![Guest](https://staging.fellow.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/bo-brabo-1.png)
17
Episode 17 35 minutes
The Culture Equation: How Value-Based Leadership Results in High-Performing and Loyal Teams
Bo Brabo, Former Director of HR at US Army and White House Communications Agency
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“If you're the leader, you're the CEO, a VP, an executive, or a mid-level manager, you have to be able to build trust and confidence in your people. Confidence that you would never ask them to do something you're not willing to do.”
In this episode
In episode 17, Bo Brabo talks about how leadership, team culture and everyday behaviours at work collide in the military and in the corporate world.
Tune in to hear all about Bo’s journey that has carried him through the military, presidential offices and the corporate world and learn about the similarities that can be identified when teams and their leaders align their behaviours with their values.
Since retiring from the U.S. Army as the Chief of HR Operations with the White House Communications Agency and as a Presidential Communications Officer for President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, Bo has served in several executive positions as Vice President of Human Resources.
Bo is also the author of “From The Battlefield, To The White House, To The Boardroom” – a book where he shares his experiences from years on the military battlefield and a decade in the White House, and is also the co-host of the Bo and Luke show, a podcast all about doing better so you can be better.
Listen to this episode to learn how the needs of leaders and their teams don’t change much, even when their workplaces do!
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05:10
Being in tune with your people, as a leader.
06:43
Gratitude letters from the White House and the power of thanking your team members.
08:00
Value bases systems and impact over ROI.
08:35
The difference between values and culture in your organization.
09:10
Bo’s equation for culture.
10:47
Why you must behave and act in accordance to your company’s value systems.
12:06
Translating your values and company culture into behaviours and how to look for them when hiring.
12:52
Is it too early to start developing your company culture?
14:06
Translating loyalty from the army, to the corporate world.
15:00
Being loyal means being an active, participating team member.
16:41
Do As I Do, not Do As I Say, a framework about honour and living up to your organization’s values and missions.
17:48
As a leader, you are on the front lines of the work you do.
18:24
Jumping out of airplanes to build mental resilience and what this looks like at work today.
19:06
How recalling challenging experiences can push us through hard times again and again.
23:26
Working together as a team to complete challenges, in the army and in the corporate world.
24:28
The army is not easy work, and neither is business.
26:33
Why planning for a crisis when things are good will help you see challenges and emergencies more clearly.
29:11
The power of risk assessment to make decisions in the army and how you can apply this inside your business.
Resources
- Bo’s book From the Battlefield to the White House to the Boardroom: Leading Organizations to Values-Based Results
- Bo’s Podcast, The Bo and Luke Show
- Leading through a Crisis, Bo’s podcast conversation with Mike Barger, co-founder of JetBlue Airways
Episode Transcript
Aydin Mirzaee 2:37
Bo, welcome to the show.
Bo Brabo 2:39
Thank you. Great to be here.
Aydin Mirzaee 2:40
Yeah, I have the feeling this is gonna be a really fun conversation. I always love talking to folks who have served time in the army. I feel like you guys take leadership very, very seriously.
Bo Brabo 2:52
Yeah, I would say that’s true.
Aydin Mirzaee 2:54
Obviously you have worked at the US Army as a Chief of HR operations with the White House Communications agency and as a presidential Communications Officer for both President W. Bush and President Barack Obama and you obviously spend time in the boardroom. So lots of diverse experience. We always kind of start out with this question, through your career, which leaders have you traditionally admired the most, are there one or two people that you’ve learned a lot from when it comes to leadership or management?
Bo Brabo 3:24
Yeah, I think the number one person that stands out in my mind, he was a very young, he’s a West Point graduate Captain when I met him when I was stationed in Germany, and he’s 26, about twenty six or twenty seven years old at the time, and he was the one responsible for our unit as we deployed to Iraq. So the deployment to Iraq, keeping the mission going strong while we were there and keeping everyone safe. The leadership that he exuded from the moment I met him till today, he’s a colonel today still in the US Army, great friend and mentor, and I think he was the first one that really exuded the focus on the people that I actually witnessed. I always felt that personally as my only leadership trait but what I saw in Tony was that exact thing from picking up me and my family at the airport when we arrived in Germany and he did that for everybody. Right? It was the ‘I’m the leader, I’m in charge and I care about my people’. And that’s just how he behaved. I’ll give you a perfect story. It was just like, something I would have never expected. So we were in Kuwait waiting for forward movement up into Iraq. I don’t think anybody in our unit had ever been in this type of war or engagement. I mean, this was scary. It was real. We were in the second wave. So we already had seen on the news, you know, the first what, nine to 12 months of combat happening in Iraq back in 2003. And now it’s 2004. And it’s our turn to go so everybody’s on edge. Everybody’s scared. So it really takes a whole new level of leadership and Tony finds his way to Kuwait. There was a military base and he found his way to that military base and there happened to be a Popeye’s Chicken. He literally bought fried chicken for all of us and came back with it like a total surprise. But what did they do, Aydin? It put a smile on everybody’s face. It was like an instant morale booster just like that, because he was just so in tune with what was happening with his people and whether you needed to or not he did it. And it was such, what many of us might think is a small thing, right? It’s easy for us to buy lunch for our teams or whatever. But in that moment and in that environment, when you’re about to go into the hot zone, if you will, it meant a lot, and he just did things like that. All the time.
Aydin Mirzaee 5:30
Yeah. And it’s so fascinating. And what I love about that is I mean, as you said, it’s a lot of times just about the little things, the little things that say you care, but also that makes you feel like you belong, right.
Bo Brabo 5:42
Yeah, that’s a great way to put it. You’re part of the team. And he, I mean, at no point in time, would he ever leave anybody out? Right? It’s, we’re all one. We’re all one team. And together, we’re strong and we’re in this together. And that was always exuded from him.
Aydin Mirzaee 5:55
Yeah. And what I find fascinating as well as you know, there’s so many things and so many stories I’m sure you could have talked about but it’s really funny how these are the types of stories that we tend to remember, when we ate Popeye’s Chicken? Yeah, that’s so cool. Obviously, I’ve read the book, and one of the things that really resonated with me was that you had all of these letters from I think, like Chief of Staff’s to the President, that would just like they were letters that all they did was thank you for, you know, particular things that you’ve done. And I just found that was so cool that that would even happen.
Bo Brabo 6:33
And you’re right, those letters from the White House Chiefs of Staff, I think there were about four different ones while I was serving in that capacity, and, you know, getting that letter of gratitude. It really does a lot for an individual, especially coming from somebody at that level, that they’re taking a moment of time to sign all those letters, make sure they’re put together they’re worded properly. And that is coming from the chief of staff on behalf of the President, which is truly something to see and to receive. And of course, I’ve held on to those ever since receiving them,
Aydin Mirzaee 7:06
I just, you know, think about it from the corporate perspective I’ve never met, and I’m sure that exists, but I’ve never met or heard about CEOs that would ever write a letter like that, sign it and then send it.
Bo Brabo 7:18
I’ve worked for some good CEOs, with them. And, you know, an email that they blast out to, to the company, you know, thanking everybody for their hard work through a challenging time, or whatever the case might be. But I also believe there’s potential for something like a hard form letter that could even get mailed to your employees address, could be huge. It could be very impactful to their companies and their teams.
Aydin Mirzaee 7:43
And sometimes I find these things are hard. You know, everybody is obviously always so busy. It’s hard because spending your time doing something like that. There’s no direct ROI measurement, like at that moment in time, but this is the stuff that probably makes all the difference over the long term.
Bo Brabo 8:00
Yeah, it really does. It’s like, and I’m sure we’ll get into it. It’s just like sticking to a strong values based system in your company. Right? If you start implementing values and you’re living by them, there’s no, there’s no visual ROI that you’re going to see right in that moment. But over time, the ROI can be huge.
Aydin Mirzaee 8:19
Yeah. And, and since you mentioned it, obviously, one of the core things that you are a proponent of, is obviously living values based within your company or your organization. And I think that the way that you put it was, so well put in the book, just like how do you define or differentiate value from culture?
Bo Brabo 8:39
Yeah, so I thought about that a lot before, before I actually wrote the book, and how to put it into words to help people understand my thought pattern and what I was thinking about it. And I came up with a formula and I actually took myself back to being in grad school and doing my MBA and sitting in economics class. And, you know, economics is filled with formulas and there are letters. And, you know, we can talk about, about anything with a formula. So I thought, let me break this down to a formula to define how values create culture. So I started with culture, because culture is a big topic. Lots of people speak on culture, it’s a big deal. And I thought, Okay, so first, I need to figure out what is culture. So I just literally said, What is culture? Culture is an outcome. It’s a result of something. And in reality, it’s a result of our behaviors, and how we act not just individually but all of us collectively, in our organization. So I created the formula where I said, behaviors over time, multiply that by everybody in your company, because everybody is going to produce your culture, good, bad or indifferent. You know, you’ll have a culture and it’s based on how everybody acts. So the point of trying to define that in the book was to say, look, because I’ve been not just in the military, but in numerous, several corporations, where I wanted to draw people away from the common misconceptions that culture is making sure that we have a cool office environment, or that we do happy hours together, or we have these events together, these team building events. All those things are part of it, but it’s not everything, because culture is truly everything, it’s how we go to work and how we behave every day. So when you take behavior plus time, those are your values. So you could either start out with a set of values and say these are our values. And that’s, that’s fine. And then I would just say, I hope you act like that. Right. I hope you behave in accordance with the values that you just said, are important to your company, or you can say look, this is how I am. This is me and if I’m the CEO, or I’m a leader of the company, this is what I believe in. These are my values. This is how I behave every day and start there. And then, and then you’re looking for others to emulate such behaviors, on your teams and so forth. That would really say, Yep, those are our company values. That’s what we live by. And that’s how we, that’s how we behave every day.
It’s often, you know, if you thought about somebody following you around for a week with a video camera, and you didn’t know they were following you. And then at the end of that week, you studied all that footage, we would figure out what Aydin’s values are. Because you behave not knowing you behaved how you behave, period. So that’s how it all starts. It’s how I define it. And then you got to go in and you have to just work that through your whole organization because that should define how you hire people, the type of people you’re looking for, you know? When people go into interviews or you’re prepping for an interview and one of the things the hiring manager and the team is trying to figure out is,
Bo Brabo 12:00
are there going to be a good cultural fit? Right? So how do you determine that? Well, you should have some questions based upon the types of behaviors you would want to see out of that person to make sure that they fit the values of your company. Right? And if they don’t, then they shouldn’t have the right answers. They don’t have the, the examples or whatever, you should be able to quickly figure out, aside from their technical skills, whether or not they’d be a good cultural fit for your company.
Aydin Mirzaee 12:28
Yeah, it’s really interesting, because I know a lot of companies that have not codified these things, maybe, you know, there’s some founder behaviors or, or things that like that that exists, and maybe a lot of people do, but they haven’t codified these things. Because they think that, well, we haven’t worked together as a group for long enough or our group is too small. We’re say, only about 20 people. Is it ever too early to start working on this stuff?
Bo Brabo 12:55
I personally don’t think so. And it’s one of the reasons why I wrote the book in hopes that I could help these exact types of small business and medium sized business, leaders and founders, as they’re building their companies. And they, you know, eventually they go from maybe 20 to 30. And they’re adding more people, I focused on the army values, which I live and breathe. And they’re part of my, my character and who I am, it was part of the organization I was with for 26 years. And they’re very, very solid, very, very well codified in that type of organization. So I said, Hey, if you don’t have them, if you haven’t written them down the seven army values, you could start there, you could pick three of them, you could pick four of them, right? Figure out what those mean to you? And could you shape that in your organization to start such a journey? So rather than sit back and you know it with any professional book and tools and tips that you offer to people, you’re hoping that they can pick something out of there that they like, and that they can use if they if they’re in that situation, and they don’t have values or they don’t have them codified and they haven’t spent time to work on them. They could pick up the book and they could say, Okay, I’m going to start here, some of the work has already been done. For me. Let me start here and see if this resonates and, and go from there.
Aydin Mirzaee 14:03
I’m going to just pick out one of them. So the specific value of loyalty, is that something that could be translated? I feel like it makes sense for the army to, to use that value would that ever make sense in the corporate world especially today?
Bo Brabo 14:18
I think we all do it in the corporate world. We said well, loyalty, you know, people only stay in jobs for two or three years if they’re lucky, maybe even less, because they’re not loyal. The thought of being loyal to a specific company or job is gone. The days of working at a firm for 30 years, and you spent your whole life at the same place. That’s not the mantra today, right people go, they look for advancement in other places, and they have to move on. So when you talk about loyalty for me, I think you have to break that down even from an individual level. So even if you only stay at a company for a couple years, hopefully within those couple years, you were loyal to your team and to your co-workers.
Bo Brabo 15:00
And getting the job done and being participative and contributing to the mission at hand and the deliverables that you were responsible for. I think if you’re going to use it in corporate America today, you have to, you have to break it down to the individual team level. And you can find loyalty there.
Aydin Mirzaee 15:16
Yeah. Or like loyalty to the mission, I find that especially a lot of the younger generation today are much more like mission oriented. And so they’re looking to buy into what does this organized group of people actually achieve in the world? And if they can get bought into that, like, maybe there’s loyalty there?
Bo Brabo 15:33
Yeah, I’ve read several studies, where the millennial generation today, the younger, younger generations that they really want to have purpose, and they want to find that purpose. And in a company or an organization that has a solid mission, then I think they can be absolutely loyal when they find that and they become part of something they are passionate about. I think you’ll find loyalty for sure.
Aydin Mirzaee 15:57
So there’s another thing that I guess folks in the army are well known for? And that’s honor. And correct me if I’m wrong, but honor is largely defined by living by those values. Right? How true you are to those values. Am I saying that correctly?
Bo Brabo 16:17
Yeah. So we should all be what we are regardless of our values, honor, if we’re sticking to them, then we’re honored. we’re honoring those values. So honor is exactly that. That is one of the army values written, written on paper written everywhere. And that’s just living up to all of the value. That’s the whole premise of honor. Yes, you’re right.
Aydin Mirzaee 16:37
It’s interesting, because you also have this saying of defining leadership,as do what I do, not do as I say, but if you have honor, they should be the same. It should be the same, right?
Bo Brabo 16:47
The Army’s by all means is not perfect, right. And we’re all people and we make mistakes and we screw up. So not everybody displays that all the time. And I’ve witnessed people military, corporate America, where if, if you think about a person’s leadership style, and when I say do as I do not do, as I say, what I’m getting at is if you’re the leader, you’re the CEO, you are your VP, you’re an executive, or even a mid level manager, you have to be able to build that trust and confidence in your people and in your teams that you can go first that you can do what you’re asking them to do that you would never ask them to do something you’re not willing to do, you know, go forth and conquer is that is you leading from the front and and i think in business that is very prevalent and needs to occur. Especially if you’re going to rally your team behind you to build what we all want, a high performing team that exceeds expectations. That leader has to be out front and has to be the person that’s, that’s doing versus somebody who sits in their office and sends out an email.
Bo Brabo 18:00
I don’t know who has ever experienced leadership by email, I’m just gonna sit back and I’ll send an email and then I’m just telling you what to do but I don’t ever really go out front and do it myself or do things where people see me doing things.
Aydin Mirzaee 18:13
Yeah, totally agree.There is another topic that I also wanted to chat with you about and I think it’s super relevant for the times. And that’s just this concept of mental resilience and it’s everywhere throughout the book and it kind of makes sense. It’s no surprise it’s a big and very important part throughout the book, you have this story about how you learned how to jump out of airplanes and how that kind of shaped you and how it was part of your development on figuring out who you were. I’m just curious if you could dive into the Who am I part and like how that helped you establish more personal value, if you will?
Bo Brabo 18:55
Yeah, for sure. With physical toughness comes the need for mental toughness and mental resilience to get through different experiences or crises and just think about you know what’s happening in our world today, you got to have a foundation in your mind that can take you through or you just collapse and you lose it. Those are things like having a good foundation of mentors and other people that you aspire to be like, you take inspiration from them. Also having faith, having family and friends that you can count on and that you can talk to. It’s very important to be able to talk through things with people who know you and know how you are, know what your goals and ambitions are, so that you can work through the mental challenges of getting through an arduous time and knowing who depends on you and what they expect of you so that you can live up to those expectations. Especially from a military perspective and why I think it helped define me, there’s a huge amount of camaraderie in the military, in your organizations, you build some significant bonds of brotherhood and sisterhood. And for me, when I’m out, when I’m at airborne school, and I’m starting to experience things physically that I had never experienced before, like the first one was
Bo Brabo 20:00
finishing the end of the week and we’re doing this run, and we stopped running and then my knee just wouldn’t, my leg was just straight, it just wouldn’t bend. And it was seen by an instructor and I got pulled out and sent to the clinic. And you know, I had a choice. And my choice was either call it a day and go home or get a big shot or cortisone in the rear end to help loosen up the knee and so forth, and then tend to it and you know, that was a decision point where like, I’ve got people dependent on me, I have a unit full of paratroopers, you know, that are looking for me to do the same thing. It’s what I signed up to do. I volunteered to be there. I’m not a quitter, right. So physically, I was impaired, but mentally I had to push through that and just focus on all the other things, and other people who were dependent on me to do it. I think that’s, I think, at least when you’re starting to build resiliency, it’s a powerful thing for your mind when you have others depending on you to get through a certain situation.
Aydin Mirzaee 20:57
I think that phrase in itself, you know I’m not a quitter, i think it’s it’s very powerful to A, decide it, but then do something that validates it, because then it starts to become part of your identity going forward because the next time there’s a challenging situation you can say, Oh yeah, well I’m not a quitter, remember that time when that happened? Was that the moment for you where that was super cemented into your psyche? Or did you have experiences in the past and like this was just building up on that?
Bo Brabo 21:26
I mean, I’ve had experiences in the past, but that was a moment for me where it was probably the toughest thing physically that I had ever challenged myself to do. So getting through that, it was incredibly important to me and I had to find that intestinal fortitude in my head right, and in my mind to to get through that and get past it and to keep going and not give up so after that, yeah, that was it. The foundation was solid after that, and now that just kind of set the stage to say hey, you know, I can get through with the right preparation. I can get through anything, right. I can help others do the same, which is a big deal too, right? So if I ever want to be someone’s mentor or their leadership coach or their executive coach, whatever the case might be, I have the credibility to say, Yep, he’s, he’s done it. He’s been there. He’s done it more than once so can help others do the same.
Aydin Mirzaee 22:18
Yeah. I mean, there’s so many examples of this, another one, and I read this in admiration, it’s that as teams, you had to be up at exactly 5:35am and then you had to do like a gazillion things, including brush your teeth, go run through lockers, do all this stuff, and within seven minutes, be ready for exercise. I just kind of, I mean, just actually a serious question. Does anyone drink coffee in the army?
Bo Brabo 22:44
Everybody? I think, haha!
Aydin Mirzaee 22:45
Did they do it in that seven minutes? Or like, when does that happen?
Bo Brabo 22:49
No, that didn’t happen in that time, the coffee didn’t come until later in the morning in that environment.
Aydin Mirzaee 22:54
Yeah, because I feel like for me, I can’t even get up and be functional without that, so I was just super impressed.
Bo Brabo 23:01
Certain times you’re being tested, right? So there’s leadership development and then in that scenario where I wrote about that in the book, it was a war army, Warrant Officer Candidate School. And this is where you’re being tested. It’s not time to develop you into a leader, like you’re, you’re on the spot to be tested. And they did things like that. And that was the standard for the entire time we were there, right, that didn’t end after the first week or the second week, that was every single morning. It was all about trying to work out as a team and work through those challenges. And of course, it took us I think, as I wrote in the book, it took us a little over a week to figure out how to actually get all of those tasks done in seven minutes and be ready, everybody’s in the same boat, you’re on the same team. You got to figure out how to accomplish this challenge. And, and eventually you figure it out.
Aydin Mirzaee 23:48
So this transition from, you know, on the verge of burnout, to achieving resiliency. I mean, you talked about you know, having mentors, having people in your network, are there other things that we can we can kind of adopt because you know it like businesses, you know, maybe not army tough, but it’s, I mean, there are challenging times, there’s ups and downs, and as a leader, say a really bad thing happened or your organization is going through some bad things or you had to lay off half your staff or, like these sorts of things happen. How do you build that resiliency for yourself? What other things can people do being in a leadership position or an executive position in your company?
Bo Brabo 24:28
It is not easy work, it’s not. It is not simple. It’s difficult. It’s challenging. And there are things that you can do to set yourself up for success when you have times when you’re facing burnout, or it’s getting really tough or something happens. I would say it’s in the good times. And this is why it’s difficult because we’re in a good place. You’re enjoying it, you’re happy to take the time to set up all of those playbooks, if you will, on how you are going to behave, how you are going to expect your people to behave in a moment of crisis or, or just a challenge in general, you lose a big contract or you didn’t get a proposal you didn’t win. How are you going to respond to that? A great example of that is, the gentleman that wrote the foreword of the book was one of the co-founders of JetBlue Airways, Mike Barger, and he’s a professor today at the University of Michigan. We were talking about COVID-19, and how the university’s handling the crisis, and everything that they’re doing to get through it. And that led us back to a conversation about the airlines. Every airline has an emergency action plan, because they are mandated to have emergency action plans by the Federal Aviation Administration here in the United States. So when a crisis happens, big or small, then the leadership and the teams can pull out that emergency action plan. It’s almost like if you just think of a binder, a book filled with, these are all the things we’re supposed to do when something bad happens. And they start going through the book and then they at least have a foundation to act upon. There’s some immediate comfort, and that oh my gosh, what am I going to do? Well, I know what I’m going to do, I’m going to grab the book, I’m gonna start going down the list of all the things that we should be doing, adjust where I need to because of the crisis at hand, and move forward. And that really starts building some mental strength and one, it helps you relieve stress, in your mind of all that, what am I going to do? It builds your mental resilience, if you will, to get through it. You have a playbook, you have a guide. And, you know, I would imagine there had to have been thousands of businesses over the past few months that when we were coming into COVID-19, and things started shutting down. It hit them all, like a ton of bricks and having never been through it, never expecting something like that to happen. And then it’s right there, It’s right on top of their head, and oh my gosh, what do I do? So my my advice is take the opportunity during the times when things are going well to force yourself into emergency planning so that you can actually talk through it and speak through it to find your strategies before the emergency actually happens. One of the most important things and I’ve literally only seen this where we did this regularly and the CEO was committed to it in a corporation, it’s the after action reviews like post post event likr when a project ends or an event and taking the time to do an after action review. What went well? What went wrong? And what could you have done better? The same holds true with the times that we’re in now. So if you came out of COVID-19 you had to have lessons that you learned for your company and yourself. Well, work on that, writing things down is very powerful. Put pen to paper and I don’t mean type it I mean, put it on pen and paper and write down what went well, what went wrong, what could have done differently and start building out the change to the next playbook because eventually something’s going to happen that doesn’t go your way. It might not be as drastic as a pandemic shut down, but something will come. And you’ll need something to build upon. And the more you do that, the more resiliency that builds up inside of you and the confidence in you that you can get through those things. You can, you’ve done it, you can get through it, seek help and guidance.
Aydin Mirzaee 28:13
You know, one of the things that was also impressive for me is that regardless of what time you were in, even if you were in the middle of combat, or you know, there’s a war going on, it’s that the HR function of the troops was alive and kicking, right. So there were performance management and promotions, like it was business as usual, which is really interesting. And you know, one of the things that I would think that you would probably come across a lot is just overcoming fear. And there’s so much of it and so many variations. Are there strategies that you teach folks to do, for example, is there an army meditation practice.
Bo Brabo 28:58
The army is very big on, and this happens in corporate America too, maybe not so much in my experience and maybe not so formal, but it’s super formal in the military, where we do risk assessments. You know, it’s just keeping it basic, you know, it’s the probability of something happening with the probability of an outcome. And then leaders have to determine, you know, through their own experience on what that would be. And well, we were talking about earlier, we’re talking about jumping out of airplanes, right? So if you send up a plane with 300 people in it, and all 300 of them have to jump out, right, there’s risk in that. All right. So what do they talk about? They talk about what’s the risk of a parachute not opening. And then if it doesn’t open, what’s the probability of an outcome which could be death, someone falling and hitting the ground without a parachute? So then everything in between you’re thinking about the mitigation of that probable outcome. So making sure that the rigors who pack the parachutes are trained, that they’re qualified and they’ve been inspected, maybe they’ve been inspected two or three times so so that and then at the end, you have an assessment that says, well, because this has been through this checklist and it’s been packed, it’s been quality checked, quality controlled three times, the equipment’s in good, in super good and functioning order, as long as the person jumping out of the plane performs their tasks properly when they’re jumping, the chute is going to open and the risk of death is super, super low. So we’re going to go on, we’re going to make the decision and we’re going to move on, right? When you can perform risk assessments, you get to the point in your life or in your profession, whatever, where you can perform a risk assessment in your head, like really quickly based on anything that you’re doing. You can help or you can start reducing fear of whatever it is that you’re about to get involved in. So that becomes a skill and it’s like a personal skill for you to quickly think through, what am I doing? or What am I supposed to do, I’m afraid to do it, what’s the probability of the worst possible outcome, right. And then in between you have everything you do to mitigate, to mitigate that outcome, the faster and the quicker you can get through things like that, and work on that and truly think about that, you can start reducing fear. And then the other thing and I do write about this in the book is control. If you want to start reducing fear, think about the things that you can control. You have to actually be able to control them. If you can, then those are things you can work out to, to work on to to get rid of the fear, things that you cannot control. Just you gotta just put them aside. I know a lot of people get petrified with speaking in the speaking in public and if you have been tapped, if you’ve been tapped to go into and give a presentation to to the CEO, and and you’re not you’re not the person you’re an introvert, you don’t like speaking
Bo Brabo 32:00
Right, there are things you can do and things under your control that you can do to help you with that. And then the things that you can’t control, like worrying about what the CEO is going to say to me or worrying about how they’re going to react to my presentation, you have no control over that. So it’s an exercise of putting that out of your mind. And focusing on the things you can control. You can put together a great presentation, you know, you can do your research, you can get your data, you can go to others and make sure that you can propose solutions. And make sure it’s all great in writing. So even if you mess up, speaking it, it’s all there in writing, and it’s in your presentation. So lots of thing, anything you can control and get your hands on it. It’s super beneficial for you to really grab a hold of those things, but the things you can’t control to the side, or they can start to tear you down.
Aydin Mirzaee 32:46
Yeah, I love that. And again, like super relevant to almost anything in the corporate world. I mean, if you’re planning a big launch event, doing a risk assessment before doing an after action review, after focusing on the things that you can control. I think again, it applies to every facet of the corporate world as well.
Bo Brabo 33:04
I think so, I think I think it does. And yeah, and I love helping people through those types of things.
Aydin Mirzaee 33:10
Cool. So we’re just coming up on time, I was going to obviously mentioned that your book, from the battlefield to the White House to the boardroom leading organizations to value based results is live people can can obviously order it on Amazon or other bookstores. And it’s available on Kindle too. And you said that you may also have an audiobook as well.
Bo Brabo 33:33
Yeah, so that’s a project up and coming with it. It’s an exciting project audiobooks are doing, they’re exploding, people like to listen. So that’s definitely on the on the task list for this year to get that done. And then I think at that point, it’ll be out and then you have whether you want to read a paperback or read it on your Kindle or a smart device, or you want to listen to it, it’ll be available for you.
Aydin Mirazee 33:58
Yeah, that’s awesome. And again, I recommend it to the readers out there, it is a super easy read with great stories. You also have a podcast, How can people find you and learn about your podcast?
Unknown Speaker 34:10
Yeah, so our podcast is the Bo and Luke show. Bo is spelled with an O ,B O. So Bo and Luke show dot com. If you go to the website, as you know, with a podcast, there are so many platforms that that podcast can go out on probably 15 different podcast platforms, so we thought, well, what’s the easiest way for us to get it to people? Well, let’s do the website. Let’s put effort into a good website and people can just go there and they can choose if they want to listen on Apple, YouTube, whatever the case might be. So the Bo and Luke show dot come. Also if you’re interested in a signed copy of the book, you can buy the book on the website on the podcast website as well.
Aydine Mirzaee 34:52
Oh, very cool. I didn’t know about that. That’s, that’s awesome.
Bo Brabo 34:55
Yeah, it’s there. Or it’s on Amazon, the Kindle and the paperback can be purchased on Amazon.
Aydine Mirzaee 35:00
Well, now that I know that there’s a way to get a signed copy, the other options don’t seem that good.
Bo Brabo 35:08
I appreciate that. Thank you.
Aydin Mirazee 35:09
Yeah. So Bo, this has been great. Lots and lots of great lessons. Thank you so much for doing this, Bo.
Bo Brabo 35:15
You’re most welcome. Thank you, Aydin. I appreciate it. It’s been great.
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