No Bullsh!t Leadership . . . and Love?!? Yes. An Interview with Martin G Moore

#enduringsuccess #choices #leadership #love #hindsightandmaturity

Newsletter Intro???

In the Choose & Become Interview series, I delve into the five critical choices that led me to enduring success, and I unearth the inspirational stories of my guests, using this five-choice framework, as they share their journeys to enduring success with us.???

Each Create Enduring Success newsletter edition highlights one episode that you can link directly to or start by reading the quick summary along with some excerpts from my guest that stuck with me.???

Today’s Episode—Martin G Moore ???

In today’s episode I am joined by Martin G Moore, founder of Your CEO Mentor, author of The Wall Street Journal best-selling book No Bullsh!t Leadership and host of the smash hit podcast.?

I absolutely love these Fun Facts about Martin G Moore in which the first is:?

“I’m actually pretty informal: Martin G Moore just differentiates me from the other Martin Moore (quality purveyor of bespoke kitchens) and Marty Moore (Irish international rugby player) . . . you can call me Marty!”

Marty grew up in Sydney, Australia, with an "unremarkable upbringing" in a middle-class family with parents who were ultra-focused on their children's education. Yet, he dropped out of his undergraduate degree and worked in the cocktail bars of Kings Cross, Sydney’s seedy nightlife district. Perhaps another reason he and I clicked.

“My parents were fanatical about educating their five children. I was the second oldest and they spent all of their money, time and focus on getting us the best education that they could possibly afford. And so when I squandered my undergraduate degree by dropping out of my law studies at University of Sydney in my early twenties, they must have been apoplectic. But they were very forgiving and very kind, and they knew that I'd find my feet eventually.”

And did he ever! Then he ran and leaped to creating his enduring success.

He went on to attain his MBA from one of Australia's top business schools, and completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School.

Venturing into corporate business, first as a software developer for a bank (before being a coder was cool!) he diversified his experience across industries—mining, transportation, insurance, energy—all in executive, and cross-functional, levels.

“It gave me the opportunity to really learn how to bring out the best in the experts around me . . . and so this absolute focus on being able to get the best out of people, to connect with them and use that to produce outstanding results really became my trademark.”

In 2018, he founded Your CEO Mentor with his daughter, Emma Green. Since then, his direct, cut-through approach has made No Bullsh!t Leadership one of the top leadership podcasts globally, with over 4 million downloads in 150+ countries, and his book debuted at #2 on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list.

His sole purpose is to improve the quality of leaders globally.

If Marty is the No Bullsh!t Leader, you might ask, hey Trish, you talk about and explore love (!) how the heck do these go together!?! Oh, they do! ?

I was honored to spend this time with Marty and interview him for my Choose & Become series. Marty’s perspective on creating enduring success, his stance on the “accumulation of choices” and his vivid and open examples of the five-choices across his life—and yes, giving and receiving love—enthralls, enlightens, and inspires. ??

Watch now . . . or check out the summary with some of my favorite excerpts below the video link.????

Enduring Success

By ALL counts, Marty has achieved incredible success.? His 25+ years as a corporate executive culminated with serving as CEO for CS Energy, a multi-billion-dollar company, where under his leadership EBITDA grew from $17 million to $441 million, a compound annual growth rate of 125% (almost unheard of), while also attaining world class safety records.

Personally, Marty shines when he speaks of his marriage, his three grown children, and his first grandchild, one-year old, Florence. He BEAMS.

What does enduring success mean to you?

“This meaning is the crux of everything, isn't it, Trish? Because so many people view success as being some sort of material attainment of different things. And that's probably the worst measure. There's got to be more to life. And the older I get, the less interested I am in material things. Now, don't get me wrong, money is cool. . . it makes everything else easier, and I wouldn't be able to do what I do now unless I built up some level of financial stability through my corporate career. And that gave me choices and options, which was fantastic.

"But enduring success to me is very simple. It's about being able to live my true nature and purpose. What was I put on this earth to do? To be afforded the luxury of being able to do that is just an incredible privilege.”

Five-Critical Choices—Marty’s Journey

In a recent episode of Marty’s No Bullsh!t Leadership podcast—Hindsight and Maturity , he talks about the “accumulation of choices” and how he wouldn’t be who and where he is, without the choices he made. Clearly, this thinking is right up my alley, so we start here!

“I've always said that until you get to about age 30, there's circumstances. There's a lot of bouncing off walls. There's just trying to find your feet and learn what it's like to be an adult.

But beyond the age of 30 and every year after that, you are exactly where you are because that's where your choices have put you. It's just that simple. And every day the choices we make big and small and, conscious and subconscious, they all take us to the place that we end up.”

Let’s explore five-critical choices with Marty.

Make a First Choice

Success begins with making a first choice.

Marty shares his perspective on making his own first choice, and recounts how he took accountability for a major failure as a young software developer, and how that choice earned him the respect and support of his CFO. He also explains how that choice helped him release his fear and embrace his leadership potential.

“I made a lot of choices early in life that were driven by my upbringing. I was brought up a Catholic. I'm now a reformed Catholic, so I don't practice anymore. But it was a great value set to be brought up with. And a lot of the choices I made were driven by the structure, the doctrine and the expectation of the people around me. The first choice that I remember making, which was so crucial that I made by myself with none of that influence sitting over the top of me was as a young software developer working for a bank.

“I just decided, I’m going to step into this. I’m just going to own this and take accountability for it, and I’ll take whatever consequences come my way.”

“Being able to release that fear was so liberating. And I was so lucky to learn this as a young guy, in my mid-twenties. And to learn that, at that point, was so incredibly powerful for me, it’s governed a lot of things I’ve done since then.”

Commit to Two Way Agreements

The second critical choice I made on my journey to enduring success was to commit to a two-way agreement. We all enter into two-way agreements—informally or formally. The power is in committing.

I ask Marty to share his perspective and examples of his two-way agreements.

“I think we're making two-way agreements all the time, some explicit and some are implicit.

Some are completely internal. I have agreements that I make between my ego and my superego. There’s the better part of me, the higher purpose part of me that's constantly bargaining with my ego drivers that tell me I should do something different. And this is a constant trade off. And so, internally I'm very often making two-way agreements and saying, all right, you go back in your box, you stay here, I'm going to satisfy you this way. But I really need to chase this higher purpose over here."

And a more practical and tangible two-way agreement, one of the most important two agreements he has ever made is with his daughter Emma, when they founded Your CEO Mentor.

“We’re so incredibly committed to our purpose of what we’re doing, and it’s so much a part of who we are that we just know we will never back off.”

Build Trust

The third critical choice I made was to build trust.

Marty and I explore building trust in yourself and earning the trust of others.

Was there ever a time you had to build trust in yourself?

When you experience Marty, even for a second, there is no way you’d think he’d ever lack trust in himself. He exudes confidence, experience, and knowledge. But Marty shares how he had to build trust in himself after losing his way as a young adult. And he reveals that he tells himself the “I’m not good enough” story that many of us struggle with, yet this has driven him to achieve success and prove himself and ultimately, he has become comfortable and proud with who he is.

“I fell away from the values and principles that had steered me successfully up until that time. And I did lose trust in myself through that process. I thought about the fundamental question of who am I? I had to really struggle with that until I found my path to greater trust.

“What you see on the outside is what’s on the inside. I feel as though I am a person that I can be proud to be. And I’m doing something meaningful with all the people I touch.”

On my journey I learned: do the little things great and great things happen.

Is there a little thing that you do consistently that helps you build trust in yourself and others?

Marty shares two “little things” with us which to me seem HUGE. But to Marty, because he has created such discipline around both, they are habits, and he doesn’t even think about it. He just does it.

“I think the little disciplines that you can build in your day-to-day life are the things that really help. So for me, when I'm at my peak, I've got this little thing in my head that says my feet hit the floor at 4:45 a.m., that's when my feet hit the floor, not the alarm clock goes off. When I'm at my peak, that's happening just bang, bang, bang. I don't think about it. It just happens. So having that discipline is super important and that's one of those things that for me is just a critical little habit."

"The difference between successful people and people who still wish they had climbed further to the success they want is that they don't have the basic disciplines. Those basic little habits that you master without questioning and you do every day."

?

“The other one for me is if I feel I need to have a conversation, I don't hesitate. I don't agonize over it. I don't try and bargain or avoid. I just step into it. And because I've been doing this for enough years, it feels completely natural and comfortable, and I don't have any fear of conflict at all. So, I can have the most difficult conversation under the most difficult circumstances with anyone at any point in time, because that's a discipline I've trained myself into over the years.”

How do people earn your trust?

“I like to see a level of openness. I think that's probably the first thing. If I can see a level of openness, someone who's prepared to tell the truth, as far as I know, tell the truth and not sugarcoat things and not embellish them. I think that's someone I look at and I go, I can trust you."

"Now in my business everyone gets unconditional 100% trust as the starting point, and then it's theirs to lose. So, if you start from this position of, I can trust everyone, and then as you watch them perform and behave, sometimes question marks arise. Well, hang on a minute. They weren't entirely honest about that. Well, hang on a minute. They said they were going to do this, and they didn't do it. Then trust chips away over time.”

How do you earn the trust of others?

“I look at this from the point of view of a CEO trying to get the trust of the board because you have so few interactions, it's so limited the amount of time you get to spend in front of them. So, every interaction has to be nailing that question, Can I trust you as the CEO?"

"And with very limited opportunity, I feel that you can build trust extraordinarily quickly if you behave the right way . . . and demonstrate that you're driven by a set of principles, not by self-interest. Those things contribute to trust.”

Create Community and Belonging ?

The fourth critical choice I made was to create community and belonging.

Marty has a unique perspective on community and belonging, as he has lived and worked in different countries and cultures. And he believes that having a sense of purpose and long-term thinking can help us cope with the feeling of not belonging, especially in leadership roles. He also emphasizes the importance of having a strong core identity and self-confidence, as well as finding a community outside of work that supports us.

“If you are really, really solid in your own core and if you're really, really solid in your own ability to cope, if you're really, really comfortable with who you are, then the sense of not belonging isn't that bad of thing. And it's easy to handle because I know it's always going to come back.”

“If you've got that sense of community and belonging somewhere in your life, you don't need to have it everywhere in your life. In my experience.”

Embrace Boundless Love

The fifth critical choice I made was to embrace my boundless capacity to give love and to receive love.

I always ask my guests to share a specific example of when they chose to give all of their love. I don't mean love as an emotion, which is not a choice. I mean love as an action, which is a choice.

Marty, the No Bullsh!t Leader and Love?!?!? YES. In fact, Marty gives us very specific examples of how giving and receiving love manifests in his world.

“The business that we're running now is all about giving love. This is what it's about. So yes, it's leadership. Yes, it's leadership on the hard edge, which is results driven leadership, not fluffy leadership. A way love plays into this is I think about this every time I step on a stage. I have to think about this beforehand.

I think about am I going out there to impress or am I going out there to give love? Am I going out there to connect and make people better? It's such an important shift in terms of how I turn up when I step onto the stage and the feeling of giving all of myself, not because I'm trying to impress someone or prove anything, but because I genuinely want them to walk away better. . . feeling as though I've connected with them and given them something that's been life changing for them. And so you can't do that or I can't do that without having this real deep underlying sense of love.”

“And this feeds back into this virtuous circle of habits and disciplines . . . are you being your best for other people? Because you never know when someone's going to need you to be your best.”

Is there a time in which you felt guarded or that you withheld giving all of your love? And if so, why did you?

Marty reflects and really ponders, had he chosen to give his love in a certain business situation, how that might have changed the outcome . . . for everyone.

“I suspect that I probably wasn’t capable within myself of giving the love forward. Would that have made a difference to that situation? I was too tied up in my own sense of righteous indignation about how they would behave."

"I think that's probably one time where I've not been able to give love, whether I withheld it consciously or subconsciously, probably subconsciously, but you know, it was never a good outcome. And not for them, not for me.

I sort of wonder occasionally . . . if I had been in a position where I was strong enough and impartial and balanced and centered enough to give that love in that situation as well, what might have happened?"

Part of embracing love is receiving it. How does it feel to receive the love that others want to give you?

"I'm getting used to it. It feels awesome and I'm getting used to it. I think it's particularly part of the Australian culture, which is, when people compliment you, it's embarrassing. It's not something where you say, Oh, that's really awesome. I'm going to sit in this and enjoy the compliment and thank the person. It's a case of No, no, no, no. It was nothing really.

"It just makes me a much more relaxed and better person, I think, because I don't have that tension of resistance that I perhaps used to have."

Final Thought???

Thank you for joining me and Marty as we explore his journey to enduring success. Check out the full episode here .? You can find Marty at Martin G Moore , LinkedIn and of course, check out his smash-hit podcast No Bullsh!t Leadership .?

Episode Reflection and Action

• Think of a time when you faced a failure or a challenge in your work or life. How did you handle it? Did you take accountability for your actions and learn from your mistakes? How did your choice affect your outcome and your growth?
• How do you communicate and honor your commitment to yourself and others? How do you handle any challenges or conflicts that arise from the agreement?

Thank you!???

Don’t miss new Choose & Become Interview episodes! Subscribe on your favorite podcast player .???

Wishing you all the best on your journey to enduring success.?????

Choose & become!???

Trish???

Join us for more inspiration and community building throughout the week at Trish Kendall Choose & Become LinkedIn ???

More About Trish????

Trish Kendall, an expert in creating enduring success, is proof that anyone can transform their life and become the most successful person they know!????

Inspiring people around the world, and providing a pathway to enduring success, Trish brings candid stories, humor in the face of true hardship, simple lessons, compassion, and love to all her speaking engagements and workshops.????

Book Trish for your next conference or team offsite.?