#387: The Purpose Factor with Brian Bosché – Part 2

Welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast where our goal is to help you increase

your reputation as a leader, increase your ability to influence others and increase your ability

to fully engage your team to deliver remarkable results. I am Perry Holly and Maxwell Leadership

Facilitator and Coach. And I'm Chris Cody, Executive Vice President with Maxwell Leadership.

Welcome and thank you for joining. Super excited that you're here today. I'm just going to

tell you as we open. If you didn't listen to last episode, you need to go listen to it.

I would encourage you to listen to it before you get here. This is going to be a continuing

conversation because our conversation was just so rich about understanding not only your purpose,

but your team's purpose. And so we'll get to that in just a minute. I want to encourage you

go to Maxwellleadership.com slash executive podcast there. You can click on a form and you'll see

a button up there. You may have a question if you got a need or if you're looking for some training

or some coaching inside your organization. One of the things we do is base everything here

around John's five levels of leadership methodology. It is the common language in organizations.

And so we would love to be able to help you and your team in any way. Well, as I mentioned,

this is going to be part two of finding your purpose. And so we have with us, Brian Bochet.

He is the new president of Maxwellleadership. He and his wife,

we should have probably had Gab on here instead of Brian, but we'll have that next time. We just

wanted to set the tone with him first. He's going to close it. He's going to close it. I promise

you on that. But one of the things we absolutely love about them is people and as leaders is their

focus on helping people find their purpose. And then the fulfillment. And that was so rich for

me last episode about understanding the purpose of a fulfillment that they get from working on

your teams and organizations you guys coach. And now we're bringing that to Maxwellleadership.

So before we dive into some more content, tell us just real quickly. I know that you are a

journalist at one time. It's hiring big screen TV news. We just learned that you are a law student

and you took the bar exam. How did you end up developing an assessment?

I know. It's sitting at this day. We'll give them a little bit of a lot.

You don't go to school for this. You don't go to school for this.

You don't. At 16 years old, you're not like, I'm going to grow up and be an astronaut. You

don't grow up saying, I'm going to help people find their purpose. That's right.

Doesn't really happen. Wanted to be a national TV journalist, all of that. Went to law school to

be a better journalist, got to be a journalist. I got to cover government corruption and terrorism

right out of law school in kind of a documentary style unit. I was so excited. What nobody knew is

that I was getting ready to go through a divorce. My ex-wife walked out on me the week before I

started the dream job. Okay, so the depression had already begun. And then when I got laid off

from the dream job a year later, the divorce was final in the same month. And it was a,

it was the first time I had ever experienced depression. And all these people, Brian,

find your purpose, find your purpose, find your purpose. And I was very frustrated with that.

I thought, I got really tired of the idea of purpose. I started out on purpose,

frustrated about finding purpose because it was like this journey driven experience. Like,

spend a bunch of money, go to Hawaii and maybe find yourself in a fun set. This isn't helpful.

I'm broke. I can't go to Hawaii. I'm walking across the, find myself. And less than one

percent of people ever find themselves. I just come back, you know, $10,000 less money in their

wallet, going to find themselves. So I wanted something that was practical, that was tactical,

and that could help me make a decision about what was next for me. And so I began this journey

depressed, even frustrated with the word purpose, wanting to use it as a decision-making tool to

help me know what was next for me. Fantastic. Well, it is an assessment. And if you hadn't

been clear to you about the purpose factor, and would Brian and Gavin brought to us, it's just

been amazing for our team. Chris put us through it. We took it seriously. We deep-dived on it.

We had you debrief us on it. We then began individually looking at what fulfills us in the

roles we have and how does it play to our purpose. One thing I noticed, a lot of coaching work we do

in working with organizations. There's a lot of anxiety. There's a lot of burnout. There's a lot

of people stressed at different places. And I wonder if you've noticed in the research,

I'm guessing if I really am clear about my purpose and my fulfillment factor, as part of this

report, does that help people shed some of this anxiety? Yeah, oftentimes you look at anxiety

and depression, not from a clinical standpoint here, just talking about it from a coaching

standpoint. A lot of it hangs out in and around fear of rejection, fear of uncertainty.

When you help somebody find their purpose, discover their purpose, turn into a decision-making tool,

you've increased their certainty, you've increased their clarity, you've increased their confidence,

and it has a natural reduction on things like anxiety and depression. Clarity of purpose can

actually extend your life as much as three to seven years compared to the average according to

research as well. So it has a huge difference on that. But there's another principle there too.

For me, when I look at this and what all this research over a decade of research

represents to me is something that I feel deeply committed to, which is internal freedom versus

external freedom. If I help you find your purpose, I can make your mind more free. If I can make

your mind more free, I can help you produce more freedom in your circumstances. When you read

Man's Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl, famous book, one of the things that he says is when

everything is stripped away, everything is stripped, taken from you, he says the thing that you have

is the mental freedom, the ability to choose a better attitude. He talks about mental freedom,

mental freedom precedes external circumstantial freedom. So when you were going through that journey,

I'm saying they're thinking about everything stripped away. Did you probably didn't have the

language for it, but that's is that what you felt? Did you feel like when you had everything stripped

away from you? Yeah. I know you were working through some depression and stuff like that, but

did you have that mental clarity? Yeah. I mean, and that's how it came up with the purpose,

right? You kept digging for the purpose. Pain is a powerful elimination tool. Pain is a powerful

focus tool, because everything you thought that mattered gets taken away, and it wasn't by your

choosing. None of those things that happened for me in that moment, they were not that, they were

not my choice. Right. That they were my circumstances. But there's, and you know, I love to talk about

another word, my second favorite word, first word is purpose, my second favorite word is conviction.

That's another episode. That's right. Right. But when you look at people who have high conviction,

it started in moments where pain and clarity coexisted at the same time. And oftentimes the pain

came before the clarity, where the pain was the clearing mechanism to get all the distractions and

the things that you thought mattered out of your way. That's good. Yeah. Okay. So as a leader,

right? And we're going to go back to this. I know you've coached a lot. And Gav has as well.

The job can begin to feel heavy. Yeah. Right. If you're not getting that fulfillment,

which means you're not in your purpose, right? What, what interventions? How have you coach

leaders and team members to help them get from that, right? Where their fulfillment came from,

back to alignment of it, but not changing jobs, right? Like it's like we're working on the

purpose and the fulfillment. What's the intervention? How have you seen leaders make that transition

or that tipping point to realize that they needed to take that next step to get to that point?

The founder CEO is a really interesting case study because you started as a founder and you play

all the positions and you might be the solo person. You're like, you started it by yourself,

no business partner. You're doing everything. You're doing the selling. You're doing the delivering.

You're doing the quality control. You're doing it all of it. Right. So your hands are in the work.

Your hands are in the dirt. And then the more successful you become, the more administrative

state you need to support that. And the further you get away from the thing that caused you to

originally love the thing, you've created distance. So as the administrative state grows,

as you get further and further away from the customer and the service and the product and how it

impacts somebody, that distance puts you in the position to constantly give away but not be close

enough to receive fulfillment. Burnout looks like this. Give. Give. Give. Keep giving. Keep giving.

Keep giving. Given efficiently, not even giving your best. Just give and give. And then all that

distance, you're getting nothing back and forth. Burnout is the result of giving and not getting

any emotional return on investment, to not see somebody's life transform, to not get any gratitude

back. Not that it's about us, but not see any gratitude feedback to not experience personal

growth. And so the intervention there is is to help the leader get close to the work and the result

again. It's great to make space on their calendar to say, you know what? It's probably an inefficient

use of my time to coach somebody one-on-one, but I know when I coach this type of person on this

type of thing and help them solve that type of problem, it fulfills me. And it reminds me of why I

started this company. That's one of the key interventions that I've seen. You're just too far away.

You've got to get closer to the result. Well, I can hear someone saying that this is great

individual assessment for me personally, but we're running a business here. And can you help

the leader out there, maybe the senior leader who's having trouble connecting the dots about,

why is house is going to help my business and not be too soft or too personal for somebody,

but didn't help the business? How do they connect those dots? Purpose for me is a non-negotiable,

and it's about individual purpose macro mission relevance. How can I draw a connection between

the individual and the overall purpose mission and vision of the organization? If I can tie a thread

between those two things and constantly remind them of that connection,

purpose is a production tool. Purpose is a performance tool. I always like purpose is performance,

because without clear purpose, without a clear pathway whereby I can experience fulfillment,

I'm not going to have a high degree or willingness to sacrifice. And so I'm just going to kind of

phone it in. And so for leaders, it's not to look at purpose as one of those soft skills,

or one of those workshops we did one time that nobody's reading their report. Yes,

buried somewhere in an email, right? We never look at it. I've got leaders that read this almost

every week. They pick up there, they got to print it off, they've got it spiraled, and they read

it almost every single week, because they're trying to make sure that what they're doing is relevant.

And so it's an organizational connection tool. It is an engagement tool. Again, I think I said this

in the first episode we did together. They're looking for a reason to stay, not a reason to leave.

Wow. By human nature, most team members don't like uncertainty. To leave a job means to

increase uncertainty. It doesn't increase certainty. It increases uncertainty. That's well said.

And so all of the, actually a lot of leaders, this is one of the biggest things, or I was like, Brian,

get down here, wait, wait, wait. You can't have my people find their purpose. They're going to

leave. That sounds more like a you problem. But if I can get them connected to their work,

they're looking for a reason to stay. Well, I have a side question. Do it. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah.

I was on the coaching call a couple months ago, and I was a group call, and one of the,

I have the senior leader, but I have their directs, and it's a car automotive business.

And they said, I said, what do you do? And the guy says, I just

service cars. And it blew all over me, blew all over me, but I had a remain composed. But I thought,

I told the senior leader, if people on your team are saying that they just do something,

and my off base here, but it sounds to me like they're not really clear on that thread you

said between my purpose and your mission, you don't just service cars. Yeah. You're doing much more,

you're actually providing safe, reliable transportation for families in the local area to get

from home to work. I mean, I could go on and make it okay as you want, but it seems like they

have a very important role, but they're not feeling it. Used in that sentence, just was a cuss word.

That was, that's how strong that word stands out because it's, I'll never forget,

when I was going through all the tough stuff before suppression. And somebody in my life said,

Brian, Brian, why don't you just be a lawyer?

I'm not six months. I can tell I don't want to just be any right now. Why don't you just

in this conversation? Okay. And so it touched a nerve, but Gabrielle was working one time

with the California Highway Patrol. She was speaking on generational leadership styles and

purposes as well. And she was talking about how this, I believe it was a sheriff and not a sheriff.

It was it was high up in leadership. What's once having a conversation with a guy who actually

worked on the radio transmission towers that helped them all communicate in their cars.

And the transmission guy was telling us to her, his daughter came home from school.

And the daughter didn't know how to answer the question, what does your dad do at work?

And that leader that was talking with the transmission guy said, no, no, no, you you saved people's

lives when they're having an architect. You helped people in the very, by making sure that that

thing's working, you make sure that the precious seconds that matter after a near fatal car accident

that we actually capture the life in those seconds, right? It's again, purpose, mission, relevance.

If maintenance is done poorly, the tire falls off a car, a family is at risk, and it's making it

relevant. Yeah. So talk to us about at what level do you then bring this into the organization?

So we've been talking about it as a posture of self and about leaders. Would you look at bringing it in

an individual contributor level would be maybe the second in command, maybe the C-suite only,

in your experience, because you guys have done this with Fortune 500 companies with smaller companies,

where's the best place to bring the sand? And then how does it become that common language that we

talk about? Yeah, it spreads most effectively from the top and then down. Sure. It always does.

Just like we learned from John Mance. That's right. Influence works from the top 10% down. It was a trickle

down effect in organizations. If you start down here, right, if you start down here, and I don't like

the, I'm not a traditional org chart guy, right? I don't look at it as a pyramid. One of my good friends

and even a mentor in my life said, we need to turn that org chart upside down, because the leader that

is viewed as sitting at the top actually sits down here and puts that org chart on his or her

shoulders. That's a picture of leadership in terms of what you shoulder with your team for your team.

That's just a side note for sure. But you start there at the proverbial top because

they do what they see. Your people will do what they see. So if they see leaders committed to

getting individual clarity on their purpose and connecting it to the mission of the organization,

when they see purpose being the primary decision making lens, not just performance,

the whole organization changes. For me in my life, I have to make a purpose case before performance

cases ever is ever a thing. We don't get to talk about money, profit, revenue. If there's no

purpose case for that, it's going to be a short-term game. So I can be a long-term game. I can't do

this for three, five years, ten years, a decade if I'm only playing a performance game. But if I play

a purpose game first and a performance game always, I'm set up for long-term success. So I want to

start up here in this executive C suite and then I want to work it down, then work it down, then

work it down, because it has to work down by example. So I had an impressive question about

performance and how you relate that. I think he really entered how these are connected. So

let me just think about practically, because I took this and I got this beautiful report.

And I was a little bit, it can be overwhelming. I mean, there's a ton. I mean, I-

Probably 46 pages, I think it's 46. I'm advanced, maybe my 43 is probably not.

Yeah, 40, 45, 46. Okay, 46 to figure out the backpack.

Yeah, so what can you use in this a real life? So you take the assessment, you get this

beautiful report. Can I, do you recommend people have a, you did a beautiful debrief for us,

but what's the best practice? What, what you have this? One of my favorite things to do,

it's just a simple exercise is get a green highlighter and a yellow highlighter. Take out the report,

set aside, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, hour, if you want to take some time with it, coffee, whatever.

Sit down with a green highlighter and highlight everything that you kind of already knew about

yourself. Then with the yellow highlighter, highlight everything you learned about yourself.

Because a lot of the things that are in there, you've potentially not had words or phrases to

describe before, which means they were latent kind of abilities, skill sets, and gifts that you

weren't aware of. So it's an awareness creating document. If I can make you aware of the words and

phrases associated with the best of what you have to help others, that's purpose. The best of what

you have to help others and give away, then I've just taken something from your unconscious mind

to, up to your subconscious, your subconscious, to your subconscious mind, to your

conscious mind. And now it's an intentional decision making tool. And so I also have like

business partners do the same thing, but they switch reports, which is, so you take his and

vice versa, you highlighting green, what everything you already knew about him, you highlighted yellow,

what you learned about him. And oftentimes you'll see a lot more yellow than green. Yeah. And

this is where you'll see maybe that's where a lot of conflict comes up because this is a place

you didn't understand him as well and vice versa. That's good. Well, I'm going to wrap us up. That

doesn't mean that it's the end of the journey around this for the purpose factor for you, for your

team. You're saying earlier during the episode about leaders who just printed off and just kind of

go through it once a week or, you know, and then sells this right here. I'm holding up for those

that are on YouTube, those that are not. Well, you might not want to look at Perry and I so you

can stay off YouTube. But if you are, mine did black and white. Perry's going to hold his up in the

color. Yeah. This right here for your team, you know, you talked about gratitude and you talked

about understanding your team. This is a one-pager that you could have and just look at, you know,

Hey, Perry and I are meeting, right? Whatever. I need to know this. I need to know that. And you

can, you can lead with different things based off of this. It's a great one. Pager for yourself.

You can definitely dig into it. And the reason I shared that is because I don't think it's optional

for you to know your team's purpose. You guys weren't with us a couple months. I'm like, I'm in.

Teams got to take it. We got to have a conversation. I had a, with one of my team, I had a year-end

debrief and I posed 10 questions and that team member answered those questions and then we took

those questions and aligned it with the results out of her purpose factoring. We said, this is why,

like this is why. And now we're often running in a new year doing things a little bit differently,

communicating a little bit differently because we had the conversation around this. So thank you

for all that you went through. You back to living at home for three months. We're doing that.

But this is a tool. Like we talk about on here, there's lots of tools. This is a tool that I think

will fuel and ignite your team members to be more engaged and to live out with the conviction

to be able to do what you're doing. And so, Perry's going to give you the URL in just a minute.

But when you get there, I want you to click on that Explore Solutions tab, there's going to be a

form and just put your contact information and the births factor. And we will be in touch

because we want to add value to you and to your team. And we don't even talk about your family

and your community and how you could use this. And so it can just go on and on.

Yeah, so it is a tool, but it's a tool that keeps on giving a gift. We go back to it again.

Yeah, again, it's great again to do that. So thank you, Brian, for being with us.

Thank you. You're a great conversation. As a reminder, if you'd like to get the learner guide

for this episode or leave us the word purpose factor in a comment, there we'd love to get

information to you about that. You can do all that at MaxwellLeadership.com slash executive

podcast. You can also leave us a comment or a question there. You know, we love hearing from you.

So grateful. You spend this time with us. That's all today from the Maxwell leadership executive

podcast.