Self-Leadership Is Your Biggest AI Advantage, with Andrew Bryant

Welcome to Building Your Leader Brand. Today on the show, Bob is speaking with Andrew Bryant. That's what self-leadership is, is taking the ownership of your own education, reading widely if you can, or consuming things like this and challenging your own thinking process, stepping out of the framing of your birth and going, what does that mean to me and my identity? And then maybe we will step. Hi there and welcome back to Building Your Leader Brand. My name is Bob Gentle and every week I speak to incredible people who share their secrets to building, marketing and monetizing their expertise and intentionally amplifying their unique personal brand and the mindset you need for your business to grow and thrive. If you're new to the show, stop what you're doing. You can even pause, hit the follow or the subscribe button wherever you listen to podcasts. You'll make me smile. You will improve every week for the rest of your life because I'll still be here for a while. Similarly, if you enjoy the show, you will love the Personal Brand Business Roadmap. It's 50 pages of everything you need to start, scale, or fix your expert business. Visit amplifyme.agency/roadmap or hit the link in the show notes. So today's guest is someone who's shaping the conversation around self-leadership and has been long before it became a buzzword. Andrew Bryant is a globally recognised expert. I've checked on self-leadership, leadership accountability, and human performance, and the author of many books in this space. 5, I think. Andrew's work sits at the messy crossroads of mindset, behaviour, and results, helping leaders not just think differently, but actually lead differently, feel differently, and do differently. So if you're interested in what it really takes to lead yourself, which is the prerequisite to leading others, Similarly around personal branding, it's not easy. In a rapidly changing world, you're going to get a lot from this conversation. Andrew Bryant, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. So I often do a bit of research for this, and a lot of the time I whistle through it. I know what I'm doing. I'm efficient. I'm effective. But I got absorbed doing my research with you, and I'm going to come to this probably again and again today. But for somebody who's been working in the self-leadership space for a while, How do you define your role and what you really want to be known for? So I am on a mission really to unlock human potential, and self-leadership is the way that we unlock our potential. And so I'm known for my global keynote speaking. I stand on stages on global conferences in 40 countries. I work with executive leadership teams, getting them to walk talk and be the mission and the values of the organisation. I coach senior executives and those are the things I do. But to continue to push the self-leadership and the empowerment model, I mentor women leaders, young girls in Mozambique, at-risk and disadvantaged teens because, as I said, I'm on a mission to wake people up to unlock their human potential. And I have through my research and writing, strategies, methodologies, and insights on how to do that. I'd like to get into the weeds in that in a moment, but how do you define self-leadership? And what I was talking about with it being a prerequisite for leadership, what's your perspective around that? Well, in my 2012 book, which I wrote with Dr. Anika Zahn, we define self-leadership as a practise, the practise of intentionally influencing your thinking, feeling, and actions towards your objectives. So we can unpack that. It is a practise. Taking a shower each morning is a practise because if you don't do that practise, it's gonna have smelly consequences. And although I've been talking and speaking about self-leadership for 30 years, I still have to practise self-leadership. I can still have a moment, something irritates me and I can get into an emotional state And my Brazilian wife will say to me, "Andrew, go self-leadership yourself." So it is a practise of intentionally influencing, not controlling, influencing our thinking and feeling. So human beings, we know, are feeling machines that think, right? We are predominantly emotional and we have this prefrontal cortex that sits on top that allows us to moderate that. We are framed from the moment of birth. We don't choose the time, place of our birth, And yet within a few moments of our mother bringing us into this world, we're given a name, a nationality, an ethnicity, and possibly a religion and a football team to follow. So waking up to be the driver of your life, to take human agency, is an act of courage. And self-leadership, once you become the driver, once you have agency, that means you get to control the software. You get to rewrite the software that was given to you. You get to upgrade. And that's how I define self-leadership. So you have a new book called Potentialize, which is focusing on how great leaders unlock human potential. Holding it up. Well done. I'll probably need to get a quick picture of that later on. I'm going to come back. Explores how great leaders unlock human potential in the age of AI. Explain, explore. So As we've already articulated, I'm known for self-leadership, although I didn't invent the term. I thought I did, by the way, till I did my literature research and realised somebody had written about it in '87. The concept, of course, of self-leadership goes back to the early Stoics and even the Oracle in Delphi, "Know thyself." So everybody thinks they know what self-leadership is, but it is not easy to practise. But what I have shared with you is that self-leadership allows us to take human agency, to become the driver rather than the passenger in our lives. So when Wiley came to me and said, what are you working on now? And I said, well, I know that self-leadership increases human agency. I know that it's a prerequisite to leadership, but leadership is always contextual, right? Is somebody a good leader? You know, on LinkedIn they're always saying good leaders do this, and I always scoff at that because it's always contextual. You know, when Winston Churchill was a good leader for Great Britain during the Second World War, but he was a terrible leader beforehand and he was an awful leader afterwards. So it's contextual. So I said, look, the context that people are operating in right now is AI. And so I'm curious about how we amplify human capabilities in this AI rather than be displaced by AI. And they said, We love it. And they wrote me an advance and therefore I had to do the research and write the book. And I did the research and through the research came a model, the Ignite model. And then the book was published 3rd of March this year in 2026. I'm so tempted to just jump straight into the questions of AI, but there's one burning question that you're perhaps very well positioned to address for me. Something I encounter frequently, and it speaks to the whole question of self-leadership. I'll explain the scenario and you will understand or see the phenomena. I meet many leaders and I look at them and I think, I would love to work with you. And what I'm seeing when I see that is somebody who's become very accomplished within an environment where they're comfortable. So within their company, they've They've either built it and the company's grown with them, or they've moved up through the company, but their growth has always been in an environment that they're controlling, that they're comfortable with. My role is often to help people move that into the online space. But what I often find is people fall into one of two categories. They either look at this with relish and think, I'm up for this, or they look at moving into a space where suddenly nobody knows them. They have to justify their existence. They have to prove themselves from the very first time. And their ego almost won't permit them to even see that there's an opportunity there because of it. It's almost like their identity is so fixed, they don't want to look into the sun because for something that I can't quite put my finger on, but I sense it comes down to how they perceive this sense of self within the world. Is that something you recognise? Absolutely. And there's a whole section in the new book on the fluidity of self. So what is self is a great question, right? And, and now we have neuroscience to say self doesn't live in one part of the brain. It is, you know, different parts of the brain are firing and our experience of self, our consciousness, when we wake up in the morning and we don't have to go, well, what's my name, right? You know who you are, you kind of know where you are. Sometimes I don't know where I am because I travel a lot. So I wake up like, you know, I'm in a hotel room, which city am I? And I have to look out the window. But self is made up of a sense of identity and a narrative or a story. It's made up in our body. We have a feeling of self and it's made up of our memories. So there's this continuity of who I am and it's informed by our culture and by feedback mechanisms. People tell us who we are and that gets reinforced by culture. In fact, Carl Jung said, "The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't answer, it will tell you." Which leads to your point. So self-leadership has 3 components: self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-learning. Those are all individual domains of themselves. And in the self-awareness, who am I? What is my narrative? What do I feel in any situation? A lot of people shore that up with surrounding infrastructure, titles, right? So doctors are always doctor even after they're retired. Military men are retired lieutenant colonel because they don't exist without the identity of their profession. So who am I when everything is stripped away is something that's very uncomfortable for a lot of people. And so we chase degrees and accolades and position because it informs who we are. To be comfortable who you are without any of those things is very challenging. And in my own life, facing my own challenges as well as the learning and study I've done, I've had to face that. I've had to face the long dark tea time of the soul and go, "Well, who am I without my job, without my position, without my relationships?" Who am I? But it's incredibly liberating when you do that work, because then you can say with absolute confidence, I have nothing to prove, only things to improve. So if I said I have nothing to prove, then that's sort of laboured with some level of arrogance. But recognising that I am work in progress is humble. It's true humility, right? But I have nothing to prove. Right? So who I am is not judged by anybody else. You can't tell me who I am. I know who I am, and I'm comfortable in my skin. Will I adapt to you in this conversation, build a collaboration, build a relationship? Absolutely. But who I am stays the same, right? In my work, I've created a distinction in ownership. So leadership, a lot of leadership is about ownership. You want people to take ownership of their jobs and their objectives. Self-leadership is ownership of self. It's ownership of thinking, feeling, and objectives. In ownership, there's two elements: responsibility for and accountability to. Now, I live in Portugal, which has a Romance language, the same as French and Italian and Spanish, and it's the same word, responsável. So we have to distinguish what is responsible for and what's accountable to. I'm responsible for myself. I'm accountable to the agreements that I make, and those agreements might be, I live in Portugal, so therefore I'm— I agree to the laws of Portugal. You and I had an agreement that we would have this conversation, and there was a set time and a set place, and, you know, you sent me a reminder and that was lovely, but I'm true to my agreements, right? I'm married to— I mentioned Brazilian— my lovely wife Andrea, And I would ask, as I was speaking around the world, I say, am I responsible for my wife? Now, it's interesting, sometimes the women are the ones that yell the loudest, yes, you are. And yet they want autonomy, they want liberation. But if I'm responsible for my wife, then I am in control of her. I'm not responsible for my wife. She's an intelligent, beautiful, empowered woman. I'm responsible for myself to be the best version of me. But together, we're accountable to the marriage. And so that creates a Gestalt, the German word where the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts. So I'm responsible for me and I'm accountable to the environment. So to your case study or example, when you have a leader, they are comfortable with their responsibility in a context. Take them out of that context and now they don't know who they are because they don't necessarily know what they're accountable to. So clarifying that for and to is a lot of the work I do in coaching senior leaders to see who are you without your title. And then it makes you a lot more relatable and much more comfortable in your skin. I think one of the things I was really interested in, in doing my research about you was how broad your online ecosystem is. And something that I meet quite often with business owners like you, where things are kind of working for you, you are busy, is there emerges either, I don't need to do that anymore, or when they're trying to get towards where you are, they resent that they have to do that. Can't I just do the work? Can't the work just speak for me? You don't do the kind of work that you do where you've written 5 books, you have a vibrant YouTube channel, lots of content there, You have a podcast, you are active on LinkedIn. You could easily say, I don't need to do that. For the people listening, what is the impact of actually making the effort? Why have you done that? What has been the effect? And why do you continue to do it? It's a good question. I mean, the first answer that came to me was sort of my Protestant ethic. I started work at 10 years old in my father's hardware store every Saturday and every school holiday. So I, I I couldn't play rugby for the school team because I was working my dad's hardware store and couldn't do the away games. And so if I'm not busy, I feel guilty. And so there's an element of the Protestant work ethic. The other thing is sort of that angst that it can go away. You know, fame is fickle and it can just go away. So I'm constantly trying to be the best version of myself, and I recognise that the goalposts are moving faster than ever. And that's the self-learning piece. So I don't see all the LinkedIn posts, the writing, the YouTube, I don't see it as a chore because in the generation of that content, I refine my ideas. I become better at me. As I do something for somebody else, I learn more about myself and my capabilities. So I think the answer to your question is, I feel like I should, have to, must, those are modal operators of necessity. Have I ever had a moment like, "I wish I didn't have to do it"? If my diary of keynote speaking with first-class travel was fully booked, maybe I could rest on my laurels. But having been in the business for 3 decades, it's a roller coaster. The moment you take your foot off the accelerator, yeah, you'll coast for a while because you have momentum. But then you're behind because then you've got to put your foot back on the accelerator and get back to speed. So I've just settled into a continuity of I will write something every day, whether it's for a book, for a podcast, or a script, because I will have an idea every day. You know, I'll come off this call and go, you know, actually, that was a good question. Thank you so much for that. What's my perspective on this? So I was actually coaching a consultant to become a speaker just this morning, and I was riffing with him. He had some ideas and he was presenting something that fundamentally belonged in a training. It was a slide that everybody would know the content and he was gonna show it. And if I was in the audience, I would've internally groaned. And my challenge was to take the piece of content. It was not my content. I'd say, here's how I would tell the storey about that to engage an audience. And he's like, oh man, that was brilliant. I go, okay, but that's what you hired me to teach you how to do. Don't deliver This is the model of XYZ. This is my take on the model of XYZ. This is my perspective. This is my insight. This is a storey where I use the model of XYZ with client ABC and got this result. And that's what people are hungry for. And those are the posts on social media that get traction. Not here's the model, here's the results that that model got for this client. What I love about that is your content layer, if you like, is a natural expression of your thought leadership. And thought leadership in the classic sense is not marketing, it's leading with your thinking, which for me is fundamentally different. There is content marketing, which is persuasion. Thought leadership is, I think, and I'm going to take you with me. And it's much more important to understand what are good questions than what are the answers. You can't come up with great content until you've got great questions. And for that, you really have to be somebody who does think about things. Just going to reinforce that you have to be curious. Yeah. Yeah. And have the humility to share the journey. It's not all about pontificating from the stage. It's about letting people come with you on your curiosity journeys. The AI side of things, the potentialize. Where does AI fit within unlocking human potential in your perspective? I think a lot of the time I see people and the impression that I get is it's a lot of like, they play with it for a little bit and then one of two things happen. They just fall into a rut with using it in some very basic ways, like we might use a calculator. The alternative is something I'm seeing more and more often where they leap into building very complex ecosystems and they start to look like people who are constantly chasing the bus. How do we find a centre point that will allow us to unlock potential, which I think is what you're speaking to? Okay. Well, I mean, I think it's a use case. What advice would I give depends on who's listening to this advice, right? And what do you need to do? So the basic premise is that human readiness is being outstripped by the speed of deployment of AI. The World Economic Forum published a paper a couple of weeks ago that said, interviewed 10,000 executives and 54% said AI will displace jobs, but only 12% thought it would increase wages, right? And it also looked at 4 possible scenarios for 2030. And 3 out of 4 of those, you know, unemployment spikes and consumer confidence crashes. In only one, which they called the Copilot Economy, is humans and AI collaborating. And that's what I wrote the book for. So the case studies that are in the book are examples of where collaboration has and hasn't occurred. So the first case study is quite well known now, which is Klarna, the the Swedish fintech who in February 2024 deployed an AI assistant that could do 2.3 million customer interactions, replacing 700 humans. The board loved it, but by the end of the year, they'd hired back those 700 people. And this is a distinction between efficiency and effectiveness because the AI was efficient, But when you are a human being with a problem, you need a human conversation, not an efficient transaction. You need efficiency. And so the organisations that are recognising and the people are being successful is, well, how can I use AI to increase my efficiency where I bring the human effectiveness? And what is the human effectiveness? It's our critical thinking, it's our curiosity, it's our leadership, maybe it's our empathy. And that's the effectiveness part. And then use AI for the automated repetitive. I was on an Irish radio show a little while ago talking about the book and the interviewer was being quite aggressive and going, "Well, it's okay for you, you write books, you're not gonna be displaced. You know, what about my listeners?" And I hope, well, look, if your listener's job is moving a piece of paper from the left-hand side of the table to the right-hand side of the table, I'm sorry, wake up, smell the coffee. Yeah, you're gonna get displaced. But if you are adding some level of creativity, insight, critical thinking, then you are in demand if you can embrace the efficiencies of AI. I read an article last week where, and this kind of speaks to what you were talking about, I think it was in Fortune magazine. Obviously I don't get Fortune magazine, but it was an article that jumped up at me on Reddit where they were talking about something called Salow's Productivity Paradox. And this was a study done when microprocessors and transistors came in. And they were saying exactly the same things then about automation and electronics that we're saying, that we're talking about now. What they found then was this facilitates greater meaningful work. And I think this is what we're going to see again, that I think, of course, there's going to be an area of automation, but I think we're going to end up having a meaning revolution that is going to create all kinds of opportunity in and of itself. I think we're going to see a shift, but the shift is going to be painful. But I think one of the things that we all know, you know, it was the shifting a piece of paper from left to right. That's a real job in many places. But nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, "Thank God, that's my job." No, no. And look, human beings are meaning-making machines. My epiphany, my road to Damascus moment when I really got switched on to self-leadership was I'd gone through a business disruption and I was feeling sorry for myself. And I realised that I had a choice. I could have a pity party or I could I could make the change. And I was very much influenced by Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. And I'm also influenced, I mean, I think self-leadership, we could trace it back to the Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. And those finding meaning, living a life of virtue, those human things are very important. But unfortunately, education today is not necessarily helping us with this. I'm fortunate I had an English grammar school education. We did get the classics and we did get critical thinking. One of the things I tell executives is that I was forced to read the same storey in The Telegraph and The Guardian, and the UK audience will understand, a left wing and a right wing or the other way around in that case, the right wing and a left wing paper put a spin on it. And of course now with obviously in the US struggling with the Fox News phenomena of spinning things in a particular way, how do we know what the truth is? And finding the truth, finding meaning, living a life of virtue is exactly what being a human is about. But not everybody's equipped to do that. And I think that's where self-leadership is, is taking the ownership of your own education, reading widely if you can, or consuming things like this and challenging your own thinking process, stepping out of the framing of your birth and going, what does that mean to me and my identity? And then maybe we will step. Unfortunately, there are signs that people aren't thinking and they are externalising their thinking and looking for somebody to come up on a white horse and save them. And that's the antipathy of self-leadership. It— nobody's coming to rescue you. Rescue yourself. Yes, which actually is a beautiful pivot into what I'd like to touch on. So in my world, you could throw a stone and hit a leadership coach or an executive coach. But a lot of people struggle, and there are probably people at home listening thinking, please ask him how I can fix this. I'm not going to ask that question because it's too flippant. But whenever I meet somebody like you, I always want to understand how opportunity comes to you. And it typically comes through one of four doors. It comes through relationships, content, direct outreach, so knocking on doors, or ads? I think I know where this is going to go. How does that look for you? What does the proportion look like? It's probably a short answer. Relationships. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's relationships and content, right? So I am, I don't know how to say this without sounding pompous, but I change people's lives. Or I'm, you know, I am honoured. And so if you speak into somebody's life and it changes, then they talk about it, they talk about you. And, you know, you've got to go see my guy is almost like something from Seinfeld, right? But it's like— and so that's how, yeah, I do a good speech, somebody from the audience rushes up and says, we have a conference in August, can you come speak at our conference? I coach somebody, they're transformed, you know, I get a phone call, hey, you know, you've got to coach my brother or my sister or whatever, you've got So it happens by having the content and doing good work. My 2012 book on self-leadership, I got a call from Iceland, "Would you come and speak?" And I was in Singapore at the time and it was too expensive for them to bring me. When I moved from Singapore to Portugal, the phone rang again and go, "You're a bit closer now. Can we get you into Iceland?" And so I got to speak to 1,000 HR people at a wonderful venue in Iceland because of the book I wrote. And somebody wrote it, became a fan, and followed it. So that is where most of it— banging on the door doesn't really work for me because at the level I need to work with, at the C-suite, they don't listen to the ad, they don't read the ads, right? Somebody tells them. And so I've, I've got to be in that room and then have other people go into other similar rooms and talk about me. And obviously nobody likes to bang their own drum too loudly. But you confidently declared that you changed people's lives. So you're not reticent about tapping the drum. Well, it is what it is. Will Rogers, the great American entrepreneur, said, "If you done it, it ain't bragging." Right? So that is, you know, so yeah, look, I am British by birth and one doesn't want to sound one's own horn too much. But that is a data point, right? And so I have embraced the fact When we talked about self at the beginning, if somebody said to you, what is it, you know, who are you, what do you do? I would say I'm a catalyst for change, right? So there are some wonderful people who lead organisations, discover amazing scientific things that I can't do, but I can help them be the best version of themselves, right? I can help them unlock the potential in their teams. So I'm a catalyst for change. And so if I was put on the planet You know, that's not actually my philosophy about how I got here, but if I was, that was the purpose I was put here for. And when you're introduced to people, I think this is how people introduce you, gives you a lot of clues about what people value about you that they don't actually tell you day to day. What's the most common carrier wave for your introduction in terms of sentiment? That's a good question. I know where you're going with this. I'm trying It's really humbling when they say it, and I'm trying to put it into words. It's very much like, you know, Andrew's the real deal, he speaks the truth. Yeah, right. Something along those lines, right? That's not an exact quote, but I'm just trying to distil a number of introductions into a common theme. And I think it's easy to de-emphasize the impact that the content layer has on these relationships. I've certainly seen that you can be introduced, or somebody could come across you as technically viable, but the content layer has quite a, an impact on how they see you. Is that something that you see a correlation with, that if the content layer weren't there you might not as effectively stand out. Well, yeah, I mean, I am known as the self-leadership guy, right? Because I've been talking about that so long. You know, the fact that I've got a body of work backs that up. I mean, if I'm just somebody who tells the truth, it's not it. But I have a body of knowledge that helps you. What I shared with the distinction between responsibility for, accountability to, absolutely changes people because a whole bunch of people are over-responsible for other people and then feel a huge amount of pain because they can't control or change somebody else in that particular scenario until they take responsibility for themselves. So yeah, I think the body of work matters. I mean, our relationship, right? You know, we've just met 25 minutes ago, but you met me before you met me because that content exists. So I very rarely meet people who don't know who I am at all. Yeah. And it's kind of refreshing when they do. I— before you pressed record, I was saying I, I play Texas Hold'em poker in Lisbon with a group of guys, and all but one have no idea what I do. And that's fine. We just play the poker, and I'm just the guy that makes some jokes at the poker table. They don't know who I am. Where was I the other day? Oh, I was getting in— I was getting an injection at my local clinic for tetanus, and then one of the nurses came in later and she said, "Oh, do you know who he is?" And the other two nurses who were in that room went, "No." And then they Googled me while I was there and then they were like, "Oh, wow." And that was kind of funny. It was kind of cute, right? You know, a little clinic in for a tetanus jab. So it's nice to not be known. And to your point, I'm comfortable with who I am, so I don't have to say, "Do you know who I am?" But mostly from a professional perspective, people have a sense of who I am and what I can do before I even arrive, which means I don't have to sell myself. It's just like, What's your problem? What are you working on? What are you trying to achieve? What's the self-leadership gap? What's the potential that needs to be unlocked? Okay, look, here's how I could help you. So the credibility piece is already done. If you have to establish that, that's hard work. You know, if somebody says, oh, we don't know who you are, tell us how you're different from all other vendors, I'm like, groan, I've already lost this before I've started. I'm just, I might as well just I believe, right? And that's not out of ego. I will go through it, but it's like, again, I would want to focus it on them. You know, what is your problem? And then go, okay, here's my body of work that has solved that for other clients. What I love about the correlation between self-leadership cutting through is if you actually do the work, you relax into your own identity. That then creates quite a bright beacon on the horizon for people. It's very difficult to stand out if you're anxious about your own identity. If you're very comfortable in your own skin and very comfortable in your own ability to bring value to people and you're not uptight about it, confidence is charisma in many regards. And charisma is more complex and potent than people realise. On the topic of difference, you have a very specific character online. And when I say that, it's not like you're playing a part. But you have a vibe. How much of that do you actively cultivate, or how much do you actually just relax into it? Well, I don't know. Only you know what that vibe is. I don't know what that is, right? Because I'm just being me, so I don't know what it is. So that answers your question, right? What's the vibe that I'm, I'm portraying? Well, I don't want to distil that just now, but I think what I do want to lean into is As a human species, we're designed to ignore similarity. It's not a priority for us. Similarity, there's no survival imperative to noticing things that are similar. There's a huge survival imperative to noticing difference. And we can be different artificially, or we can be naturally different because confidence always kind of shines a little bit. It's not something you can fake. But I was just curious, how much of that difference is intentional and how much is— okay, well, I've been comfortable with myself for a long time, but I am aware that I'm not for everybody, and that, that's the difference, right? So I lived in Asia for 17 years, and confidence can be misconstrued as arrogance. I don't think I'm arrogant. I know who I am, I know what I'm good at, and also I know what I'm rubbish at. I know my own failings because I'm married, so I have a wife that will list those for me on a regular basis. So confidence is a superpower. But to your point, you know, Shakespeare said, "Methinks the lady doth protest too much," right? If you have to sell your confidence, you're not confident. Yes, right. Confidence is, I can do it, right? When I said I change people's lives, I've been doing it for years. There is the evidence. There are, you know, go on my LinkedIn read the 100 recommendations that of people who said, Andrew changed my life, right? So that's a third-party testimonial. Those people that have been to Harvard and within the first 3 minutes of the conversation they've mentioned it twice, you think, me thinks the lady doth protest too much, right? So it is a fine balance. Confidence, it does shine a light. I mean, I always think about the poem My Greatest Fear by Marianne Williamson, which was used by Nelson Mandela at his inauguration. Our greatest fear is da da da da, it's not our inadequacies, it's our light. Who am I to be so brilliant? I'm paraphrasing here, I can't remember the poem today. But you shining a light gives other people permission to step into theirs, but it will create jealousy, it will create pushback from people who feel insecure around you. But as a self-leader, I'm not responsible for their insecurities. It's not my job. I'm not going to make myself small because it's going to make them feel okay. I'm going to walk up and be me. They can choose to step up and be themselves. They can choose to be put out or malign me, and that has happened also, but that's their choice, and I have to accept that. Would I like to be universally popular? Would be nice, but it ain't the way the world works. I think one of the things I repeat quite often is, and for me this was hugely liberating, was understanding that one-third of people will not like you. One-third of people completely ambivalent, they'll take you or leave you. One-third of people will love you. But if you're busy trying to pretend to be somebody else, they'll never get to meet you. Everybody's busy hedging for the other two-thirds. You relax into your third, you will fly. Sure. You don't need that many people to really get you, right? You want, you know, it doesn't have to be, you know, we can't, we can't serve the whole world. It would be nice to sell a dollar to everybody in China and India on a monthly basis. You know, that would sort you out very nicely. But I serve a particular demographic. And, you know, my father used to say, you know, if you sell, if you sell to the classes, you'll dine with the masses. But if you sell to the masses, you'll dine with the classes. Well, I'm in the former rather than the latter. I sell to a distinct audience who wants my services, and I get paid relatively well for that, but I haven't leveraged it with the mass-produced. And a lot of people online have gone for the dumb it down, everybody loves them thing. I've intentionally said, and I've had people advise me to do that, and I've said, but it isn't authentically me. And they say, but sometimes you're too complex or too wordy. And I'm like, 'Cause it needs language, it needs nuance, and not enough people are giving things language and nuance. So that's gonna be me. And it's maybe a smaller audience, but that's the one I'm comfortable with. So I really like that. Rolex has a small audience, but it's very specific. It does. And you know, so does Aston Martin. I walked past the showroom, I was speaking in London 2 weeks ago, and I walked down Park Lane past the Aston Martin showroom, and I did have a sort of a little lust through the window. So I have two more questions. The first one is very simple. When I see somebody where things just seem to be working, they've hit their stride, obviously you've worked for it, but whenever you see a master craftsman, the master craftsman, when he spots somebody else trying to do the job that he's trained to do, can immediately see what the problem is. And people seem to be making the same mistakes again and again and again. When do you see other people trying to go down the same path you're going down, trying to build the executive coaching leadership space, and they struggle, 9 times out of 10, you could probably spot where they're struggling and where they may be looking under the wrong rock. What comes to mind thinking about that? It's too much focus on self, right? It's, you know, here's who I am, this is what I can can do, et cetera, but not who do I serve, right? What's in it for the— if I'm coaching a speaker, what does the audience want, right? And the classic mistake for a keynote speaker is the first 5 slides is, here's all my qualifications. To your point, they don't have the confidence to just stand up and tell a storey without saying, but here's my permission to tell you that storey because I went to these things. If somebody's trying to be a coach, they're focused on, well, I went to this coaching school and I got these credentials. There's nothing wrong with credentials. You need frameworks, but they're again locked into the framework. And the analogy I would always do with coaching is a bit like salsa dancing, right? If you go to a salsa dancing lesson, you learn these very, this backwards and forward step. But then what happens, you go to a club and then you drink a couple of mojitos and then suddenly you're dancing or nobody else seems to be following those steps, right? So what mastery does or discipline does is it gives you the level of freedom. So people are trying to shortcut things. I think you have to do the work, and you've said that, and you've kindly recognised I've done the work, right? If you've done the— you've done the discipline, you've studied your field, then that gives you the liberty to be free with it, to be creative, right? Picasso did study art before he broke all the rules. Right? So if you're going to be an artist, and I think we want artists because the normal stuff we've already discussed, AI can do that, right? So we want people to add a level layer. So do whatever discipline that you need to do, learn your craft, do your apprenticeship. And then, well, it was Bruce Lee said, you know, take what is useful, discard what is not, but then add what is uniquely yours. And I think it's the Bruce Lee factor, isn't it? Add that extra layer. And that's— I don't know whether I tried to do that, but I know it's happening, and that's why you've invited me on your podcast. So thank you for that. And that would be the thing that I would get people to fix is, what do you uniquely bring to this scenario? And if people can't answer that, I'm like, well, you need to do some work on yourself because clearly I can see some things that you're bringing, but I could tell you, or you could find them out yourself. It's a lot better when you find them yourself. So let's get into your 3 amplifiers. I'm aware of the time. To the client I'm supposed to be seeing in 3 minutes, I'm terribly sorry. I'm going to send them a message. It's all good. These are 3 things people can go and do, mental models, your favourite podcast, a cheese toasty filling that you absolutely love. Doesn't matter. 3 things that will give people value that matter to you. So Amplifier number 1. Well, I've written about this in my latest book, Potentialize, but it's a Stoic philosophy, and that is start every morning with intentionality, right? Spend 5 minutes going, what do I intend to achieve today in terms of who do I need to be to achieve those things? Not what do I want to have, but who do I need to be? Intentionality. And at the end of the day, look back at your day and go, okay, what worked, what didn't? And then set an intention for tomorrow so that then that flows through. That would be number one. Number two, watch Ted Lasso on Apple TV with a notebook and watch it with a notebook. If you haven't seen it, watch it and enjoy it, and then watch it again and watch it in terms of what does Ted Lasso do that makes other people be the best version of themselves? Because it is spot on. In terms of the best thing, right? That's fascinating. I have comments, but I'm going to come back to them. So amplifier number 3. Amplifier number 3. I think the third one is very simple. It's— I've already given it to you, and I think it's the mantra: I have nothing to prove, only things to improve. I think use that as a mantra, use it in the shower, because it builds self-esteem. Now, you talked about confidence. A lot of people who lack confidence really actually are suffering with a level of self-esteem. I'm not good enough. I need to be better, right? And I've coached a lot of women leaders who are pushing for perfection because they don't feel they're good enough. You are good enough. You've got nothing to prove. You are the best version of yourself in this moment, but you could get better. So say that, I have nothing to prove, only things to improve. That would be my third thing. I love it. I think the first one, intention for the day, it's profoundly high impact. And I think had something sensible to say about that, which has similarly escaped me. Ted Lasso, I've seen some of that. I see exactly what you're talking about. I'm going to have to go back, and this time I probably will take a notebook. Watch it with a notebook and write down the real power of what that show shows you about being a human being, because that's what Ted Lasso is. He's all about improving people's lives and therefore improving performance. In the book Potentialized, there's a storey I tell about Steve O. Stevenson, who is a pastor but working in schools. And he worked— he was working in a school in New Zealand, and there was a suicide, and, you know, the kids were distraught. And a group of girls came to him and said, we want to do rowing to kind of get us through the grief. And he said, okay. So he formed them as a rowing team. Now, normally a coach would measure, you know, speed in the water. Right? Boat speed. He didn't. He measured, all right, how are you feeling in yourself? How's your sleep? How's your relationship with your parents? How are you studying? How's your nutrition? So he looked at the things that they were doing to improve themselves as human beings, and then the boat speed took care of itself, and they won the race. I like that. I have a lot to think about. If people are thinking about bringing you in as a speaker, or if they're thinking about working with you as a coach What's on the other side of that? What are they in for? What's it gonna feel like? Don't hire me if you don't wanna be challenged, right? So you're gonna have to tell me offline what my vibe is, but it is that I want to positively provoke you because if self-leadership is becoming the best version of yourself, to potentialize is to expand what best means. And that's what you can expect on the other side is I'm gonna expand what best means and give you some strategies to move towards that. So that's what to expect. I love it. I've had so much fun today. I've learned a lot. I'm very motivated and very inspired. And when I get the goosebumps in an interview, I know it's a great interview. I've just had the best time. But that does bring us to the end of another episode. Thank you very much at home for listening. If you did enjoy this show, I would invite you to leave a 5-star review. that's 5, count them like the fingers on your hand— wherever you listen to podcasts. Similarly, you will love the Personal Brand Business Roadmap, everything to start, scale, and fix your expert business. Just visit amplifyme.agency/roadmap. And I'm realising it's remiss of me, Andrew, I haven't asked how people can get into your world. How would you like people to get in touch with you or connect with you? Well, the easiest is my website, selfleadershippodcast.com. Selfleadership.com, easy to remember. And there's pretty much— well, there is links to everything from there. If you're a LinkedIn person, I accept your LinkedIn request. You can find me on YouTube. It's Andrew Bryant is the— is my handle on YouTube. That's easy. And the other social medias, I think I'm, I'm either Andrew Bryant on TikTok and Self Leadership on Instagram. I will include links to most of that. In the show notes. Yeah. Andrew, thank you so much for your time. It's been really good. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you.