319. Stop Chasing Happiness: Leadership, Love, and the Myth of Success with Anthony Silard

What if the promotion, the praise, and the “big win” you’re chasing isn’t actually the thing you’re looking for? We sit down with Anthony (a professor and leadership researcher focused on relationships, loneliness, and sustainable leadership) to challenge a stubborn assumption in modern work culture: that success and outcomes are the path to happiness.

We dig into why leaders get trapped by results, even though results live outside our control. Anthony offers a practical shift: focus on the process you can control, accept the reality you’re operating in, and invest in the quality of relationships that make teams thrive. Along the way, we explore his framework that moves from acceptance to forgiveness to gratitude to love, and why resentment can quietly paralyze leaders and poison culture. We also talk about the difference between goals and values, why “respect” is deeper than politeness, and what compassionate, meaningful, sustainable relationships look like in real organizations especially in a hybrid and remote world.

You’ll hear stories and research that connect personal well-being to leadership effectiveness, including how solitude and presence help us stop living an inherited life of “shoulds” and start building a life of meaning. If you’re wrestling with burnout, disengagement, or that nagging feeling that achievement still isn’t enough, this conversation will give you language and tools to reset your compass.

🌐 Connect with Anthony:
• Website: https://theartoflivingfree.org/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthony-silard-a305516/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anthony.silard/

📚 You can purchase Anthony's books on Amazon:
• Love and Suffering: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0981785379/
• Screened In: https://www.amazon.com/dp/098178531X/

Transcript

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Mick Spiers: 0:01

What if the thing you've been chasing isn't actually what you're looking for? What if success, achievement, and outcomes aren't the path to happiness? But in some cases, the very thing pulling you away from it and as a leader, have you ever stopped to ask yourself, are you creating an environment where people feel truly fulfilled? In today's episode, I'm joined by Anthony Sylard for a conversation that challenges some of our most deeply held assumptions about happiness, success, and what it means to live and lead well. We explore the idea that so much of what we chase results, status, recognition sits outside of our control, and yet we often build our sense of happiness around those very things. Anthony introduces a different way of thinking, a shift away from outcomes and towards meaning, shift away from control and towards acceptance and a shift towards what really matters, the quality of our relationships, the way we show up for others, and the sense of purpose we bring into our work and lives. Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Leadership Project. I'm greatly honored today to be joined by Anthony Silard. Anthony is a professor and world leading expert in leadership and relationships. He's a director at the Center for Sustainable Leadership at the Lewis Business School in Rome, and he's the author of multiple books, including The Myth of Happiness, The Myth of Friendship, and his latest offering love and suffering. The one that we're going to double down on today is this myth of happiness. I think we all fall into these traps. Anthony's going to share with us three myths about the way that we perceive happiness and how they can be very counterproductive in terms of what we are pursuing. But I don't want to steal any of Anthony Silard, I want to hear from him. Anthony, I'd love it if you'd say hello to the audience and give us a little flavor of your background, and what inspires you to do the work that you do around leadership, relationships and this myth of of happiness?

Anthony Silard: 2:19

Okay, well, thank you, Mick, I love your show, and I'm honored that you invited me to be on. So appreciate you. So I'm originally from Washington, DC. Live now just outside Rome in Italy. My wife is from Mexico. We have two kids, 12 and 9 years old, and as Mick shared, I'm a professor at Luis Business School in Rome. I run their Center for Sustainable leadership. And my background sort of what's guided me along the way, really. I think probably my most formative experience was as a volunteer in Kenya, as I was a teacher there for two years back in 1990 so I'm 58 now. So this was the past life back in 35 years ago, and the experience I had there really taught me a tremendous amount about leadership, because there was no way to get anything done any other way except through relationships. And it really taught me that people read you like a book. People see through you. There's really no fooling people. And it taught me to be straight with people, to be honest, to be kind, compassionate, which, you know, I do some days better than others, but it's always my intention, and to listen everybody's got a story. And I found, I found, just by listening, listening to others and spending time with people was really the only way that I could find to get anything done. And it's kind of counter cultural, almost, to you know, especially like, like American society, or many Western countries, sort of focus on on results. I found that results and results come but not from focusing on them. I found that the results come from focusing on the process. I use this visualization sometimes of a swimmer. And imagine she's swimming like a two kilometer open water swim to an island, and it's a race, and there's hundreds of swimmers. And when she thinks about like the finish line and coming in first, then she starts to feel overwhelmed. And there's all these other really good swimmers, and they're swimming so well, and who is she to be there? And she doesn't do very well because she's focused on the results, whereas another swimmer, she says, "Okay, I would like to be, I would like to come in first, I'd like, I'd like to have a really good time today, and I'd like to swim really well". And then she says to herself, "Well I'm going to focus on the process. My effort, what I give to swimming, I'm going to focus on what I've been training my whole life to do, which is swim, on the on my breathing, the rhythm of how I move my body, my strides. And you know, 1% of the time I'm going to look up and make sure I'm going toward the island. The other 99% I'm going to swim" and like that, she's there. And I think that's a good kind of metaphor for, for life that I really love. I have one close friend of mine from India, and he, he has this image he shares with me sometimes of a person who's fishing on a pier. There is there they're sitting on a pier, and there's a beautiful sunset, and they got their fishing rod in the line in the water, and there's no hook on the line. And I think that's I really, I really like that. Just focusing on the process. How do you show up to people? Because I think that's probably the most potent leadership approach or ability, is just being with people, being present. And I think when we do that, people tend to want to be around us, and they want to work with us.

Mick Spiers: 6:12

Yeah, really, really good, Anthony, I'm hearing three things there. So hearing the importance of relationships, and the things that you you're learning in Kenya there, then I'm hearing that you're not always going to get it right in leadership, and you're going to make some mistakes. You're going to have good intentions. Even with good intentions, you're going to make a few fail steps. And then the big one for me was this, focusing on results can lead not to the result at all, not the result that you're seeking on, but focusing on the process. I'm going to say the process and the people, because you're threaded to the relationships back in there again at the end, is actually the answer to get to where you're trying to get to. And I'm just curious, from your experience, what do you think it is when when we get fixated on the result? That we tend to capitulate and maybe even go backward? What happens?

Anthony Silard: 7:06

Well, that's a fantastic insight you just shared, Mick. And I think, I like the word you use capitulate. Because I think when we focus on the result, we're focusing on something that, that doesn't exist yet. When we focus on the process, we're focusing on something that does exist, that we have power over. Have you ever thought about that we in life have 0% power? We have no power over what we received. Over what results we bring in. We don't have any power over that. It depends on so many factors outside of ourselves, so many externals, and we just don't control it. And so when we were focusing on something, we when you focus on something you don't control, it's kind of like reading, reading the news on your phone before you go to bed. You're probably not going to sleep well, because there's all these crazy things going on that you just don't have any control or power over. Whereas, when we focus on the effort, the process, what we give, you have 100% control over what you give, how you give it, to whom you give it, when you give it, and the passion you put into how you do that, how you conduct that giving. So that's empowering. Is there something you can do? Whereas what you get the results there's we just don't have any control over it. I think also, I like, what you shared about perhaps one of the most important leadership abilities is how we handle failure, how we handle not achieving the results that we desire. One thing that I found really helpful is to recognize that the ideal is always above the real, and always. So, it's great to have goals. Wonderful to have goals, because otherwise, if we didn't have any goals, we really wouldn't move in any direction. Half the time it's good to have goals. It's good to say, "Okay, here's here's what I want to accomplish this week, great, and write it down, and I'm going to go after it". But goals are ephemeral. Goals are only in front of you until you achieve them, and then they're behind you. I'll use our eternal. Goals are ephemeral.

Mick Spiers: 9:18

Yeah, really good Anthony. Yeah, I just want to play back what was jumping into my head when I was hearing you say this. So I think a lot of people have heard of the concept of spheres of control and spheres of influence. And it's easier said than done sometimes, by the way, but to let go of the things that we can't control. So you can't control I'm going to use your swimmer as the metaphor. Can't control the waves, can't control the weather, can't control what the other athletes do. What I can control is what's happening in my moment, in my you used the word presence before, in my present moment. What I can control is my stroke. And I'm not a swimmer, so don't take any swim lessons from me. But I'm imagining what I can control is my breathing. I can control my stroke. I can control the curvature of my hand. Am I swimming efficiently? I can control that. And then coming to our relationships, which, as a solo swimmer, it's probably not in the moment, but it probably led up to it with your team and all this kind of stuff. I can influence other people. I can't control them, but I can influence those around me through better relationships. So what I'm taking away is, when we get fixated on something that's outside our control, is when we can I'm going to use the word of it again, capitulate. But when we focus on what is in our control or what is in our sphere of influence, we end up with better results.

Anthony Silard: 10:46

Well, well, that's right, and I think the kind of missing word in all of this, when we think about control and influence, is acceptance. It's being able to accept what we can't control. It really comes back to the Alcoholics Anonymous Mantra, right? So change the things you can you know, accept the things you can't, and the wisdom to know the difference. So this acceptance is really powerful. In fact, my latest book Love and Suffering, break the emotional chains that prevent you from experiencing love. It starts with acceptance. Have these, this love progression model, and there are four plateaus on a journey toward love, and each of these is research. So I've got a lot of stories in there. I've got, I've got studies, psychological, latest psychological studies, but in really easy to digest form, like, you know, so it's not so they don't, they don't put off the reader like, "oh, wait a study, you know?" And the first plateau is acceptance. So we overcome suffering to reach a state of acceptance. The second is forgiveness, and then gratitude and love. Each of these plateaus has an obstacle that has to be overcome. So we overcome suffering to reach a state of acceptance, we overcome resentment, to reach a state of forgiveness, judgment, to reach a state of gratitude, and then what I call incarceration, to reach a state of love. And acceptance is, I think, one of the most overlooked states of mind and under researched states of mind. Literally, when I was researching Love and Suffering. I had to go way, way back to a psychological, psychology review paper on acceptance that, you know, really so little has been published on in the last couple decades. And it's really, really amazing what acceptance leads to, like, you know. So there's so I found studies, for example, where you have mothers who have a child who has to go through an operation for an invasive bone cancer. And this is really one of the most horrible things, like a parent can could go through, certainly their children even more. And what they found was those who were able to accept the state of their child's health, were much less depressed, much less anxious, and much more able to be helpful to their child. And I think we see that all, all throughout there's an interesting story I have. I have in love and suffering about about a guy. His name's, his name is Bill, and he's, he's living in the United States, in the Midwest. This is the early 1970s. He's just gotten married a few years before. He's got two kids already living in his beautiful, suburban home. He gets drafted to go to Vietnam to be a pilot in the Vietnam what's called in America, the Vietnam War, and what's still called in Vietnam, the American war. And so he, he goes there. Within two months, he's caught. He's now a POW. He's in in like a filthy prison cell filled with, you know, with rats and lice and cockroaches, insects. And within about a month, he's lost 30 pounds, right? So about 15, 15 kilos, almost. And he's literally he's gonna die, like he's not gonna last much longer at the rate he's going and he whether this happened or didn't happen, is kind of immaterial. He believes that he hears a voice, and the voice says to him, this is your life. And so, you know, as as you know, Shakespeare once, once wrote, there's no such thing as good or bad, or our thinking makes it so. So it's not, you know, there's no there's no reality, only perception. Our perception shapes our reality, his perception is he heard the voice and is saying to him, this is your life. And from that moment, everything changes for him. He's like, "Okay, I guess I'm here in this cell in Vietnam. I'm no longer back in my comfortable home with my wife and kids". And he starts doing push ups and stomach crunches. He, he starts getting to know some of the other prisoners of war and talking with them, and sort of joins their community. And this change gets him through the war until he's reunited with his family. And I think in, in so many ways, each of us, I would put this challenge to each of your listeners, what is that one thing that you have not been willing to accept in your life, that what is the one thing that you know the writing on the wall has been there. You know it's there, but you're not willing to confront it. And this acceptance, a lot of people have said to me, since Love and Suffering came out last year, they've said, "Well, wait a second, is an acceptance a recipe, recipe for positivity? Does that mean you're going to accept racism and oppression?". And actually, it's the opposite. Is that if we want to fight against any kind of social ill. We want to improve anything in a company or organization, until we accept, and are aware of with the real information. This is what's happening right now in this moment. This is what is, as leaders. That's the moment that we can then move toward what we can create with knowing that this is what we're operating with at this moment.

Mick Spiers: 16:18

Yeah, really good, Anthony, I'm going to share with you, what I'm taking away with this part of it is this inner narrative. We all have an inner voice. Like you don't have to think you're crazy to think you've got an inner voice. We all have it. We we're telling stories in our mind all the time, either about ourselves or about the world around us. And, I'm going to say listening to you that with the prisoner of war story that we get to choose to hold the pen, as to what our perception is and what how we write that story, and then the, then the four stages that I'm hearing from you, to be able to accept the things that are not in our control, to accept that this, this is how it is. The ability, and this is it's got to get through that resistance in your mind. You're going to be resistant to that initially, but to move past that and to accept the things that you can't control, including the resilience to get past the things that were not the way that you would hope that would be, and to be able to move forward and realize that you can't change the past. You can only change what you do in this very moment. The ability to then forgive, including the ones that have in your mind maybe betrayed you or or didn't treat you in the right way. The only way they hurt you is if they if you let them hurt you. It's, It's your decision to forgive and move forward, and then to have the gratitude for what you have instead of always seeking what you don't have. And this is at the end of that journey we can find love. This is what I'm taking away from what you're saying. How does that sit with you in terms of that summary?

Anthony Silard: 17:53

Well, that's fantastic, Mick, and it's a great summary. And, a lot of people ask me, like, so "Okay, wait, you're a leadership professor and trainer". I mean, I I've spent the last 30 years, providing leadership development trainings for Fortune 500 companies like, like Google, Toyota, Disney and, and most of the world's largest nonprofits, like World Wildlife funds, Save the Children Care, Political Leaders, Mayors, G20 Cabinet Ministers. And people ask me, "well, why did you write a book about love? I thought you're teaching leadership?" And what a lot of people don't realize is that, the thousands of people that I've coached these, these Senior Leaders and CEOs of all these of all these companies and organizations agencies. What I found is, well, first of all, anyone who comes to me for coaching, it's because they're stuck in some area of their life, usually related to their work. But I also get a lot of people come in for other, more personal reasons. And what I've noticed is that every single one, with no variance whatsoever, the challenges they're facing as a leader, root back to someone in their life they've never forgiven. Because what they've done is, they've because they've not been able to accept how this person acted in some previous time in their life, and they resent that person, and resentment. Resentment is dangerous, because resentment comes from "re-" which is again, and "sentire"which is to feel. Resentment is to feel anger again and again and again, until you become paralyzed. And so people come see me when they're paralyzed, and they want to get out of it. They want to break that mold. They want they want to find a better way. And I always have to help them forgive someone. Yeah, and without, without being able to forgive, we're not able to construct what I call and this, I think, is that the number one responsibility of leaders is to develop what I call CMSR. Compassionate, Meaningful, Sustainable Relationships. And those words, I didn't just make them up. Compassionate, meaningful, sustainable right now, I'm along with Sarah Wright, Sarah Wright in at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. We're the top two researchers in the world on leadership and loneliness, and what we found is that the reasons that both leaders and their direct reports become lonely in organizations. Is it's either, because they don't feel like they're connecting well with others, emotional connection, and that there comes the word compassionate, or they don't feel that they belong. They don't feel as that they're being valued, appreciated, respected in the organization. And there comes the word"sustainable", because if we don't feel like we belong, we don't feel we experience respect in our work, we don't stay generally. In fact, the word respect, a lot of people don't know this, but it comes from"re" which is again, and"speculate" which is to see. So it's to see again. And the way there's two, it has two different meanings. So one of the meanings is, if you want to see someone again, there comes, you know the word sustainable, you have to respect them. The second meaning, though, is that you first see someone and then you see them again. You look deeper into them to understand their motivations, what makes them happy, what makes them suffer, trying to understand what really, what really drives them. And when we do that, we're expressing respect. So the third driver of loneliness in organizations that we found this is from hundreds of interviews with CEOs and their team members, is when someone has a need to contribute, a need for meaningfulness. And what we've, what Sarah Wright and I have found, is that the leaders often experience this. The higher you up you are in the organization, the higher up you are, the more you think about what is our overall mission, and are we really achieving it. And if not, there's this existential loneliness, this existential angst of and where does that come from? Let's go back to the definition of leadership. So the widely agreed upon definition of leadership in the literature, it's the capacity to mobilize a group of people toward collective objectives, right? So in plain, in plain English, is the capacity to develop relationships towards shared goals. So when leaders have been unable to forgive someone, and by the way, when I say leader, a leader, I'm not talking about the CEO necessarily. There are many CEOs who are not leaders. Leadership is not a person. It's not a position. Leadership is a process, a process of what, of mobilizing a group of people toward collective objectives, developing relationships toward shared goals. Anyone who does that is practicing leadership. So you don't have to be the CEO or president of a company or organization to be a leader. If you're working with others, and you're trying to mobilize them towards shared goals. That's leadership. In fact, the rawest form of leadership is parenting. That's what parents do, right? Mobilize a group of people toward collective objectives, right? You know, it's the hardest form of leadership, too, I got to tell you, as a dad.

Mick Spiers: 23:17

Yeah, can be.

Anthony Silard: 23:19

So this is what leaders do. And, anyone who doubts it that the importance of relationships and leadership, I would say, take a look at at a University of Chicago study where they tracked over 7000 engineers for over a decade, a longitudinal study. And they want to see what made these engineers successful. Some of those engineers became very successful and led these great teams and earned more money and got more status and all that. And other engineers kind of faltered, didn't really some some were fired. Others just never really grew in their roles, and they wanted to understand well, what made these engineers successful? And I always ask people in my conferences, well, what percent of the success of those engineers do you think is attributable to their knowledge of engineering, their wherewithal, their technical expertise? 14% okay, the other 85 plus percent attributable to only two things. Number one, personal character and number two, their capacity to develop relationships with their co workers, how they got on with their co workers. So essentially, character and socio emotional abilities. Now those two are so intertwined it's almost almost impossible to separate them. I mean, try having a really poor personal character. Where you lie. You say you're gonna do something, you don't do it. You manipulate you back bite and good luck with developing relationships with others, right? It's probably not gonna work out so well. So really, yeah, I think back to Stephen Covey's book, The Seven Habits, the highly effective active people. You know, he talked about private victory and public victory. And I think, in a way, personal characters about private victory and then developing relationships, relationships with others is about public victory. So it's really they come down to the same thing as like, who are you as a human being, and how do you show up in relationships based on who you are.

Mick Spiers: 25:21

There's so many things I'm taking away, Anthony, I want to play some of them back to you starting off with this resentment, and that this resentment being almost like toxic is going to lead you to being stuck forever if you can't move beyond it. And the words I was thinking of forgiveness as you were talking about it, were freedom and live and liberation that once we do forgive, we can liberate ourselves from that resentment that was holding ourselves from being stuck. And then when I was listening to you about the relationships and about leadership, and by the way, I loved your definition of leadership around mobilizing people towards shared goals. I'll share mine with you. It's it's not dissimilar, and you may or may not agree with it, but I talk about inspiring people into meaningful action around a worthy goal because they wanted to do it, not because you told them to do it. This is what I think of when I think of leadership, and then I think about your compassionate, meaningful, sustainable relationships. And I think about, well, if you're going to win, if you're going to inspire people, you need to have those relationships if they don't see your compassion, if they don't see that you're have their interest at heart, if they don't see meaning in the relationship, if they don't see it as a sustainable relationship, like you could manipulate someone into action, but that's not manipulation is not sustainable. They wake up to it and go, That guy manipulated me, or that that woman manipulated me. But a sustainable relationship is based on compassion, meaningful relationships, where you're inspiring people towards some kind of common worthy goal, and that enables you to become a multiplier. The other word that jumped into my head when I was listening to you, Anthony, was the word multiplier, because now, instead of me trying to achieve this goal by myself, and I only have 24 hours in a day, now, I've inspired 10, 20, 200, a thousand people around me that want to achieve that goal with me, not because I asked them to, but they want to achieve it with me. How does that sit with you?

Anthony Silard: 27:33

Well, I love what you shared, Mick, I think your definition of leadership is it's using different words, but it's the same. It's the same feeling, right? It's really whether we're mobilizing or inspiring people. It's working with with a social group, to move toward meaningful goals. And for like you, like as you mentioned, for people to be doing that work, not because they feel compelled to, but because they want to. So it's getting people to do more than show up, show up for work. It's getting people to show up holistically with their hearts and minds and really engaging. I mean, if we look at the at the common definition of work engagement, it's the holistic investment of the self in a work role. So it's, it's showing up physically, psychologically, emotionally and gosh, how many people do you know who do that at work? Right? Very few.

Mick Spiers: 28:26

There's a lot of disengagement out there.

Anthony Silard: 28:29

Oh my gosh, over 80, 85% from a Gallup study recently. So really, so many people are disengaged. And I think when I was listening to you, Mick, what one, one thing that was resonating, resonating with me, is that, if you're not, not you, but generally, if people, if someone, if someone's not influenced by who I am, I'm not going to be influenced by their advice. And many leaders go out there and they just are telling people what to do, and people just feel undetected, unheard, unseen, and so they don't and that's why they're disengaged. And so when we think about the importance of relationships and leadership, I think, if it's okay, let me take your listeners on a brief journey back in sort of the leadership ideas and how we came to where we are today, around the importance of relationship in leadership. So there was a study by Elton Mayo at Harvard Business School. This was in the 1930s and they were studying at the General Electric's Hawthorne Plant, which is on the east coast of the US. I forget. I think it's like it's in was in New Jersey or Connecticut, somewhere around there, and they were studying 14 women working on a factory floor. And they had millions of dollars invested in this study, and they wanted to see what would what could they do that would result in these women working more productively increase their product activity. So they changed the lighting. They changed the time for lunch, the food for lunch, what time they showed up, what time they left. Other they all these, what are called hygiene factors, right for a job, and nothing made any difference whatsoever. And they were like ready to throw their hands up in the air and sort of pull the plug on the experiment when, after it was after about about a year and a half, they realized that there was only one thing that was making any difference at all in the productivity of these women working on the factory floor, and that was when the women felt they'd come together as a team. They felt like they didn't, they didn't, they now started to be more productive because they didn't want to let each other down, and that was the only thing that increased their productivity. This was the birth of the human relations school of organizations, and which started out at Harvard and then spread out pretty, pretty much everywhere, and this was the Genesis of Relationship Oriented Theories of Leadership. So before this experiment, the leadership theories in vogue were called task oriented theories of leadership. So transactional leadership, for example. So Henry Ford in 1916 if you asked him, "What color can you make a Model T for me?" he would say, "Any color you want, as long as it's black". Right, So this was assembly line. One person comes up, comes into work. They put the tire on the car, on the Model T. Another person puts the hub cap. Another person tightens the bolts on the screws, on the on the hubcap. And this was the basic idea for transactional or transactional or task going to theories of leadership, was you have contribution and you have compensation. So if compensation is high enough, you'll get the contribution you want. If you expect contribution way up here, and compensation is way down here. You're not going to get that contribution, so you've got to try to equilibrate them. And actually that worked for Ford, it worked for others, and it's it is an important component of leadership. We have to compensate people for what they contribute. But after this experiment, this is when relationship oriented theories took center stage. And so to this day, the Leadership Theories that are really shaped and elaborated the way we all perceive leadership, our relationship oriented theories, you know, transformational leadership, authentic leadership, servant leadership, humble leadership, leader, member exchange. It's all about how leaders develop relationships with the people they lead, and how they facilitate an environment where the people they lead can develop relationships with each other. And that's, that's really, where we've come to. I think there's also a dark side of it, which we could, which we could talk about, but it's really relationships. And I think especially today, in the environment where we've pretty much gone hybrid, most people are working a few days at home, not everybody. Some people are fully remote. This is the greatest challenge. I interview a lot of people, a lot of remote workers and, and for a lot of them, they're, they've become, like, interchangeable parts, like they're literally, I hear people saying things "I never would have heard from them even, even a decade ago". Like, "Well, I like the company, but then they're not giving me free parking. So I left, you know?" So it's just it's becoming very it's almost like, we're reverting back to transactional leadership as we go into this really kind of strange age of disconnection we're in today.

Mick Spiers: 33:47

I certainly hope that doesn't happen, Anthony, because that's not sustainable. Come back to your word that's not sustainable if we just go transactional. It can work for a period of time, by the way, but it only works for a period of time until people start building some of that resentment that you spoke about. They start feeling it's inevitable that unfairness and inequity starts creeping in in a transactional environment where they fall well, hang on a second my, my compensation doesn't match my output anymore my contribution. So this is and this is where I feel like listening to you. I feel like, there's a mini full circle moment in what you're sharing, but also feels like a fork in the road that as leaders, we've got this choice, this point of choice here that we've got to make. Are we are we going to pivot left or we're going to pivot right? And the pivot left looks a lot like transactional leadership, but it looks like people that don't have any purpose and meaning in the work that they're doing. They don't feel like they're respected. To use your respect, and you gave me a new definition of respect that I'd never heard of before earlier, and now I'm going to do two things. I'm going to start building resentment to you, the leader, if I'm that worker, and I'm going to disengage so that's the fork in the road, is the disengagement, and the other one is the relationship, and that is to give people meaning, to give people compassion, to give people a purpose, and to make them feel seen, heard and respected and valued, then I'm going to and there was something you said about the collective to feel like I'm in it with other human beings, that we're doing something important, but we're doing it together, and we're building something bigger than any of us individually could do. All of a sudden, it feels exciting, and I am going to bring my whole self to work, and I'm going to do my very best work. Is that the fork that leadership sits at today?

Anthony Silard: 35:37

I mean, I think, I think so. I think that leaders today. We have to look. We have to it comes back to we're kind of going full circle. Comes back to not focusing on what leaders tend to focus most of their time and energy on which. Which is results always focusing. I mean, results are important. Like that swimmer, she's clear on what her result is. She wants to reach the island and reach it first, right? But, you know, so keeping like, the Civil Rights Mantra, mantra in the United States,"keep your eyes on the prize". That's fine, you know, look up once in a while and make sure you're going in the right direction. It's kind of like, like, Stephen Covey's example of like, like, like, if you're, you're cutting through the jungle with a machete, you know, you got to climb a tree once in a while and make sure you're going in the right direction. So, but that's, that's 1% of the time that she's looking up at the island, or the machete wielder is climbing the tree. So most of the time we're in there, acting and interacting with others. And that's where I think we have to see, really, if we want the kinds of relationships that will make a company or organization thrive. And I've seen this time and time again with the with the CEOs and leaders that I've coached, we have to take an inner detour. And so just as I would say to someone who says, Hey, I want to meet the right person, what should I do?" I say, "If you want to meet the right person, you first have to become the right person." I would also say to leaders who are saying, well,"How can I be more effective as a leader?" I say, "If you want to be a leader on the outside, you first have to become a leader on the inside". And so perhaps I know you wanted to talk Mick about happiness, well being, maybe we should also bring that in, because leaders, which I think was very a lot of foresight on your part, because this is really the core of how a person emerges as a leader. So think about, have you ever been in a group? And I'm saying to each of your listeners, "Think about when you've been in a group and you've experienced emergent leadership. Emergent leadership is when someone expected in the group emerges as a leader of the group". Now, how does that happen? It's because that person, we believe in their values. We feel we can trust them, and we feel that they that they embody the values, features, characteristics of the group. So how? How to become a person like that? I think we have to look at some of the scripts that we play over and over again in our in our minds, that keep happiness at arm's length, like so how can we, how can we bring more happiness, well being into our lives so we can emerge as a leader that others really want to lead to be around. You know, think about it. How I would ask each of your listeners, "Have you ever been to a job interview where, within two minutes, if not two seconds. You know, there's no way you're ever going to work for this person". So this is what happens. Because if you see, I don't ever want to work for this person, because I don't want to be like them, they're they're a miserable wretch, how do we not become that person? And I think this is a big challenge, because I think like so in the Myth of Happiness. this is a book I'm going to give to you guys at the end of the show today. So stay tuned. In the Myth of Happiness, I have a quote in there, which is, "To live the life you love is success". "To love the life you live is happiness". So there's a really critical difference here success, success is important, but success, like happiness, is entirely subjective. So for one living the life you love for you is going to be different than it is for someone else. And this is the big challenge for each of us, is that each of us, what we tend to do is we live the life we think we should live, and that's a big mistake. We're our thoughts of what we should do are really the habitual patterns that we've inherited from others. Instead of living the life we create, we live the life we inherit. And living an inherited life will never feel fulfilling, because it's not your life. Your life is the life you can create if you just believe you can create it. And this is, this is different. This is about saying to yourself,"Okay, I'm not, I'm not going to go through life. I'm going to grow through life". And how can you grow through life? It's, it's being willing to embrace who you really are. And I think most of us, we're too afraid of ourselves to embrace who we really are. There's a really interesting experiment took place at University of Virginia. Timothy Wilson, Social Psychologist. He had this shocking apparatus. And he gave, he gave all these people the shock, shocking apparatus, and asked them to shock themselves. And so it wasn't dangerous, but it was very uncomfortable. And then he asked them afterwards,"Did you enjoy it?" No one enjoyed it. "Could we pay you a certain amount of money to shock yourselves with this apparatus?""No, I don't want to do that again". So then what Wilson did is he put these people individually in a room alone for 15 minutes with nothing but, you guessed it, the shocking apparatus. And would you believe the majority of people, especially the men, more men than women, but the majority of all the people, they preferred to shock themselves than to do nothing. So an unpleasant feeling of being shocked was better than no feeling. And so this goes back to Carl Jung, the Austrian Psychiatrist that to his saying that "All mental illness stems from a person's inability to sit in a room alone". So leadership is much less about how to do and much more about how to be. Let's talk a little bit about what what that means today.

Mick Spiers: 41:56

Yeah, really good, Anthony, so a few things there. Coming back to the emergent leaders. I think a key thing I'm hearing there is you're looking for someone that embodies your values. So that's one thing, but also someone that's congruent. Their behaviors are authentic, and they're congruent with those values, and that's going to make me want to be with that person. I think that's the key thing there. Then, as we pivot towards happiness and the Myth of Happiness, the things I was listening to you there, you know to live the life you love is success. To love the life you live is happiness. I came back to your model that you had in your new book, Love and Suffering of that requires acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude. So for me to love the, the life I live, the happiness. I need to accept what I can control, and what I can't control. I need to forgive for the things that are out of my control, and I need to be I need to have gratitude for the things that I have, instead of worrying all the time about the things that I don't have. And then thinking now I want to go all the way back to the start of our conversation, and you talk about the pursuit, you talked about the swimmer and the pursuit of results. Well now the result is happiness, and if we constantly pursue happiness, it gets even further away. There's always a bigger car, there's always a bigger house. There's always like, if, if we think I'm constantly trying to hit some target, either you hit that target and then go, Well, what now? Or you never hit that target and you think that you're less than worthy. So this acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude and love, is coming back to me together with the if we pursue the result of happiness, we'll never get there. We'll never get there. So we need to accept and love the life that we have already. That's where happiness lives. How does that sit with you?

Anthony Silard: 43:58

I it's just with me that you're extremely brilliant guy, Mick, you know, because I hadn't, I hadn't made that linkage before. And you know, and you're and you're absolutely right like to how can you, you can't love the life you live until you first accept the life, the life you live. And it's a really good point, and it brings those two, those two kind of would for me, have been different areas of writing and research, and it brings them together really nicely. So yeah, thank you for that. I got to share with you that I personally struggle with accepting the life I live sometimes, and that that pushes happiness away from me. And I want to share with you that one thing I realized, this was actually last weekend. I realized that I have for many years defined my own success subjectively, like we all do, in terms of the not the number of books I've sold, you know, and I still haven't sold millions of books, right? I still haven't been on the New York Times Bestseller List, and I compare myself to others who have, and I feel low about myself sometimes. And I realized that I've never, I never, I didn't really. There's only like from this last weekend that I could even sort of, sort of verbalize that. But I recognized that, "Yeah, that that's how I with, like, unconsciously, that's how I've been feeling". And so what I started to do was to say, "Well, okay, you know, maybe I have this metric for success, and I need to reconsider it." Because I started thinking about, "Well, okay, what have I done?" And I thought, "Well, okay, so I'm running this center in Rome, and I do really well in my classes. The people who do read my books, I get really wonderful feedback from them about how it's helping them in some small ways, to make changes in their lives, which is the reason I wrote the books". And then I also started thinking about, "Well, I do these, these Pro Bono Leadership Conferences for nonprofit organizations". And I do these multi day conferences in, you know, about four, four per year. And I thought about, you know, the last conference I did was where the last two were in Mexico and in Kenya, each of them with hundreds of social change leaders. And I hired like, I had like, 19 different trainers who joined me in Mexico, for example, from all around the US and Mexico and Europe, who came and and taught. I've also had Australian trainers who've come and joined some of these. And I thought, well, "That's I should feel good about that, because that's something I'm doing this to help others. And why aren't I measuring success with that social impact?" Because that's, that's really a lot of what I'm about. And then I thought about, well, you know, I'm really fortunate to that I have a wonderful wife and children, and I'm really grateful for that. And I started so my instead of defining success with what I hadn't yet accomplished. I started thinking about what I have and appreciating that. And that lasted for an hour or two. And then I realized something else. I said, "Wait a minute. So I'm kind of trying to replace one poison with another". So first, I evaluated my success based on one particular metric. Now I'm substituting other metrics. All of them are about external results. And then I thought to myself, well, "What if I just felt good about myself? What if my self esteem hinged on, who I am as a person and how I treat others, how I treat myself, how I treat my kids." And that was really transformative for me, because I thought, okay, you know, I guess I need to walk my talk here, instead of focusing on the results and to focus on the process and what like, what are my motivations and values? How am I trying to be of service to others in the world, and I'm still working on it Mick. I don't want to, I don't want to pretend with your listeners like, Okay, I you know, last weekend this all came up, and now I've got it all figured out. No, it's, it's, it's a continual journey. I will say that that one of the books that really influenced me, Srinivas, was true. Now Suzuki, who ran the San Francisco Zen Center, and he, he had a book called Zen Mind, beginner's mind, and it was all about that. We all try to pretend that we're experts, but if you're an expert, all it says about you is you're no longer curious. You think you've got it, you figured it all out, and you're basically you've gone past your apex, and you're on your way down to you're on your way down to the grave. You're decaying. And I think he's right, like, I'd rather be a beginner and just be open, be curious and be learning and so, so yeah, this is the kind of learning journey that I'm on. I'm on right now, because we can have all this beauty outside us, but if we don't have if we don't see the beauty within, we won't enjoy any of it.

Mick Spiers: 49:05

Thank you so much for sharing that very openly with us on the show, Anthony. To hear you say it as an expert in the field, that shows us we're all human beings, we're all we're all going to have struggles with this, but if we don't do the work, we won't be able to reframe it and re look at it through a different lens, which is what I'm hearing you do. I'm also hearing you be careful not to replace one set of goals and results with another set of goals and results, and to then more think about the present and being grateful for what I have. You also were talking before about inner, you always spoke about the stories we tell ourselves and inner narratives and the way we perceive things. One of the ones I've heard recently, Anthony, I want to run it past you and see what you think is the power of the language that we use. Even in our own inner monolog whether it's externally or internally. Things like, and I'm going to put myself in your shoes of the work that you do, and you really articulated well to stop focusing on the things that you don't have, and focus on the things that you do have, and be grateful for the things that you do have. But then I'm going to also go reframe things like, instead of going I have to go to work today, I get to go to work today. I get to go to work today to be grateful for that opportunity. So for you, when you're doing these lectures, I don't have to do these lectures. I get to do these lectures. I get to have this impact on students from New Zealand, from Australia, from all over the world. I get to do that, and I should be proud of that. How does that sit with you? That really resonates, Mick. I got to share with you this, okay, brief story that my son is really in the tennis and, and this is kind of funny, because he's 12, and when he we lived in California. Now we live in Italy, right? But when we lived in California, he would be playing soccer, and he just had no clue how to play soccer. And the coaches, their idea of coaching was just let the kids run and do whatever they want, and then give them huge amounts of donuts after practice. And so literally, he came and asked me in the middle of a game, he said, he said, "Daddy, which is the goal I'm supposed to be aiming for?", like, "It was that bad, right?" And so I was like,"Okay". And then, and then, when we came to Italy, he's in this Italian school, and in Italy, if you're a boy and you're not good at soccer, they call football here, you're nobody. And so he just didn't fit in because he wasn't a good soccer player. And I've watched him. I don't know what happened, Mick, but somewhere around eight months ago, we spend the summers in Mexico, because my wife's from, you know, we ever our family there with my wife, and he had a coach there, and also one of my wife's friends boyfriends, who started just showing him a few things that I wasn't able to show him, because I'm not a great tennis player, but even though he and I play all the time. And he, just like over the last eight months, made this huge improvement, and now he's playing in tournaments and and so we we drive him all over Rome and this region called Lazio, where we live, and he plays in these tournaments. And it dawned on me that you have these kids and their parents coming from all over the region to go to these tournaments, so they can find someone else who they're aligned with in loving tennis, and they go there and they play and they have a ball, and it's not only about they all want to win, but it's just about that these other kids. They get each other, they understand each other. And even, this has led to friendships where, like, this one kid beat him pretty badly, and then, you know, he went up to him, said, "Hey, can I have your phone number? Why don't we get together and play and play again?" and now, and he's been playing with this kid, and now that now they're kind of head to head, right. So, and they're becoming good friends, independent of tennis, they really enjoy each other.

Anthony Silard: 53:01

And so it dawned on me, like, when I'm here, for example, when I'm here with you, Mick, and we're talking like you said, I don't do this podcast appearance. I get to do this podcast appearance. It's a blessing, because you, to me, are like another kid who plays tennis, to my son, like you. It's not just that you also like podcasts, but you in this area of relationships and leadership and personal and leadership development like I will have to go very far to find someone like you who really deeply cares about it the way I do. And it's really, it's just, it's wonderful, and so it's interesting, because I think, well, for sure, work is a four letter word. So let me ask you, your listeners here, if work is a four letter word, which it is? Which word is it for you? Is it C, R, A, P, is it hell? Is it play, or is it love? Khalil Gibran, the Lebanese poet, once wrote, "Work is love made visible". Again, work is love made visible. I really believe that day you find the job you love is the last day you have to work. I, you know, if you can find work where it's not just a job, it's not just a career, even it's a calling. You do it because you just love to do it. And that's where, you know, a lot of people ask me, like,"Okay, love and suffering. Your last book, like, what's the what's the connection between love and suffering?" Well, your suffering informs you about what you love. Because when you suffer from something you don't, you start to love whatever it is that will prevent that suffering from reoccurring in you. And if you're civic minded, if you if you think beyond yourself in other people. In fact, a lot of people don't know this, but the word passion comes from the latin "Patti" or "Patire", which means to suffer so, in Christianity, we have the crucifixion, the suffering, the passion of Christ. In many African cultures, you have the phoenix rising from the ashes. In almost all national cultural religious traditions, this construct exists of beauty coming out of something really challenging. And I'll say, I mean, in my work as a leadership coach, let me give your listeners an example. I had a woman come to me. She's a marketing director of a Fortune 100 Pharmaceutical Company, and she comes to me and she says, "Tony, I really can't even get out of bed anymore, like I go to work, but I'm just not there. I just don't not feeling it. I'm not enjoying my job at all, and so we started working together". And so taking a psychoanalytic perspective, I asked her, I said, "Well, tell me, tell me how you grew up. Like, what's what's important to you? What did you experience, what's led you down the path you've been on?" And she shares that. Well, "My childhood was not easy at all. Actually, my father died of cancer when I was 12, and my whole childhood was spent with, really, my mother, and I just nurturing my father before he passed away". So then I asked people, well, "What do you think I helped her to do? What kind of career change did I help her to make? What's she doing now?" So a lot of people will say, "Well, is she a nurse?" "And no, she's not a nurse. She's the director of a major hospital, leading a team of researchers and doctors to find cures to cancer and other diseases". So fewer families suffer the way hers did. So she took that suffering and that she I think, in her subconscious, she always knew that what she experienced was important to her, because even working in a pharmaceutical company, it was some idea about health, but marketing wasn't enough. It wasn't really what her passion was, and now she's living that passion. And I think any of us that like, if you're able to find something you love to do, you know George Lucas, the director of Star Wars, once said, make a list of the things that you love to do and find one that you're really, really, really good at. So I think it's that finding that passion and also being honest with yourself, being, you know, accepting what are you really gifted at, and trying to put the two together toward a purpose you believe in.

Mick Spiers: 57:21

So this is where you can come full circle back to your two statements. To live the life you love and to love the life you live, if you can find what you just said, Anthony, and it's interesting what you're saying like when we talk about giving people purpose and meaning, and that is when they can find energy that they'd never discovered before, when they when they have purpose and meaning and what they do. And nearly always, it comes down to one of two, and maybe it's even both at the same time, is something where they're helping some other human being in some way, and the warm feeling it gives them that they did something that meant something to another human being. And the second is, if they see something that they see as an injustice in the world, and in the example that you gave, the injustice is I went through that. I went through that experience of having sick parents and everything that went through it. So I want to help other people to not have the experience that I had, or at least to have a better experience than what I had. They see it as an injustice, and now they're driven. They've got drive. They've got passion from that suffering because they don't want to see others suffer in the same way. How does that sit with

Anthony Silard: 58:34

Yeah, that's a great summary of what we're what else. about what they are and what fact, capitalists. And what they'll you? we've been talking about. Mick, I mean, I'll tell you my, you know, my own story. I think I've lived this, and that's why I can talk about it. Because I had a physically abusive stepfather growing up. And when you're, you know, when you're a kid and a man comes into your home who's, who's not your father and beats you up, sleeps with your mother, you don't feel like much of a person. And that's how I grew up, very low self esteem, and really, really, like I was the nerd at school and kind of an outcast. And I mean, other kids can see when you have little self confidence, and they prey on it, or at least they did in the school, in the school I was in. And so it was a really rough time. And, you know, we think about how suffering, like passion, emerges from suffering, what really motivates me today they're not looking for in an intimate partner, that second is like I think back to feeling powerless, thinking about when I ran away, when I used to run away from home and sleep in parks and I didn't feel safe in my home, and being able, and even in a small way, to help others to feel powerful, to help person is more likely to move toward developing, discovering others to access the power that's rightfully theirs, if they can just see it. I think a lot of us, we walk around with our hands covering our eyes, and we lament the darkness. I think, in what you're doing, Mick, and what I'm trying to do here is that we, we help people to remove their hands from their eyes and see the light, see the love, see the potential, the possibilities all around them, so that they cannot go to work sustainable for them, a life partner. And you know, and the but as you said, "Get to work". And you know that work and the same thing, not go and have a relationship, but get to have a same in organizations you get, and these are the leaders I'm relationship. And that that really, that really goes deep into when we talk about forgiveness, and, you know, the coaching, you come into an organization, and if you just plateaus in love and suffering from acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude and love. How do we go from forgiveness to gratitude? It's realizing that forgiveness we've been told, we've been told a number of things about forgiveness that I think are patently untrue. One is that forgiveness is the highest form of love. So that's a common quote that we've heard a lot. Ronald neighbor or others have said it, and if forgiveness is the highest form of love, then what I'm about to say would seem really loving. So "Hey, you really hurt me. My life was tell you is that they're more likely to fund your business if miserable from what happened, what you did to me, but I want you to know that I forgive you for it, like I don't know about you, to issue your listeners I don't know about you, but I you've already started a couple businesses that failed, because certainly wouldn't want someone to say that to me, because forgiveness is a power play". It's also like, "Hey, I forgive you. I'm the I hold propriety over what is right and wrong. You did wrong. I'm morally right. I hold the moral rectitude and I forgive you". So what a lot of people don't realize is that forgiveness is impossible without judgment, you can't forgive someone unless you first judge them. So judgment creates the problem. Forgiveness creates the solution. So what I write about in Love and Suffering is that higher than forgiveness is gratitude, and is being able to is being able to say "I'm grateful for each relationship I've been able to have in my life, even if some of them have been challenging". So believe it or not, I can tell you I'm grateful. It's a longer story, but I forgave my ex stepfather, and I'm grateful grown. If you have, they'll be trying to assess that, and that he was in my life. I wouldn't do it again, but I'm grateful for it, because I can tell you with a reasonable that's going to make them more confident that you actually can amount of confidence. You know, I can think strategically and knowing myself. I think if I hadn't gone through that, that pull it off this time. physical abuse, I'd probably be on Wall Street driving a red crappy us to a close now, you and I. I

Mick Spiers: 1:02:21

from human sports car, having my third affair on my fourth wife. And that's not the life I'm living. I'm living I'm here with you Mick and with your listeners, and I'm talking with with all of you about really themes that I really believe in and I feel connected with. And that's I'm so grateful to be to be able to do that, and that's the thing is that is that we often think about just being grateful for the joy we've experienced, but what if we could reframe the challenging experiences we've had in our we've had in our lives, as learning, and be grateful for that learning? Because let me tell you, compare two people. say this out without any hesitation. We could talk for seven hours and we'd still.

Anthony Silard: 1:03:21

At least!

Mick Spiers: 1:03:22

You you on the journey. But what I can tell you for sure is it doesn't happen if you don't step into it, if you don't lean into it and take action, you'll just stay on he came along to talk to him, he

Anthony Silard: 1:06:03

often come up to me and they say in my conferences, and they say, Well, what? What's the most important thing I need to know to become a leader? And what I usually reply was like, not want to let the person go. He was so happy to see them and talk with them. And so I think it's like, wherever is, find like, you are, be there, be present. You know, I went. I once heard Thich Nhat Hanh, the founder of Mindfulness. I heard him talk to a group of about, we have got over 10,000 people at this theater in Washington, DC, and he said, what's the greatest gift you can give to the person you love? Everyone silent, says"To be fully present". And so this presence, with your starting with yourself and then with others, that's going to be your path to leadership. So any rate, I'll stop there. But just to say, yeah, Mick, these are great questions. And you know, you're a very empathetic host, and I'm really, really enjoying this.

Mick Spiers: 1:11:54

Thank you, Anthony. All right, so I take us now to our Rapid Round. These are, these are the same four questions we ask all of our guests Anthony. So, what's the one thing that you know now, that you wish you knew when you're 20?

Anthony Silard: 1:12:08

I would say it's the one thing I know a little more of now, but I'm still working on, which is accepting myself. You know, I think it's I spend so many moments of my life, trying to please others, trying to prove my worth to others, trying to prove my worth through my work. And I think what I what I've realized, is that our worth is not our work. It's something that's much more profound than that, and that also winning the good opinions of others. You know, opinion, opinions are like armpits. Everybody's got one, right or got a few. And in the end, everyone has an agenda. And when we're there, trying to, trying to win someone's approval, they can use that to manipulate us, whether there's approval is genuine or not. And so I would say what I've most learn, and I'm still learning, is to believe in myself independent of the good words of others.

Mick Spiers: 1:13:08

Very good, sir. All right, very good. What's your favorite book?

Anthony Silard: 1:13:12

I would say my favorite book that I've ever read. You know, it's interesting, because I've been thinking about whether it be Personal Development or Leadership Book. I think, I think, in the end, the most formative book that's really influenced me in my life has been a book by an Indian Guru named Swami Vivekananda. And it's called Living at the Source. And one of the quotes in that book is, "Happiness is a gold chain. Misery is an iron chain. Both are chains".

Mick Spiers: 1:13:46

Yeah, okay, that's powerful. All right, what's your favorite quote? That could be one of them, but what? So what's your favorite quote?

Anthony Silard: 1:13:53

Yeah, I just gave you a quote, didn't I? Okay? So I would say my favorite quote would be, this is from Picasso, the painter, said"Every act of creation is, first of all, an act of destruction".

Mick Spiers: 1:14:08

Okay, very good, right? And finally, people are going to be blown away with what you've shared today. They need this kind of support. How do people find you, and learn more about you and your work and to take these steps?

Anthony Silard: 1:14:21

Well, thank you, Mick, and I'd love to connect with your listeners, so I'll share with you first, my latest book, Love and Suffering. I'd be humbled if you're for your listeners, if you purchase it, 100% of the proceeds go to nonprofit education programs in Africa and Latin America. You can find love and suffering on Amazon or wherever books are sold. Now, if buying a book is not top of mind for you right now. I know, I know times are difficult all over these days, I'd like to offer two free books to you, to each of your listeners, and we've been talking about them. One is the Myth of Happiness, how your definition of happiness creates your unhappy. The second book is the Myth of Friendship, how your misunderstandings about friendship keep you lonely. And you can access both books and download them by going to theartoflivingfree/freehappinessandfriendshipbooks, once again, theartoflivingfree.org/freehappinessandfriendshipbooks. So it's really simple. You you put in your email at the artoflivingfree.org you'll get confirmation email, and you confirm it, then you get the download links, and then you'll be part of my author ecosystem, where every two weeks you'll get an article on leadership, loneliness, relationships and so forth. And yeah, I'd love to, I'd love to have you be a part of the community, and then we could, we can stay connected.

Mick Spiers: 1:15:50

Well, thank you so much, Anthony for those gifts, and we'll put those links in the show notes as well. And I want to thank you again and be very grateful for the gift of your time today, the gift of your present, you've been very present with us, sharing your wisdom, sharing your experience, even more so, sharing your personal suffering and your passion on how you help people to find a better path. So thank you so much. I feel richer and wiser for this conversation. I'm very grateful for it, and I know that the audience will be as well. Thank you so much.

Anthony Silard: 1:16:25

Thank you, Mick, you've been a you've been an amazing host, and I think whatever I've shared, it's been thanks to your, your guidance on on how to pursue our conversation. So I really love the way you framed it. Thank

Mick Spiers: 1:16:38

What a powerful conversation with Anthony Silard you. out there something to really stop and think about. So let me ask you, what are you really chasing right now? Is it outcomes, success, recognition, or is it something deeper? Because one of the most powerful takeaways from this conversation is that happiness is not something you arrive at through achievement, it's something you experience through meaning, connection and the way you live. And that's a big shift, because so much of what we focus on as leaders sits outside of our control, but what is in our control is how we show up, the effort we give, the intention we bring. The way we treat others, the relationships we build and the environments we create for people to feel seen, heard and valued. So here's something for you to reflect on. Where might you be tying your happiness to things you can't control, and how might you shift your focus towards what you can give rather than what you hope to get, because leadership is not just about driving results. It's about creating meaning. It's about creating purpose. It's about creating that feeling for everyone that they matter. In the next episode, we're going to bring it back to the individual again. I'm going to be joined by Mark A Pittman, and we're going to explore something that every leader experiences, but few talk about openly, doubt, imposter syndrome, and the stories we tell ourselves about whether we truly belong. You've been listening to The Leadership Project. If today sparked an insight, don't keep it to yourself. Share it with one other person who would benefit from listening to the show. A huge thank you to Gerald Calibo for his tireless work editing every episode, and to my amazing wife, Sei, who does all the heavy lifting in the background to make this show possible. None of this happens without them around here. We believe leadership is a practice, not a position, that people should feel seen, heard, valued and that they matter, that the best leaders trade ego for empathy, certainty for curiosity, and control for trust. If that resonates with you, please subscribe on YouTube and on your favorite podcast app, and if you want more, follow me on LinkedIn and explore our archives for conversations that move you from knowing to doing Until next time. Lead with curiosity, courage and care.