Leadership For Smart People With Adam Quiney
Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments
There is leadership and then there is leadership for smart people. What is the difference and why does it matter? Joining John Livesay on the show to enlighten us about this is Adam Quiney, a coach for the Smartest People In The Room. Smart, brilliant people often feel bored when they lack challenge or have too much of it; they fear looking stupid though they shouldn’t, and they tend to act condescendingly. Being a smart person yourself possessing these qualities, how do you lead other smart people in your team? One advice Adam gives is, you can’t think your way into your heart. Tune in to this episode where Adam discusses leadership for smart people. Enjoy!
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Leadership For Smart People With Adam Quiney
Our guest is Adam Quiney. He said, “The goal is not to get rid of your concerns and resolve them, but instead learn how to dissolve them.” Adam works with smart people who sometimes struggle with boredom and the questions around, “Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?” Adam says he learned firsthand that we cannot think our way into our heart. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Adam Quiney who is an Executive Leadership Coach specializing in working with the smartest people in the room. A former Software Developer and Attorney, Adam learned the hard way about the costs that come from keeping your heart safe and chasing after external rewards to feel whole and complete. From love, Adam is connection, passion, presence, wit, and brilliance. From fear, he is awkward, robotic, apathetic, irrelevant and arrogant. He learned to embrace all these parts of himself and works with others to do the same in their own lives. Living with his beautiful wife and their two dogs, one of which is a cat, in Victoria, BC, he is a man on a mission to bring the world to a more inspired and fully-expressed place. Adam, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. My bio sounds so cool as you read it.
I try to put a little emotion in everything in storytelling. Before we get into what you’re doing now, I love to ask guests to take us back to their own story of origin. You can go back as far as childhood, high school, college, whatever it is. At one point, you decided you wanted to be in the software world and a lawyer. That’s an interesting combination. Usually, it’s one or the other. You decide where you want to tell the beginning of your story for us.
I’ll start us at software, how I got to law, and then into what I do. You can interrupt me at any point if it’s too long or questions or whatever. It was sequential service. In software, I was working in that field for about five years. What I was doing was getting good at controlling all the variables that would come into the space. I was a project manager at this point and I would get everything handled. I managed to control the world at large. That meant I could get most of my work done in about three hours. The remaining five hours of my day, because you got to be seated in your seat, I would spend surreptitiously getting stoned, working with a rear view mirror above my monitors so I could see if people are coming up, and working madly on a whole bunch of other projects.
I was very committed and driven to do work. I’m very A-type. I was siloing my life and not a model employee by any stretch of the imagination, although I was sophisticated in making it seem as though that was what I was. I could create this appearance for someone doing things well. Underneath all that, what was happening was I was getting more and more righteous about what I was doing. It was like, “I’m doing this because I’m not getting challenged enough at work.” That would then have me spend more time at work and less time doing this other stuff I’m doing over here that’s not so good. That was the point where I decided, “I’m going to leave this career. I’m going to study something new. I’m going to take on law and I’m going to practice that field.”
I went back to school for that. One of the things about it was I was surrounded by smart people who had thought a lot about everything that they had to say. At first, that was thrilling. As I learned more about law which is fascinating to study, you’re learning about the operating system that society runs on top of along with all its bugs and how you hack it. The theory of attorney, I found very noble. You’re like Atticus Finch standing for someone when everyone in society has turned their back on them. The practice of it, I found very opportunistic, quite cutthroat, very capitalistic. The highest ideal was not the truth. It was being right.
[bctt tweet=”Concerns don’t get resolved; they get dissolved.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The path I found myself on, I’ve noticed a lot of people around me, and those that were already doing this work was about getting better at running everything through your head and at shutting down your heart. They would say things to us like, “It’s important to be able to empathize with the client or with the person on the other side of the table so that you know where they’re coming from, but then you got to put that away so that you can formulate the strongest legal arguments.” I felt concerned a little bit as I was doing this. I couldn’t find attorneys who loved what they did or didn’t feel like they loved it.
It’s shocking. My many friends, my sister, and a lot of people go through the process, it’s not easy for most. Even if it is, it’s somewhat tedious. It’s the thing that I hear. It’s emotionally draining if you’re a divorce attorney and you’re dealing with that every day. What kind of law were you going to specialize in or did you specialize?
Initially, my thinking was intellectual property because it’s interesting to me and my background was software. I was like, “That’d be cool and a good fit.” With about a year left of law school, I was clear I was going to finish, practice law, ride the bar, and do all that. I was also clear, “I don’t think this is the profession for me,” for all of the reasons I’ve mentioned. I wasn’t looking to, “How do I find my niche in law and push that forward?” I was like, “I’m going to find a place to work while I build this new thing called coaching.” The cool thing about the place I ended up was I worked with this guy who is cool. We got along super well. His background prior to law was he was a commercial fisherman.
We ended up doing a whole bunch of maritime law, along with a lot of general practice. Some corporate, wills and estate, family law, but then a lot of law where I was at the north end of the island I live on, which is about an eight-hour drive up there. I’m defending a fisherman who had bagged up some seals in his fishing net, dragged them, and let them go to try to tell them, “Don’t eat the fish out of my net,” which is innocent in a way. It’s very old-world thinking. Nowadays, the seal goes where it wants to go and you do not touch it. That’s the law. I learned all these interesting weird facts about seals, the migratory patterns of them, and stuff like that. It’s weird.
You’re doing that and then you still are feeling a little dissatisfied. You knew going in this wasn’t for you. You call yourself an obsessive perfectionist on your website, which I find fascinating. A lot of people will own up to being a perfectionist, but you layered on obsessive. I would think that would make you a great lawyer because or even a software person because you’re checking and double-checking every detail and don’t want to be surprised in court or what have you. As a person, what I’m hearing you say is it gets you too much in your head and you’re never present with anybody.
I love that you picked out both of those words. The way it occurs to me these days and what I can distinguish about it is I learned somewhere along the lines growing up from parents who loved me very much and wanting to instill a good work ethic that what was natural, what I would do innately wasn’t quite enough. There was always a little bit more and a little bit further I needed to go. I learned from there not to trust that part of me that’s like, “This is good enough. I’m happy with this. This is finished. I don’t want to do anymore.” On the one hand, that is a great piece of work ethic to learn to always go one step further. When that becomes automatic and always on, it becomes less this good thing and more like I can’t trust that intuitive part of myself that says, “This is fine. You’ve done enough. This doesn’t need to go one step further.”
Leadership for Smart People: How You Let Go of Being OK Being Alone
As time went on, I got better and better at strategizing to ensure that the problem with me of not going far enough didn’t come to light. It became this pattern that was always like, “Don’t trust what’s natural for you, Adam. Go one step further.” That becomes two steps further and then three steps further. That part of me that’s very obsessive and perfectionistic shows up often when I’m up to something that has high stakes and I’m worried. I’m afraid it’s not going to be good enough and then that’s my easy go-to. It was like, “Here’s the solution to your fears, Adam. Spend the next five years making this perfect.”
I know for myself, I was aware of its tendency to keep people at bay. It’s through our vulnerability that we’ve let people in and drop the mask and people can relate to us. We think, “I have to look perfect. I have to be perfect. If I make a mistake, then no one’s going to want to be my friend or love me.” Ironically, the opposite is true. I’m fascinated by what you said about the law, “They need to be right over truth,” and this compulsive need that becomes, “I’d rather be right than happy.” Flipping that is, “Would you rather be happy versus right?” If you ask that to some people, they struggle with the answer sometimes, which fascinates me. It’s not an obvious choice to be happy. I think it’s because their self-worth is so tied into needing to be perfect and being right all the time. You’re the expert who can probably answer that in a way that I want to get your insight on what that is.
You’ve drawn it out beautifully. That’s so accurate. First of all, when we ask people that question, “Would you rather be right or happy?” Some people, the strategy they’ve learned in their life is always come from their heart, which is great until there’s a time when you need to come from your head. There’s no right way to be. What we ideally want is the most fluidity and the most range available to us. The people that question will have the most impact on are the people like me who learned to operate entirely from your head. You never have to be with the messiness of heartbreak or getting intimacy wrong, which is hilarious thought in itself, getting it wrong.
When we ask someone like me or my people, “Would you rather be right or happy?” Where we go to answer that question is not the place that would make a difference, which is our heart, we’d go up into our head. We’re like, “What does it mean to be right? What is happiness really?” We started doing this calculus and it’s like “None of the juice that’s going to set someone like me free is up here in my head.” That’s just doing more of what I’m already doing. Whereas if there’s ever a way or access to get down to that person’s heart and have them be with what that question means. It might almost be devastating for them to see what is available is so much richer. It’s hard to get there from our head. We can’t think our way into our heart.
That’s great line. That’s going to be a great tweet, “We can’t think our way into our heart.”
I’ve tried a lot.
[bctt tweet=”Brilliant people fear looking stupid.” username=”John_Livesay”]
A lot of people joke around like, “I don’t want to be the smartest person in the room.” You have doubled down on this concept of, “I only want to work with the smartest people.” There has to be some confidence that you can hang with those kinds of people because smart people, in my experience, tend to test other people, the earning the right I call it, “You got to be smart as I am before taking advice from you.” Having that niche is fascinating. With your legal and software backgrounds, you’ve proven that you can certainly be book-smart and achieve. What are some of the biggest challenges that you see smart people struggle with?
We’re talking about the quality of brilliance. It’s the word I would use to describe it. What brilliant people fear underneath it all is occurring or perhaps even being stupid or looking stupid. The most generous people in the world tend to be preoccupied with fears about being selfish. That’s less of a concern for me because part of what I bring to the table is brilliance. It’s the absence of that, which is more frightening. From a fear of looking or being stupid, brilliant people tend to create 1 of 2 or often both flavors of strategy. One is knowing all the answers and be brilliant at arguing to prove why I’m right. When someone else occurs smart, condescend and bring them down so at least you’re below me. All amazing traits for a lawyer, you can probably see already.
The other strategy that they tend to move towards is getting, “I can admit that I don’t know. When I do, I stop until I do know.” They go to this point where they’re like, “I don’t know.” The solution then to not knowing is, “I need to read more books, figure out more answers, and then I can get back over to this other side where I’m the smart person and I can start moving forward.” The trouble with both of those is that what tends to set brilliant people completely free is a willingness to look stupid. They don’t have to keep score and they don’t have to pause every time they get stuck and figure out what’s the right answer, especially in areas of things like intimacy where there isn’t a right answer. If there was a right answer, there’s no longer intimacy. Now, there’s a right answer. It doesn’t exist whatever the counter. Here’s me being stupid.
It goes a little bit there. You’re looking for an answer where it doesn’t exist. If you find it, then you’re no longer being vulnerable and connecting. Let’s talk about this concept of being bored. If you’re someone who happens to be above average intelligence, school might be boring to you because it’s going too slow, or you master something. A lot of entrepreneurs say, “I only like launching something. I don’t like the real running of it. I need a new idea. I get bored quickly.” Some people get bored in their relationships. On the flip side, I’ll never forget my dad who was an accountant that he went on to become a carpenter. He was someone who was happy with very little stimulus.
I remember once saying to him, “Here are all these things you can do in case you get bored.” He looked at me surprised and went, “I never get bored.” I was like, “I need a lot of options. Can I watch Netflix? Is there a book to read? Is there an activity to do?” We are different in that regard. This concept of everybody wants to have their phone with them because if we didn’t stay online for five minutes, we’re not constantly entertained or we didn’t want to be bored. How do you help people, even if they’re not brilliant, not get bored with whatever is going on whether it’s in their career or relationship?
I want to pause to say one thing. Remember that, “Condescend and bring people down below me so that I get to feel brilliant?” As I’ve learned to let go of the safety that provides me and be with my own stupidity or, “natural human, not have everything figure doutedness,” I’ve learned everyone has the capacity for brilliance. What tends to get in the way of that is the lens through which we relate to them. “They’re smart. They’re dumb,” which then means that dumb person never gets to be smart because I’ve already labeled them.
Leadership For Smart People: For some people, the strategy they’ve learned in their life has always come from their heart, which is great until there’s a time when you need to come from your head.
It’s like creativity in a way. If you were told you can’t sing or you can’t paint, then you’d think you’re not creative at all. The same thing with brilliance. I may not be brilliant at everything, but there’s usually something we’re brilliant at. It comes easy sometimes that we don’t give it credit.
The question was, what do we do with boredom?
How do you help your clients, whether you’re speaking to an audience? I know you’re also a speaker or you help skilled people not get bored whether it’s financial professionals or CEOs. They get a little addicted sometimes to the adrenaline rush of a new challenge every day. When that’s not happening, they get bored.
One thing that I find often with people with a lot of brilliance is they have sharp learning curves. They can pick something up. It’s like snowboarding, where you become intermediate very fast, unlike skiing that takes a little bit longer. Brilliant people tend to have their sharp learning curves, which is thrilling at first because they’re like, “I’m awesome at something,” then comes the plateau, which is not that fun. The plateaus where we’re trying to integrate, learning stuff, doing drills or practices. It’s not sexy, exciting, and integrating the way it’s meant to. If you stick through the plateau, then you get the next upswing. That tends to be how growth works. What I noticed with brilliant people is we all have muscles in being with different aspects of life. Brilliant people like to hang out in that early sharp learning curve because it feels good and they feel they’re ahead of the game.
When things level off, that occurs to them like boredom. It occurs to them like, “Something is not right. This isn’t the way I’m supposed to be.” The opportunity often for those people is rather than run away and jump into the next thing where they can then feel the comfort of being in the new sharp learning curve or being in the next start of the relationship, “What am I trying to avoid in this moment? What is it about this flat plateau period that is edgy for me to be with? What is it about boredom that I can’t be with?” If they can start to look there, that’s where there could be a real breakthrough. Those people as a leader could start to be able to not just be with that sexy early starting point, but they could be the leader who also helps people get through the plateau, and then to the next thing. It broadens their range tremendously.
That leads into your book, which is called Leadership for Smart People: How You Let Go of Being OK Being Alone. That concept of being alone at the top is something a lot of people don’t think about when they struggle to get to the top.
[bctt tweet=”Always go one step further.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The thing that’s fascinating for me about these people we’re talking about is they’re almost never alone, but they’re often quite lonely. They’re very good at figuring out social dynamics. What’s the right thing for me to say to this person that’s going to trigger the response for them that makes them feel liked? They’re playing this game of a connection via chess, “If I move this here and that there, you feel liked and I get a smile from you. I occur as the life of the party,” but there’s no actual connection underneath it. It’s just the artifice of connection. They’re surrounded by people and if you’re like, “It’s lonely at the top.” They’re like, “I don’t feel that. I’m always around people.” At a deeper level, they’re like, “It never feels like anyone truly knows me. I never feel truly gotten.” That’s the dichotomy between how these people show up and occur to us versus what’s going on underneath that beautiful surface.
The people who want to have you come speak to their organization or people who hire you to coach them through these transformations of being bored and isolated, do you find that there’s an event that happens to realize they can’t keep going the way they’re going? It’s like a mini wake-up call for them, whether it’s their own illness, a divorce or being laid off that wakes them up.
Yes, for most of us. The way I would assert how life goes is we get the training around us like my parents gave me lovingly. It wasn’t like they were being malicious. We developed the strategies to overcome the deficiencies we’ve been trained exists in ourselves. We use those strategies, hone them, and get better at them. What’s happening is I’m creating this life that is a response to me being better and never having to feel stupid. That’s awesome, but there’s a cost to any strategy. It’s resisting something about myself rather than owning my fullest heart and expression.
Over time, that cost becomes more and more pronounced and the payoffs of the strategies diminish. It was like, “I can get another $100,000, but who cares? I can buy another Ferrari, but that’s not doing it anymore.” It’s like a painkiller, we need more to numb the same degree of existential pain we’re feeling. Usually, there’s a moment where people have a breakdown, get an illness, lose a loved one, or life does something that slaps them. It was like, “It’s fleeting. This is not a long ride. It’s precious and fragile. Is this the way you want to keep going?” That’s when they’re almost open a little bit briefly to allow something to make a difference for them.
Also, the concept of not comparing themselves to other people is where I see a lot of people struggling who need your help. “I have a private jet, but somebody else has a bigger private jet.” You’re like, “Are you kidding me?” That game never stops. Part of that comparison game is, “I care about what other people think about me. Therefore, I can’t ever be seen as stupid. If I let go a little bit of what other people think of me, what I’m judging myself with is so harsh and critical that it’s exhausting and draining.”
My observation of watching you work with people and interacting with you personally is, you get people to the place where they’re free of not only worrying about what other people think, but not worrying about trying to prove something to themselves anymore to compensate for whatever hole might be inside that, “I need to be the best of the best based on my family upbringing or trying to prove something to myself that I’m enough, that I could then be successful.” Whatever is driving them, it’s not from a place of expression. It’s from a place of emptiness. You get people to still stay a top performer but the motivation that gets them up and working is completely sourced from a different place. Would that be accurate?
Leadership For Smart People: What tends to set brilliant people completely free is a willingness to look stupid.
Yes. If I already 100% was able to trust that I’m experienced as brilliant by the rest of the world, or generous, spiritual, humility or whatever the thing is, the need to buy the next bigger jet, win the next case, or make you smaller than me, all of that falls away. The funny thing is when people first come to me, they’re like, “Help me get the big jet. We have to meet them there.” That’s the concern. Over time, they start to discover as we do that work that’s way down closer to the heart, core, soul or whatever we want to call it, it’s not that these other concerns get resolved, they’re dissolved. It’s like, “Why was I even caring about buying the next big jet?” It’s just, “I don’t need to.” It’s no longer there to resolve some pain that’s undistinguished.
Concerns don’t get resolved, they’re dissolved, especially if you tend to be somebody who’s a problem solver. You go, “I got to resolve this conflict. I got to resolve this problem.” You’re like, “No, we just need to dissolve the whole need to be right as a starting point.” What a great little soundbite, resolve, dissolve. That’s great. Any last thoughts you want to leave us with before we tell people how they can find you and explore hiring you as a speaker or coach?
The big one for me is to reiterate that idea that at some point, we learned there’s a deficiency in ourselves. We learned to rely on the fix for the deficiency to get us to where we’ve gotten in life. The reason it’s so hard to trust in ourselves is because we’ve built up a life based around avoiding a deficiency. We’re afraid that, “If I stop buying the planes or whatever, I’m going to lose all my drive. The reason I have all my drive is because I’m worried, I’m not enough” or some flavor of that. I get that. I can completely relate and empathize with it. We can try to trust intellectually, but we can only arrive at it through practice for getting supported. As we get deeper into being able to trust that who we are is sufficient and in fact is tremendous infinite possibility, everything starts to shift and it’s not a free ride. We’re letting go of stuff that’s got us far in life. Sometimes there are consequences to that, especially in the short-term.
You’re the perfect sherpa to help people get through those fears of what that unknown might look like when they finally realize they can’t keep going like this indefinitely. Is That All There Is song comes to mind. You make the world and anyone who’s interacted with you a much better place. Thank you so much for coming on the show and for being my friend.
It’s an honor to share a space with you. I love who you are and what you bring into the world. It’s cool to get to share the space with you.
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Tags: boredom, brilliance, happy, heart, learning curve, strategy