WAYNE BROWN: Hello, I’m your host, Wayne Brown, and welcome to the ET project. We’re delighted to be delivering this podcast for executive talent all over the world, whom we’re affectionately referring to as Team ET. Today, we’re chatting with our guest, Mr. Aaron Trahan. Aaron’s career began with a rapid ascent into leadership. Early in his professional life, he found himself navigating the challenges of leadership, often described as streaking through the proverbial fire holes. By the age of 30, Aaron had secured a senior executive leadership role, helping lead a billion-dollar publicly traded company, a remarkable achievement that came with its own set of challenges. With early success came many mistakes and failures, which taught Aaron the invaluable lesson that continuous self-improvement is crucial for sustained success. As Aaron reflects, success has a way of breeding complacency. He had to accept the fact that what got him here won’t get him there. It required leaving his ego at the door and to stop avoiding the development areas and the weaknesses that needed attention and refocus on becoming a better leader. Aaron’s disciplined approach ensures that distractions do not derail his focus on executing the strategy. He strives to make daily progress in the key areas that are important to him to be the best version of himself. And I close this intro with a quote directly from Aaron. ‘I want to be the best in my field, and so the rule I live by is that to be the top 1% you must be willing to do what the other 99% aren’t. Mindset is everything, therefore fortifying my mindset to allow me to show up every day with a focus on getting better and continuously improving my craft is my top priority.’ Team, buckle up as we dive in for this engaging conversation.
INTRO: Welcome to the ET project, a podcast for those executive talents determined to release their true potential and create an impact. Join our veteran coach and mentor, Wayne Brown, as we unpack an exciting future together.
WAYNE BROWN: Hello team, welcome back to this week’s conversation. Today I want you to think about two versions of yourself. Version A is the leader that you believe you are, the strategic, empowering, decisive, the person you see in your mind’s eye when you think about your best self. And then, probably no surprise, but version B is the leader your team actually sees and experiences every day, day to day. The one they talk about after the meetings, the one they interpret through your emails, your tone, even your decisions under pressure. And then here’s the uncomfortable question for you to ponder; how wide is the gap between version A and version B? And what if you couldn’t see that gap? Not because you’re not looking, perhaps, but because no one dares to tell you about it. So today we’re diving into that exact disconnect with somebody who makes it his mission to close the gap for elite performers. Aaron Trahan is a former senior executive CEO, Aaron turned performance mindset coach and who uses the proven stakeholder-centered methodology to help leaders see what perhaps they can’t see and to change what they can’t change or learn. So, this discussion is more about just receiving feedback, it’s really about your awakening. So, Aaron, with that intro, thanks for joining us on the ET project, I’m looking forward to our conversation.
AARON TRAHAN: Yeah, I am as well. That’s a great intro and a big topic, I know for a lot of executive leaders out there.
WAYNE BROWN: Absolutely. Many of our clients, yours and mine, I guess, really struggle with this whole concept and we’re going to dive into it relatively deeply. Normally, I would ask you to give a little background, but we’re going to come to that later in our conversation, I’m sure. I wanted to start with perhaps the stark reality. And in preparing for our conversation, I came across a Harvard Business Review research that shows while most leaders think they’re giving clear feedback, probably less than half of their teams would agree. I’m not sure what your experience with this is, but why do you think that we have this transparency gap and why is it so dramatically wide, the higher we get to the top of the tree?
[00:05:00]
AARON TRAHAN: Yeah, feedback is one of those tricky things, right? It’s one of those areas where a lot of leaders at just about every level think that they’re good at giving it, they also think they’re good at receiving it. But you mentioned a gap a moment ago and how they perceive themselves as a leader around being able to give and receive feedback, that’s where there’s a pretty wide gap that exists with others perceiving how a leader gives and receives feedback and I think it’s one of the more challenging communication areas for any leader. Just by telling someone what they did wrong does not mean that you’re giving high quality constructive feedback. And so, I think there’s right ways to do it and there’s probably millions of more wrong ways to do it and I think for a lot of leaders, there lacks the intentionality around how do I do this exceptionally well, not only on the giving side, but also I would say the bigger struggle for a lot of leaders is on the receiving side, how do you do that well? I think everybody listening to this conversation has either probably personally experienced or watched another leader just immediately get defensive or take offense to feedback that’s given. It’s just one of those things that’s hard to do. As a leader, if you’re not very intentional and deliberate about doing these things well and really learning about the art of giving and receiving feedback, then there’s a high probability that you’re going to be in that gap of thinking you are much better than you actually are.
WAYNE BROWN: Yeah. Full transparency to all our audience, I’ve been exactly where Aaron is talking about, I’ve had that gap, there has been times where I haven’t received feedback so well and I definitely haven’t given it to the level that I should have. Based on what you just said, I’m wondering, is there a reason… there’s probably more than just being afraid to speak up as a team member or a direct report, is there something about a leader’s mindset that inadvertently silences the team from speaking with the leader about this issue?
AARON TRAHAN: Yeah, I kind of call this the leadership paradox. And this is just a fact of the business world that we live in and for every leader, regardless of industry, regardless of sector, regardless of size of organization, what I refer to as the leadership paradox is just the simple truth that the higher up the organizational chart that you go as a leader, the less truth you’re going to get. Some of the most valuable feedback is going to be from those individuals that experience our leadership day in and day out, that could be peers and colleagues or direct reports. And especially from the direct reports, you think about the relationship as you become a leader with higher and higher status, it’s not like you’re a young leader, a first time leader, and you’re getting all kinds of feedback and all kinds of course correction guidance, a lot of the people around you are now managing the relationship they have with you. So, what are your direct reports and even maybe some of the colleagues at a lower rank around you, what are they doing? They’re managing up. They are usually prioritizing the safety of the relationship that they have with you versus opting for full transparency and candor, they want to make sure that they stay in good standing and there’s a good relationship there and they’re always going to unless the environment is set up right or unless the leader is known for really being great at receiving feedback, then it’s probably not going to come their way, because a lot of the people around you are kind of managing up, they want to make sure that the relationship they have with a superior stays in good standing. And so, it’s just a paradox that every leader is going to have to experience and that’s why being intentional, being deliberate in how you behave, because everybody is going to be watching when you receive feedback, how you behave to that; if you’re defensive, if you shut it off, if you immediately kind of explain it away, all that is telling to everyone around you is that the door to receive constructive feedback is not open.
[00:10:00]
AARON TRAHAN: And so, if they know you react to feedback or have observed you reacting to feedback in any negative form, those that are managing the relationship that they have with a leader that has a superior title or ranking, they now store that away of saying, I’ve got to be careful here, that type of language or interaction is not welcome. And so, you can almost guarantee it will start coming in in lower quantities from that point forward.
WAYNE BROWN: You refer to yourself as a performance mindset coach, just sort of touch on this for a moment, because when I first read this, I thought, okay, performance in my mind immediately jumps out and says, “okay, I’ve got to hit my targets, I’ve got to be resilient, I’ve got to make sure they do all the right things, I’ve got to be focused.” And then I thought, gosh, isn’t every leader focused on that? Isn’t that their whole premise for being? So, what is it that you do with your clients when we come to that specific topic, performance mindset?
AARON TRAHAN: I love this question because I think it deserves a little background and a little breaking down first, and we have to give credit where credit is due. Carol Dweck, the professor at Stanford, who has now wrote the blockbuster book, ‘Mindset’ really brought to the mainstream people thinking about either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. It’s like the growth mindset, the thinking and believing that you can increase your intelligence, develop new skills, nothing is fixed, anything could be grown and developed. Well, the fixed mindset, you kind of believe that I either have it or I don’t, I was either born smart or I wasn’t, I was born talented or I wasn’t. But when we started to apply, in my observation as a 20-year senior executive, as I started to kind of try to apply that in the business world, it wasn’t directly applicable. And here’s what I mean by that, when I’m speaking to a room of leaders and we talk about fixed versus growth mindset and I ask everyone in the room, “who in here associates most with a growth mindset?” What happens in the business world? 9.99999 out of 10 hands are going to go up. Every leader thinks they have a growth mindset, right? And so, years ago, I started asking myself the question, well, if everyone has a growth mindset, why is there such wide variability in how they are growing as a leader and in a lot of cases weren’t growing at all as a leader. And so, I started to kind of play with this concept of in business, what I see from a leadership perspective, fixed and growth really transitions to a status quo mindset, being more closely associated with the fixed mindset where they prioritize predictability, they choose safety, they don’t want to rock the boat. They’re kind of like the, from a mentality standpoint, kind of the old dogs who don’t want to learn any new tricks, they want certainty. Where on the other side, I would say the 10% to 20% of every room is what I’ve come to call the performance mindset and there’s one big differentiation that you’ll see in a performance mindset group versus the status quo mindset group. The performance mindset group is not looking in the rear-view mirror, they’re not just leaning on their track record of what they’ve achieved, they’re constantly asking some variation of the question; what more am I capable of? How do I get better at getting better? I may have just had a great year in 2025, how do I make it even better in 2026? And so, there’s this bias for action and a comfortability with being uncomfortable because they know that that’s where the growth is. So, if I could summarize all this and put a bow on it, a growth mindset is great, but thinking and believing can only take you so far. If all you do is think and believe, well, that’s great, but if there’s no action behind it, you’re going to be in the exact same place one year from now as you are right here right now. So, a performance mindset is really around that bias for action, of understanding what’s required to get better and actually taking the action to make that concept of getting better turned into a reality.
WAYNE BROWN: That’s really interesting. I’m again thinking and I can imagine a large portion of our audience and myself included in this has some form of common misunderstanding and I love your explanation that differentiates between that common growth mindset versus that performance mindset.
[00:15:00]
WAYNE BROWN: There’s actually quite a gap there or a gulf to move from just believing and looking to that growth mindset versus reaching that performance mindset, I can see how that would play out. I came across a term, I don’t know if you’ve heard it, it’s called ‘CEO disease.’ It’s the idea that the higher you rise, the less honest input you get. Now you’ve already touched on this, right? Is it an inevitable byproduct, do you think, of your career success that as you move up in your career, you can expect not to receive the input that you need or the openness that you seek?
AARON TRAHAN: Yes, I think it is inevitable. I’ve yet to find an example to that and that’s exactly where I work with leaders because if they expect the type of feedback and the type of feedback loops to come to them that’s going to point them in the direction of exactly where they can become a more effective leader, the higher up you go, the less it’s naturally going to flow, it’s inevitable. It’s just going to happen, it’s just the way humans are wired in a hierarchy and political system. And so that’s why leaders have to have that bias for action. Leaders have to go out and manufacture that feedback, they’ve got to create the feedback loops. Because to your point and back to your question is, yes, because that’s going to happen, you’re just going to get less of the version of the real truth the higher you go up the organizational chart. So, if you don’t do anything about it, that’s where so many leaders get trapped into that status quo, that kind of comfort zone. And we’ve kind of talked about the different reactions before. So, if we go back, not growth and fixed mindset, but status quo versus performance, what’s the status quo mindset going to do when they hear feedback? It’s going to be the example of they’ll get defensive, they’re going to explain it away, they’ll have all these reasons, they’ll say things that… the ‘yeah, buts.’ Yeah, but you don’t have the context, you’re missing this detail, they prioritize safety and certainty. The performance mindset group, what we train on, when you get that feedback, regardless if you agree with it or not, you say thank you because there is some element in it being a stakeholder’s perception of reality that your behavior in some form or fashion has caused. So, any feedback that comes in, if you’re wired to keep getting better at getting better, your only response is thank you.
WAYNE BROWN: Yeah, very true. And again, picturing even at a C-suite level, this plays out. So, if you’ve moved into the role of CEO and the board or your senior executive is sitting at the table with you, you don’t see that level of openness, transparency, willingness, then even at that level, you quite often will not receive the input or the real situation in the moment.
AARON TRAHAN: Yeah.
WAYNE BROWN: I want to get a little bit personal now, if you don’t mind, Aaron.
AARON TRAHAN: Sure.
WAYNE BROWN: We both spoke about this situation the first time we connected and how pivotal leadership altering even the single 360-degree feedback report can be. So, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind just painting a bit of a picture of your own leadership ascent and identifying the gap that you had as a leader.
AARON TRAHAN: Absolutely. Yeah, and the reason I’m so passionate about this subject is because I am the exact leader in the past that I’m now talking about today. For me, leadership happened at a very early age, at 23 years old, I was kind of the next man up in my organization and was tapped to run a $100 million annual revenue division. And from there, a lot of things happened quickly, I was able to scale my way up into becoming a 30-year-old senior executive now running a billion-dollar business and kind of just thought I had this leadership thing all figured out.
[00:20:00]
AARON TRAHAN: I was like, I know what I’m doing, I’m good at this, it seems like every position or initiative I took over kind of turned into gold, so to speak and so I was riding pretty high. I was thinking that, yeah, I know what I’m doing here in the business world. And it wasn’t until that we brought in some outside help to do some leadership development and I was given my first 360-degree feedback assessment and it kind of shattered this false perception that I have of myself as a leader because it was the first time that I got to hear from the stakeholders around me, those that experienced my leadership of what they had to say on experiencing me as a leader. And there was some bruised ego moments there and that truth was a hard pill to swallow and the overwhelming thing that came out of that report was that I was a terrible people leader. Yes, I may have been skilled at strategy and operations and being able to see the big macro picture, but when it came down to the 80, 100, 150 people that made up kind of my organization, the feedback was loud and clear, it was a pretty miserable experience having to be part of my area of the organization. And that was the moment for me, I could have been defensive and I’m sure I initially was, but I really came to understand this is exactly the roadmap on where I can go from good to great as a leader. If I take this seriously, this piece of paper that hurt my own ego so much points me in the direction of how I can be a next level leader. And so, I dove in, I wanted to take this weakness and not just do something about it, I wanted to turn this weakness into a superpower. And from that point forward, leadership, most especially around helping others reach the next level started off as a something I wanted to do to improve myself, which then turned into a passion. And it started the slow and steady gravitational pull for me now doing what I do today of really dedicating my entire career to helping do this for others.
WAYNE BROWN: Thinking now from the audience perspective, all of us suffer from blind spots. I’m wondering, are there any subtle signs that we should be aware of that you’ve come across that help us realize, hey, maybe there’s something I’m missing here, maybe I have a blind spot, whether it’s sitting in a meeting and learning to be quiet for a change rather than be the focal point or asking other people for ideas, is there some way that you can start to hone in to start finding those blind spots?
AARON TRAHAN: Yeah, it’s interesting, there’s a couple of things I’ll touch on here. One of the things that a lot of, as I’m sure you’ve experienced too, you know, I coach high level elite executive leaders and one of the common issues I run into so much is… I mean, think about it, when a really high-performing leader asks for feedback from those around them, what do they get back in response a lot of times? “You’re doing great, boss” it is like, “yeah, we appreciate your leadership.” It’s very hard for people to give high-performers constructive feedback that will help them get better. And so that’s why I use the feed forward framework, and this is something that every leader can do at any level and it really flips feedback on its head, because feedback is not always going to be comfortable for your stakeholders to give you because they don’t want to ruffle any feathers, they think of you already maybe as a high-performer. Like, “what is he talking about? You’re already doing great.” Instead, don’t make it looking backwards, I would make it looking forwards and just asking the high… It’s almost kind of fielding ideas and suggestions where there’s feedback baked into it. So instead of how am I doing? And instead say, “if you were in my shoes, what is one thing you would try to change moving forward that you believe would make me a more effective leader for this team?” And so, it completely takes away any type of stressful, “am I going to ruffle his feathers?” “Am I going to say something I don’t want to?” So, start thinking of it in terms of getting ideas on one thing that you can change to be better kind of moving forward.
[00:25:00]
AARON TRAHAN: But I think if you’re not asking those type of questions, if you’re not trying to bring it in, or if you’re not working with a coach that can help do this for you, I think one of the things we kind of talked about previously is that you should not expect this type of feedback to come in because the higher up you go, the less truth you’re going to hear. So, to answer more directly, when you start feeling the frustrations, you feel like your effectiveness is just not the same as a leader, when you kind of feel like you’re having trouble getting the team to execute, to align, just whenever you start sensing and feeling friction, that’s where it may be time to go out and collect some feedback. Because, yeah, anytime you just start to see or feel or sense through kind of your intuition that your effectiveness as a leader is not progressing, not moving forward, even if it’s kind of like stuck in neutral or even going backwards, that should raise up a red flag almost saying, you need to go maybe collect some feedback. Are you showing up? It’s easy to point the blame at other teams, other colleagues, my team is just not executing the way that they should be, that’s all fine, you may be a bigger reason why that is than you initially believe. So that should be a key indicator for you, I may need some feedback to maybe look into some things that I can’t see that other people are seeing. And so, those are kind of good indicators to say, “I need some feedback to understand what’s really going on here.”
WAYNE BROWN: And I like that advice because I think even if it’s not us that is the reason behind the issue, by starting at that point, you can then move forward very confidently, you’ve asked the right questions, you hopefully have got the right responses and you’re going to narrow down and find the issue more quickly and you can at least either eliminate the fact that it’s you or confirm the fact that it’s you and then deal appropriately with it. One of the people I know that we both follow, I call him my adopted mentor is Marshall Goldsmith
AARON TRAHAN: Yes.
WAYNE BROWN: And Marshall has a book called ‘What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.’ Many researchers often point to that What Got You Here trap where your past strengths become your liabilities, which you have spoken about many times already, do you have clients who really suffer from that? Do you find people who are continually blindsided by it, even though you may be talking or coaching them?
AARON TRAHAN: Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. I call it… it’s kind of an identity trap. When you’re a high-performing leader and a lot of the things that you’re doing today are the very things that got you into the seat that you’re in, there’s almost kind of an identity that comes with that. You’re used to being right, you’re used to being maybe a subject matter expert, you’re used to making kind of the big decisions and while that can work for a period of time, if you rely too heavily on that identity, it makes you a bit rigid and unable to change and no matter how much anybody is telling you something, you’re hung on the fact that, well, this is what has got me up to this point, so it must have worked and yeah, it probably did under a certain scenario in a certain period of time, but back to the Marshall Goldsmith quote, just because it got you here, it does that mean it’s going to be the very thing that gets you there and could actually be the thing that’s holding you back because you now need to recalibrate and kind of triage what next level success looks like from here, where you’re sitting to where you want to go, not where you came from to get to here. And so, yeah, I think it’s working with leaders to really feel proud about the identity that they’ve created, but are you still evolving? Because if you’re not able to adapt, if you’re not able to evolve, if you are just relying on the things that brought you success up to this point, I mean, look around you, we’re in a world that’s arguably changing faster than it has ever changed before. So just because your approach worked 10 years ago, five years ago, three years ago, it has zero guarantee and applicability to what may be required to you to lead a growing team or growing organization over the next five years.
WAYNE BROWN: Exactly. You mentioned the 360-degree feedback surveys, quite often they’re only done once a year.
[00:30:00]
AARON TRAHAN: Yeah.
WAYNE BROWN: How frequently do you feel that we need to be seeking this input? Is it a constant? Do we need to be talking with our team every week? Is it every month, every quarter? What’s your approach?
AARON TRAHAN: Yeah. So, my approach is actually the same approach that I learned and trained under from Marshall Goldsmith and his organization. And what’s interesting about his approach, because he would do the same thing. He tells a great story about this 20 years ago, he did the 360, would give the report, do these seminars. And I think he was doing a seminar at, I believe the company was Lockheed Martin, where one of the executive VPs comes up to him and says, “yeah, this is great and all for these two-day seminars, but does this really work? Do you have proof that this stuff actually generates long-term change?” Then Marshall sat back and said, “I don’t know. I don’t know if it actually generates long-term change. I don’t have data that I can… I get high satisfaction scores of people that attend the seminar, but are they acting differently six months from now than they are today?” So that’s what allowed him to evolve what is now called stakeholder-centered coaching. And what we do is we do an initial 360-degree assessment, just like the one I received, and I’m sure like you’ve received before that gives you all of this great data, but that’s just where the process starts. In my case, in my company, that’s where it ended, I didn’t even have a follow-up meeting with my boss. I got this report and it was like, “okay, see you later.” But that’s where it starts, from there we enroll the stakeholders to then say, “here’s my action plan based on the 360-degree feedback that I received, here are the one to two things that I’m committed to putting action plans in place to work on.” As a result of that, I’m going to ask you and check in with you every month, so we identify at least eight to 10 stakeholders that the leader is going to have, they participated in the 360 and the leader checks in with them every month saying, “how did I do based on what I committed to doing the prior month and back to the feed forward? Do you have an idea or suggestion of moving forward? What’s one thing I can do to make me even better?” So, we have a monthly cadence that does that. Now to measure the effect, we come back every three to four months and we issue a survey out to the leader stakeholders that rates how well they followed up, did they actually commit to doing the actions that they said that they were going to do? And did you experience an increase in their effectiveness as a leader? So now not only do we have the 360, but we have a monthly check-in process to where it keeps that feedback coming in and then we have a survey that grades and gives the leader back measurable data of saying, “no, you never followed up, you never checked in and no, I didn’t see any improvement.” Or “yes, you checked in and followed up as you said you would, I saw a tremendous improvement here.” And the reason why this works so well is because of that follow up and feedback mechanism. And in coaching, if it’s just one-on-one, I may think a leader’s getting better, the leader may think they’re getting better, but if the people around them don’t experience that improvement, are they really getting better? And so that’s what the stakeholder-centered approach really aims to target, is it provides guaranteed measurable data that a leader has in fact taken the action plan steps to improve this behavior that shows up as effectiveness, not through me, but through the eyes of their stakeholder.
WAYNE BROWN: Your approach really hits at the core challenge I see for coaching, particularly with leaders who are told they’re going to be coached versus leaders who willingly come saying, “I need coaching.” Because if I’m a proud, egotistical, let’s say leader, and I believe things are going well, somebody like you or I come along and we say, “okay, we’re going to get all this feedback, we’re going to help you improve,” more often than not they’re going to become defensive, they’ll start to push back, they may even shut down, it’s very psychologically intense for that leader. How do you deal with these types of people or do you even have them as your clients? I’m just curious.
AARON TRAHAN: Yeah, you bring up a great point. It is a pretty honest conversation upfront that, look, this is not a light touch or low intensity type of program, it’s not for everyone, if you’re not comfortable with feedback, in my opinion, it’s the best way to improve.
[00:35:00]
AARON TRAHAN: But if you’re not comfortable with it, this is a particular style and approach where… some people call it brutal in the sense of just how much feedback is coming in, how frequently that gives us a lot of data to play with. But we have to have that conversation upfront and what in stakeholder-centered coaching, we call it the CHD, kind of the CHD method. And so, a leader has to be able to commit 10 out of 10 in three areas. The C stands for courage, it’s like, are you going to keep showing up even when the feedback may piss you off, may upset you, may bruise your ego, do you have the courage to keep asking for it? So, courage is number one. The H stands for humility, because if you have the courage to ask for it, but you don’t have the humility, all you’re going to do is create chaos by saying, “yeah, but you don’t know, that feedback is BS, you don’t understand this.” Do you have the humility to say thank you, as we talked about earlier? And so, courage, number one, humility, number two, and then number three is discipline. So, it’s courage, humility, and discipline, those are the three areas that every leader must commit upfront of saying, “I’m 10 out of 10 committed,” because the discipline is going to be where we get enough feedback to where that’s where me and the leader meet and create monthly action plans based on the feedback or the feed forward that you receive from your stakeholders, here’s where we can create an action plan to change actual behavior that your stakeholders will experience. If they’re not ready to commit 10 out of 10 in those three areas, that’s where we have to have the honest conversations, maybe that now is not the right time or what’s going to get you there. What’s the hangup? What is it that’s getting in the way of you saying, “I’m 10 out of 10 ready to check that courage, humility, and discipline box,” because if you’re not, this process doesn’t work, you got to be all in.
WAYNE BROWN: Is there something you normally see as the first shift or the first click? Let’s say when the change starts to really take effect, do you hear it in the feedbacks or do you see it in the personality or maybe even in the business metrics, what normally changes in the first instance?
AARON TRAHAN: Yeah, it’s hearing from their stakeholders that they are acknowledging that the effectiveness is there. Once that take holds, then we have momentum. And I always like to say it, “momentum is like a fickle animal,” it’s the hardest thing to gain, but the easiest thing to lose. And so, when I see a leader starting in… it could be as soon as the first 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, when they’re doing those follow-up check-ins and they’re starting to get acknowledgement, not from me, you know, show me your incentives and I’ll show you the behavior. I’m the one getting paid here, I’m always going to be at risk of saying, “yeah, you’re doing better.” But the people that are in the arena with you, when they start showing and giving you that feedback and feed forward that, yeah, I mean, you’ve made a great leap in this particular area, everybody likes to see the scoreboard where they keep scoring points, right? It’s very motivating that they feel and see progress. And so, then we have momentum, we just got to capture it and keep riding that momentum wave.
WAYNE BROWN: If there’s a leader in this one who’s feeling the resonance of this, but isn’t ready for formal coaching, what’s something small or courageous that they can do next week to start opening the window perhaps to identify their blind spots? I know we touched on it a little bit earlier but is there one step they can immediately take after a conversation that’s going to help them move in that direction?
AARON TRAHAN: Yeah, I think everybody has kind of got a trusted partner in the business and I would just highly encourage them to go to someone they trust and say, “I’m curious to hear your ideas on what’s one thing that I can do that would make me a more effective leader.” Start very simple, start very safe and even that conversation with a trusted partner may bring out some anxiety, but what sits on the other side of you asking that question is going to be a golden nugget. And when you take that and start acting on it, you’re building the confidence muscle to keep doing more of that. And when you get more of those feedback loops coming in, you’re ready to take ownership of that feedback, you’re committed to changing behavior based on that feedback, and then you actually take the action, I’ve never not seen a scenario where a leader doesn’t improve.
[00:40:00]
WAYNE BROWN: Our audience, quite often likes to connect with our guests, Aaron, where’s the best place that they can connect with you if they want to find out more about what you were doing?
AARON TRAHAN: Yeah, I would say LinkedIn. It’s where I show up most, I’m constantly trying to put out information to the community there. And so, yeah, find me on LinkedIn, let’s connect, if interested, we’ll have a follow-up conversation and I would love to connect with you there.
WAYNE BROWN: Maybe just the last question before we wrap up, but how do you see AI and the future of coaching in particular, how do you see AI playing out in this whole scenario?
AARON TRAHAN: Yeah, I think it gives everybody the opportunity to get coaching insight at their fingertips. I think there’s going to be great applications but the relationship that you’re able to build and the intimacy that you can have with a coach to be able to see things holistically, I don’t see a scenario where the kind of in real-life relationship that you’re able to build with a coach who can understand different layers and context of what you may be dealing with at a personal and professional level with the insight, especially of coaches that know what it’s like, that can feel what you feel of kind of being in your shoes. And so, I’m actually excited about the different applications that can help increase the effectiveness of coaching. But yeah, I think for anybody that thinks that they’ll just be able to use ChatGPT for this or Gemini, I haven’t seen anything that’s going to replace the coaching industry at this point.
WAYNE BROWN: Yeah, likewise. Thanks for bringing this conversation to us and I’m really looking forward to seeing where performance mindset coaching goes in the future, as well as staying in contact.
AARON TRAHAN: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Wayne.
OUTRO: Thank you for joining us on the ET project, a show for executive talent development, until next time, check out our site for free videos, eBooks, webinars, and blogs at ‘coaching4companies.com.’
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