What makes a leader truly effective, and how can you develop these leadership qualities?
In this episode of the #Career101Podcast, host Porschia is joined by Vik Kapoor, a leadership development coach, to break down the essential qualities that define successful leaders. They dive into the skills and mindset that transform leaders from good to great, covering topics like emotional intelligence, trust-building, and adaptability.
Vik shares insights on identifying and managing overused strengths, as well as understanding the impact of emotional intelligence and self-regulation on leadership. The conversation provides listeners with actionable advice on nurturing qualities like humility, empathy, and the ability to create a culture of psychological safety.
Learn how you can continuously improve as a leader, recognize key areas for personal development, and bring out the best in your team. Tune in for a deep dive into what it takes to lead with impact and integrity!
Vik Kapoor is a seasoned leadership coach with extensive experience in conflict resolution for organizations like the United Nations. A certified coach and former professor, he is the founder of ExtraM Coaching, helping leaders worldwide refine their skills and unlock their potential.
What you’ll learn:
- Key leadership qualities that foster trust, motivation, and team cohesion.
- How to identify and manage overused strengths to prevent burnout and enhance effectiveness.
- Techniques for improving emotional intelligence and self-regulation as a leader.
- Practical tips on creating a culture of psychological safety for your team.
- Ways to develop a servant leadership mindset and build genuine connections with team members.
- Actionable steps for continuous leadership development to stay adaptable and impactful.
As a thank you for listening to this episode of the Career 101 Podcast, we are sharing our FREE master class – Career 911: Solving the Top 5 Challenges Executives and Professionals Have! It’s a training based on solving the common problems our clients have experienced to reach their goals. You can get access to the master class here!
Resources:
- Episode Transcript
Porschia: Today, we are talking about leadership qualities with Vic Kapoor. Vic Kapoor builds training and mentoring programs for senior disaster leaders and is a conflict resolution specialist and coach for organizations, including the United Nations and various universities and nonprofits. He wrote First Serve Yourself, which won a Living Now Book Award and was an Amazon number one bestseller.
Vic is a lawyer by trade [00:01:00] and formerly a professor of dispute resolution, a court mediator, chief legal officer, and a board member of the American Bar Association’s section of dispute resolution. He is also served as an ombudsman in various capacities and as a class action litigator. Vic has a JD from Georgetown, a BA from UCLA and advanced coursework in trauma from Harvard medical school.
He is also a certified coach, proud husband and Papa. Hi Vic. How are you today?
Vik: Oh, doing very well. Thanks for having me. Portia.
Porschia: Great. Well, we are excited to have you with us to discuss leadership qualities. But first, we want to know a little more about you. So tell me about seven year old Vic.
Vik: Yeah. Seven year old Vic, I guess, was very into playing pogs, Marvel cards, trading, learning how [00:02:00] to play football and.
Being a goalie on a street hockey team. Gosh, these are things I remember. Mashed potatoes and cheese danishes. I guess a lot of food connected with that time. But yeah, just a little roly poly kid having a good time with a nice smile.
Porschia: Sounds great. So what did you want to be when you grew up?
Vik: At the time I wanted to be a neurosurgeon, a brain surgeon that changed later when I was volunteering at a hospital.
And finally they let me experience open brain surgery just as an observer. And it was a mistake. I realized then that I would not be doing that as a profession.
Porschia: I get it. I wanted to be a veterinarian, Vic, and then just something about the blood with the animals. I was like, yeah, no, thanks for
Vik: everyone.
Porschia: I get it. What was your first job?
Vik: My first job, I was working at a real estate agency that my uncle was a broker. So I was just a secretary, a receptionist, and also yeah, scheduling appointments, coordinating the summer picnic, that [00:03:00] kind of thing.
Porschia: Very cool. That’s a lot of great business experience, Vic.
Vik: Yeah.
Porschia: So tell us about some highlights or pivotal moments in your career before you became a coach.
Vik: Right. Yeah. You mentioned I was a trial lawyer, so class action attorney for a while, and that was before coaching. I actually went to a federal government and I went in as a mediator thinking I was going to do a lot of conflict resolution and really had a chance to do that for a while and really loved it and learned about coaching on the job and realized very quickly that that was what I wanted to be doing.
So that inflection point was, you know, really focused for so many years on. How do I use these skills of neuro, you know, there’s interest in neuroscience, these skills around negotiation and working with people. And I found this convergence around mediation and facilitation, ADR, dispute resolution. So that was very important.
And I think one pivotal moment was just sharing a taxi ride with [00:04:00] somebody who is very prominent in the field. ombudsman? And I was like, what is this? Oh, word. I have no idea. And I went on to you know, I ended up working for the ombuds office of the United Nations. I ended up helping create policy around what, how ombuds are recognized by the American Bar Association.
All of that because one person just, you know, really said, you know what, it’s, it’s kind of a new thing. More and more younger folks can get into this field. You should try it out. You have the right demeanor for it. So things like that. Another pivotal moment before coaching it was just, you know, somebody else took a leap of faith and hired me to work for the United Nations association to run large educational simulations of the model, a model UN around the country.
country. And that really set me up for a lot of other opportunities down the road. So yeah, I can think of a few times where people really took a chance, pulled me out of a list of applicants and, and that created space for me to hone a skill that later became helpful in coaching. [00:05:00]
Porschia: Wow. All of those.
moments sound very interesting. So Vic, can you explain what an ombudsman is for anyone who doesn’t know out there?
Vik: Gosh, it’s a loaded question. So there’s many flavors of ombudsman. And by the way, that’s supposed to be a gender neutral term. I use ombuds, you know, it’s kind of synonymous. There are professional organizations of ombuds, international ombuds association, coalition of federal ombuds.
- S. organization for ombuds, etc. There’s so many. And I guess to answer your question more directly, it started off as a function that would resolve complaints. So people would complain about certain things. Maybe the government’s not working well. Maybe the long term care facility is not treating its patients well.
Patients, well, whatever it is. So there’s this advocate ombuds is a classical ombuds that has subpoena power that can investigate that can, you know, make heads roll. There’s also an organizational ombuds that’s internal to a system that helps to navigate systemic conflicts. It [00:06:00] helps people work through the system, get them to the right resource.
Maybe it elevates systemic trends to the right stakeholders, including the senior leaders, the head of the organization. And it’s serving as a. Early warning system, but also it’s helping to navigate individual and team conflicts and dynamics in a preventative way as well. That’s what I was for many, many years in that organizational internal capacity.
But there’s so many different flavors, as I mentioned, and I’m not even covering all of them. So it’s not a term that can be easily kind of thrown around, I guess.
Porschia: Wow. Very, very interesting. So you had this background as, you know, a litigator in ombuds mediator, what motivated you to become a coach?
Vik: Yeah, I learned on the job that while we were mediating things, we were playing whack a mole same conflicts were coming up over and over again. There were issues around mindsets and behaviors and, [00:07:00] You know, skills, frankly, that you can’t necessarily teach someone in a mediation. You, you can, but it’s not really in your scope as a mediator generally.
So it’s a little bit odd to do that. Some people will, but if you do coaching, we had this one situation where two senior leaders were vying for the same position and we knew how it’d work out. It usually works out. One person gets it. The other person kind of tries to sabotage, or maybe we’ll leave the agency.
Well, in this case, they both agreed to coach each other. And they both agreed to be coached by us. So we were coaching them individually. They were coaching each other. Then one of them got the position. The other one became a really good deputy because they realized that, look, this person has some really intrinsic values and skills that I like, and we’ve been working together and I get it.
And, and so that helped me realize that. You know, you can help to shift mindsets. You can help people just see the world differently in an instant sometimes, and then that will carry forward. And then it’ll just reduce their [00:08:00] propensity to be in conflict. It’ll just create more conflict competency within the organization.
Porschia: Wow. So how did you decide to focus on leadership as one of your areas of expertise?
Vik: I think it’s just, you know, we’re all, we’re all leaders, we’re all natural leaders and yet some of us, you know, we don’t get the training. We don’t really know what we’re doing. And I saw this at, at all levels, leaders would come to me and say, you know, I’ve kind of suddenly whatever got me here is not going to get me there or, you know, whatever I was overusing, my strengths were being overused and now they’re really getting in the way of my trajectory here.
So I just saw more impact. I was at the United Nations building. A team of 80 coaches in 40 countries, and although none of them actually had a lot of supervisory authority, we purposely chose people that didn’t have that. They’re all natural leaders. And they were leading with influence and they were impacting very senior level leaders in the field.
So [00:09:00] that I think was a great laboratory for this kind of work and just, how do we coach, how do we coach up and how do we coach ourselves to be empowered, to be in these situations, a lot of self determination.
Porschia: Wow. You touched on a lot of great things right there, Vic, but one I want to ask you more about is the whole concept of strengths being overused.
How might someone know if they are, you know, an executive or professional, if they’re overusing some of their strengths?
Vik: You’ll start to get feedback, I think, or you’ll start to notice that. The reaction you’re expecting is not there. Oftentimes we’re overusing the strength and we’re coming from a place of fear or vulnerability.
We’re nervous. And so we’re relying on that hammer that we have. If you have a good confidant on the team, you know, if you’ve built that psychological safety, then they would easily tell you that, look, [00:10:00] you’re very good at this. For instance, I’m very good at making decisions quickly, but I absolutely need someone like my wife to say, look, you’re skipping steps, you know, you don’t need to make this decision so quickly.
Be more deliberate about it. You’ll get a better answer. So we need that. And that’s the, you know, the strength psychology would say, absolutely spend all your time on your strengths, make them super powers, look out for that Achilles heel to that weakest weakness, because that’s the thing that’s going to get in your way.
But then remember that you have a range of strengths. You don’t have to just keep using that same one over and over again. And you certainly shouldn’t be using your strengths at the expense of other people on your team. If you’re optimizing your own performance at the expense of sub optimizing the rest of your team’s performance, then as an executive, you’re failing your team.
And so that’s the kind of dynamic I try to get people to think about a little bit is what are you really, really best in class at, and now give me some instances where you didn’t need to use that strength.
Porschia: Wow. [00:11:00] Wow. I think those were all great points that you mentioned, Vic. A lot of times, I agree that people hear that feedback that they should just focus on their strengths, but then, you know, to your point, not realize when it is being overused.
So that’s
Vik: the shadow side of the strengths.
Porschia: Exactly, exactly. In I’m certified in a few different, you know, personality assessments and, you know, hearing about it as, you know, a blind spot or a derailer you know, things when overused can kind of Spiral out of control. And I really liked how you explained that back in episode nine, Vic, we discussed if leadership skills can be learned, what are your thoughts on if people are naturally born as good leaders or if they can develop those skills?
Vik: I think by and large, you can develop them. I think sometimes we’re at an advantage on some things and we can [00:12:00] optimize those. And there are a few things that you might be at a disadvantage on that maybe are not as learnable. And I’ll give you some examples. So emotional intelligence has been widely accepted as one of those learnable things.
So you can learn emotional awareness, right? You can learn for instance, you can look at Plutchik’s wheel of emotion. You can sort of diagnose emotions and you can get a better literacy around that. You can start to be able to perceive what emotions other people are presenting by looking at facial expressions.
Now, of course, there’s some limitations, you know, we may have other cognitive limitations, maybe there’s neuro, Divergence and things like that, that we have to look at that may limit our learnability on some things. And that’s fine, but we also want to notice things like self regulation, which is also, you know, a sub component of emotional intelligence.
Self regulation is a little bit harder to learn because for instance, our amygdala are different sizes. They have different. Different reactivity. There’s different contexts and life experience, but it’s plasticity, right? So we can [00:13:00] meditate. If we meditate a long time, the FMRIs will show that actually our amygdala is shrinking.
It’s becoming less reactive. Monks have virtually an unreactive amygdala. They don’t, if you ring a big bell behind them, they won’t even jump or anything. There’s like very little activity in that part of the brain. So when I’m working with crisis managers, one of the big things is they’re very, very competent, certainly, and in moments of emergency and crisis, of course, we’re going to have amygdala hijacks.
So how do we, we can’t really hold people to that standard of you’re not allowed to have a hijack, but how do we manage that? How do we mitigate it? How do we create structure and process so that we can just be more connected with the different aspects of our brain and our reactivity? Because it could damage relationships could damage long term partnerships could be a matter of impacting people’s lives and livelihoods, right?
So that self regulation piece, how you feel about pressure, I think is [00:14:00] one of those things. It’s not as learnable, but of course you can put yourself in a lot of circumstances, but your nervous system is still going to react how it reacts, right? So you have to build a lot of structure around that. And some people are just naturally inclined and we’re reading now more and more about research that some people’s brains are hardwired where they get excited by uncertainty to the point where it’s like, you know, that what would be very painful for some people is very exciting for other people.
And that’s something that I’m not so sure is learnable, right? It might just be that we want to assess that early in life and realize, wait a minute, I’m a thrill seeking. I shouldn’t aim at those kinds of careers, that kind of thing.
Porschia: Great, great. Emotional intelligence, self regulation. Those are really important concepts.
I’m glad you brought those up. We had an episode, I think it was episode 62 on emotional intelligence as a leader. And we talked about some of that. As well. So Vic, in my years of [00:15:00] coaching and, you know, working with hundreds of clients, I’ve seen many different kinds of leaders. Can you describe some of the common qualities you’ve seen in the best leaders?
Vik: Sure. Yeah. It’s a great question. I think the best leaders are very present. They’re with you and they’re with you. They’re not distracted. Right. They respect you and your time when they’re talking to you. It might not be very long, but they’re going to be hyper focused and trying to help. There’s also a service mindset, some level of, I want, I’m looking out for you.
It’s not just about the transaction or the, you know, the work product. It’s about the humanity there. And there’s a humble inquiry. So there’s a curiosity, there’s a willingness to be wrong. There’s a willingness to not know the answer. Right. And more so willingness to really accept as truth the expertise sometimes, you know, when the stakes are not super high to not have a lot of edits, right?
Some people, some, some leaders like to make it 2 [00:16:00] percent better. And I often advise, try not to do that because I know you’re trying to add value, but yet that 2 percent is coming at a great expense because now the person who had the idea, Or the, it is not going to feel as empowered to execute on it. So it’s sometimes better to just say that just excellent, go for it.
And maybe they’ll make it 2 percent better before they bring it back to you. Right. Or down the road, it’s possible that you can adjust something differently, but we often have this need to immediately jump in and tell someone why they did it. Not the way we would have, or here, let me give you my wisdom or whatever it is.
So the humble inquiry and kind of the acceptance piece is really important. Treating people like people. You hear this all the time with like senior leaders you know, generals and chief justice and all these people, you know, somebody’s assistant, a family member dies and suddenly the chief justice, whoever just steps in and does that person’s work for them all their way without saying anything.
Right. That’s treating people like people. It’s like, look, it’s not a transaction in that moment. Like [00:17:00] it’s humanity. You’ve lost somebody go like, don’t even worry about the work. You will get done. You know, we know how to do the work. So that’s, you know, just having the priorities in the right place. And I think that all ties back to alignment around values.
If you’re mindful and if you’re mindful about your values and you’re aligning your behavior with your values, then you’re just going to build this rabid following as a leader. People are just going to go with you wherever you go. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen people cry. I’ve seen dozens of people cry at someone’s retirement party.
You know, we want to be that leader not the ones that throw a party when you leave, right after you leave.
Porschia: Yeah. Wow. You mentioned a lot of great qualities there, Vic. I’m wondering if you think certain leadership qualities are more important than others.
Vik: I think the single most important thing is that outward mindset. It’s like, do we treat people like objects or do we treat them like people? You know, are they part of my [00:18:00] fiefdom or am I part of their operation and enterprise, you know, that servant leader, I, this is image. I had a boss who I walked in the door and she’s on the floor cleaning up the coffee grinds that spilled.
I mean, that’s, you know, just very visceral as a servant leader. Would people do that? You know, if you’re senior director managing hundreds of people, would you be on the ground cleaning up the coffee grinds? Or would you just politely ask somebody else to do that, right? And there was one story of somebody that was stuck on the North Pole and they were shipwrecked and he said, I have an idea.
I’m going to take a small party with me and I’ll be back. And we’re going to go over this mountain and we’re going to come back. And they’re like, you are not going to come back. But all right, they waited over a year on the North Pole shipwrecked and he came back and they all survived. Why? Because he was just that kind of leader that they just believed in him, trust and the psychological safety was there.
And you know, it’s, that’s sort of at the speed of trust. Once you have that, everything else just [00:19:00] comes together. And that’s really about that humanity. And there was something about how you like hugged everybody before he left. And he, you know, it was like a, it was a really emotional kind of leader.
And you could tell like, wow, if this, if anyone’s going to do this person’s going to figure out a right. So that’s, you know, that’s probably more than one quality, but it boils down to just creating the conditions by which other people can really trust you. And they feel that you trust them. There’s like a reciprocity of trust.
Porschia: Wow. Creating conditions with the reciprocity of trust. I love all of that, Vic. I always take notes during the podcast episodes, and that was definitely a writer downer for me. And I’m sure other listeners as well. You touched on some different leadership styles, which I think are great to talk about as well.
You mentioned servant leadership. That’s a [00:20:00] big one that is taught in organizations. Transformational leadership is another one. That is pretty commonly taught out there. Do you have any thoughts on the different leadership styles that are taught in organizations?
Vik: I think, you know, there’s the transformative, like you said, transformational and servant and integrative.
And I think as you’re looking at [00:21:00] it, some of them are semantics. Some of them, of course, there’s theory, theoretical underpinnings. But looking at case studies, looking at various archetypes, you know, what kind of leader. Do you like to be who would you kind of morph into if you could, like in terms of style, in terms of their their ability to galvanize folks around a common vision, right?
I think, I don’t think there’s a, One size fits all. I prefer servant leadership myself. I think there are certain instances where that wouldn’t work. If you’re dealing with a competitor, for instance, if you’re dealing with somebody who was trying to sabotage, right, there’s various things at times you’ll have to adjust and be more assertive kind of shift and agility is very important around that.
But in general, my default is servant leader. And there’s a lot of research on that. There’s a great book, servant leadership in action. It’s from the Blanchard companies. Just so much research around how the emotional value of it, how you’re empowering people, and you have to [00:22:00] have, you know, the effort at the front end to really hire the right kind of person who will be receptive to that but ultimately, then that allows you to, as a leader to free up a lot of space as well.
And. The important thing is there’s a, there’s a humility to it. You’re not really doing it for yourself. And oftentimes I see people who will tell me, Vic, I’ve already won all the big awards in my field. You know what I mean? I’ve already done all that stuff. I have all the stars and the purple heart and all this stuff, and I don’t need anything now.
And and those are the folks where they’re really just pouring it back into the people around them and the organization. And so you’ve got these really high performing teams oftentimes when they’re not even the most large or well resourced team.
Porschia: Yeah. So how might an executive or professional know if they need some leadership development?
Vik: Yeah, I think we all are should be in that journey all the time. I mean, there’s so much to learn about leadership. It’s a lot of it’s about [00:23:00] self management. And so I don’t I don’t I don’t I hesitate to make it feel like punitive or like, gosh, you need help on this, but I think we’re all kind of on that journey.
And so I spent about 000 a year personally, just, you know, on my own professional development, leadership development, and I recommend everybody do that really, if you can, you know, whatever you can, but make a commitment every year to do that. Do that. And then once you do that, then things will start popping up.
You’ll start seeing courses and programs and retreats and immersives, and it could just be a book or a audio book, whatever it is, but you’re starting to get clearer about what are some of those leadership competencies? Those, because we can learn a lot on the job. But learning theory always says there’s kind of two layers to it.
You have to do on the job, but you also have to learn the theory as well. Otherwise you’re just going to miss, there’s going to be holes in your understanding.
Porschia: Yes. Adult learning theory is very [00:24:00] interesting and I completely agree with on the job, but also understanding the theory behind it, it’s great that you make that commitment to yourself and leadership, leadership, leadership. Development. I think you started answering this question. But I do want to still ask, you know, if someone Vic is listening and they, you know, have heard what you’re saying and they’re like, Hey, I know that I want to develop as a leader.
What are some first steps that you think they could take on that journey?
Vik: I think some of the best leaders are really good coaches. So to the extent you can maybe do some kind of short training, learn some stuff, maybe even on one of these online course platforms, like Coursera and Udemy and things like that, but just coaching skills for leaders.
is a good one, anything like that, getting clear about the coaching mindset. There’s a couple of books on things like coaching with backbone and heart, co active coaching, you know, all kinds of [00:25:00] books you could probably find at the library or local bookstore. And then folks can get a little bit clearer.
How, how do I coach my team? What does that even look like? You know, you’re building that culture and that’s going to be very empowering for folks. There’s also various leadership development firms that have newsletters, they have, you know, free programming and small sessions to introduce you to things.
Sometimes you can just look at the syllabi. The agendas of various conferences and reach out to some of the people who have spoken there or about to speak. And even if you can’t make it to the conference, sometimes they’ll be very open to speak to you, share some resources with you. I find the space is very supportive, right?
Cause we’re all about developing each other. So you, you, you know, if you have some questions and chat, GPT is also very helpful. Something like AI assistance, any augmentation, sometimes people will use perplexity. ai. So you can get a lot of your questions answered pretty quickly with some of this assistance.[00:26:00]
Porschia: Those are all great suggestions. So what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve seen people have with leadership at work?
Vik: It’s about prioritization, management, time management, taking care of your health, right? There is a constant feeling that I’m on an island and I’m running really fast, you know, just to keep up sort of treading water.
So it’s hard to be strategic sometimes for these folks and these things, you know, it’s just a natural ebb and flow of volume, right? Resource constraints and the, just the extent of the uncertainty in the world. But also just. A cultural norm, I think, of just, in this day and age, just keep pushing yourself until you’re tired.
And I think that’s a paradigm we have to shift, right? We shouldn’t just push ourselves to we’re tired. We should stop before we’re [00:27:00] tired.
Porschia: That was a drop the mic moment. It’s my opinion,
Vik: at least, you know, take a break.
Porschia: Huh. Yeah. Yeah. I find, and I’ve experienced this personally, but a lot of our clients are what I like to call ambitious professionals and seasoned executives, and they’ve been going, going, going past their limits of tired and, you know, eventually generally experience some burnout from that.
So I think it’s great that you are Cognizant of that. And I really like that whole idea of stopping before you’re tired.
Vik: Yeah, that’s a micro moment, you know, because our bodies and brains are conditioned to keep stretching that moment. We can get better and better not being tired for longer. That’s what we’ve been doing our whole lives.
So we’re just stretching and stretching and stretching, but that’s supposed to be in case of emergency, not every day.
Porschia: Right. Right.
Vik: So now we should build in those micro minutes. You know, I [00:28:00] often tell my executives I’m working with, if you’re really late to a meeting, you can be another minute or two late, but dump the old, start fresh, you know, do two minutes of mindfulness.
It’s so good for your brain, right? Otherwise you’re, the research shows that you start off blue green in the morning. If you have meeting after meeting after meeting with no break, it’s dark purple by the end of the day, your brain. Whereas if you take micro breaks throughout the day, it stays blue green.
You know, and that’s, that’s the healthy zone. So we’re just creating more risk of Alzheimer’s and that kind of thing. If we’re pushing ourselves too far.
Porschia: Agreed. Agreed. So tell us more about extra M coaching and consulting.
Vik: Yeah. It’s for extraordinary millennials of But of course you know, I’ve kind of branched out centennials and all kinds of folks, lots of senior leaders will also come to me if they’re trying to get some help with working with their millennial leaders.
But the focus is one on one group coaching, training, [00:29:00] facilitation, speaking. I’ve written a book on how to coach yourself for young leaders. And so a lot of my work is around that, around self coaching, around augmented self coaching now with AI and things like that. And I’ve really been grateful for a nice range.
And I work with diplomats. I work with the founders, lots of government folks in the past, academia, finance people, lawyers, technologists, consultants. So I’ve had a good time so far.
Porschia: Yeah. Tell us about your coaching program.
Vik: Yes, so I do this twice a year. It’s called Design Your Epic Life. It’s a mix of life planning and design thinking.
And the goal is just in a couple of weeks, folks meet once a week in a small group. And in a couple of weeks you’ll have a life plan. Some actionable plan you can carry forward, you can revisit. And it’s comprised of your values, your strengths. We do a number of different assessments. You work together [00:30:00] and it’s kind of a comprehensive program.
It’s an adaptation from something I used to do as a VIP immersive for some of my clients, where they would maybe go on a road trip or something. I’d spend the whole day with them on the phone and we would build this map out. And I found that this new approach is really accessible for folks around the world.
It’s very cost effective too. And we’ve had a lot of fun. We launched it in January. So we’ll be doing it twice a year.
Porschia: Great. Well, we’ll be providing a link to your website and social channels in our show notes so people can find you online. But what is the best way for someone to get in touch with you?
Vik: Yeah, that’s great. But we can throw on my website and on LinkedIn would be good as well. And I can also give you an email address folks want. And for your listeners, we can do 50 percent off on the group program if you like.
Porschia: Right. Great. I’m sure everyone will appreciate that. So I like to ask other coaches, Vic what is your [00:31:00] definition of career success?
Vik: Yeah. I think it’s about just kind of setting a goal and then making reasonable efforts to move towards that goal. That’s just kind of how I think of it. And at this stage of my life, that goal is about. Really amplifying the impact of others. So how can I really encourage the service mindset and the people that I work with?
A lot of folks I work with are very successful. You know, some I’m thinking one person just sold his business for a hundred million. Right. And so now they’re wondering what to do with all that. And so I’m really grateful for a chance to be able to. Just guide or assist somebody and thinking through what matters to them.
How are they going to look back at this? So success is, you know, meeting people where they are and then helping them take a couple steps forward at the pace that they want.
Porschia: I love that. So now I want to ask your final question that we ask [00:32:00] all of our guests. How do you think executives or professionals can get a positive edge in their career?
Vik: I think by even doing something like this, right, you’ve got this great program for folks. They’re developing themselves. They’re listening. They’re taking tidbits when they can and applying them in practice, right? It’s great to listen, but we have to actually apply the stuff and and my own research from my book and looking at a lot of high performers, I think.
You know, and something Tim Ferriss says to about 60 percent of the people he interviewed also had this mindfulness practice. And if you don’t like mindfulness, you can do daydreaming, creative daydreaming, creative visualization, but something where you’re priming yourself in the morning and at night, or you know, both preferably, but if you can only do one, that’s fine.
But some kind of positive priming where you’re anchoring yourself to your best future. Right. And you’re, you’re just, you know, the animal research says we’re going to get to our goal better if we’re running away from [00:33:00] something we don’t want and we’re running towards something we really want. So we want to create that visual, like, well, where have I been?
And let me have gratitude for that, you know, and maybe there’s some stories of people that didn’t quite make it. And you can remember that that’s not where I want to go. And then where do I want to go? And who are those role models? And can I kind of visualize that? So just that minute or two Priming, setting an intention before a big meeting, you know, giving yourself a chance to just daydream about it is going to allow you to improve your focus.
And it really could make the biggest difference. I would say it’s a huge edge.
Porschia: I agree. So Vic, you have shared a lot of wisdom with us today, and I’m sure that our listeners can use it to be more confident in their careers and with their leadership. We appreciate you being with us.
Vik: Oh, thank you so much.
Great questions, Portia. Appreciate it. [00:34:00]
