Welcome to Resilient Entrepreneurs, the podcast where we speak with business owners and entrepreneurs from around the world and from all walks of life in the hope that something you hear will leave your business a little richer. We're your co-hosts, Vicki and Laura from Two Four One Branding.
And today's guest is Aneace Haddad, a global nomad and Executive Coach who's spent over 15 years coaching leaders of multinational companies. He's a certified Transformational Leadership facilitator, he's a professional certified coach and he's passionate about mindful leadership, resilience leadership, culture change, personal transformation, self-improvement, and team performance.
Aneace wrote the book The Eagle that Drank Hummingbird Nectar and that has been compared to The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin Sharma. So we are really keen to get into finding out more about that novel. Welcome, welcome, welcome Aneace.
Thank you, thank you, very glad to be here. Wonderful meeting you both.
Yeah, same. Thank you for joining us. So tell us Aneace, I'd love to just go back a little bit of time and learn a little about who you are. where you came from? So can you tell us a little bit about your backstory, your childhood, where you came, where you grew up?
Wow, a long story. So I'm what they call a third culture kid, if you've heard that term, it's not a term we had when I was growing up. It means that you grew up in a different world from your parents and you create your own culture. So my father's from Iraq, my mother's American, Scottish origin a couple 100 years ago, I was born in Texas where my mother's family is from, and then, but by the time I was 21 I'd lived half my life overseas, I already spoke French fluently, so I've lived all my life in a very kind of moving environment with different cultures.
Originally I was a programmer, so that's my personal side, the professional side, I was a programmer originally and became a tech entrepreneur, built a payment software company in France, in the south of France in Provence. Grew it to 30 countries, sold it in 2007 and I thought that I was going to be a serial entrepreneur because that was the only thing that you would do after doing that, and then I discovered what I was most proud of was my people so I was quite surprised at that.
I had people that worked for me that went off and became CEOs, CTOs, CFOs of other companies and I found that I was a lot more passionate about that and proud of that than the technology we’d created, the patents and all tha. That quickly sent me into mentoring, mentoring startup founders at the time and then that quickly became coaching, leadership facilitation. So it was a major transformation at 47,48,49,50 and a completely new and different career than what I was doing for the first half of my life.
It sounds very meaningful.
Yeah.
Very fulfilling. And the novel is actually a fictionalised version of that transition, capturing the difficulty that we go through, especially later in life, with the identities that we've created for ourselves and then letting go of that and shifting into a new phase, resisting that shift until you don't have any other option, all that messiness involved in transformation. So the novel was fictionalised, I wanted to write it, I'd written two payment software books, payment systems books 25 something years ago when I was running my company, and I didn't want to write this one as a ‘how to’ book, that felt boring so I made a novel. And that allowed me to play with it in a much, much deeper way than just saying, “Here's my story”, so it was very difficult. It was a very, very difficult process but rewarding.
How long did it take from when you first started writing the book to getting it published?
Oh, oh, three or four years. I rewrote it two, three times. I had three or four different writing coaches and I still remember one of them, her voice is still in my head and it's in the book but through other people and she'd be saying, “You're teaching again, this section you're teaching”. And I’d tell her “No it's a story”, and she’d say “You're teaching, reread it” and I’d reread ir and go, “Yeah, okay, I'm teaching”. And then I'd have to pull back and really dig deep as to what was the experience of that moment. So it was a challenging process to get that teaching voice out of my head and recognise it faster. But that's served me in my coaching because now I'm a lot more comfortable coaching without telling people what to do, which is already a huge part of coaching but there are always little things that stick in there, that little.. little bugs that are still going.
I do find that the more curious we are in life and about other people, the less we come across as teaching. And I've only become aware of that recently because I have exactly that issue when I'm talking to people and I think I know the answer, I know how I can help them, or I know someone I can put them in touch with and it all feels so helpful. But actually, it's not helpful, it's much better just to sit back and be curious and ask them what their experience is. And it's a very different way of communicating.
Absolutely. All of my work with very senior executives, the vast majority of work is in that space and it's because we build our careers, our value comes from the answers that we can provide.
Our sense of worth is having answers and being able to fix problems, that's the first thing that comes in. And then at some point, something shifts at very senior levels where you start going, “Okay, maybe my worth is somewhere else”. So I encapsulate that into the idea of your value and your worth is now in the questions that you ask, as opposed to the answers that you have. But it's that sense of deep worth, the worthiness that's so linked to solving problems and having answers and it's what got us to where we get to at a certain point and letting go that is very difficult.
What do you find is the main issue that a lot of your clients deal with?
I think that's a huge one. Linked to that, and it's in the novel, but it's not presented as ‘here's a big problem, you need to solve this’, it's woven through the novel as the protagonist and other characters discover this. Another element that I find is, this is also in the novel, it was a personal discovery, empowerment is such a buzzword and leaders feel like they're empowering their people and I have a story in there that near the end of running my company I was doing a leadership retreat, we were doing a ropes course, you know where you're walking through the trees and you've got your harness and all that, and I was paired up with a young lady, we were supposed to go up to the top of a platform and then the facilitator tells one of you to put on a blindfold. And so the facilitator pointed at me, so I had to wear a blindfold and you're supposed to let your partner guide you across this rickety bridge that has holes in it and all that. And she was paralysed, she didn't want to move, she was scared, and I'm telling her “Come on, you can do it, just pull me across”. And then my Type A personality kicks in when I see that we're not moving. So I squeeze in front of her with a blindfold on, I have her hold my harness in the back and I managed to get us both across by feeling for the the empty planks and all that, I get to the other side, I'm proud I got the job done, I look down and people are clapping. And the facilitator, I still remember her face, she was furious. When I came down she said “What the hell was that?” I said, “I got the job done, I got us both across”. And she said, “You deprived your partner of the opportunity to find her own courage. And you deprived yourself of the opportunity to learn what it means to truly trust someone else”. And that settled on me for the next day or so and I came up with the term ‘courage vampire’.
And we all do it in business and leading companies, we do it, we don't realise it but we step in, even if we don't know how to do the thing we step in and get it done, because that's what we've always done. But then it deprives others of their own opportunity to tap into courage.
I think that happens so much more often than any of us are conscious of because I'm even thinking as a parent, that’s probably something I do a lot and don't even think about, just get it done, let’s get it done, get the thing done, right.
How old are your kids?
I have a 10 year old and a 15 year old, they’re at that age, they’re stepping out into the world and beyond, right.
Exactly, there's a lot in my book in comparison with parenthood. I found through comments from senior executives, I found that we have a subconscious way or an unconscious way of bringing our parenting energy into work. So as your kids grow your parenting energy shifts, you don't parent the same way. Some of us do and we really mess up with our adult children who don't want to talk to us anymore, because we keep telling them what to do.
But it's a fascinating thing to see senior executives who have teenage kids, and they're bringing KPI type things into their work, because that's what works at home and then you see board members who have adult children and they don't do that anymore, because they know that you have to.. you have to inspire, it's a very different kind of leadership.
Is that leadership taught? Is that something that you can teach? Or does it have to be found by the leader through coaching?
I don't like teaching anything. So I tell people, you already know this, you're struggling with it as a parent, you've gone through transitions already as a parent, you're not parenting your teenagers the way you parented them when they were three or four years old. So your capacity to lead, to parent, has changed. And in the same way, you change it, you dig, it's exactly that same analogy as on the ropes course, you find that, you find that courage, that wisdom from within. And my work now after going through all that process, it really is constantly checking myself when I'm working with a group. Do I truly believe that they can get through whatever it is they're getting through, and as long as I have that, it works. As soon as that starts to drift away a bit, I need to pull myself back on track and remind myself these are powerful people, they can get through anything and then it does, they take off.
It's that trust, I think that trust is what is so key. And entrepreneurship is such an interesting thing because often entrepreneurs start off as solo entrepreneurs, and then they start building a team and they suddenly have people working for them and then they start scaling and it starts to take off and the years go on, and they find themselves in a leadership position but they didn't set out to be in a leadership position. And often, they have to find their way as a leader and it can be really, really challenging when you're bumbling along and you've got some other people bumbling along with you and trying to figure it all out. What advice would you give to someone who's right there before they're heading into having a big team? So when they're just starting out, maybe they've got their first few employees and they're trying to figure out how to be a leader, how to lead a team? What advice would you give somebody in the startup phase?
Oh, my. I don't like giving advice. What insights maybe.. so my insight was… everything changed when we just got over 30 people. We became a big company, big company in people's minds. So we all of a sudden had silos we had.. I couldn't understand it because I thought we were still a startup until we were 70, 80, 100 people, and there's something, when I talk to other founders I've encountered, you all have probably I'm sure you've encountered some shift that happens after a certain number of people, it's not a very big number, and all of a sudden the leadership comes in because you're not just a band of friends that are getting fun stuff done. You're now running a company and it's very, very different.
If I were to give advice, it would be to really know your strengths and your weaknesses and find other people around you that fit in - for me it was finding a fantastic CFO who eventually became COO and then when we separated the chairman and CEO positions, he became CEO and I was Executive Chairman, it was having that financial and operations capability, which I've never liked, it’s never been something I'm interested in. I think the biggest thing would be to be aware of that and find those people, that's simple to say, everybody kind of knows that, I think.
It's simple to say, not always easy to do, that’s the thing. It's not always easy to do because often, we want to hire people that are like us, that are like-minded and want to enjoy the ride with us. But it really is better to find the people that are thinking a little bit differently, that have expertise in the areas you don't, and then it might be a little bit easier working together like that. I think it's Daniel Priestley that says a small company from one to 12 is quite easy and everyone is one big team working together, as soon as you hit number 13, it starts to really change. And then from 13 to 40 it's like everyone's out in the wild, trying to figure things out, and it's a little wild. And then something changes after 40, you start to become teams and you have an executive board and there's a much more organised organisation. But yeah, that in between part is the part where it's a little a little crazy. And some people never want to get to that and that's fine and happy with the small lifestyle business with a small team and that's amazing and others want to go big, right?
I think that's a wonderful way of putting it and I realise now that it probably had changed at 12 or 13, I only realised it at 30. My nose was to the grindstone and I was just running around getting things done, so when I say 30 that was when I was aware of it, it probably did occur at 13-14 people.
Hopefully all those employees weren't knocking on your door saying something's got to change. Come on, why aren’t we doing it this way? And you see a lot of leaders almost ruining their creation, their own business because they're not tuned into those things that you're talking about. If there was some advice that someone had given to you or steered you in a certain direction early on, would there be anything?
Yeah, one big advice is to realise that the runway ahead, I don't mean the runway in terms of finances and all that, but there's still potential for a lot in the future. When I was running my company I was under a sense of, “This is my only really big shot in life. This is it! it has got to work. It's do or die. If it fails, I failed my life, there's nothing else, I'm not going to have another chance”, and that's a weird thing to get stuck into in your 30s and early 40s.
And then it was subsequent to that, that I started to realise, actually there's a lot more and it can go in many different directions. One exercise that I do now with people is ‘Who will I be at 100’. And in elementary school in Singapore, when my stepson was in elementary school, we were there for a parent teachers meeting some 7-8 years ago and there was this bulletin board in front of one of the classrooms with, “Who will I be at 100” And it was amazing because it was something that I'd been asking myself and asking coachees, and it just hit me that we grow up in an environment where you work until 65, you retire and then you die. It's kind of unspoken, but it's kind of that. And they're growing up in an environment where they expect to live to 100 they're going to have lots of different careers and stuff. Their answers were funny, some of them said when I'm 100 I'll be dead. Someone else says I'm going to be a rock star. So they’re kids putting that in, but it seeps in and I think it relaxes the brain so you're not really like “I’ve got to make this work by the time I'm 30 otherwise it's too late”.
And what I really love about that is, the question is ‘Who will I be’, not ‘What will I do’.
Exactly.
That's a huge shift
Big shift. So it opens up a possibility I could have multiple identities, I could play with different things, I could be multiple different things over a lifespan. It's not fixed. It's not static.
Do you think this ties into the purpose conversation because I find that people at 40 and 50 and that was myself until recently, I felt a little stuck on my purpose. That I've already had that purpose but now I feel like there must be something more, I want to contribute more now that I'm at this stage of my life, and then this whole purpose question comes up. And it feels quite helpless if you can't answer that for yourself. And I wonder if because there's this image of it being a fixed thing, where if you don't find it, you missed it?
Yep. I like to have the brain relax as well, through questions like, “What's your purpose going to be in the next five years?”
Then, ironically, it feels like when you relax the brain it gets easier to see a deeper purpose that could last much longer, but you're not coming at it with tenseness, you're coming at it with a more relaxed brain.
Is that where your mindfulness leadership comes in?
This is all mindfulness, I don't usually call it mindfulness, it's being aware of where your thoughts are, relaxing your brain so that you can see, it also fits into the changes we have in our neurocircuitry in our late 40s, early 50s, where we have much more, we forget things, we forget where we put our car keys and stuff like that but we have more connections between the two hemispheres so we start to connect the dots easier. So there's a lot going on in the brain at that time and all of this fits into that because if you can relax your mind you can see those things, your intuition goes up, holistic thinking expands. If we stay focused the same way and we feel like the things that got us here we got to continue doing, it starts to feel like it's crashing, people hit burnout easier. So I think that purpose thing is... we're coming at purpose with a Type A personality of getting over that rickety bridge with a blindfold on or we come at purpose of, ‘Let me just see what comes up for me for the next few years’.
Do you buy into the “midlife crisis” thing?
Yeah. I think it's that same energy. It's exactly that same energy refocused, channelled in a different way. It's an energy that's coming at it from, “Oh my, I've reached the point in my life where I thought I would be in a completely different place, I didn't achieve what I wanted, my relationship isn't exactly what I'd wanted, I have friends that have gone much further, woe is me, what's my purpose going to be, how in the world am I going to be useful? My value is going down”. All of that stuff comes together but rather than going out and buying a sports car maybe I can channel it in a different way and, although sports cars are great too, in Singapore they're so expensive so I wouldn't do that, but it's that channelling of that energy that happens at that time in life.
Yeah it's interesting. And in another podcast they were talking about how happiness is you - so at your youngest you're the most happy and then you hit midlife where it's the good 30s and 40s and early 50s and you're most miserable. And then as you get older you get happier again. And I think a lot of people were down here, right in that midlife because it's also the time when you have the most pressure on you, financially, responsibility wise, you’ve got ageing parents and young kids to look after at exactly the same time, there's all these factors that make this time of life some of the most difficult and probably the most unhappy. It's a tough time and that's why I think the crisis comes in too, it's like, oh, I'm dealing with all of this and I'm not living any purpose, or I hate my job or it’s not what I want to be doing. Getting through that is the challenge.
It's a perfect storm that's happening right at that time of life.
And that brings me back to your book, which you describe as a bit of an autobiographical novel. It also sounds like a hero's journey. What's the essence there? Share with us more about the book.
The subtitle is, A novel about personal transformation and business leaders. So the whole story is on transformation. It comes from the angle that we don't go out and seek transformation for the sake of transformation because it's fun, we do it when we're really pushed into a corner and nothing else is working, and then bang something clicks and then it opens up.
One of the stories, so there is the protagonist, which is kind of me at 50, around 20% of the anecdotes in the book are real, most of it is fictional. And there's a story in the book about an Indian man, it's in Singapore. So there are a mix of cultures and all that. And one of the people in the book is the Managing Director of a textile factory in India, somebody I'd coached around 12 years ago. So he's in the book as well but fictionalised and he's facing fatalities in the factory. And he is struggling to figure out how do I deal with this, and he's brought in management consultants and all that and they've spent millions of dollars having all the safety stuff put in place, the regulations are all met and yet people are still dying. And so in a conversation, I asked him, How would you rate your commitment to safety from 1 to 10? He said, very, very high. And I said, Can you give me a number? He said, probably nine. So the conversation turned around to maybe that's why people are dying, what's missing? If your gut feel is nine, and you're not saying 10, what's missing? And then he blew up and he got angry, he said, You don't understand, many of my people aren't educated, I've got 1000s of people I can't be on everyone's back. That was his definition of a 10. I have to be on everyone's back and do it for them and make sure. He said when someone wants to get from one end of the shop floor to the other, it's very long, if a forklift is going by they'll jump on the front of the forklift. They know they're not supposed to do that, but I can't be on their backs. And then in our next session he was excited. He told me the story of an elderly janitor who had tripped and fallen and he stopped and took care of him, called the safety people to come check the man out and he took his jacket off, put it under his head. He told me all of that was nine out of 10, that's what I would normally do. Then he said, but then I went further. When the safety people said the man was fine, he just needed to go home and rest and stay off the leg for a few days. He said I got him in my car, which in India is not expected, the Managing Director would take the janitor in his car, he said I drove him home to his place, I helped him into his house, I made sure that his wife would make sure he doesn't get out of bed for a while, I had tea with both of them. And it was that, he wasn't seeking transformation but this question of what is a 10 out of 10 commitment to safety, something that he couldn't answer, there's no book that tells you what it is, he had to find for himself what that was, then things shifted because he showed, he modelled a behaviour of trying to find his own full commitment and connect with people as human beings. He never would have come at it through, “I want to transform and become a better leader”. It came because he had to. So the book has a lot of that in it, we go through that when we really have to.
I love that story so much because as leaders in really big organisations it's easy to step back and you step away and lose touch with the people that work with you. It's all about relationships, life is all about relationships and how do you build good strong, trustworthy relationships with people. That's what gets people behind your mission in your company. And probably the workers just seeing him care that much would want to take better care of themselves within the factory, look after each other and make sure somebody isn't jumping on the forklift because it was a risk, yeah wow.
That's a mantra that I use a lot, is An organisation at the end of the day is just a bunch of human beings creating value for other human beings. That's all it is. We get lost in the details of how we're creating value and we think that's the input, but really it's human beings creating value for other human beings.
So yeah, and I like it was Richard Branson that said, if you take care of your staff, they take care of the customers, it’s that mentality of the importance of the leader, looking after their own. Yeah, first.
Yep.
It’s all about caring and sharing, beautiful. Aneace, do you have a particular author or a podcast that you follow? Any favourites that you care to share or recommend to our audience?
I read quite an eclectic array, right now I've been reading things on neuroscience and the ageing brain. These aspects of the prefrontal cortex is getting slower so we're not processing information as fast as when we were young but we have all of these holistic connections so it compensates. I love that stuff.
Another book, I can't remember the name of it, is on freewill being an illusion, there's a whole area related to neuroscience and much more than neuroscience because there's a lot of things that impact what we feel is our freewill. But there's a very intriguing angle developing that freewill is just an illusion that we make up. I don't know what to make of that yet, I can kind of understand it from a biological and neurological standpoint but at the same time I see so much, it's like if you live as if the illusion is real, there's something much more effective in that lifestyle than just saying, Okay I don't have any freewill.
Yeah, this is not a pen. Yeah, I do not choose to go and make a cup of tea. I have no control over me. It's what all biologically driven or psychologically driven?
Yeah. The biology is deeply..so it's an interesting area that seems quite solid.
I think what I'm noticing is this appreciation for paradox a lot more than I did younger. So I'm reading things in those directions, I find those interesting. I need to be careful not to be drawn in, it feels like it could be a rabbit hole.
Very much. And they’re so deep those rabbit holes, so deep. And that self inquiry then leads to universal inquiry, is this real? Are all the paradigms that I've been living my life on, is that real? Is that true?
And I think that's a wonderful place to be as a senior leader, the ambiguity, the lack of answers, things that can't be easily answered. There's a quote by the Brazilian Julio Olalla, the founder of Ontological Coaching, which I love that ‘Knowledge is a love affair with answers. Wisdom is a love affair with questions.’ And it's that Latin element of a love affair with questions that there's something really juicy about that. Loving the paradox, and whoa, isn't this cool? And I think that's really the space today in this massive era of change, where senior leaders they will increasingly be living in that space. That's their role, asking the really hard paradoxical questions that don't have answers, but that help the company, help the organisation adapt and move and change and be more resilient through those difficult questions.
Isn't that the fun though? I think that is the most fun part of being in business is trying to go figure out something new that doesn't have an answer yet. It's being curious. Right, and you're going and finding it.
Yep. I love that. I love that.
And you mentioned resilience so of course we have to ask you, what is your definition of resilience?
I actually don't much like the word resilience anymore. I use it because I don't know what else to use there but resilience has an element of I bounced back from adversity, something bad happened to me and I bounced back. And what we're facing today is this constant onslaught of change, where it's no longer resilience of ‘Okay, here comes the big wave, let me steel myself and get through it. Ah, okay, I'm through the wave,’ because there's another wave. So it's more a sense of surfing the waves rather than constantly being battered by them. The resilience for me it feels like, I know it has that sense as well, both senses that I just described, but I think most people use resilience in that first manner as I need to bounce back from something bad that's happening. And my angle is maybe it's not bad, maybe it's just the way we're livin, maybe it's just life and we're just going through that. And I don't know what word to use on that. Resilience is the word that's there.
Aneace maybe we don't need a new word, maybe we just need a redefinition of the word. Let's start the movement, the new resilience movement - riding the wave.
Yeah, I have friends that work at the resilience company. It's called The Resilience Company. It's a coaching and facilitation organisation on resilience, and that's how they look at it. It's more that second version that they look at it.
Yeah, it's good advice for all of us to just surf the waves. Don't stand there and be battered by it. Because you're right, more waves are coming. It's just life. Life comes at you in waves. Sometimes you're on top sailing, having a great time and sometimes it sinks and you've got to ride with it. It's just life and business is like that, as well as personal life. So as strong leaders we’ve just got to keep riding the waves. Aneace, thank you so much. This has been an awesome conversation, I love talking to coaches like you. You always come so full of and I know you don't like the word advice, but there's advice in there, there’s lessons, there's stories, there's great ones to go back and listen to again and lots to learn from experience like yours, so thank you very much. We really appreciate your time.
Thank you. I loved the conversation thank you very much.
Same here. Take care.
