How to build a point of view people actually follow, with Kat Kibben

Welcome to Building your Leader brand. Today on the show, Bob is speaking with Kat Kippen. Whether you loved every manager and you felt like everyone poured into you, you hated every manager. I think all of this, it's a mirror that you get to hold up for yourself as a leader, as someone who wants to be a leader, as someone who wants to lead from where they are. It's that mirror that allows you to say, Am I being as helpful and kind when I apply these rules as I could be? And recognising One of the universal truths that can be very, very hard is that nothing changes if you don't change. Hi there, and welcome back to Building your Leader Brand. My name is Bob Gental, and every week I speak with incredible people who share their secrets to building, marketing, and monetizing their expertise and the mindset you need for your business to grow and thrive. If you're new to the show, you know what I'm going to ask you to do. Take a moment and subscribe or follow or whatever button you need to press so that you find out about the show when it comes out. Next week, which it does every week. So today's conversation is going to change how you think about hiring because most companies treat job descriptions like admin. Kat Kibben treats them like sales pages. The HR and talent spaces, and I don't know if these are the right spaces, Kat, we're going to talk about this, but they are noisy and everyone has frameworks, templates, and best practises. And yet in that noisy world, Kat Kibben stands out, and that's not easy to do. They have a voice, a point of view, and they are not afraid to lean into it. And that's why Kat is here. Kat Kippen, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. So my intro went on about lots more good things, but I actually got to the point where I started to feel this intro is awkward, and I need just to get into introducing Kat. So at this point, I've usually rambled on about how excited I am to have a guest here, and I truly am. I've been trying to get you here for three times, and it's because I've cancelled it that it hasn't happened. So first of all, apologies for that. Secondly, oh, my God, you're here, Kat. It's so exciting. No, I'm excited to be here because I know every time talk in real life, it's one of those conversations that I leave still thinking. I feel like now everyone else can tune in to listen to one of the great conversations that we've had. For the listener who's meeting you for the first time, what does the world of Kat look like? Like you said, my name is Kat Kibben. I run a company called 3Ears Media. It's named after two dogs with four ears. I can tell you that story if you want to hear it. But what I do every day is I help recruiters make hiring more human. That sounds contrary to all the headlines I'm sure you're reading about AI taking everyone's job, but ultimately, I'm trying to help them finetune the skills that make them really good at the human parts of the job and finetune the machines to do what they do best, too. On the other side of that, I also think about life because the reality is that there's actually no separation between work and life, no matter how hard we try to drive it. I a book about my life and figuring out how to be better at leadership and really navigating uncertainty with confidence. That book is called The Bounce Back Factor. I guess that's really what the life of Kat looks like, is me trying to constantly find time to write Because that's what I love most. I think one of the nice things about you is you hear this phrase thought leadership all the time. What most people interpret that as is I need to write a blog post. I need to produce something. I often describe it to people as it's leading with your thinking. Prerequisite is you need to think, catch your thoughts, and share them. It's not complex. But it begins with thinking. And you're a wonderful example of this. I do want to talk about the book specifically in a moment, but a lot of people find this idea of thought leadership very challenging because they're worried so many things. What did that look like in the beginning for you? Because now it's easy to look at it now and think, I could never do that. But I could never play Olympic sports. That's not how you start. That's the end point. I think for the first half of my career, I believed that social media was a place in which I needed to convince other people that I was right. That just wasn't the strategy. It never really worked for me. Where I've shifted, and I I think all of us need to shift, considering the noise that's available to us, is to shift to conviction. We are not convincing, we are sharing with conviction. I distinctly remember this moment for some reason when I decided that I was never going to post on LinkedIn again unless it really made me mad, sad, or excited, and I had an answer. I had to have an answer. I think that's where so many people miss is that they are willing and trying to make you mad and sad. They're trying to convince you to feel something without providing that guidance. I think, like you said, that's the thought part. That's the leadership part is when we give direction and allow people to imagine a better way of doing the thing. I think one of the things with creating content like this is a lot of people have no idea actually how their brain works. That the average person will have about 800 ideas in a day. They just pass unnoticed. This is a bit of an aside, and I apologise. But for me, this particular phenomenon, I really would like to shout about because it's so important in my work that a lot of people struggle with idea generation, and it's because they're often coming at it from the wrong perspective. What they want to notice is their own thinking to begin with. And for me, I notice as soon as something puzzles me, I write it down. One line, that's all it takes. But because I write it down, it's being given cognitive space, it's being anchored, and it won't go away. Now you think, Okay, that's fine. That's a process, but it's bigger than a process. This is the only point... I'm going to hug the microphone, by the way, for the listener. I remember reading about dreams back when I was a teenager, and they were talking about teaching people to do lucid dreaming. I thought, No, that sounds cool. But the problem they had is people couldn't even remember a basic dream. So they said, All you need to do is write down just a fragment, a corner of a dream that you had. And what you'll find is the next day The next day, you remember a picture. Write that down. The next day, you'll remember a whole sequence. Write it down. The next day, full-blown technicolour dream. Write it down. The next night, like You've been on several adventures during the night in full technicolour, and it works perfectly. It's bulletproof. And what that tells us is the subconscious wants to give us what it sees as matters to us. It's the same with thought leadership, you need to, first of all, notice your thoughts that matter, capture them so the subconscious knows that's what they care about. And suddenly, you will have no absence of thought, and you will have an opportunity to answer your own questions and then share them with others. For me, this is thought leadership. Yes, it's answering questions, but a lot of the time, it's your own questions. Exactly. That idea flow, I think, is so important Because if you don't love the thing you do, it's really hard to drive connexion and be convicted if you actually don't care. I think that's the conversation that most people never even approach is like, Do Do you actually care? Do you actually care about that outcome? That's how I got so attached to job postings. It wasn't, Do I love job postings? No, I am not a researcher. I didn't just fall in love with the idea that you could write 500 words that made sense to no one and post it on the internet and attract 5,000 people. That wasn't the joy. For me, what I really fell in love with is this idea that in a moment, and I'm a writer, in a moment, someone could imagine a new life. If we gave them permission, if we gave them enough information, it's like that dream. You capture these little moments, and all of a sudden, there you are in this moment where you're looking at a job, and that could change your life. Anyone who has ever changed jobs knows. It deeply changes your life if you do that. How that functions to my creativity is so many people would be like, Well, how do you blog that much? How do you write that much? That's so much. I'm like, I like it. It's really easy. I like it. I think this is really important because a lot of people approach marketing as trying to convince people. It's marketing. But actually, if we change marketing to mission, so Personally, we look at it quite differently. I think that's why you cut through, and it's why it connects with people. Because my sense for you is helping people with job posting, Helping people with the processes and the communications around that, it's not about bottom line. Bottom line matters, but it's about creating environments where there's a true sense of belonging, because that's actually what's going to drive bottom lines. If people feel bonded to an organisation, if they feel like they've arrived in the right place, that's going to philtre through a whole organisation. That's what changes cultures. In a world of automation and AI, where we've really become line items in many respects, belonging becomes the premium. If I'm going to move company for $10 more, what are you going to do about that? Belonging is the only answer. That's where bringing in the right people rather than the wrong people matter, but also demonstrating to people that that matters to you. I wonder how you work with organisations to communicate that in order that they can buy into it. Do you need to, or how much of that work does your content marketing do for you? I think it's focusing on the most human element element here which is deeply understanding. Because if we understand something, then we can be committed to it, we can trust, we can build something off of that. But if we don't have deep understanding, it actually becomes a root rot issue because that data propels itself across the workforce. What we see is that 36%, I want to say is the latest number I saw, will quit a job within the first 60 days if the interview does not align with their expectations, with the reality and that misguided connexion. For so long, we worked off of a power dynamic in which I'm the employer, you're the worker, you do what I say, and that was okay in a different timeline when workers had trust in the '60s, when people took a job and they trusted that that would be available to them for the next 30 years, that they could stay there their whole lives and live a good life. That base safety trust does not exist anymore. Every leader knows that. Every leader is feeling the consequences of that, whether it's a retention issue, a connexion issue, an employee experience challenge. It bleeds into your entire business. Now they can see there's a lot of value in explicitly communicating, but there's always value and clarity. Especially in the world where it's just so noisy. The best part is that it always works because the competition is so bad. All of these AI tools are only accelerating all of the problems that with job postings in the first place. Any decent leader can see the benefit of standing out. What does a typical commercial engagement look like for you? How does the conversation go? Then what does the deliverable actually look like? Obviously, you have peripheral things you do, but the core business. The core business is they come to me and they say, My job postings are bad. That's usually the first conversation every time. There are a couple of very common reasons why job postings are bad. They either have archaic systems that manage them, they believe that job postings have to look like that, or they're suffering from an ownership issue in which the job posting is not owned by them. They're trying to do basically version management at scale fail, and that becomes harder and harder the bigger your company is. They come and we start with the process because I actually believe that we should not be implementing any tools, any training, or anything without dealing deeply understanding what flaws exist in the process and correcting that. As anyone knows who's used AI for even a minute, if a person can't execute the process, the machine can't either. We start with that, really defining the process. Then we revise the templates and systems that exist within that process so that we have some base level of understanding of this is what we think will work in order to create the improvements and results we want because speed is never the goal. I want to underline, emphasise, italicise that. That's probably the conversation I have to have the most, is that the outcome of this, how we will measure success is not, job post got out faster. Speed is not the problem. Speed is never the problem. One extra day between an offer letter is not going to break any business. Quality is the issue. If we hire the wrong person, that's the problem. Then Then typically from there, once we build all of those systems, we run a pilot programme. We find a region or a role so that we can deeply understand how it works and some of the depths of that because the systems actually do work across every level and across different industries, which always surprises people a little because they think that they're all unique snowflakes, but that's just not the truth. Then we roll it out at scale. What I love about that is that so many people treat recruiting like it's magic. Oh, you just got to know the right person. The reality is that there's a tonne of science. If we approach this with experimentation instead of treating it like a traditional product rollout where we just sent out an email and a user guide, I think that's how we build better systems. Ultimately, I see the teams being able to replicate those outcomes then across the different divisions of their business and scaling it across global organisations now. I've seen, and I don't remember if it was you showing it to me or if I saw it through content, but I've seen you contrasting bad job postings with good job postings. For the listener, they're probably thinking, Am I in the right podcast? Should I be listening to this? This next bit, if Kat's willing to share, you want to listen to because it's actually universally applicable in lots of areas. But I haven't asked you to prepare this, but you talk about this all the time, I imagine. What What does a bad job posting look like? This is something that we do during training, and this is a really important part of that engagement process is training the team on knowing what good looks like because broadly, we actually don't know as an industry what a good job posting looks like. It's my mission. I've been at it for eight years now, but we're still working towards it. A bad job posting is going to be full of buzzwords. It's going to say, A highly collaborative team player, joining my group of rock stars to accelerate our future. I can excite that so steadily because I could probably find 10,000 job postings with that exact phrase right here and right now with a Boolean string. It's that repeatable. The issue is not the language, it's the context. It's that we use the language with no context, assuming that it has universal meaning, and no word has universal meaning. Every Everyone internalises their own definitions of words, especially when they're contextualised by work. So collaborative to you and collaborative to me might look completely different. Team player might look completely different. And so providing buzzwords with no no context, is basically just saying, blah, blah, blah, blah, before their brain draughts off into some other exciting topic to them is about 250 words. That scares me every single time I say it. I call it my toilet theory. It's about as long as they would sit on the toilet and scroll. So 250 in words. That's all we get. Except we have job postings that are articles in the Atlantic. They're 1,000, 2,000 words. You're like, There's no way they read this beginning to end and actually understand what you're asking. I think the last and the most dangerous This mistake that we make consistently, and this is the training that I offer most often, is teaching people what mandatory requirements means. Mandatory, meaning that without the help of God, Google, and a really good LLM, You could not figure this out on your own. You must have context or experience in order to execute this at the scale that we need you to. I find that when we're missing that, what we actually do is we fully zone into these high bias outcomes. Things like years of experience, degrees that don't matter, and a lot of other things that become barriers to entry for people that are systemic barriers and really problematic at scale. I don't think I've ever actively looked for a job. In fact, I've only had a job twice in the traditional sense. But I have looked at job ads from time to time, and I can't even remember why. But one of the things I noticed, I know what it was. When I was looking to hire people, I would look at competitor's ads. That's where I would generally see them. You would see this big essay about requirements. But I knew what they were hiring for, and only three of those things mattered. Everything else was, it would be nice if. But the person who's looking at a job doesn't know how to work out, like you said, what is mandatory? Because I got to do all that. If you're asking me to expose I chose myself. I don't mean in a weird sense, but if I make moves towards you because I'm interested in this job, I'm creating risk where I'm moving from. I'm not going to do that unless I've got clarity, yes, I have an opportunity here. I think this is why, statistically, in a one-off job, this might make a difference. You aggregate this up over a large organisation. This is the difference between you getting 60 70% B players and 60, 70% A players. It's mind boggling when you actually think about it. Yeah. Well, and you're getting people who have massive egos because they think they're qualified, but they're not. We end up hiring the wrong person. Like you said, that becomes a trickling consequence and could be very, very expensive for your business. I think the other piece that we really need to understand is that ultimately, if they never find your job posting, if the right person never even sees it, does not understand, then you can't hire them anyway. Whatever you want to accomplish with that person because we don't hire people for fun, there's always a business objective, some income or outcome we are looking for when we bring that person in, that outcome and the revenue associated with it is All of a sudden, it's like, why would you not want to have a high-quality piece of information that's easy to discover that stands out at the front end of this system? That's going to feed the entire process. Plus, with AI, it means that we can actually feed employee experience processes. If I defined all of this now, I can inform performance, I can inform development opportunities, I can start to pipeline this person into parallel roles where their skills might be useful in other departments inside of our business. That's going to be really, really important really soon. I'm interested to know when you're engaging with an organisation, I'm not projecting this onto you. I'm just simply saying what I see quite often is I would want to be engaging at an executive senior board level, but they delegate the work, for example, that you do to HR, which means it can be, on the one hand, deprioritised, but on the other hand, easy to countermand. I'd imagine with your position listening, you managed to enter an organisation where you would like more of the time than a lot of people. But I guess the question is, at what level do you feel it's appropriate for you to be interfacing with an organisation in order to get the buy-in at the level you need it? How does that contrast or does it with where you generally seem to be interfacing? Typically, where I come into the business is The mid-level manager. So not the most senior person, not the most junior person, but the person who's observing that every person on their team has mildly or wildly different skills. Because recruiting, there's not one education pipeline into recruiting. You see that in marketing, you see that in sales. I mean, this bleeds across a lot of different divisions inside of a business, but specifically in recruiting, because there is no education pipeline, there's also not a lot of consistency in use of tools that we have people with wildly different skills on our team. That team could be anywhere from 3-30 people who all have wildly different skills, who are delivering wildly different experiences to hiring managers. That becomes a liability. When it becomes a liability, i. E, the hiring manager hires the wrong person. They post a job and they get no one they like. They interview for days, and I don't like any of those people. Then we're starting to waste other people's time, and that's when they call me. Is, All right, we have a problem. We're having a pain that's usually people-related, but the pain that they're actually feeling and where I wish they would call me is like, Oh, I just went through 500 resumes and not one of them is qualified. Yeah, I probably should have gotten some training on this first. That's where they should have been calling us before the pain was ever someone else's problem. I have been responsible for hiring in my own organisation. In the past, I grew a good-size team, but I did it badly. I'll tell you the mistake I made, and I could say this in retrospect, prospect with some confidence, was I hired a lot of people like me. I hired people I liked. I hired people I liked spending time with. What I know now is I'm not somebody who should really be allowed to spend time in the weeds. I'm a strategic tactical thinker. I'm just imagining myself as running a team in a corporation. I want to hire for a specific skill set But when I'm interviewing, so I got 10 candidates, all same skillset, but I like this guy the best. I hire him or her, and they are clearly somebody who likes to work at a tactical strategic level. They had all the skills, but I need somebody who's going to get down in the weeds. Psychographic testing, there's all kinds of ways you can understand somebody's profile, but what place does that have in this this journey to getting the right people in the right seats? How does that play into your role, or do you have a perspective on it? I have a very distinct perspective on this, and I think every single entrepreneur who is listening to this right now, you better get your pen. Because the most expensive mistake you could ever make with your business is to spend it on the wrong people. We all make the of hiring people we like, especially if you are not super familiar or you've never been trained on hiring. Because what ends up happening is we start comparing people to each other instead of people to the job. That is the number one mistake entrepreneurs make when they are hiring new talent into their business. What I tell people, and we work through this exercise, I actually have a job audit on my website that you can buy. It's very, very affordable, very cheap, and it will walk you through this chart and give you a template that you can use every single time you hire. But this is really how you need to distil the work. I want you to sit down and you're going to distil the work into these categories. The first one is autonomy. How autonomous do you want this person to work? Do you want to look at every single thing they do, or do you want them to do it by themselves? The next one is peopleing. Who are they going to talk to? Who are they going to present ideas ideas to? Really understanding their relationship with other people, or is it just with you? Next are the tools. What tools do they use? What do they know how to do with the tools? That final bit is understanding that background. Going into and understanding if there's any industry experience or something specific that would really, really help you and help them be successful at this job. If we're able to distil all of that and write it down, what you're going to do next is develop your interview questions based off of confirming or denying that they have everything in that column. When you are In an interview, you're going to sit there and fill in those blanks and you're going to write down their answer and you're going to ask every single person the exact same questions. Then from there, you're going to compare their answers to the questions, not their personalities, not their charming not their cute outfits. You are literally going to compare the answer, the qualifications of this person to the person, the other people that you involved and looked at, and give yourself a qualitative, quantitative, real answer to, I hired this person because I think they can do this better. That's how we get to better hiring. I can absolutely see that making a big difference, a very simple process, leads to much more controlled and effective result. But as you were speaking, I'm also thinking, that's me bringing people into the organisation as employees or team members, but I could apply almost the same process to clients. That does make you look at things quite differently. It's quite fascinating. I need to spend some time with that. Well, you know what I like about it is it allows you to know what works. I spent too many hours many years of my entrepreneurial journey doing everything instead of doing what works. Over the last year, I took that step back and I was like, You know what? I don't need to experiment and try every single thing that's available to me. I sat down and I decided what I wanted. Then I said, What have I done in the past that got me these things? Because I'm not trying to get anything. I'm looking to have more speaking engagements. I'm looking to train more teams. How did I get training in the past? I did X, Y, Z. I got to tell you how rattling it was to me to sit down and write about what works and to realise how much time I dedicated to trying other things instead of doing Yes. Instead of doing what works. Abundance through elimination, I've begun calling it. There's a fascinating statistic that it began as, I think this is a thing because Because I was looking at what worked for me in my business in terms of how opportunity comes to me. And 65 % was through relationships that already exist, 20 % content, then a tiny 15 % direct outreach, and then a five % maximum ads. And so knowing that this ratio holds good from the biggest expert business consulting firm all the way through to to solo practitioners, the most prosperous people report those ratios. So efforts need to be applied proportionately. Exactly. And that makes me look at things completely differently. And this is why I get really cross when to bust a metaphor, you ask the orchestra who's the most important instrument, they all think they're the answer, when actually the music is the answer. The conductor is the guy who knows. Similarly, all marketing tactics work. Everything works, but you can't do everything. What you can do is the things that work best first. Yes. Sorry, that's another rant. Let's talk about your book, The Bounce Back Factor. I love the subtitle, A Leader's Guide to Liking yourself while leading your people. You know why I love that title? Because when I was running a big team, I thought, How am I going to make this work? I thought, I don't want to because I don't think I'm going to like the person I need to become to make it work. And your book broke that and makes me look at it completely differently. Tell us about the book. I grew up in a military family. I think when I wrote this book, it really was about going on van life. That's the back story, is that I packed up all of my things, I moved into a van, and I travelled the country while running my business for three years. I thought that's what the book was about. Then once I started to get these stories and these lessons down on paper, I think what I realised is this story was about rewriting the rules of leadership that I had always thought were true, the rules that made you believe that you had to be someone you wouldn't like simply to lead all of those people. Many of those seeds were planted in me from a very young age. I grew up in a military family, both Both of my parents were active duty, and then my parents divorced, and my mum pursued her career with her whole heart. We moved 13 times. We were restationed 13 times between the time that I was five and the time that I graduated high school. That was just my school years. We moved a lot more outside of that. I believed that my career and my success was just dependent on me doing more. I just had to work harder. That's how you be successful, work harder. In the military, that works up to a certain point. If you go to the school, you complete the PT, you complete your mission, whatever that is, you will get promoted over a certain period of time. I went into corporate America very much with all of those expectations. You can laugh at me now because you know that's not how corporate America works. They do not put you on a promotion plan. No one gives a crap about making sure that you have a livable wage or housing covered or medical expenses covered in the US. I went into corporate thinking, I just had to work harder, and I always did. I was always willing to do that extra thing. Then all of a sudden, fast forward many moons and many toxic managers One day, I got feedback that was just so completely unacceptable to me. I had grown in a way where I was like, No one is going to say that to me. That's what pushed me into the leap of entrepreneurship. You'll read all about that story in the book. But what I found is I checked all the boxes. I made great money. I had a good team. I had the beautiful apartment. I could see the Rocky Mountains from my living room. My couch looked at the mountains. I still felt the same way about myself. I still felt frustrated at the end of the day. I still felt like I wasn't successful, all of those things. What I realised is that what I was struggling with was navigating uncertainty with confidence. I did not know how to walk into a scenario where I knew nothing, I didn't know the answer, and feel successful. But again, didn't quite know that yet, just knew that the apartment life all of that, and I ended up moving into a van because I met someone who was living in a van, and it opened the windows of YouTube Van Life for me. The book tells the stories of these really practical lessons that I learned by being forced to change everything. They very cleanly align with a team culture in which people can show up as who they are and they can grow that muscle because resilience isn't going to show up right on time. It's actually something you have to build all the time. But you don't need to go live in a van to figure it out. I really like that because I think we think about leadership as how we shape other people But actually it begins with yourself. If you can't lead yourself with compassion, how can you possibly create an environment where other people feel safe and willing to take risks? Because we want people to take controlled risks. If they're not willing to take controlled risks for us and for each other, then you're going to find a team that doesn't thrive, that doesn't prosper. They just play safe. And that isn't going to create a culture where people really feel like, I have a home. And in today's world, that's a massive point of difference. To bring it right back to where we began the conversation, this is courageous leadership. It's leading without worrying about consequence with a small C, not a consequence with a big C, and where I'm comfortable that I'm going to make mistakes. In that, I give other people confidence that it's okay. It's quite interesting. I need to spend some more time with that. Yesterday, I gave this talk to an ERG group for a bank, which is a unique and complex thing. They take federal funding, they're thinking about how they can engage. I was telling my girlfriend about the presentation beforehand, and I think what came up for me is this idea that if someone had taught me this earlier, it probably would have changed my entire career. Because uncertainty is not just, like you said, big C, consequences. It's not like, I screwed up the entire website, and now no one can book a flight for the next 12 hours. That's not what we're navigating. We're Navigating all these little moments where people feel like they're doing it wrong, where they feel uncomfortable, where they have to have a hard conversation. You and I both know that the majority of adults are not prepared to have a productive, high Highly educated, informed conversation about a problem. Even that is something that if we instil this in our teams, we have the opportunity to make them better. I don't just mean at their job. I I mean better friends, better parents, better partners, better community members, better people, humans. What an incredible opportunity to know that you can actually improve the quality of someone else's life by doing this bit of work and creating some simple infrastructure on your team that allows other people to imagine a new way of doing it and rewrite their rules. What an incredible philtre as well. If people can't tolerate that as a culture and they self-exit, that creates a self-cleansing organism which creates a very positive environment. I don't know quite how to articulate, but I think you know what I mean. Hopefully, the listener knows what I mean because it's all I love you. But everyone who's ever worked at a company they love knows exactly what you're talking about. You don't need to have any adjectives. You know what it feels like to go into a business where your manager is invested in your goodness, in making Are you good at your job. I'm thinking of one of my very first managers. Her name was Camille Watson. Should she be listening to this? She should know she was one of the best bosses I ever had in my whole life. She was so invested in helping me understand how to navigate corporate America, and it went so far beyond making me good at Twitter, which is, guess what she called it the first time she asked me if I wanted to work on it. It was so much bigger than attaching herself to some result. It was truly I think it was a conviction of making me better. I think that's that core quality of any leader. It's not just what's in it for you, what's in it for us. I think as well. To touch on this, it's not just about you at work, but it's about you in the round, 360 degrees, completely organically and holistically. I look at what millennials these days, they're the bulk of the workforce, is what they want. They don't want work-life balance. They want life. It's a difficult thing to accomplish, and particularly when a lot of corporate America, corporate Europe, corporate around the world is run by people like me who were trained by people who grew up through management training in the 1940s and '50s. I'm curious to know, for example, when you're speaking about the themes from the book to a traditional senior corporate structure, how do they react to it? What's What feedback do you get? The feedback that I get most often, and I'm actually really proud of this, is this feels so much more simple than I expected. When you tell someone we're having a speaker on Navigating uncertainty, I think they expect a certain something, right? They expect some acronyms and frameworks for showing up, and that's not my jam. I've always believed that the right answer is the easy one, that the The right answer is actually really practical, and there are some eternal human lessons that we all need to learn. The hardest part is actually convincing yourself that the rule that you believed your whole life actually isn't true. To respond to that, it's simpler than I thought. For me, that's a sign that the messenger has accomplished mastery to an extent, because simple is not easy. I think that's probably what they're reacting to is, this could have been complex, but now I could hold it all in my head. To bring it back to psychographic testing, a friend of mine is a coach, and he was frequently talking about a particular type of personality test, and I've done a hundred of these. But the problem is you walk away and you remember the name of whatever it is you are, but everything else is so complex. The context of where you sit within this matrix is just... It very quickly becomes meaningless. But this particular test, the result was so easy to see, My goodness, this is so useful. I could hold the whole thing in my head. It's simplicity. Clarity, simplicity, these are very difficult things to accomplish. I can see why they would react to that. We're going to have to speak again because I know you have a meeting at some point soon. Who should read I really... It was a biassed answer, but I feel like anyone who has to engage with other people regularly should read this book because I think there are parts of it that can be so healing for you no matter what you've experienced in the world of work. Whether you loved every manager and you felt like everyone poured into you, you hated every manager. I think all of this, it's a mirror that you get to hold up for yourself as a leader, as someone who wants to be a leader, as someone who wants to lead from where they are. It's that mirror that allows you to say, Am I being as helpful and kind when I apply these rules as I could be? And recognising one of the universal truths that can be very, very hard is that nothing changes if you don't change. I feel like it's for everyone because we're all people that need to grow and become. I guess another question I'd like to ask, I'm going to make this the last question before I get into the three things. What I hear from a lot of people who aren't accustomed to it with content marketing, thought leadership, whatever you want to call it, is it feels narcissistic. It feels like I'm trying to show off. It feels inauthentic. They haven't yet understood that self-advocacy is not necessarily about them. What would you want to say to that person? It's interesting to have a conversation about authenticity in a world where we're constantly comparing ourselves to machines. I want to reframe because I think it's really unfair to even give AI that credit. Ai cannot be authentic because authenticity is Requires passion. I think that's the thing that I tell people when they're like, How I feel like it's inauthentic. I ask, Are you passionate about it? Do you care about it being better? Then it's authentic. Stop worrying about delivery. Perfection is not the goal. Execution is the goal. If you take the 10,000-foot view, this is one of my weird fascinations right now, is how people never People never try. I am currently doing a lot of very science-oriented exercise because I really want to have a healthy body. Both of my parents, their health has deteriorated really rapidly right around the age I am now. I've done a lot of research to understand different benchmarks of health that seem like simple baselines and working towards those. For example, I want to be able to do five pullups. I want to be able to run a 10-minute mile. I want to be able to do so many pushups because all of these are things that would help me if I lost function in my hands, if I experienced some of the health things that my family has. When you start to look into it, for example, a pull-up, less than 20% of people in the world can do one pull-up. But then, one. But here's the even crazier part. What percentage has even tried? There's There's no data on that because most people never try. Yes, I need to play with that. Kat, three things. Your amplifiers, we're going to call them. These are three things for the listener, if you haven't listened before, where I invite the guests to share three things you can go and do something with. So mental models, books, podcast, literally anything. Do gardening. What's Amplifier number Amplifier number one is going to be asking for help. I think all of us can learn to ask for help more. When we look into the workforce data, what we find is that only 41% of people can remember the last time they asked for help. Now, that's not as scary until you flip the statistic. That means 59% of people can't remember the last time they asked for help. There was no great problem solved by one person. Not ever. Not innovation, not science, That's not the future of anything. There was not one person who sat in a room and figured it all out by themselves. Remember to ask for help. One of the easiest way to practise asking for help is to add a hot seat element to any team environment that you have. Number one, you assign your hot seats early. You always tell people in advance when they're going to have a hot seat, and then you spend 10 minutes letting this person bring up a problem, whether it's personal or business, and you all focus on helping them solve it. It can be a really, really to bring asking for help. Again, build that muscle in real-time instead of expecting resilience to just show up when you need it. Internally in an organisation, I could see that being incredibly powerful, shifting culture in a department more widely. But also, I think for the entrepreneurs, business owners listening, I would extend this into there is nothing another business owner likes more than somebody asking for help. It's the best. Somebody ask me for help, I will cancel things to help people quite happily. It's the best. It's the most rewarding thing. You're going to get a binary answer. Yes, absolutely no problem, or get lost. If it's get lost, frankly, who cares? Amplifier number two. Yeah. The second one is get really good at changing direction. When you live in a van, you end up in some rather precarious situations because your vehicle is much larger than the average car. It's actually about 13 feet high and about 20 feet long. I know all of that because I have tried to put that van in dimensions that are smaller than those numbers. But the lesson for businesses is that sometimes you need to consider that the way forward is not the way you've always done it. I think often we just fall into these patterns. The story from the book is that I drove down an ATV road in my 13 foot high 18-foot long van. An ATV is a very small four wheeled motorbike for anyone who's not familiar. I drove about a mile down the road before I hit a path that was too narrow for me to cross. It wasn't until an ATV pulled up, laughed at me and said, You got to back up, that I considered that backwards was an option. Traditional corporate logic, traditional hustle culture will never tell you that backwards is an option. It It always is. It always is. You have to be willing to change direction, even about things as simple as idea generation. The example I wrote about in the book, and one of the ones that we talk about a lot is brainstorming. The most effective way to brainstorm is not to put yourself in a room and try to marathon your success. The science shows that in brainstorming, what you should actually do is break it into three sessions. In the first session, all ideas come out. I'm talking the bad the good ideas, and everything else. You do not anchor to one and you do not say no to anything. The next session is where you cancel out a couple of those ideas, but you just let the ideas exist in a public place for everyone to pass and process over at least a 48-hour period. Then, minimum three days later, you do a one-hour decision meeting. That's actually how brainstorming is most effective when you are trying to come up with the right way to do something and to give yourself space to say, Maybe I shouldn't do this at all. The whole time you're speaking, the sunk cost fallacy keeps coming to mind. If you're listening and you don't know what the sunk cost fallacy, just Google it. I'm not going to explain it, but there are lots of good things about the sunk cost fallacy, which I'm not going to complain about. You know what I'm talking about. But similarly, we're all prey to these biases and ego, which Which I think is the most pernicious thing in business, ego. Because admitting that you turned down the wrong road, it's hard enough when you're driving a van. But when you've told everybody this is the best thing ever, and you're going to have to go back. That requires a bit of humility, which a lot of people really struggle with. So amplifier number three. You should set your goals with compassion for what you want, not competitiveness. When it comes to goal setting for most of my life, I set my goals either in competition with myself, meaning last year I did this, so this year I'm going to do this, or in competition with others, which is even more dangerous because all of a sudden the bar is your perception of where they are. It's often actually not the reality of where that person is. We are trying a new goal setting, and I actually have a whole worksheet that my team uses, and I highly encourage other people to use as well. How I approach goal setting now is the very first thing I do is high level, what do I want more of and what do I want less of? I get really, really clear about how I will know I am doing it right. For example, in my world, I would be doing more speaking, more presenting, and more training over maybe the consulting work that I'm doing. That's just an example. There are these visible cues that tell me that I'm winning. The next thing you do is that you break that into a goal that would help you get more or less. Typically, we're looking at annual and quarterly. Let's say annually, I'm determining what I want more and less of. Then quarterly, I'm like, What can I do high-level projects that I could complete that would help move me directionally towards what I want? Then the last piece is what I call the next best step. The next best step is when you just roll and you literally ideate of every single thing you could do during that project to help you move the needle. What's every single possible action that you could take towards that? What I like about this system is that it allows for things to change. I know I want more and less. It allows me to say, Actually, I don't want more of that. Let's shift for next quarter. But then when we get into the micro, it also provides direction, especially when you're leading a team. I hear a lot of managers say, Well, I don't know what they're doing with their time. If you follow this goal setting, you can trust that that person has a list of every single thing they could be doing. You know that it rolls up to the quarterly and annual goals of your team, and so that their energy is guided towards the right energy and the right things that they're supposed to be doing, not just doing more work. I love that idea. I could talk about why I love that for another 20 minutes, but I'm not going to because I know you have to go soon. But I did over here, you mentioned briefly that you encourage everyone to go and get it. Is there a link that we can use to go and get it? Yes. And bonus, You can get the book on the same page. It's on the website, bouncebackfactorbook. Com. There you can see more about the book. You can buy a copy, and you can also get a copy of that goal setting worksheet for free. Amazing. Well, I will go there this evening and get the book and the worksheet. I'm so grateful for your time. We are going to have to do this again because- Yes, please. Best chat ever. If people want to get closer to you, if they need more Kat Kibben in their life, where can they do that? Yeah, this is a half joke. I'm the only Katrina Kibben in the world. If you spell my name right, you will find me. If you spell my name wrong, you will find a priest for the US House of Representatives, and you will absolutely know that you're you are in the wrong place. Well, hopefully people will Google that. Similarly, if you Google Bob Gentle, it used to be the guy who did all the backgrounds for ScoobyDoo was first in Google. Now it's me. You won the Gentle Award. Also, he hasn't been doing any work for a very long time now. Okay, so not the best competition, but... Kat, Kippin, this has been the best time. That does bring us to the end of another episode. Thank you. I hope for listening. If you did enjoy this, then you will love the Personal Brand Business Roadmap. Fifty pages of everything you need to start, scale, or fix your expert business, 100% free as a gift from me. Just hit the link in the show notes or visit Amplify Mead or agency., while you are listening to this, if you have enjoyed the show, then I would invite you to leave a five-star review wherever you listen to podcast. That's five, count them. For listening. And Kat, you have been awesome.