EPISODE. Stop Fighting Yourself: How Understanding Your Personality Can Unlock Success - Dr. Anne Dranitsaris
Transcript
Anne Dranitsaris - 00:00
Leadership around this is we've hit a point where leaders are trying so hard to fit the model of a good leader that they're becoming increasingly ineffective because they're not looking at developing real competence and mastery over leadership skills. They're trying to be good and they're basing being good on whether or not they're making their employees happy or not.
Theme Music - 00:39
Welcome to the ownership game with Gary Montalvo What would it take to get into the driver seat of your life and leave your mark? The ownership game starts now
Gary Montalvo
Have you ever tried to change something about yourself tried to be more disciplined and more confident more patient only to feel like you're fighting against your own nature. And as a result, you end up pushing harder, reading more books, setting more goals, telling yourself this time, this time is gonna be different. Only to slip back to your old patterns, which leaves you frustrated, riddled with doubt, maybe even a little shame. But what if your effort isn't the problem? What if the real issue is not understanding how your brain is wired. That's exactly what my guest today, Dr. Anne Drenisaris, has spent her career uncovering. As a psychotherapist and leadership consultant, Anne has spent 40 years helping people break through their biggest personal and professional roadblocks, not by forcing change, but by helping people understand their unique personality style and how to work with it instead of against it. In this conversation, Anne breaks down why self-awareness is the missing piece of personal growth and how entrepreneurs and leaders often sabotage their own success without even realizing it. If you've ever felt stuck in the same patterns or frustrated that change doesn't seem to last, this episode will give you a whole new perspective on why that is and what to do about it. Let's get into it.
So, Anne, I'm really excited to talk to you. I've been wanting to have this conversation with you for a while because I'm really fascinated by the work that you're doing with your personality style framework that you've developed. And we're definitely gonna get into all of that. But I wanted to start, if you don't mind, a little personal at first. And, you know, as I was prepping for our interview,
The thing that really stood out for me right away was, you've been at this for 40 years. You've been at this for a really long time. The world has changed a lot. And I imagine 40 years ago, it would have looked very differently for a woman to break into the psychotherapy field. And I kind of want to start there. Like, what was that like for you? Give us a little bit of your background story there.
Anne Dranitsaris - 03:24
Interestingly enough, and it's a great place to start, given I'm in the process of writing a book on the evolution of codependency throughout the last hundred years. The models that we've come out of, and psychotherapy was born out of a Freudian model, but in the 1980s, it had taken on more of a grassroots approach.
Gary Montalvo - 03:35
Okay, wow.
Anne Dranitsaris - 03:51
Recognizing that not everybody wanted to go to a psychiatrist and explore their neurosis, that there was an opening up more to how do we develop as human beings, who are we as human beings? And so I became a part of a therapy community called Therafields at the time in Toronto.
And we had everything from a standardized psychotherapy training program at the Center for Training in Psychotherapy to living situations, house groups, where we actually lived with other people who were looking at developing out of childhood patterns. However, that was very, very unique in itself because mainstream was still looking at
If I have a mental illness, it's a stigma. If I can't control myself, it's a character flaw. Right up to the 80s, this is the way we were still thinking. And those of us with a bit more of an alternative mindset and a more holistic mindset, we're looking at different ways to help and support psychological growth by having these types of communities and therapy with non-
psychiatrists. And so the people who enrolled in the psychotherapy program, they could be anyone from, you know, I was a massage therapist at the time, and I enrolled in the program. you know, that's a whole other story being a massage therapist back then when it really wasn't that legitimate. But psychotherapy wasn't seen as a legitimate profession back then. And in Ontario and Canada,
Gary Montalvo - 05:16
Mm-hmm.
Anne Dranitsaris - 05:44
You couldn't even get registered. There was no college that oversaw psychotherapy until I think 2011, something like that here in Ontario. it wasn't, it was not mainstream, but people were coming and getting help because they needed, they needed a safe place to come and talk and be listened to.
Gary Montalvo - 06:06
Yeah.
What started to happen for you that you were called towards psychotherapy?
Anne Dranitsaris - 06:16
Well, as a massage therapist, what I, was seeing.
Gary Montalvo - 06:21
They’re the very different routes.
Anne Dranitsaris - 06:26
As a massage therapist, what I realized was people were coming to me, not for my great skills as massage therapist, but they were coming because I knew how to listen to them. and I was seeing I was seeing a psychotherapist who was a part of this community at the time. In secret, nobody knew that I was seeing a therapist because it was a bit taboo.
But what I would do is I would be able to take my client, my massage clients to a certain place, and then I'd refer them to my psychotherapist, and then I'd have to rebuild my massage practice. But it was in that realizing that people were coming to me to talk and because I could listen, and I had some innate skills that I was just coming to terms with.
The fact that I was able to do this. And so I started the psychotherapy program.
Gary Montalvo - 07:27
Yeah. So now, like, how old are you in this? I'm in... So you're already, like, full into life. already... Fascinating. there's... So I know they're... I'm trying to ask the question without setting up the story, but you have a really beautiful story of reuniting with your daughter. So it's like...
Anne Dranitsaris - 07:31
My early thirties.
Thank
Gary Montalvo - 07:56
Can you walk us through that and weave it into this point in your life so that we kind of get a picture of the different phases of your life?
Anne Dranitsaris - 08:04
So when I was 16, I got pregnant and because of my life circumstances and the situation that I I decided to
Gary Montalvo - 08:15
and because you were 16.
and because you were 16.
Anne Dranitsaris - 08:22
I decided to give my daughter up for adoption, which probably led to, you know, me acting out for the next, you know, 10 years of my life in in different ways. I actually didn't start my career or start my education until my late 20s because I decided to go over to Europe and hitchhike around Europe and get into all kinds of mischief over there.
Then I came back and part of why I sought therapy was I had no idea how to land. I had had a decade of experience different than any of the people I had grown up with and I had nowhere to connect and I had an interest in helping people. Having given my daughter up for adoption, really left.
an emptiness inside of me. it was all, you know, when you have a child that you give up, you think about them every day. It's like a part of you is out there somewhere. And when she was 27 years old, on the verge of about to get married, she decided to search up her family history, her medical history.
And I had registered with the Ontario government here and they sent her a letter saying that if she wanted to connect with me and her her paternal grandmother as well was also registered. If she wanted to connect, she could.
Gary Montalvo - 10:00
So you registered first without speaking to her. were basically saying, I'm open. And the government would now take that letter and say, hey, your birth mother is open to meeting you. And so she said, OK, wow. OK, so.
Anne Dranitsaris - 10:21
That's when it happened. She was living on the West Coast and I'm here on the East side of Canada. So she's out there and we began our relationship via phone and at the time it was 1997 that we met.
Gary Montalvo - 10:43
What? Yeah, I mean, what was that like? Because so the for the listeners to who don't know this, so you guys now have a business together, a podcast together. You have had your business for 23 years, 25 years, the business you're working together. So you guys didn't just reconnect like you like this was like going all in.
Anne Dranitsaris - 11:12
This is where we make that segue into personality type because what we mostly bonded over was our interest in people and helping people and the business side of things. Heather was 27 at the time. I'm in my early 40s and it was essentially she didn't need a mother.
I wasn't coming in as, okay, well, your adoptive mother's out of here now, I'm your real mother. There was no position that I was trying to take, which made it even more challenging because we had to build a friendship or we wouldn't be able to connect. And so we connected over our mutual interest in helping people. And Heather was an organizational development consultant helping
organizations through putting in systems and performance systems. And I, at the time, had my psychotherapy and coaching practices. We decided we would blend and join forces and create a more holistic model for helping leaders help their organizations achieve their potential. And personality type in the role that it played was
Gary Montalvo - 12:30
Yeah.
Anne Dranitsaris - 12:35
And I helped Heather because I had I was already certified as a Myers-Briggs practitioner at the time using the MBTI and we had so many conversations about your personality. She she prefers thinking. I prefer thinking we're both really objective in our approach. We're not touchy feely. You know we didn't do some of these things that you read in. You know, reunion stories where, you know, they lie in the bed together and hold it was more of connecting with our brains and our interests.
Gary Montalvo - 13:14
Nothing is anything wrong with that for those that want to that
Anne Dranitsaris - 13:17
There's anything wrong with that. It was not our style. And true to our style, we built something that was not necessarily mother-daughter, but it was based on our mutual connection and our desire to be together in the arena that we both felt most comfortable.
Gary Montalvo - 13:21
Yes, of course.
Yeah,
it's fascinating to me that you both got separated and then you're both in the game of helping people. know, that you're both like expressed differently, you know, and with obviously overlaps. But that's really fascinating to me. It is beautiful and it's so interesting.
Anne Dranitsaris - 14:02
Yes, yeah. Well, you know, again, where what we what happens in reunions a lot of the time is that people don't know how to just create a relationship without looking at the roles and the entitlements of the roles. So I'm your real mother, which means that entitles me to, you know, say what I want or expect things from you, whatever it might be. But because we're not, our personality types are role-driven, we're more developmental oriented in our approach to the relationship, we just let it unfold, not without a great deal of angst and anxiety about the whole process. Because it's so much easier when you just say, okay, well, this is my role and now I'm performing in my role.
Gary Montalvo - 14:55
Uh-huh, so you're saying that your personality types, both of you, is one of the factors or the factor that kind of allowed for this partnership, this new relationship, because your personality styles were not the emotional types in that way, so you were not coming at it from expectations or the emotional component. That's really fascinating.
Anne Dranitsaris - 15:23
Yeah, and both of us, because of our orientation toward helping people achieve their potential, that might be, that doesn't mean achieving potential is to get you to conform to my idea of what you should be like. we both in our work and in our personal life, it's, you know, I'm on my path.
And that path might lead me away from you, it might lead me toward you, but my expectation is not that you conform to my idea of what you should be like. And that makes us successful in our work as well because we don't judge the other person when they don't meet our expectations. We try and understand where they're coming from.
Gary Montalvo - 16:01
Yeah.
I mean, you're pointing to something, there's a whole book right there, right? Because I think that what you're pointing to is not necessarily how we mostly operate in relationships. Like I think mostly we operate with some type of expectations, with some type of ideas about how you should be taking care of me or giving me or.
how you should be responding to the things that I'm saying, which the things that I'm doing. And those are the things that really get us in trouble at the end of the day, because we're not now dealing with who we are in reality. We're dealing with who we want you to be, right? Like what I think you be. Yeah.
Anne Dranitsaris - 17:04
Yes, very well said. And if I can segue a little bit into leadership around this is that we've hit a point where leaders are trying so hard to fit the model of a good leader that they're becoming increasingly ineffective because they're not looking at developing real competence and mastery over leadership skills.
They're trying to be good and they're basing being good on whether or not they're making their employees happy or not.
Gary Montalvo - 17:41
Yeah, yeah, do they agree with me? Do they like me? We're really invested in the social capital aspect of it. Which I mean, you need to be obviously, because the leader needs to be able to influence, but not necessarily by getting you to agree with me. I think there's much more power and respect and trust, right? We may not always be on the same page.
But if you trust my leadership and you trust that I'm coming from the place of always trying to do the right thing, then there's much more leverage in the relationship, I think, than the superficiality that comes with we agree. Yes. Right. Yeah. Yeah, we're very invested now in agreeing culturally. And it's a bit of a bleep show out there right now.
Anne Dranitsaris - 18:40
Well, in the workplace, what's happened is this idea that using one's leadership authority, one's role authority, as it were, is somehow a negative, that you're being a bad leader if you are direct in your communication because you should be more sensitive to everyone's feelings..employees have become increasingly demanding in their expectation that the leaders take care of their psychology and their mental health. I'm not saying that it's not an important thing to be sensitive and empathetic because absolutely, we can all use more of that. But the expectation that leaders should be perfect and I've talked to people about this, about do you feel empathy toward your leader? And most people say no. Why should I? Well, because they're a human being just trying to do their job.
Gary Montalvo - 19:51
And it's so difficult to be the person at the head doing all that having to me. It's so difficult.
Anne Dranitsaris - 19:59
You know, a really interesting fact, I do mean, might or might not know this, Gary, but most managers in the US and Canada are in their roles for nine years before they get any training.
Gary Montalvo - 20:14
did not know that by fact, but I knew that by practice. Well, yeah, because most leaders end up in that position because they work their way there. They perform at a certain task and they get promoted and then the task changes. Now it becomes about managing people and that's not why you got put in that position to begin with.
Anne Dranitsaris - 20:18
my practice.
Gary Montalvo - 20:37
You got put in that position because you were good at pulling the levers of another task and now, okay, well, let's put you there. And then we give you absolutely no training and no support. We just go great. you're now and now and usually you're now having to manage the people that were your colleagues, which is like awkward, right? And yeah, it
I didn't know the mathematics, but I'm not surprised at all because I did know that that was a common practice over and over again.
Anne Dranitsaris - 21:12
tighter when the economy shrinks, the time period is even less because leadership and managerial development, the budget for that is one of the first lines.
Gary Montalvo - 21:24
to go one of the first things. One of the first things. That's a whole other conversation. We could talk about that forever. So you were already interested in personality types before you started the business, before you reconnected with your daughter. How did you go from being Meier Briggs you know, certified and believing in Meijer Briggs to saying, there's something else here that's not getting right, because you went on to develop your own work. So I'm curious, like, what did you notice? And not to like talk crap about Meijer Briggs or, you know, but what did you notice was missing and that you started to fill in the gaps with your own work?
Anne Dranitsaris - 22:14
So it was probably one of the programs that Heather and I offered was leadership development programs. And when we first started out in our consulting firm, what we would do is an upfront assessment for leadership skills and competencies, emotional intelligence. I was also certified in the emotional quotient inventory and the personality assessment, the MBTI. So that's three separate assessments that we would do and then put it all together in a report to interpret what all of these things meant. And after we had done this for a few years, we realized that at the end of the day, you know, when whatever personality type we have, we are going to create the culture that we want to work in. And so, for example, if I'm left-brained and left-brained leaders, for example, they like to build toward their goals, their outcome-oriented, their objective, their facts-driven, just in general.
And so they want an environment where systems and bottom line are prioritized over the employee experience. And so we already knew that. We already knew that they would be more effective at this than they would be at the interpersonal skills. So why bother having them spend all of this money doing all of these different assessments when we could create an assessment that would give us their emotional profile and tell us what the emotional drivers of their behavior was and how their brain is organized, where their blind spots would be, so that the next step would be immediately getting them on a development plan. We could also tell them from that profile the impact of their behavior and what it was most likely and their behavior was most likely having on their employees and whether their employees would be intimidated by them or whether their employees would expect them to be more nurturing or caretaking and they'd be frustrating their employees needs. So Heather and I developed this striving styles personality system that incorporated a number of different approaches, including emotional intelligence brain development, the brain hemisphere theories. he just took everything and said, okay, let's combine it all and make it really simple for people so that when they start their process of leadership development, they are doing it from the inside out. They're not having it imposed on them that this is the kind of leader you should be, that you actually need to, as a human being, develop this part of your. And for many leaders, was interpersonal skills.
Gary Montalvo - 25:24
Yeah.
Yeah, there's, I'm trying to keep focused because a lot of things I want to talk to you about right now. But I think for the, I think what I want to say,
for the listeners is so if you have no experience with personality profiles, it's really fascinating because I think most of the people who listen to our show are entrepreneurs. I think a lot of entrepreneurs think of these types of tools as corporate. Or one of the things that I often come up with, I'm a leadership coach for entrepreneurs, but
a lot of entrepreneurs don't have a team. So then they think, well, I don't need to invest in my leadership because I don't have a team yet, right? It's just me or it's just me and my virtual assistant. And so it's like, no, no, no, no, your personal leadership. it's how are you leading your business, right? Like those are the things that we need to talk about. But I think that they often...
there's often a blind spot in just how much your personality profile plays a role in how you navigate the world, how you respond to challenges, how you interpret challenges. And so I'm excited to bring this conversation because this is not just something that you should be looking at if you
have a team or it's not just something you should be looking at if you're in corporate America. It's actually, you know, for me, when I started to understand these, technology, it really answered a lot of questions about myself. answered, it helped me understand why I do some of the things that I did. And it helped me look at it without judgment.
because up until that point, I would judge myself. I judged myself for not being a less brain person who could look, when I first, my first coaching business, I had a business partner and she, I was definitely more the right creative people. could, I would come up with our marketing ideas and I would.
write our trainings and I would, know, and she was the backend, she was the structures person, she could make a spreadsheet out of anything. And I was fascinated by that, right? I was like, wow. And I remember we would have, we would sit down and have these meetings with our business manager and they would just start talking spreadsheet to spreadsheet, spreadsheet to spreadsheet. And I would tune out, I would start playing with my phone. Cause I'm like, okay, you guys got this, right? Okay, got it.
And, you know, I had a moment where I said, okay, hold on, like, I'm a business owner now, like, I need to know what's in my bank account. Like, I can't just like tune out, right? But this technology, this methodology helped me understand what was happening. And then it helped me figure out how to work through it. So then I had to come back and say, okay, guys, this meeting can't be more than 30 minutes long.
Perfect, yeah. I need you to organize this information for me in this way. I need you to color code it for me in this way. So I was able to bring what I needed in order to distill this information, which was important. I had to get through it. But I find what often happens is we go, I'm not good at the money stuff. And you walk away. You leave it alone. That's not for me. Especially if you have somebody in the team that can handle that.
or your wife or your partner is like, that's their strong suit. So you go, okay, you got this. And you just use it as a way to avoid. And I feel that this technology gives you access to not avoiding it and learning to access it. So I said a lot, I'm gonna let you respond. And then I think it'd be interesting to kind of go into what are some of the ways that entrepreneurs, different personality styles
approach entrepreneurism and approach some of the challenges that come up with entrepreneurism and maybe giving them a little bit of coaching.
Anne Dranitsaris - 30:05
So one of the things that Carl Jung said about psychological type, because it was his theory that the Myers-Briggs is based on, and one of the things that he said that in order for us to truly individuate and achieve our potential as human beings was the ability to use all four of the functions, all four of these functions that we have. And that essentially,
It's easier when we're using our predominant function because it's wired to be more efficient and more and use less energy to perform. so for right brain people, to your example, for your right brain to stay in a conversation about detail, that ultimately becomes a stressor after a certain period of time.
This isn't necessarily psychological, it's more physiological when you look at the mechanics of the mind and how the functions work. And we're all going after meeting our needs, right? And so when our needs are frustrated, we start doing things like tuning out and looking at our phones and making mischief as it were. Which of course is then into my...
the evolution of the entrepreneur who there are certain personality types that whose brains are organized to become entrepreneurs. And for example, the ENFP, the ENTP, the INTJ, those are the top three entrepreneurial styles because they are more future focused.
and wanting to create something that does not yet exist. And we're not talking about solopreneurs here. We're talking about those who are most likely to take an idea and just know how to sell it, how to push it, how to drive it forward, and their brains are ahead of the curve. And they love it. And the more they can develop it and move on to the next step, the more energized they are.
by the process and it's exciting. And then they get other people excited about this process and what can become. They're enthusiastic about it. They sell. And then they hit this stage in the business, which comes at about year two or three in the growth of an entrepreneurial business, where the business starts needing things different.
from what the entrepreneur needs. And in essence, it's an entity of itself. And the entrepreneur then has to create systems and processes, and they have to be accountable, and they have to hire people, but that slows them down. And they say, I don't like this. Okay, I'm going to hire someone. I'm going to stick them in there, and they can do all of that stuff, and I'll just keep doing my thing.
And the business can stay in crisis for years as a result of that. And when the entrepreneur knows my business, this entity that I've created is no longer meeting my needs, they can either make mischief and do something that slows the business down where they have to make it smaller or they can sell it or the third option they can develop.
but their development comes at the cost of frustrating their need to keep driving toward that next vision.
Gary Montalvo - 34:06
Yes, you have to be willing and it's so interesting. Humans in general are so unwilling to do that. It's like we want the instant gratification. We want the quick wins. want the... It is like there's just... I mean...
It's almost in immaturity about it, you but I think it's just a lack of awareness. Like I think it's just you get caught in these automatic trigger reactions and not really understanding that you, what's the machine at work in the background here.
Anne Dranitsaris - 34:44
Well, truly, every personality type creates their own comfort zone. And that's the comfort zone of the entrepreneur is stepping out into what is possible. It's not in coming to work and doing the same thing every day or having to deal with interpersonal issues. And in order for any human being to develop, we have to create new neural pathways in our brain.
And that's when we say, it's hard because it takes work. takes daily work to just hold ourselves in one place. Not exciting. It's, know, and many entrepreneurs suffer from the Peter Pan syndrome that they just want to keep playing with possibilities and driving toward their next vision because it's so exciting to them.
Gary Montalvo - 35:38
Yeah, yeah, and that's the part that I'm always trying to drive this message home. These skills that you think are natural talents that people have, and maybe for some people it is, they are, you can learn them. know, I, one of the first places I go to now is how do I systemize something? How do I organize it? In fact, it's one of the things that I'm really good at. I can,
come into chaos, I can come into a situation, I can look at your business and go, nope, this will simplify, this will create that. But I had to learn how to embrace the uncomfortableness of creating a plan, the uncomfortableness of, and now I think one of the things, I use it to my advantage, now the processes that I create in the systems,
You know, one of the feedback that I often get is like, wow, you break things down so simple. And I can, I can understand, I can access what you're saying. So I'm combining my, my left and my right. Like I use, I use that natural angst that, that, that is, is still there. I use that and go, okay, how do I, how do I break this down in a way that the angst relaxes that I can, know, but if you just resist it and avoid it that
that training that needs to happen internally, that growth, those new neural pathways, it never happens, it never gets developed and you never get to know yourself as the type of person who can have that breakthrough, who can have that growth. You get to know yourself as the person who avoids things, who runs away when something's hard.
And so now that's who you identify with. That's the muscle that you've developed. And these personality profiles, one of the ways that I think people go wrong with them is that they use them to put themselves in a box. And they go, okay, I'm this way. I'm this way. And it's like, no, that might be your default right now, but we can grow, we can learn, we can expand, we can… beautiful.
Anne Dranitsaris - 38:01
well said, but you know, it's that and and I've heard. For people who are still trying to discount psychological type theory or the Myers Briggs or any of the many assessments around this, it's that if if we don't, if we're not aware of it, then the functions use us. We don't use our functions. Yes.
And that, you know, if I, for example, I have extroverted thinking as my second function, if I use that in my relationships, I'm going to be a drill sergeant. you know, it's like, we got to get to it. Let's talk about this and enforcing things as opposed to letting them emerge and evolve. And that when we know, when we understand these functions in our brain,
And the emotions that drive our behavior, it is all about development. As you say, that we can learn to use them and develop them. And just as a, as a, addition to that, so many people these days, because they don't expect themselves to manage their frustration or saying, I can't do that. I have ADD or I have ADHD and I can, can't possibly expect me to focus.
That is something that we can learn and train our brains to focus through practices like mindfulness of the hundreds of mindfulness practices over and above just meditating. We can train our brains so that we can delay gratification and manage frustration. But if you put that blanket, I have ADHD, you can't expect that of me. You're in control.
Gary Montalvo - 39:48
Amen.
Yeah, and what you're pointing to is it's so good. And I think it connects back to our earlier conversation about when we were discussing how now employees just have like this unrealistic expectations of our leaders. I think there's a place now where culturally, I think it's culturally, I don't know if it's only American or if it's worldwide, but
there's a place where we're almost like not doing our work. Like the work that we're doing, the battle cry that we've taken on is, I'm gonna make you do your work. I'm gonna make you over there do your work. But it's like, no, if you're getting triggered, that's your work. If something's happening over here with you, that is your work.
You know, it's not, but we're like, no, I'm setting boundaries. And I'm going like, okay, you should have boundaries, but it's not about forcing the other person. I mean, you could force other people to change. And I'm not saying that other people don't need to change their behavior, but the real power for you in that conversation is you dismantling what's happening over here. You looking at your triggers and your limitations. And I do, I agree. feel like it's like, okay, well, I have ADHD.
and now you need to accommodate for my ADHD-ness. And it's like, no, yes, there may be some accommodations that need to be met, but we gotta meet in the middle here. You gotta do your work. something I often, people are surprised by with me, for example, is I'm an introvert. But when you see me on stage and when you see me on these podcasts,
I don't show up as an introvert, you know? And when I go into a networking event, I don't show up as an introvert. That was, I trained myself to do that. Like I was not, when I would, I mean, I always share the first year, the most, the only thing that I accomplished in my first year of business was not throwing up when I was in a room full of people and had to like talk about, you know, what I did. And
There was a way that I had to learn how to be in those rooms in a place, in a way that was authentic for me and allowed me not to retreat. But when I go to a conference, I'm in an event, when I'm leading, when I just got off a stage, my instinct is to run back up to my hotel room and go in my cave. But.
I have the ability to bring myself and bring my other skills out and say, no, you can go up to your room a little bit. Now it's time to connect with people. Now it's time to talk. And now it's time to go, okay, got it. Put on my thing. I put on my little suit and I go smile and I go connect with people. And it's not like, enjoy it after I do it now. So it's really important.
Anne Dranitsaris - 43:16
Self-talk.
Gary Montalvo - 43:17
Yeah.
Yeah. So I just want people, I, you know, I got on my soapbox because I think it's really important for people to understand that these personality traits and these labels that we put in ourselves, they're useful in that they highlight the work that there is for you to do, right? This might be an area where there is some work for you to do, but they stop being useful when you label them and you… and you treat yourself as a fixed thing and they stop really being useful. Not only they stop being useful, they become harmful when they box you in and now you start to try to force the world around you to interact from your limited box versus what's possible for me out there when I drop the walls and discover something new about myself.
Speaker 2 (44:14)
One of the challenges many leaders are experiencing is having an employee, when they're asked to do something, to break down and say that they're overwhelmed. again, when we look at skill development, in giving leaders words. You see, leaders get stuck because they think that they have to attend to the emotion instead of saying, okay, show me everything you've got on your plate and I will help you prioritize so that you can focus on one thing. Because overwhelm happens when you're focusing on everything all at once. But if you don't know that simple approach, then the leader takes the work back and does it themselves.
Gary Montalvo - 45:05
Yeah. Yeah. You lower, you end up lowering the bar for them. Yeah. And, what people don't realize the person who is having that done to, and the person who's doing it, they're both getting hurt because you're, by you lowering their bar, they never get to rise to the occasion instead of teaching them, okay, let's get, let's write everything down, dump everything, put everything on paper that you have going on. Okay.
Anne Dranitsaris - 45:06
You see?
Gary Montalvo - 45:35
Well, half of this stuff, you don't have to worry about for two weeks. So let's take that off. Okay, so now we got five, you know what I mean? And there's just a way that you bring, cause that's what overwhelm is, is your brain trying to grasp all the straws and not understand, like we can't do everything. So yeah, you get overwhelmed. But teaching people how to do that, you rob them of that opportunity when you go save them, right?
You rob them of that opportunity when you're like, okay, let me take this project and move it to somebody else who does have the ability to do that.
Anne Dranitsaris - 46:13
It's a difference between focusing on feeling and focusing on the issue. And the issue is, this person actually have the resource of time to complete this task? Do they have everything they need as opposed to attending to the feeling? And again, for the uninstructed leader,
who they just follow the feeling, they're too overwhelmed, I can't give it to them. And then a story, they've got so much going on in their life and they let them off the hook. And then as you say, the bar goes down and then we have a mediocre workforce that leaders are complaining about them, but don't see how they're contributing to the overall issue.
Gary Montalvo - 46:44
Yeah.
Yeah, and to your point earlier, there's a lack of, we have to hold our teams accountable in that way too. And not from a place of like, did you do the work? But are you challenging yourself? you bringing your growth?
you know, your growth mindset. And if you don't know how to do that, how can we, and I think this is back to your point where leadership training is one of the first things that get caught is companies often don't understand the value of how these types of conversations in the workplace, both for the leader and the employee, are transformative and reduce so much friction. Yeah. Yeah.
Beautiful, beautiful. And it is so much fun talking to you. You are super, not just super charming, but super wise and super smart. And I think you're doing such important work. And I'm, you know, this, I was excited to have conversation and you did not disappoint.
Anne Dranitsaris - 48:18
Thank you.
Gary Montalvo - 48:20
My pleasure. I hope you stay a friend of the show and we'll have you back soon. Okay
Anne Dranitsaris - 48:25
I look forward to it, Gary. Thank you so much for having me.
Gary Montalvo - 48:32
As I reflect on my conversation with Anne, one thing becomes clear. What takes most of us out of the game isn't a lack of effort, intelligence, or even ambition. It's the self-judgment. It's the spending years trying to force ourselves into someone else's version of success instead of learning how to work with who we authentically are and celebrating.
The ugly truth here is there's nothing wrong with you. There never was. Your personality isn't a problem to be fixed. It's that foundation to build from. Now that doesn't mean you stop striving or pushing yourself to grow or developing skills that are outside your natural strength. But it does mean that you do it from a place of understanding, not shame. From a place of self-awareness, not self-rejection.
The moment you stop fighting who you are and start understanding yourself and embracing it, you eliminate the friction that often comes with growth. And then you start to unlock the power that comes with momentum. Instead of running in circles, you start moving forward towards the life, the leadership, and the success that you want. So here's my challenge for you this week. Where in your life are you making growth
harder than it needs to be. Where are you judging yourself for not being naturally good at something instead of learning how to approach it in a way that will work for you? See if you can drop the judgment and look at how you can create a plan that works within your skill sets and within your wiring. Because the truth is you're not failing. You're just fighting against the wrong thing.
Well, that is our show for this week. If this episode spoke to you, don't forget to hit follow or subscribe, depending on the platform that you're listening on, to stay up to date with the ownership game. And as always, please share the episode with someone who you think really needs to hear this message. Until next time, keep owning who you are, keep growing on your own terms, and keep playing the ownership game.
Thanks for listening to this episode of The Ownership Game with your host, Gary Montalvo. Make sure to like and comment on your favorite podcast platform, as well as subscribe so that you never miss an episode.