Yes for Success

This episode is a discussion with Gary Ryan, the author for Yes for Success. This book right here, if you’re watching it on YouTube, I’m showing it to you. Our goal is to help you unlock the power of your mind, to enable Professional success, Gary’s new book focuses on explaining how our brain adopts what he calls mental models and being aware of them as well as learning how to use them is crucial for your professional journey.

Renata Bernarde: Whether you are on the hunt for a new role or you’re feeling stagnant in your career progression, understanding the deep seated beliefs that guide your decisions is crucial. Gary’s insights will illuminate you. how to navigate career crossroads with confidence and clarity.

When I’m with Gary i’m reminded that the journey towards career fulfillment often begins within our own minds. By recognizing and reshaping our mental models, we can unlock doors to new opportunities and pave the way for success, a success that aligns with our deepest values. So thank you, Gary, for empowering us to take control of our career narratives with such practical and profound wisdom.

You’ve been doing this for longer than I have and I really trust your coaching and I trust your thought leadership. I hope that you enjoyed this episode. Let me know what you think. Remember to follow us wherever you found us and for ongoing career support and great guests, you can also subscribe to my newsletter.

The more people on my newsletter, the bigger this project becomes and I am so proud to say that we have thousands of professionals now signed up for the newsletter. It means that you will never miss a new episode and you will always be reminded of your career plans and the fact that you need to be investing in them and developing them and working on them carving out time for them throughout your career.

So you can find the link to sign up to the newsletter in the episode show notes. Without further ado, here’s my conversation with my friend, Gary Ryan.

Gary, I feel so bad that we’re recording today because it’s such a special day for you. You received many boxes of your new book and here we are. I feel like I’m between you and a glass of champagne.

Gary Ryan:

that’s going to come a lot later. I’ve got to, cause I, the whole lot of that first order are all sold. So I’ve, yeah, I’ve got to get them out. So we’ve got more, more

ordered,

Renata Bernarde: that’s fantastic. That’s great. And , who bought your book so early in the piece? Are they corporate clients that are buying for their employees or are they just individuals that are buying for themselves?

Gary Ryan: So 60 percent of corporate clients that have bought it on behalf of teams. And which is not really what I was expecting, but delighted about. And the other 40 percent are individuals that have yeah, bought it that way. Now, you mentioned that you got a copy. Did you get it through

Renata Bernarde: I bought it in Amazon and the reason why I bought it using Amazon is because I have a feeling and I could be wrong, so correct me if I’m wrong. If you want to write a review on Amazon, you have to buy it on Amazon and I wanted to do that for you. That’s my gift to you.

Gary Ryan: Yes. Yeah. Well, it’s a great gift because that’s already there and it makes a big difference. So I mean, Kindle’s cheaper. I don’t know if you like Kindle

Renata Bernarde: I didn’t have access to Kindle. I had the option of a hard cover or a soft cover.

Gary Ryan: Not with Kindle as well.

Renata Bernarde: but remember, it’s not the first time that this happens. Maybe there’s something wrong with my Amazon because when you launched your last book, the Leadership Matters book, I also had trouble buying it. So I think it might be, could it be my

Gary Ryan: interesting.

Renata Bernarde: my Amazon, because my Amazon is all over the place.

Sometimes I access the UK Amazon. Sometimes I access the U S Amazon. So it could, it could have been that I was in the wrong Amazon platform.

Gary Ryan: not Australia. You don’t

Renata Bernarde: Oh no, I do. I do. I just don’t remember which one I used to buy your book.

Gary Ryan: because Amazon had my book up until yesterday in three different spot or was it two days ago? It was very recently had it in two different spot three different spots. They weren’t together And I’m like, Oh, no, they need to be together. So I contacted them and within less than 12 hours, they put them together that I could see.

So I’m like, yeah, they’ve got them together. Okay. Cause yeah, cause the Kindle version has been available for probably nearly a month

Renata Bernarde: Oh, okay.

Gary Ryan: but I don’t, yeah, but I don’t know who gets

Kindle. Yeah, it was the 9th of October. Yeah, it was actually, it’s a month now cause it was the 9th of October when we launched.

bUt then the, the whole, I had some delays with Ingramspart cause they’re my global distributor for the, for the book that’s purchased anyone through anyone other than me. So I don’t know who the, I don’t know who the purchasers are. I don’t know how many there are. Is it like a six month delay before I get the data?

Renata Bernarde: Oh, that’s so interesting. One day, Gary, one day we’re going to sit down, you’re going to teach me how to write a book. I’m not there yet. I’m just too lazy for that.

Gary Ryan: that’s not true. You are no way you to you would have

Renata Bernarde: It’s a different, way of working that I, too long form for me. I don’t have the patience for

Gary Ryan: yeah, but what if your book was just a collection of your

Renata Bernarde: Yes,

Gary Ryan: that you’re already,

Renata Bernarde: that would work. That could work.

Gary Ryan: you would, you would have. Easy 150 pages worth of, worth of, you know, if the top 50 articles or posts or whatever you want to call it with a slight amount of tweaking, you’ve got, the book’s already

Renata Bernarde: I know. I’m reading.

Gary Ryan: Because I think a lot of your audience would love to see that in one resource

Renata Bernarde: Yeah, no, you’re probably right. I just don’t want to do it myself. I’ll probably have to get a research assistant or somebody to just compile and curate all the work that I’ve done. All the transcripts.

Gary Ryan: That person’s in Upwork just waiting right now for that job. They’re there. They are, you know, they’re there. They’re just waiting for it. You obviously, you know and I did experience some hiccups this time around with Upwork. Do you use Upwork? Yes.

Renata Bernarde: fortunate to hire people in the Philippines to work for me and I keep them forever. So I’ve been working with Estella. Since they dot really I I hired her on if anybody is interested and we’re keeping this audio. I’m not sure what we’re keeping it But we hired Estella in Her gosh 2019 I think it was and Listen to this.

Estella, who now does all my Facebook ads and all my ads she had worked at Accenture. She has an engineering degree and wanted to work from home so she could raise her little girl. And I’m like, yeah. Let’s work. and then after doing EA work, when she would do everything, she said, no, I really just want to do Facebook ads.

I want to have other clients. And I’m like, of course, you know, that’s your, your professional goal. I’ll back you up. So she now has several clients and I’m one of them. Then I hired Camille and Camille has been with me. Two plus years now, and that’s, that’s what I do, but I, I would probably need to find somebody at Upwork to do that research work.

Yeah.

Gary Ryan: Yeah, I’m not, I’m not sure what you pay in the Philippines, but Upwork’s

Renata Bernarde: Mm hmm.

Gary Ryan: like it’s not cheap, not like Fiverr. Because it is, it catches me every time because it’s in U. S. dollars. I often end up hiring people that are here in Australia

Renata Bernarde: didn’t even know that Fiverr was cheaper than Upwork. That’s how ignorant I am. Mm. Okay.

Gary Ryan: Yeah. But the quality is not

Renata Bernarde: Huh.

Gary Ryan: But I did, get someone in Upwork this time, which had never happened before that. Accepted, well like, up front looked fantastic, accepted this job, and then, but they wouldn’t, so they verbally, like, sorry, they written, it’s all sort of messenger stuff, they had messaged and accepted the job, but didn’t accept the job inside Upwork, yeah, and hadn’t accepted the offer, which is what it’s I’m like, you need to accept the offer, that’s how this works, it protects us both, oh yeah, I forgot, I forgot, and this went on for three days.

then I did some research on Upwork’s offers not being accepted as the question mark, why? And I saw online, people use it to avoid bad feedback when they accept a job that they can’t do. And they’re buying time to research it, to then do it if they can. But because the milestones you’ve set, so in this case, my milestones were getting passed and missed.

But because they hadn’t accepted the offer, I can’t give bad feedback on a milestone that didn’t actually exist. So they’re manipulating the

Renata Bernarde: I see. Okay.

Gary Ryan: Yeah. So I, I sent some feedback to Upwork about this particular person for doing that behavior and, and quickly worked it. So I thought I had to fire them.

Well, I didn’t really fire them cause I never but I had to go, I had to go back to the market and find

Renata Bernarde: And what sort of person were you to help you with? What was the work?

Gary Ryan: The work was the person who created my cover wasn’t able to produce the cover in a format that Ingram spark would

Renata Bernarde: I

Gary Ryan: Just couldn’t do it. And I was helping this person out by giving them the task of the cover design. They’ve had a bit of a hard time, blah, blah, blah. And you know, they came to me and said, I’ll do your cover.

And I said, do you really know how to do it? Yeah, I’ve never done it before, but I’ll learn on blah, blah, blah. And I, I took a bit of a risk. It bit me a little bit, but they still did a great job. But in the end, it was just causing delay after delay because they couldn’t

Renata Bernarde: I see.

Gary Ryan: So then I, then I, then I had to go to the market because I didn’t, I couldn’t find, I didn’t find out that they couldn’t deliver until IngramSpark rejected the files and said, no, this is not.

Meeting our standards and I look at that stuff and it’s just gobbledygook to me, you know, Because there’s a lot of along this journey with the type setting and the and And even the a pub versions for kindle. There’s there’s a lot of technical things that get in the road of delivering when you want to get this project Renata.

So anyway we, I managed to go back to Ravi who, who created my EPUB version, which is for Kindle and Apple books. And I didn’t realize that he knew how to do the covers as well. And I went back to him and just said, Oh, do you know how to do this? And he goes, yeah. And he ended up being less than half as expensive well.

Renata Bernarde: So that’s, all very interesting. Just so you know, in the future, a lot of people ask me this, where did I get my logo done for the job hunting podcast? And I did it using a design platform.

Called 99 Designs. Have you heard of them? 99 Designs is awesome. It’s Australian, but it’s now global. It’s like a Canva thing. It started here, but everybody

Gary Ryan: Oh yeah.

Renata Bernarde: and it’s equivalent to Upwork for design. So if want a podcast logo or a book cover or a website, anything that’s design related. You can go there and this is the thing you say, I’m, I’m willing to spend 200 and this is all So you give all the specs and then. It’s a crowdfunding thingy, a crowdsourcing thingy that you will get like 10, 20 different designs and then you can choose from them and it’s amazing. I feel really bad because so designs were high quality and I only chose and paid for one and I feel like the others spent a lot of time, you know, doing things that I didn’t pay for.

But

Gary Ryan: Oh,

Renata Bernarde: up with a great, you know what I mean? Like I ended up with a great logo. I think I love my logo. So I really think I did well.

Gary Ryan: Oh, it looks great. Yeah, it’s so, I see. So that means people do work and they know they’re taking a risk and they might not get paid. In fact, there’s a higher probability that they won’t get paid.

Renata Bernarde: I don’t know if I agree with that. I

Gary Ryan: my brain’s just processing that at, at the

Renata Bernarde: feel bad. But look, I, I was really, I mean, I hope that I was nice and like, I, I thanked every one of them individually. And like I said, you did a great job. I really liked what you did and explain why I chose, you know, the one that I did and. And yeah, like I felt bad, but, but I ended up with a good logo.

Anyway, 99designs is quite well known platform for design. Listen this is our second episode and I’m not going to make a huge introduction about you because I’m going to redirect people to listen to the first one so that they can get the full picture, but I want to say. It’s been, oh my gosh, I’m terrible with maths, 15 years since we first met.

Can you believe it? Because it’s been that long. And I think the reason why we have so much respect for each other’s work is because we both come from a similar place of servant leadership style, I think. You know, I really, we have different styles of coaching. We have different styles of clients. We have different, you know, you do more consulting than I do, but we care a lot about what we do and we’re passionate about what we do and you and I are privileged to.

do what we want to do. You know, that is such a privilege, right? To actually enjoy what we do and, and have fun doing it. And, you know, from time to time things go Not so good, but we’ve, you know, you’ve been doing this for way longer than I do. And I look up to you in terms of resiliency and grit and your ability to always be coming up with something new and exciting for your own practice, because you don’t want to stop and just do the same thing over and over again.

So now you wrote this book. Yes for success. And I want to know all about it. I mean, I know a little bit about it because I read some chapters already, but I, I want you to explain to the listeners. Why did you write a second? It wasn’t that long ago that you wrote, wrote leadership matters. So why did you feel the need to write yes for success?

Gary Ryan: So it’s actually my third book because my first book was in

Renata Bernarde: I should know that because I know I have a testimonial on that one too. Oh, God.

Gary Ryan: that was focused on young professionals. So then Disruption Leadership Matters was two years ago. Just now it was in fact not quite the, the 21st of November, 2021 was when that book came out, but yes, for success was largely written 10 years ago.

And it was. So where it came from, since 2013, I’ve had an online program called Yes for Success, which is about life planning and life balance and life harmony and execution and supporting through execution. In 2010, I started facilitating live workshops of that largely through Monash University and in particular, the Monash Business School and over a period up until 2018, I had over seven and a half thousand people go through that program.

Renata Bernarde: a lot of people.

Gary Ryan: Yeah, so rave reviews and. I always had, I needed to write the book.

Now I’d created the online version of the program and that includes transcripts for all of the 10 modules. So those transcripts are in fact the basis of the 10 chapters. There’s now 11 chapters in the book. But the, they formed the basis of the book and I was always going to go and use those transcripts to write.

Yes for success.

Renata Bernarde: Okay.

Gary Ryan: However, starting with transcripts turned out to be harder than starting with a blank sheet of paper, because transcripts don’t really line up for a correct book very well because they’re just what you say. And because of the way I speak, it’s not particularly grammatically correct or any of those sorts of things.

So it turned out that it was quite a dilemma. So then it still comes to your question, well, why Yes for Success and why now? And the truth is, is that because of what happened to my business in the first week of the pandemic, which after which I wrote Disruption Leadership Matters Lessons for Leaders from the pandemic, and I took the opportunity to practice what I preach in Yes for Success to look for opportunity when bad things happen, and 90 percent of my business stopped in five days.

In five business days, 14 years of work came to a screeching halt. Now, some of the things that I believe in that Michelle, that’s my wife and I have practiced is having a financial backup plan, which we had to execute. But to be brutally honest, we weren’t expecting that we would need to execute that for multiple years, like we ended up having to do.

And. I had to go back to practicing exactly what I preach in Yes for Success to get us back from the brink, so to speak and to, you know, lead our family through that challenging time. Seven people living in the same household through the pandemic you know, young adults through to You know, not quite teenage, you know, still, still in their single digit age group, you know, it was a, it was an extremely challenging time as it was for people all around the world.

But I really had to put into practice what I preach and it works. It’s worked again. Like it’s, we’re back and Renata. So basically on the 1st of June of this year, I, Michelle and I just agreed. I have to write this book. And as I’ve done with the other books, I just set a date, which was. The date being the month of November.

I have to have this book out by the month of November. And in technically we had the Kindle version out by, by October. So a lot of it was written and, and I’ve been extremely busy with my business as a result of putting into practice what I preach in the book. But equally Renata, something that’s really, really struck me.

And I don’t know if it’s the pandemic that’s brought it to the surface or not,

Renata Bernarde: Silence. Okay. Okay.

Gary Ryan: having to have a cesarean section. And then when they’re stitching up Michelle after the Caesar, I found myself after they checked Liam and he had all these different parts and they wrecked him up and. All of a sudden I’m in a room on my own with my brand new son and, and I’m looking at him and was he extraordinary?

Renata Bernarde: Okay. It’s

Gary Ryan: the answer is a hundred percent. He was, yes, he was just extraordinary. And then so I’m, I’m, I’m

Renata Bernarde: telling him stories.

Gary Ryan: him stories.

Renata Bernarde: up the echo

Gary Ryan: I think I’ve just picked up the echo

Renata Bernarde: It’s my fault. So let me, let me see what I, okay. All right. Yes, we’re good. We’re

Gary Ryan: Yes, it’s gone.

Renata Bernarde: Okay. Hmm.

Gary Ryan: absolutely extraordinary. And it’s like you, my job as your parent is to help you be extraordinary for the rest of your life. To help guide you and encourage you. And this isn’t, this isn’t saying he’s better than anyone else in the world.

Cause I genuinely believe everyone’s born is extraordinary. And a friend I’ve made this year is this wonderful human being called Nick Urhart, who lives in Austin, Minnesota. Now he was born dead and he was revived after birth. And a year later, they discovered that he had cerebral palsy. As a result of the complications, his body went through when he was born and Nick’s now just turned 31 years of age and he’s been a, you know, he’s been driving waste trucks in the USA for a long, long time now, but he’s now become a coach in building people’s confidence and he had, he taught himself through his own research, how to stop his stutter,

Renata Bernarde: Wow.

Gary Ryan: how to speak more clearly.

I mean, he moves and he shakes and Nick was born extraordinary too, even though he was actually born not alive like the rest of us. And I guess a big driver for me is I want to help people reignite that understanding that we’re all actually extraordinary no matter how we were born or what we were born with.

And the world needs. Whatever that is, the world needs it. Our families needed, our communities needed and to help give people a framework to work out whatever that answer means for them. So I definitely do not preach that I have the answer for anybody other than myself. But I do believe that 10 steps that I take people through enable people to not only define success, life, harmony and happiness for themselves, but to be clear about how to bring that to life literally day to day, because I think you can’t have a life where happiness is all tomorrow.

You know, do this and do this and work this and do that. And, and happiness will come tomorrow. Well, what if it doesn’t? What if, what if something happens to you and you, you don’t. So I believe it has to be a combination of some clarity about where you’re going and what that looks like for you, but also the awareness Renata, to be able to celebrate so many of the small successes that bring happiness along the way that I think.

A lot of people are not noticing now because it’s so easy to get sucked into the negativity that has just floods our social media, floods our TVs, floods our news, floods our advertising. One of the things I teach people is you got to feed your brain positivity deliberately.

Renata Bernarde: now I want to talk about that and about mental models and feeding that positivity. But one thing that stuck with me when I wrote some extracts from your book Is this idea the analogy of the iceberg? of one’s behaviors. I’d love, I’d love for you to expand on that and how you came up with this idea.

This idea that sometimes just something visible picks up, you know, peeps out of the water and you can, you know, identify. Some miniscule behavior that you’re showcasing to the world, but beneath the water, there’s this massive iceberg that people can’t see. And I found that so interesting to talk about, you know, because you can use that in both ways.

You can use that to understand why things are not working for you or why things are working for you, right? Depending on the behavior that is Peeping, peeking out, you know, at the top there. So, tell me about what that meant to you and how you use that to educate your students that go through the Yes for Success program.

Gary Ryan: Yes. So you know, with the executives and the corporates and the, the organizations that I deal with in top of cause what was interesting is when I was doing a lot of yes for success, they’re actually graduate students, mostly through that period. So they were people doing MBAs and master’s type programs and, and some of them have actually become lifelong clients.

So the, the idea there is that our behavior is, is, is like the visible part of an iceberg above the waterline, which we know is one third of the iceberg as you were just, just, just describing Renata. But below the waterline are our mental models, our theories about how the world works, and those theories have come about as a result of our upbringing, our nationality, our religion or no religion, our schooling whether we’ve traveled or not, our experience of leadership and our organizations and community and trauma and all these sorts of life experiences contribute to whatever our mental models might be.

But they’re mostly subconscious for most people. So they are below the waterline and they are deep below the waterlines. None of them are very, very deep. So one of the, one of the ones that I talk about is, and I’m not, and I’m not saying this in any way, shape or form to, to talk badly of any religion or anything like that, but the religion I was raised in, we were taught that it was harder for.

rich person to get into heaven than it is for a camel to get through the eye of a needle. That was, I can still remember being in church and hearing that and going, gosh, it’s bad to be wealthy. You know, this mental model gets formed. And then, you know, for long periods of your life, it’s, it’s as if anyone that is wealthy must have done it in a bad way.

They’re actually not going to heaven right now. I’m, I’m not now many decades later. I don’t, you know, to be brutally honest, I still struggle with that mental model. I, it is, it was so deep right now. I don’t agree with it because one of the things that I’ve learned and one of the things that we’re able to do through the pandemic is we were literally able to support, directly support a family in Indonesia that we’d only come across because the, the the, the husband had been our driver when we were in Bali.

And he’s, and I remember reaching, I reached out to him at the start of the pandemic, cause we heard how bad things were in countries like India. So how are you, how are you doing? All the businesses cars have been taken off from often from the banks within two weeks of the start of the pandemic. Not only was it their family, but their village who sort of all relied on this family one way or another for ripple effect of work had nothing.

Renata Bernarde: Silence.

Gary Ryan: we, we, while we was, you know, as I said, 90 percent of my business went out of the, out the door, but we were able to support that family and in, in a ripple effect version, help that village for two and a half years. Now, if you’re not wealthy enough, you can’t do that. You know, literally the thousands of school Children that we’ve been able to support with food in India in regions where the Children effectively have grown up on rubbish tips and the food they get through buy one give one is through their school.

So the parents send their children to school to get food. And that’s, that’s why we’re in that project because not only do they get food, but they get educated. And those poor children born into that set of circumstances through no fault of their own Renata, their only chance probably is education to break free of what they were born into.

Right? So we pay for the food to give them the education. You know, I don’t know how many thousands of meals were provided over the journey. But again, you can’t do that if you’re not wealthy enough to do it. And I’m not saying everyone has to be wealthy, but in Yes for Success, it’s about, well, what does your life that you want that brings you harmony and happiness, which can include your contribution to other people from a financial point of view, your charities and those sorts of things.

If you don’t know what that is, how can you create it?

Renata Bernarde: I love that. One of the reasons why I like it so much, it’s because it explained, it gave me also a framework and analogy to use with my clients, because many times there will be a situation where somebody is stepped on the shoulder for a promotion, or they are told to apply for a job because they think, you know, somebody thinks that they would be a suitable candidate, and they think they’re not, right?

Or a different situation is when, They are made redundant, like, you know, unfortunately, quite a few of my new clients were at the end of 2023 as we’re recording this end of year is usually redundancy time and I have a few new clients that have been made redundant and they react very differently from each other.

As I say, I, I’d say that the most common reaction is one of grief, anger, sadness. Destitution. They feel like they’ve been left behind or kicked out of their tribe. And, and they, they, they show that behavior as they approach recruiters for not for other opportunities. And, you know, we, we need to sort of work on that behavior and understand the iceberg that lies underneath before they go to market.

Right. So you’ve given me this great metaphor that I can use to talk to people and say, all right, this is. what you’re showing. I want to understand why you’re showing that behavior. So that, that’s a great way of starting a conversation with them. And, and then I want to talk to you about those mental models, right?

And why they’re so crucial for professionals, especially the sort of professionals that listen to this podcast who are usually at a crossroad. They don’t know if they want another job, if they want a better job, if they want to maybe Career change and do something else, you know, when you are between opportunities between jobs, it gives you a chance to think about what you want in life, right?

And the mental models are hugely influential in people’s ability to take risks, you know, their risk appetite and their abilities to You know, maybe do something that they’ve always wanted to do. Will they have the courage to pursue their, their genes? What, what do you think about that, Gary? I’d love to hear your views.

Silence.

Gary Ryan: Well, this is again a large reason for why I’ve written yes for success. And people have to start with assessing their mental models. And the work that you and I do is we literally help raise the iceberg out of the water so you can look at your theories. And it’s not about whether their theories are right or wrong.

It’s are they useful. So if someone says I really want to do this over here, Yeah. But, and then they’ve got this whole list of buts, well all those buts are just mental models. That are actually forming resistance. So I also talk about this, this whole concept of resistance, which is stopping them and they’re allowing it to stop them.

They’re actually, they’re stopping themselves. No one else’s. They’re stopping themselves from having a go at creating what they actually believe they want. And so what I want to encourage people to do is, is, is, you know, get focused on what you want and unpack your mental models, work out the theories that are really just getting in the road.

And my, one of my heroes, Chris Argyris, he says, real learning is when you shift or change or adopt a new mental model, a new theory. That’s what real learning really is. is that you actually recognize I have this theory that was not working for me. Okay. You know, I’m working with someone at the moment that is absolutely certain in their own mind that they don’t get an endorphin kick from goal achievement.

Renata Bernarde: Silence.

Gary Ryan: life, it’s been goals all along. But because of their mental model about what they think other people are getting when they achieve a goal, that somehow they think they don’t get it. That therefore goals don’t, aren’t relevant for them.

And then this person’s a parent. I said, well, what are your goals for your children? And they said, what do you mean? I said, well, do you want your children to grow up and end up in jail for the rest of their life? And they said, no, of course not. I said, do you want your children to be healthy? Do you want them to have careers in whatever they want to be having careers in?

And they said, yes, of course I do. I said, well, that sounds like a goal. So what are you parenting now in a manner that will help manifest that for them? Because it doesn’t start when they turn 18. This starts when they’re born,

Renata Bernarde: Yeah. Silence.

Gary Ryan: What if you could influence the mental models of a child that you’re the parent of now that will hold them in good stead throughout their whole life, particularly in the social media age where there’s so there is potentially so much praise, but also so much criticism, right?

And, and equally, you might, people might know people that are literally floating along or lost and they don’t know how to help them. Part of the reason why I wrote yes for success is to give. Some people, the tools to be able to have conversations with people that might be floating along or lost to actually help them.

And again, understanding mental models. And it’s fascinated me, Renata, how many professional people, I was just in a meeting just last week with, with four people who have doctors got PhDs who’d never heard of the concept. And I was, I was quite surprised. I said, have you got a different, different name for it?

Maybe you’ve heard of it. And they just said, no. I was like, okay, let’s, let’s unpack it then. This is what It is.

Renata Bernarde: be a good idea to unpack it here as well then. So what are mental models? Are there, do you have like a framework with different types? Is one better than the other? Other, how do you help people navigate if they’re, if, if a mental model is getting in the way of them achieving success or happiness, how do they navigate out of that?

Yes,

Gary Ryan: You’re probably doing work on your mental health and you’re probably doing work on your spiritual health. However, you might choose to design that. That would be observable and recordable. Yeah. Now you might not be able to verbalize your theories until you hear an episode like this, but if you’re doing that sort of stuff, You have got a theory of some sort that tells you to do it.

So for example, when people turn up to a voluntary program of any sort, which I think some of your sessions, for example, people can voluntarily turn up initially, is that right, Renata? Yeah, yeah. So those folk are displaying through that behavior of turning up when we both know lots of people register, but then don’t show up, right?

So, and certainly some of my clients at the universities where they are paying on behalf of the students and the students register, but then only a third of them turn up. The ones that are turning up are showing a shared mental model that they believe that whatever advertising they saw. That this was going to benefit them in some way.

There’s a theory. They’re a mental model that this session in some way is going to benefit me. And that’s why I’ve shown up. Does that make sense? So now your behavior is a very strong indicator for your mental models. The second one, which is not as strong, but quite strong is your language. Particularly your self talk, the way you speak about yourself is a very strong.

So for example one of those people I was mentioning a bit earlier was said that I’m, you know, was, was kept saying, Oh, I’m horribly lazy. I’m horribly lazy, but that was part of excuse itis, as I call it, for not doing things that they had supposedly committed to doing. But they’ve got this model, this theory about them themselves, a very deep one in this person’s case, that they’re lazy.

So what they do is. They then match their behavior to their language. So one of the things with our mental models and your audience will be, we’ll understand this for sure, Renata, is us human beings like to be right.

Renata Bernarde: yeah,

Gary Ryan: Anyone that has a life partner knows this to be true.

Renata Bernarde: yes,

Gary Ryan: We like to be right. So what we do is we go and seek evidence or create evidence for ourselves that matches whatever our mental models might be. So if we have self talk that’s negative, we will behave in a way consistent with that negative self talk to create. The very negative outcome that maybe we don’t, well, probably we don’t want, but because we say it, we create it.

Renata Bernarde: yes, Gary, that that’s fantastic. I’ve been thinking a lot about this very thing because of the work that I do, right? So, the, the language, in fact, shows up and denotes or correlates to your mental model in the way that you write your COVA letter for your job application. In the way that you talk about yourself when you’re answering interview questions in the way that you walk into an interview and walk out and what you say as you walk in and you walk out.

Those are like important touch points. And when I do interview preparations with clients, when they book consultations with me or when they work with me ongoing, that’s usually what we work on. Right. So in a way I try, if it’s a consultation, we kind of have to re engineer that because I don’t have a, I don’t have the bottom of the iceberg to look into because it’s only an hour, right?

Like, but I know it’s not going to get them the job if they use that language and if they approach with that attitude. But if I, if I’m working with a client ongoing, you know, three months, six months private coaching, then, then we can address the bottom of the iceberg and it provides a whole boost of, it’s not just confidence, it’s courage, really, for them to go through those very stressful anxiety inducing moments, which are part of the recruitment and selection process.

Yeah.

Gary Ryan: And, and that’s the powerful place. I mean, that’s the value of, of, of being coached properly, of going through that proper journey. You can’t, you can’t take a sheep dip into this. You, you have to do the work. You, you, you folk have to slow down and spend the time on themselves. And I know that’s not popular in the modern world.

I mean, the modern world is full of everything has to be in bites. And absolutely a lot of, a lot of things in the world can be, but ultimately there’s, there are times when we just need to slow down. and really contemplate ourselves and get to understand ourselves and understand our mental models. And because that’s when the insight and the power can come from.

And I’ll give you a concrete demonstration of this. Okay. I am so convinced with my mental model that when bad things happen or things I wish didn’t happen, happen to me that I know I will look for the opportunity. I’m not saying in any way, shape or form, I will deny any trauma or anything that might come with it, but I know at the same time, I have trained myself to have the mental model to ask the question, okay, what is the opportunity here?

What is the opportunity? When I get surprised by things, it’s like, okay, what’s the opportunity? Now, I did that with writing Disruption Leadership Matters. When, when the pandemic came, you know again, the opportunity for, for the book in fact, also when I was talking with a lot of people, in fact, giving away copies of disruption, leadership matters to parents at the local junior football club, where we’ve been involved for 15 years, but because of a hip replacement surgery, I hadn’t been there this year and I went to give it away and the club president was happy for me to give it away.

And I had 50 books that were given to me for free because the print, my printer had made an error. And as a result of fixing the error, which was great of them, I ended up with 50 books that I didn’t pay for. So I’m thinking, how can I give them away? And I’m at the club and the president’s, you know, book ended me really well after the coaches have spoken about the children, there’s 350 people there, lots of mums and dads.

Renata Bernarde: Hello.

Gary Ryan: I’m not a bad salesperson, Renata, but I couldn’t give away 50 books. I could only give away 32 and parents were standing there, good people, like standing there with their children saying out loud, remember mental models are reflected in our language. Gary, this sounds really interesting, but I don’t read Gary.

This sounds really interesting, but I don’t read. And my, my then 12 year old son, his jaw was like this. He’s looking at me. What? They don’t read. And I’m also thinking particularly for the men. Because I know this to be true with conversations with them. I know you read your betting app, so I know you read, right?

So, you know, I didn’t want to, of course I was respectful and I wasn’t going to say anything in front of their children in any way, shape or form or, you know, try to push them to take a book. So it’s literally a five minute drive home, Renata. And on the way home, again, I’m like, all right, that was a surprise.

That’s not how I expected that to go. I didn’t expect to have 18 out of 50 books still in the box.

Renata Bernarde: Silence.

Gary Ryan: a traditional book for, because whatever reason, I bet you a lot of them, their mental model is readings for school.

And I didn’t like schools. I don’t read that’s the, like mental models actually get stacked on each other as well. So they’ve shut themselves off onto the world of reading. Right. And. I don’t know if you know people like I have in my life who could not read as an adult who would give anything to be able to read, you would never say I don’t read anyway.

So that’s what, so then I said, well, actually I own the, I own the Audible and the Kindle versions, but I also own my own ebook and my own audio book versions that aren’t Kindle. I can give them away for free. So what if I give that book to them for free?

Renata Bernarde: everyone.

Gary Ryan: For the people at the football club, the people that had said that they don’t read Renata.

And then immediately my brain went with this idea of what’s the opportunity here. How many other people in the world think the same thing? Who may be scrolling and reading won’t feel like reading, or listening won’t feel like reading. Why don’t I just give away 10, 000 copies? And as we record now, people in 21 countries around the world have taken up that

Renata Bernarde: So, you’ve given away the Kindle version or the Audible version, what did you give away?

Gary Ryan: I’ve given away my ebook version, that’s not Kindle, and my audiobook version, that’s the same quality, in fact the same files, but not, but not Audible. People can actually

Renata Bernarde: So we can have a link in the episode show notes if anybody wants.

Gary Ryan: Yes, they can, they can, they can get

Renata Bernarde: I think I’ve already given them a link. I remember we discussed this maybe last year, but I’ll do this. I’ll do it again for this episode for sure.

Gary Ryan: well, that free one has only happened this year that that only happened, that would have been a year after our previous conversation, Renata. So but again, that’s just, that’s just clarity of mental models, you know, and I’ve, you know, I’m happy for people to get that for

Renata Bernarde: So you’re basically saying

Gary Ryan: some people.

Renata Bernarde: you You take the feedback and you come up with alternatives and you come up with options and you come up with better understanding instead of sort of shutting yourself out to the world and and Receiving feedback as negative you say, okay What is this telling me about the world and how can I reach out in a different way?

Is that what you think?

Gary Ryan: Yes. And how do I need to adapt? What do I need to do differently? Like, that’s a set of mental models for me to take that attitude. So you could imagine, despite having spent 14 years on my business, when 90 percent of it walked out, out the door at the start of the pandemic, you know, and then six weeks goes by and eight weeks and then things start trickling back in, but it’s nowhere near where it was.

The pressure to, well, do I just go get another job? So when, when something quite large happens like that. What, what happens is our vision gets tested. Now, my answer to that question was no, I don’t want to get a job. I want this to work, but I need to, I need to change. I need to adapt. I need to find a different way.

I need to have different services. I need to build my business into the future so that if there’s anything like a pandemic, 90 percent of it can’t walk out in five business days. Cause now I didn’t know a pandemic was going to come, but the facts are and the brutal facts were. My business was not protected against something

Renata Bernarde: and many jobs and careers weren’t protected as well. So you can draw a line between what happened to you to what happened to marketing managers and financial people and engineers and. HR professionals that, tech professionals that lost their jobs during the pandemic and were unemployed for months, if not years, because there just wasn’t a job market to go back to.

And what you want to learn from This crisis that we’ve experienced in our careers and in our businesses, we, we need to be able to withstand and have patience and understand that there’s nothing wrong with us, but there is opportunity for continuous improvement or learning adaptation to a different environment and just understanding that it’s partly things that we can do and partly waiting for the environment to pick up as well.

Gary Ryan: yeah, now this part is controversial and some people get a bit triggered by what I’m about to say. And that is that when these things happen to me, my choice is that I take responsibility for the circumstances I’m in. I choose that I am now responsible for what happens now. And I was equally responsible for what happened.

For putting myself in that situation. The truth is in my business is that from 2019, sorry, from 2017 to the pandemic, the business was flying along, but I got comfortable, I got comfortable. And the pandemic came and bit me on the leg and said, this is what happens to people that get comfortable when they think they’ve made it and, and, you know, that will never happen again.

I will never let that happen again. I will continue. And look, the. The hard work and the action that you have to take that gets me up and about. I actually, I love that. I, people say to me, Gary, how many hours a week do you work? I have no idea. It’s not something I even remotely

Renata Bernarde: mm.

Gary Ryan: It’s just, I mean, cause it’s my research is, is, is that, is that work?

Is this interview work? Yeah. Like. Would I prefer to be doing this interview than sitting in front of the TV, watching, I don’t know, the news? I can promise you, I’d much prefer to be here with you, Renata.

Renata Bernarde: Well, especially these days, the news is just so sad and horrible. Look, before we go, I need to address this with you because I think it’s so important. It’s this idea you mentioned before about the shared mental models, when the students That came, had the shared mental model and so much of the dissatisfaction in the workplace these days has to do with what I believe is shared mental models that are just different from what you would expect to see in a workplace, what you would want as your personal values, not being aligned with the company’s values, the Culture that you would expect to see in the workplace, not being there for you, not supporting you and your colleagues managers that don’t know how to manage.

I think the pandemic has exacerbated bad management and micromanagement and, you know, the inability of leaders to. Engage with a hybrid workforce. And I think that, you know, it’s something that we need to address. So how can that understanding of mental models improve workplaces, professional relationships, team dynamics?

What are you doing working with your corporate clients to, to address that and educate them?

Gary Ryan: Well, we, we have to do the work and this is what I spend, you know, I’m very fortunate. I get to work with large teams, whole groups of leaders, and it’s around this idea that. It’s not possible to not have an organizational culture, right? So if you’re going to have a culture, no matter what, is it better to have the culture that just happens to be there?

Or is it better to have a culture that you deliberately and collectively create? Now, the answer is pretty obvious. The one you collectively deliberately create is going to be better for everybody. Then the one you just happened to get. Now, what that means is you’ve got to put some time and effort in with the people, with the leaders to talk about, well, what does that culture actually look like and what are some fundamental shared mental models, shared policy, shared procedures, shared structures that we need to put in place to enable that culture to be manifested.

Renata Bernarde: Okay.

Gary Ryan: it’s extraordinary that we have a circumstance where the average age of a leader being trained as a leader is nearly 47 years of age now.

It used to be 42 in 2012. It’s actually gone up. And that’s through research through Jack Zenger and his partner, business partner, Falkman with Harvard. And it’s, it’s, it’s just outrageous that people are leading because they’re still leading in their early thirties in many cases. And obviously that’s an average.

So people are often, you know, got formal leadership roles well before that. But we still have this underlying mental model structurally, Renata, where the only way I can earn more money in many instances is to become a manager.

Renata Bernarde: Yes. Silence.

Gary Ryan: When that’s wrong, it’s, it’s wrong for me and it’s wrong for my skill set. But in the ever increasingly expensive world, we need, we live in, people need to have opportunities to earn more money.

And so we have a structure in place. Now, human beings through their mental models have created these structures. Human beings did it when no one else did it. We invented these structures where the only way you can earn more money is to become manager. Why can’t we, now there are organizations that are doing this, but there’s still few and far between, Renata, where why can’t we pay people for their value of their technical skills if that’s what they’ve got?

And why can’t we pay people for the value of their, of their people and leadership skills if that’s what they’re bringing to the table? Why can’t they be the similar or the same? And why can’t people have people reporting to them that earn more than them? Why does it have to be? the other way around.

Like

Renata Bernarde: Well, funny story for you. I have clients all over the world and I have clients mainly in the U S that when they start a new job, they have this amazing onboarding situation where they are offered mentoring to progress internally in one of two ways. You can either progress and become a team leader, a manager and take.

Leadership roles where you would be responsible for other people, or you could go down the path of being promoted for your expertise and you would, you know, become more of an expert in your field, not, not necessarily managing people. And I would say half a dozen of clients of mine that have been offered this and, you know, the, the Pacific Coast of the US where things are trendy and hip and, and all the things and.

They still, I think because of their mental models, they still choose the managing people because in their minds that, that looks and sounds more like the career advancement to them, even if they’re being offered career progression and advancement in two different ways, they’re still opting to manage people because in, in our minds, if you manage others, you are a leader.

Gary Ryan: that’s the status issue. Okay. So, and, and I talk about this in Disruption Leadership Matters Renata, where being a mammal status is part of our makeup, which is why we, it’s, it’s why when you walk into a room of strangers, you instantly know where you fit. Whenever you walk into a room of strangers, could be a party, could be a could be a business experience.

You straight away, you know where you fit. And you’ll do one of two things for sure. You’ll either behave accordingly to fitting in because you go, okay, this is where I fit and I’ll behave that way. Or if you reject where you believe that group has you fitting, you will You will behave in a manner that, that matches rejecting it.

And you will be a bit uppity and a bit disrupt with your behavior. It’ll only be one or two ways, but this happens instantaneously because, and that’s part of our evolution as a mammal. So status. So again, if you don’t have, if you’ve never done the work or got exposed to conversations like this, where you get to learn that, Hey, I actually have these mental models.

It’s very, very hard to be able to say, well, is that really what I want? Do I really need that? Does it really matter? Can, can I be like Nick Yerhart, the cerebral palsy warrior and confidence coach who looks himself in the mirror every day and says out loud to himself, I love you, Nick.

Renata Bernarde: we all need to do that.

Gary Ryan: And I share that with, and I know he does it.

I, I, I meet with Nick every, every Saturday morning here in Australia. And I know he does it. And yeah, I say that to people, I go, I couldn’t, I couldn’t say that. I couldn’t look at myself and say out loud that I love myself. I go, why not? Well, you know, who does that? People that love themselves. Yeah. But that’s all, isn’t that bad to love yourself?

I’ll go, really? Who taught you that? You know, do you want, don’t you want your children to love themselves?

Renata Bernarde: They probably do and then they unlearn it over the years.

Gary Ryan: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and these are the things that, that, that That people, there’s so much that we’re holding ourselves back on ourselves and you, you would see it so much in your own work. And what’s brilliant about our work, Renata, is when When people have these breakthroughs and they go and do things that they didn’t think was possible, like, you know, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve, it wasn’t a deliberate strategy or anything, but I was asked to coach a person who was a very reluctant leader, a very, very, a very reluctant leader in her late forties.

But once she committed to leading this team of her peers. And she knew it was going to be difficult was in an acting scenario where unfortunately there was some issues with mental health with the actual leader. And, and this went on for 18 months and she was offered coaching and I was providing her some leadership coaching and she just blossomed like she just took it on.

Now, some of the staff she was leading didn’t really like the fact that she blossomed, right? But then eventually. Which was always a possibility. The person that had the substandard role came back with decided to come back and this leader was supposed to go back to their old job and they went, I don’t want to go back to my old job.

I want to lead people. I now this person who a year and a half earlier would have never Renata gone for jobs three levels higher than what she was doing. And now she’s in a different different organization leading in a position three levels higher on nearly twice the income. And because she only because she addressed her own mental models about herself and then took action and said, you know what, I’m just going to be the best that I can be.

I’m going to learn. I’m going to embrace the fact I will make some mistakes along the way, but I will learn from them. You know, I’m not deliberately making mistakes and the those mental models when we develop them are so, so powerful. We do not have to be perfect and everyone is learning. And just on that last point is Too many people in the workplace from my experience, Renata, give up responsibility for their learning to their organization.

And the bigger the organization is and largely the better the organization is at developing people, the more people tend to give up responsibility for their own learning, which sounds like that’s not a problem except for when it becomes a problem when they get that redundancy letter and they’ve actually not been responsible for their learning.

I say to people, please, please, please adopt the mental model. Like anyone listening right now, if you’re not doing this, please, from today forward, please do this. Adopt the mental model that you are 100 percent responsible for

Renata Bernarde: Yes.

Gary Ryan: You be proactive with your learning and take anything your organization gives you as a bonus and good organizations will give you fantastic bonuses.

But if your mental model is that I am responsible for my development, you will be reading what you need to read. You’ll be listening at the sorts of podcasts you need to be listening to. You’ll be taking courses on the side that you might even pay for yourself to enable you to have The, the, the skills and attributes and characteristics and capacity to do whatever it is you want to be able to do to be valuable in the world.

Renata Bernarde: yes, now that’s a great way to end this conversation. I wish we could go on forever, but I, I think that reading your book will make My job so much easier, you know, if my clients read your book, if the listeners of this podcast read the book, because the job hunting podcast exists to educate people on the importance of what you just said, taking control over your learnings, you know, I would expand that to taking control over your career, your professional development, your career advancement, it belongs to you, it does not belong to your employer or to Anybody else you should do with it.

Whatever you want to do it, not what your parents told you 30 years ago, not what you, you know, think society expects of you now it’s whatever you want to do. We are quite privileged in 2023 that we can make those choices. It may not happen next year, but if you invest three years, five years, it may really be transformational for you.

So I think, I can’t wait for my copy to arrive so that I can read all of it. And I thank you again for coming in and sharing with us. You know, you’re always so inspirational, so inspiring, and you have such great energy as a podcast guest. I hope that you not only are very successful with your own podcast, which I’ll link in the episode show notes below if people want to check it out.

But I hope that you get access to other shows as well to promote your book and the work that you do, Gary. Thank you so much for being here today.

Gary Ryan: And thank you, Renata. And I love your work. And if folks, if you haven’t picked that up, I’m saying it out loud. I love

Renata Bernarde: We’re big fans of each other, aren’t we?

Gary Ryan: Yeah, and it’s and it’s authentic because and and you know, this, this is another thing like, like we’re, we’re colleagues. We’re, we’re, you know, we’re supporters of each other.

We don’t see each other as being in competition. Because we’re not, the world’s well and truly big enough for us. We probably need more folk like us who are in both of our networks, of course, as well. So, you know, we, we want people genuinely to be successful and be happy. And it’s better for our communities.

It’s better for our society. The more, the more people that are feeling strong in themselves and feeling clear. And know why they’re doing what they’re doing and taking responsibility for their careers and for their learning. As you’ve just said, Renata, the world’s actually a better place and I want that for my kids.

So there is a selfish reason.

Renata Bernarde: Me too. All right, my friend. Thank you so much once again.

Gary Ryan: No worries. Thank you.