need to look at the words vision, because is that their own personal mission and vision?

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Is that the mission of the organization that they lead?

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We can get into that in a minute.

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Most of the time, it's about tapping into their reserves and or looking at their battery power in each one of those well-being batteries.

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And so if a leader is reluctant to maybe fund into that, it may be because they're running on empty.

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I say a lot of times to the groups of people that I lead and to organizations that I consult with is, you know,

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you're not going to make it to the bank unless you fill up the well-being tank.

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And what I mean by that is tapping into the things that really supercharge you and your batteries,

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knowing that particularly if it's physical, that's things like sleep and hydration and good nutrition and exercise,

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the obvious things that we talk about with well-being.

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If it's emotional energy, we're talking about how you process emotions

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and how you may be feeling certain things when you're feeling good

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and how you may not be processing or experiencing feelings when you're feeling bad.

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Those two energies and batteries are the most obvious to people.

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But often where leaders also fall down and forget is the mental charge up.

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You know, leaders have to use a massive amount of mental power.

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Our mental energy was really how we organize our brains.

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It's how our brains actually organize time, how we organize space, how we organize structure and thought and logic.

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And, you know, when people come home at the end of the day and say, God, I'm just mentally exhausted.

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They're talking about how much they use the left and the right brain and that prefrontal cortex to process the entire day.

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And as leaders, you know, we're constantly in that space all the time.

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Last but not least is that spiritual energy, that well-being battery around purpose.

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And again, we get to the idea of vision.

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Leaders may be reluctant to fully invest if they're not clear themselves on what it is that they're doing for their life's work or their life's mission.

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And similarly, and often I like to say ideally, leaders are using their personal mission

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and their spiritual energy to drive what they do in the work and the organizations that they lead.

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Ideally, they're intrinsically connected, but oftentimes they're not.

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So there might be a lot of reasons why leaders are hiding from this kind of investment into their vision.

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I'd always say that, you know, the best way to consider really showing up fully, most vulnerably,

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most empathetically, and most wholeheartedly in the work that you do is to make sure that your four well-being batteries are supercharged.

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Part of that includes doing an energy audit.

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And I have done energy audits with a lot of leaders to say, let's look at the things that charge you up, supercharge those batteries,

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and let's look at the things that also drain those batteries,

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because it's the drains that make us vulnerable and susceptible to the hardships of adversity.

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And leaders need to be as supercharged as possible when they're leading teams through change and through hard times.

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So that's where I would say we may have some evidence where leaders are reluctant to fund into their vision.

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Yeah. Thank you for sharing that.

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My next question for you.

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I mean, we can go to the second part as well.

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If you want to add something to it, then how do leaders lean into funding that vision, unless you want to add something to it?

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I might just say, you know, do the energy audit and, you know, connect with me if any of you are leaders in organizations or, you know,

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in families or social structures where you are curious about how to do an energy audit.

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It's really a valuable lesson in looking at all the things that you do in a day, because it's not time that we need to manage.

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We all have the same 24 hours, seven days a week amount of time.

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What we need to manage is more of the energy that we put in different places.

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And doing that energy audit is a great way to start the awareness journey in how you want to lean into where you want to get different results or have different outcomes.

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Tell me more about the energy audit.

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Is it something how long does it usually take?

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And is that something someone can do?

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Like, can we do an experiment right now to take longer than that?

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I'd love to know more about that.

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Yeah, it can be as long or as short as we want it to be.

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Often with my clients, my coaching clients and some executives and leaders that I work with,

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we take several hours and we identify all the activities of a day.

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And those are the personal activities from the time that you wake up to the time that you go to bed.

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What are all those personal things that you do?

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Do you exercise?

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How much do you eat?

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When do you eat?

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All of those things, when do you spend time with your family?

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When do you spend time with your spouse?

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Are you spending extra relationship time at work that is outside the working hours?

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Then we do the same thing with the working hours and we identify all those activities.

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Once we identify the activities, we look at the actual amount of time.

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After we look at the amount of time, we associate a level of emotional connection to that.

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What are the feelings that are related to doing that particular work or that activity?

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Then finally, what we do is we try to identify in a very black and white way,

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is that something that supercharges you and charges up your battery, makes you feel great?

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Or is that something that actually drains your battery?

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In a black and white way, then looking at one day, you can do the same exercise over a week,

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over a month, over a year, depends on how much time you want to invest.

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You get a real good sense of where you're spending your energy

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and which activities you're spending energy in and how those either positively charge up your well-being batteries

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because we also identify which battery does it charge, which battery does it drain.

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Not all of them are superchargers.

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For example, I don't mind doing expenses.

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In fact, that's what I was doing when we got on the phone.

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I don't mind doing it. It's kind of energy neutral for me.

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But if I do too much of it too long, it drains my mental battery.

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My mental well-being battery is drained.

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What I have to do in order to charge that back up is to go out for a walk, drink a glass of water, get some fresh air.

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That helps me readjust.

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This is what I'm talking about, is looking at the things that drain you and the things that charge you up.

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Thank you for sharing that. I think that was very helpful.

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My next question for you goes along with what we have been talking about.

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To you, Nathan, what defines a great leader?

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That's a big question here.

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I answer some of this in my book, which is Your Real Life.

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We talk about not just being a great leader in organizations, but a great leader in your life.

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Great leadership starts with leading yourself.

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I would say that what makes a great leader is a leader that is authentic, which is what I mean is really genuine,

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knows inside out what their values are, what their strengths are, what their beliefs and philosophies are,

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and how to use those in the world.

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But in addition to being authentic, they're great listeners.

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They know how to listen with empathy and how to lead with curiosity.

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These three things kind of in combination enable leadership, particularly leadership of self,

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to move and progress to a life of well-being and joy.

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I would say a great leader, particularly those who lead themselves in their lives,

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are ones that are also really connected to their purpose, which is part of that authentic understanding,

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but also lead their lives and lead their inner and outer world with love.

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Love is the fourth anchor of my book and the real model.

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I think it's not just a Huey Lewis song from the 80s, the power of love, or a ballad love song,

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but love really does enable us to get a lot of things done.

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And great leaders are those who lead themselves with love, but also lead their organization with love.

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And specifically what I mean in my definition of love is they know how to manage forgiveness, how to navigate forgiveness.

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They know how to communicate and are very wise with the word choices that they use,

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both in the words that they use to talk to themselves in their inside voice and outside voice,

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their inner voices and their inner coach and inner critic voices uses language of love,

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but also how they speak to the people that they lead.

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Thirdly, love consists of creating a community and a chosen family and a network of people

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who understand what it means to show up and be in a place of well-being and joy with each other and navigate hard things.

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And last, humor.

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Humor is a big part of the love formula. We're not laughing enough at some of the hard things that happen to us.

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And great leaders know how to harness humor in the adaptation of using and leading their lives with love.

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But I would say those are some of the elements of that formula to great leadership.

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Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.

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I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.

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This is going to get more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement as well.

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We'll invite people to participate in the show.

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And thank you for giving us your time and attention.

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Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.