Leadership Lessons from Telepathy Tapes Podcast

If you would like to start 2025 with something that will not only challenge your way of thinking, but may also inspire you, listen to the Telepathy Tapes podcast. I came across it through a recommendation from a close friend. I never would have given it a chance otherwise, as I am generally opposed to following social trends. This just goes to show that sometimes we need to do things outside our norm, or to quote an Ancient Greek saying: “everything in moderation, including moderation.”

Leaving the spiritual, religious, and scientific dilemmas of the Telepathy Tapes aside, it is worth listening to for its humanity and its reminder of how much each of us have to give to this world, and how we need to leave our biases aside and see the potential in others.?

To all of you who love listicles, here are my 5 takeaways from the Telepathy Tapes to become better leaders and better professionals:

1. Challenge Your Thinking Patterns. You cannot grow as humans and as professionals if you are not challenged, if you keep the same patterns of behavior and patterns of thinking. This Podcast will certainly cause you to reconsider some previous preconceived notions and ways of analyzing information. It might help you identify where you have biases in how you evaluate information, or at least see where the restrictions to accepting a given paradigm without truly analyzing it can be of limited benefit.
2. Trust in Your Team. Just as the nonverbal speakers in the podcast can only communicate telepathically with those who believe in them and in their abilities, your teams will also operate best if they have your trust and support. Think back to the times when you were an individual contributor and operated at your best. What were the reasons why? Chances are it was because you had a leader who believed in you and you wanted to reward that leader/team/company for their trust.
3. Build a Supportive Environment, Focusing on Attitude and Aptitude to Reduce Bias. Develop ways for how you can hire talented people from as many walks of life as you can, as it will give you the largest candidate pool possible to identify the best talent. Create opportunities for neurodivergent people to recharge their office batteries, or perhaps rethink requiring a mandatory return to office altogether. Think about all of the single parents or those taking care of elderly relatives who may not be able to relocate or put up with a long commute, or all the disabled people that might not be able to drive at all. Give people opportunities to provide feedback in different ways, such as not only during team calls, but before and after in individual or offline settings where some teammates might be more comfortable.
4. Believe in Our Experiences and In Our Abilities. So many of the parents, teachers, therapists, and scientists interviewed on the Podcast had expressed negative experiences with figures of authority not believing what they had experienced, leading to years of distrusting their own senses and abilities and those of their children. You cannot give all of our power to external entities over what you experience. When you know deep down that something is right or that something has happened, even when everyone around you tries to ignore that, you have to follow your own moral compass and your integral beliefs.
5. Innovation Lies When There Is Evidence to Challenge the Status Quo. When there are events that go against the prevalent paradigm that can be reproduced, it is likely a great opportunity to innovate. Become the market leader. Do not be afraid to test out your hypotheses, no matter how crazy it might seem. This Podcast is another reminder of how we have gotten away from the purpose of science in experimenting and challenging existing systems and have become so rigid in our accepted scientific paradigms that they stifle creativity and innovation.

If you are looking for more inspiring content about individuals overcoming bullying, discrimination, and other challenges to celebrate our humanity and love for each other, here are a few suggestions:

• “Champions,” a movie with Woody Harrelson, about a basketball coach overcoming his own prejudices and emotional trauma to help people with different intellectual abilities to form a basketball team.
• “Riders of Justice,” a movie with Mads Mikkelsen, a violent dark action-comedy on the outside, ultimately about traumatized people finding their community and acceptance.
• “My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry,” a book by Fredrik Backman about how people need each other and how they can overcome difficult things.