Good Leaders in Turbulent Times: Martin’s Reflections

T[00:00:00] Paula: Welcome everyone to “TesseLeads” with your host, Tesse Akpeki, and co host Paula Okonneh, that’s me. “TesseLeads” is a safe, sensitive, and supportive place and space to share, hear, and tell your stories, as well as your experiences. We get super curious about the dilemmas shaping your future and our future and the journeys that we all are on. Our guest today is an author. In fact, I’ll let him tell you more about himself. His name is Martin Farrell, Farrell, and the book is “Good Leaders in Turbulent Times, How to Navigate”. I’ll let him read that for you. Martin, please go ahead and introduce yourself, and please give us the title of your new book.

[00:00:54] Martin: This is lovely, I [00:01:00] think we should leave this in. Can we leave this in? Because this speaks absolutely to things going wrong, and things go wrong in life all the time. And hopefully they don’t go like disastrously wrong, they just go a bit wrong like this. Okay. So what we’re experiencing now is stuff going wrong and we can put it right and we can laugh at it as we’re all doing now. So my name is Martin Farrell with the emphasis on the Farrell and the title is “Good Leaders in Turbulent Times, How to Navigate Wild Waters at Work”. Now I can say that fluently now because I’ve said it many, many times. But yeah, but to start with I thought of many different titles, all variations of something like that. We landed on this only about nine months ago. I couldn’t say it to start with, you know, I’d have to write it down and rehearse. So it takes a while to get used to some of these things. So it took a while to get used to that title. So the fact that the portal, you know, it’s a jumble, it doesn’t matter, that’s just how life is. And it’s absolutely [00:02:00] fine. And this book, if I could use it as a way of introducing myself is. If I could think of the words that Sir Nick Young used at the launch last Tuesday, here we are in early October, and, Tesse, you will have heard this. When he said, I see this book as an accumulation of what Martin has been doing throughout his professional life, that was both an exaggeration, and it was true. Because of course, there’s loads of things that are not in here, but it’s somehow a distillation, a condensation of that stuff that I’ve done throughout my professional life over pretty much six decades. Well, if I include the volunteering when I was a teenager at university, and when I traveled to through Africa and the volunteering I did there and the many different things, the different jobs I’ve done during that time, it’s a distillation of that and I did it in order to be of service. Because here I am at this stage in my life, I guess I can say you can cut [00:03:00] this out if you think it’s inappropriate. I’m 74. I’m an old guy, and yeah, and that’s fine. You know, the only bad thing about being old is I’m going to die before most of the people listening to this podcast. I hope anyway, you know, because the average age is a load younger. That’s fine. You know, I’m very well aware of the span of life. And that’s partly a sort of spiritual process, but it’s also just waking up to the fact. So I want to use my time, the remaining time on the planet as best I can. And it feels to me that a way of doing that is to not be in the fight, if I can put it that way. Not in the daily struggle of work and all that, but to support those who are there. And to particularly support those who are there who are concerned about civil society, creating a society, which is decent and civil for everybody, and a society which encompasses the 8 point something billion people on the planet. Not just the rich people, not just the 20 percent [00:04:00] of. I gather that 80 percent of the people on the planet have never been in an airplane. And the numbers of people who are poor, but everybody, they want to sustain life on the planet for everyone and for that to be decent and wholesome. So that feels to me like worth doing in the time that I may have left. Then other aspects of that is, you know, for you both and people listening to this podcast all being well, you will get old and when you get old, you know, your energy starts changing and you don’t have the energy. I don’t run so fast. I can bet. Well, I do run, but it’s challenging, and your enthusiasm for things shifts. I noticed some years ago, and it was five years ago when I first expressed this, and I remember the moment I was sitting in this chair that I’m sitting in now, there were some dear friends I was talking to, and one of the groups that I’m part of, and I was in tears, I was sobbing, and what the words that came through that [00:05:00] time was, “I don’t want to be in the fight anymore”. Those were the words I used. “I don’t want to be in a fight anymore I’m tired I don’t want to be in the fight but I want to support the people in the fight”. And I remember that moment which in a way came across me as a surprise, I just come back from holiday and I was getting back into the normal run of things and it was painful and I remember it, and it’s taken that five years to, in a way, land at the point where I think I’m doing that. And anybody as they get older needs to pay more attention to the available energy. Not just physical energy, but your desire to do stuff. So I’m having to be more focused. And it’s a time also, as you get older, to have the potential for being more in touch with the spirit, more in touch with the ultimate, more in touch with, hey, what’s this thing called life all about? What have I done with my life? What could I do in the [00:06:00] future? So that’s the point that I’m at now and have been growing towards that over the last, it feels like five years and particularly over the last year and a half, since I found a publisher for the book. So the book has been a vehicle for me to find my voice and to use my voice in a way that I hope is of service to other people. And that’s because that’s fulfilling for me. I hope it’s helpful to other people. That will be really nice. That would be cool. I’m doing it, not out of a sort of sense of duty. Oh, I have to do that to be a good person. I’m doing it because it’s fulfilling. It’s where my heart is and it’s satisfying. This conversation now is satisfying, because you know, it just feels good when I’m with people, coaching, supporting people, or if I’m facilitating a group. That feels good. If I get to the point where it doesn’t feel good, I’ll probably hang up my biro or my laptop or whatever you, [00:07:00] no I wouldn’t do it. But so i’m doing it because it’s satisfying at this stage in my life so I say i’m retiring. The big difference between retiring and retired. Retired is what my dad did and many of his generation did, he worked he was a probation officer and the chief probation officer and then he had a party one day and they made nice speeches and they gave him some gifts and then he was retired from the next morning. Many of us now and not in that position, particularly those of us who have been in consultancy for many years. I started out as a consultant in 1999, which was after a particularly painful experience in a job that I was in, it was in a mental health charity as it happened, and that was a really difficult time, and that was after I’d been made redundant from another charity, which was also very painful, and I started working independently. So, that experience of that last 25 years has been brilliant and fantastic and enormously energizing and also exhausting. [00:08:00] I don’t want to do that anymore. I can’t do that anymore. So I’m retiring and I’m not retired. Retiring means that I’m happy if the phone rings, I’m happy if they say, you say, hey, come on my podcast. Oh, that would be nice. That seems that sounds like it might be fun. And it is. Big fun. So that’s what I do. And the fact is I don’t have the financial pressures that I’ve had before. I understand that. Absolutely. Mortgages, children, two adult children, you know, I understand all those realities, but they’re not a burden now because it’s more stable. Yeah, so I think we need to bring in that, you know, cause someone listening to this, they may be in their thirties or forties or fifties thinking, how am I going to pay my next bills? And so it’s okay for him, look, he’s an old guy, but you know, I know what that’s like, I know what it’s like doing a monthly budget and then writing down everything that we spend and you know, how much have we got for this? How much have we got for that? I’ve done that. I know that and full respect to the people who are in that position, because I understand that. [00:09:00] Just so happens I’m not there now. So I think how can I best spend my time now, which is satisfying for me and it’s going to be of service to other people. Now then, did you ask me a question? Have I answered it? 

[00:09:12] Tesse: I think you introduced yourself and a lot of things, a lot of threads there. But I’m kind of curious about your thoughts on leadership, as per the personalities and the different shades of individuals that they bring to their leadership. You know, we were talking as we were getting ready for the show about private truths and public faces. So I’m really curious about your take on those shades of leadership. 

[00:09:44] Martin: Hmm. Those shades of leadership. Well I can tell you what inspires me, and it may be also that if you were to say think of some great leaders, people are going to be mentioning those leaders who have integrity. Those leaders who have resilience [00:10:00] and energy and staying power. Those people who hold a vision which is inherent in their being. And we can think of the big names. We can think of Mandela. We can think of Gandhi. We can think of maybe personal leaders who we’ve had the privilege of working with, and I’ve had the privilege of working with one or two. So Nick Young gave wrote the forward for the book, and I worked with him at the Red Cross. I found him a visionary leader. I found him exciting. I found him, you know, he would back me up when I screwed up, you know, and that happened. You know, actually, I remember he would kind of be there. So that’s one of the characters of leadership. When things go wrong, they will be there to back you up. If you do something wrong, they’re going to tell you about that in private and when things go right, they tell you about that in public, you know, everybody gets to hear that. And they’re there in service of whatever the goal is, and for me, that goal needed to be something to do with [00:11:00] making people’s lives better, solving crisis, helping people through some kind of tricky situation. So that’s why I work to the British Red Cross, I work to save the children. Worked in lots of smaller charities community groups and so on. So, you know i’m not interested in the profit making, nothing wrong with making people who make profit, they do some nice, all sort of nice things that I make use of, but is personally not what inspires me, not what gets me out of bed. Because I think that the capacity a good life is in a way part of a good life and leading a good life, whether you’re a leader or it’s just for yourself, is that you not only don’t somehow put too much burden on the planet in terms of carbon and using resources. But because of where we are, you’re spending your time in trying to reverse the damage that’s already done, in one way or another. It might be [00:12:00] small impact, it might be a big impact. And that those people who are good leaders are motivated from a position of love, that’s a little word with a massive, you know, so many different meanings. But those people you believe are doing it with the best of intentions, and that their personal life and their work life is driven by desire to do things for the best. And that’s something that they’ve somehow managed to do that, which includes screwing up sometimes. It includes messing up sometimes. 

[00:12:34] Paula: Wow. Includes screwing up sometimes, includes messing up sometimes. I love it because that makes us real. You know, this is all about your personal story. This is about you. I wanted to save the raw you, but that’s okay. But I love what you said there, and when I read your book that jumped out was about fishing for [00:13:00] invitations. About, you know, whether if you have the invitation in your hand and you don’t use it, you don’t do anything with it. And that’s kinda what you’re saying. You know, when we get to a certain age, we have choices and we have options. And we can be instrumental in helping change the mistakes that probably we, or collectively our generation has done, and help young people or younger people see where we went wrong and what they can do to improve that. So when you wrote that particular piece in your book, was there anything in particular that happened in your life that led you to write that? 

[00:13:37] Martin: Well, if I could answer that in a moment, but say a bit more about invitations, because I had a challenge when I started writing the book. If I’m working with someone as a coach, and that’s a crisis coach, because often I’m supporting people who are in crisis, leaders who are in crisis. It’s really bad. And it’s one person at one moment of time. Were if I’m [00:14:00] facilitating the international facilitation and with a low range of international bodies. It’s one group in one moment of that groups process, so you can work out what’s worth doing with that individual what’s worth suggesting, what might be a program that you might develop for that group. When I’m writing a book I have no idea who’s going to be reading this. I have no idea what stage they’re going to be at in their what, how on earth can I say anything. I could maybe you know write a list of two hundred things that you might consider and say pick one of these, but I thought that’s not very interesting. So then I came with the image of imagine you’re on a fishing trip which kind of fits with the wild waters metaphor. Which I could tell you about as well, cause I really had a wild waters experience in Southern Africa, which was crazy. Yeah. Anyway, nearly drowned. Did actually nearly drown. Yeah. With my family in the year 2000. But so fishing trip [00:15:00] in this podcast, whoever’s listening to this podcast and maybe one thing that strikes you. Great. Oh, that there may be two things. If you’re lucky, there might be three things. If you read the book, there might be something you go through. Oh, that’s interesting, well, that’s interesting. It will be different for each person. It’ll be different from each person at the particular point in which they read it. That was my intention, that they would pick out one or two or three things that work for them now, but then you need to, as it were, go to the party. You know, someone gives you an invitation and the invitation hangs on the fridge door and you don’t go to the party. You don’t have the experience of doing anything. So when that thing strikes you then do something. And it may strike you as a flash of something wonderful. Oh god this is such an insight it’s so wonderful yes i’ll do that, or it may be something that is like stubbing your toe against something, something that’s painful or irritating [00:16:00] and whatever it is notice that and, so you stop and then you notice and then you appreciate it maybe you analyze it a bit and then you plan what you might do next, and then you proceed, and it’s you that has to do that. Now, for those who are listening very attentively, you will know that that spells snappy, which is one of the comments that I make in the book. There’s 138 pieces of commentary, advice, and there was one at the end of chapter one, “Snappy, Stop, Notice, Appreciate Plan and Proceed and it’s you that has to do that. So there’s no point just noticing something. You need to take some action You need to embrace it in some way, whether it’s something that’s painful to you or whether it’s something that’s joyous and a great insight. And that’s kind of worked for me in a way, particularly if there’s something really unpleasant. I can tell a little bit of a story, which is a very current one, which I just today [00:17:00] received a mail and email from someone I know, he’s just read the book and I know that that person had had some challenges some years ago, and that person said by reading the book, I realized it’s not quite finished. So I’ve taken some action, you know, emotionally, I know it’s not quite finished. It dug up some stuff. I thought I dealt with it many years ago. So I’ve taken some action and that action had a positive result. I shouldn’t say more than that, but it had a positive result, because the book stirred up a little bit of that mud that was still lurking around there at the bottom of the, at the bottom of the lake. So he stirred up the mud and he did something about it and that has proved to have been a very happy succession of events. If for those, well, you can’t see this, but if you were seeing me, you would see that behind me, there is calligraphy. It says no mud, no lotus. We know that mud [00:18:00] is pretty messy, but you’re feeding it, you’ll sink into it. It’s messy. Maybe it’s smelly. Maybe it’s compost like, you know, what grows out of that? A lotus, that beautiful lotus can grow out of that. A beautiful lotus somehow arises from this yucky stuff. And that’s a powerful symbol I think. A powerful metaphor for what we can gain from the troubles, the difficulties that we have. It’s worth saying also that we could just have mud, you know, sometimes it’s just mad, because you don’t work with the mud and you don’t grow the Lotus because you’re not working with it in a way that helps that Lotus grow. So there’s just mad, and there are people who are in difficult times, who are staying in difficult times and they’re stuck in the difficult times. They’re stuck in the mud. That happens too, but that’s not necessary because there are ways of working and a lot of that is the way of community and people sharing and really [00:19:00] listening to each other. And right at the beginning of this conversation, you referred to, let me just look, I wrote it down. Yes. Safe, supportive, sensitive place. It’s so centrally important. If I’m not safe, I’m not going to do anything. I’m just going to try to, you know, preserve myself, look after myself, and that’s for most of us, at least where I’m living, the physical safety is not really a question. I might get knocked over. I have someone might attack me in the street, but generally I feel quite physically safe. But the emotional safety is a whole other story. And we know how the words, whether it’s of anybody and particularly of a person in a leadership position can be so powerful and it can destroy a feeling of safety very quickly just by a chance comment, and that can come from anybody but if you’re in a position of leadership your words count a hundred times more than somebody else because people are looking at [00:20:00] you. So that safety I think is so important which then allows a degree of sensitivity and appreciation, because some of the stuff that we have inside. It’s not just written on a back of an envelope. It’s just not written out, oh yeah the reason i’m feeling really agitated today is because of X, Y, Z, it’s a muddle inside. So this is a sensitive journey, a careful journey to understand. I was very provoked by something two or three months ago. It would take probably another half an hour to tell the whole story, so I bore you with the whole thing. I was really troubled by it. I mean, you know, to not sleeping and feeling provoked by something that somebody else had. It wasn’t a physical thing, but something that they had. And then someone in one of the groups that I’m part of said, Martin, I’d be happy to give you some time to think that through. And she did. And it was wonderful because she helped me touch what was really going on there at depth and it was [00:21:00] about birth and death, right? So it was kind of really profound stuff. And I needed that safety, which I knew that she would provide because I’ve known her for some years. And also it needed that sensitive touch really, because it was felt very delicate. It was about my birth, what was happening at my birth and my view of my death that this whole thing, someone that had happened when I was with someone I’d revoked, like a match being thrown into petrol vapor, went off. So she showed that sensitivity. And that helped me understand it and that feeling then subsided and I felt I’d moved on. 

[00:21:38] Tesse: That sounds like therapy to me. You know, Martin, thanks for sharing that. At the beginning, you mentioned that you were 74, or 74 years young. And I was actually thinking about any thoughts you have for the future, the present leaders who are Millennials, who are Generation [00:22:00] Z, a lot of them kind of see life differently from baby boomers and so on. But your thoughts are so welcome on this. 

[00:22:11] Martin: I might tell you my first thought, which is to be there for them, if they want that to be in service to them, because that’s where the action’s happening. It’s not happening with me. Okay. We’re on podcast. I’ve written a book and all that, but that’s all in service of people who are in the fight. It’s funny I say in the fight, and that’s because those are the words that sort of felt resident five years ago and still do, because it was kind of brutal out there, but it’s not fighting, fighting, fighting. It’s just being active and energetic and having the energy to do that. So I think it’s well worth those people who are somewhat older consider carefully about how they use their time and to find ways to be able to sensitively, safely be supportive of those younger people, because [00:23:00] they are the ones with our support, who are going to bring us through to a decent and civil society, which is sustainable, which our current society isn’t, and to appreciate the pain that we’ve delivered to them. Because we have, they didn’t ask for that. I’ve got two children, well not children, young adults, late 30s and early 40s, you know, they’ve picked that up. So I feel also there’s a kind of responsibility, but it’s also a heartfelt calling to be there, not to impose, but just to say, here, if I can help, let me know. That’s what I think. 

[00:23:38] Paula: Martin, thank you so much for saying that, because that’s a discussion I have and I keep having with my generation on a baby boomer. And that is, you know, the younger generation, the Gen Z’s, the millennials all the other gens that I can’t remember. Gen X. 

[00:23:56] Martin: Gen everything. 

[00:23:57] Paula: Yeah, gen everything. They [00:24:00] need us, but they don’t need our criticism. They need our wisdom. They need our input. And yes, I mean, sometimes you can see things. Sometimes there’s a lot more said by not saying things as opposed to like, you generate, you do this, you do that. Yeah, we sometimes forget that we were there too. And how we felt when we told our music was too loud and there was nothing in our music but noise. How we could feel the music, that was it, you know. So, thank you for saying you’re there to be service to the other generation and not. 

[00:24:40] Martin: And also, I think that’s incumbent upon us to do the work, if I could use that term, to do the work, to understand some of those things, which some of my generation may look at and go, what? You know, I don’t get it. No transgender or, you know, neuro diverse or these things. You know, this is close to home for me and so [00:25:00] I really do that work as best I can to understand getting into the mindset. Because it’s a different world, it’s a different world, but to really understand that in a genuinely engaged and not patronizing way. Not in a kind of, well, you know what, that’s all a bit, what do you mean? But to really try to understand that and that’s work, that’s work. It’s psychological work, which requires us and need to be as open as we can be to be as curious as we can be about some of those movements, which are happening now. Which just reminds me, I heard a quote the other day, which is quite nice and “the end of the world will not come because of the lack of wonders, but because of the lack of wonder”. I think it was GK Chesterton, you know, maybe others didn’t know that quote. You know, so let’s keep that curiosity, that curiosity and that sense of wonder that we have as a child about all the social movements and all the stuff that’s happening now, not from a position of criticism, [00:26:00] but from a sense of wonder. Oh, wow. Look what’s happening now. I could be interested in that sense of wonder, yeah. 

[00:26:06] Paula: Wow. We’re wrapping up. 

[00:26:08] Martin: Oh, we’ve only just started. We’re just getting going, aren’t we? 

[00:26:12] Tesse: Time flies  when we’re having fun.

[00:26:15] Martin: Yeah, it sure does. Yeah. 

[00:26:17] Paula: Oh, boy. So, Tesse. Any parting questions for? 

[00:26:22] Tesse: I think that Martin has sprinkled insight, wisdom, wonder, and I’m going to reflect on that. I hope that our listeners will as well, because, you know, I could listen to Martin all day until it gets dark. 

[00:26:42] Martin: Or if it rains, which it is outside my window right now. And it’ll be sunny tomorrow. Yeah, well, it’s been a real pleasure. I’m sorry that time has gone. See, I know we could have a really rich, longer exchange. There we are. Time’s up. 

[00:26:59] Paula: [00:27:00] Yeah. And so to our precious listeners and viewers, we want you to know that your stories matter, just as your lives matter. And we ask that you continue to share them with us, just like Martin did. And we also want you to know that we support you, we encourage you, and we try to nurture you through the guests that we bring on, so that you know that you’re never alone. And with that we also, we would like to ask you or encourage you to head over to, if you haven’t already, head over to “Apple Podcasts”, “YouTube”, “Spotify”, or wherever you listen to your podcast and please subscribe. And if you have found this episode or any of our past episodes helpful, we ask that you let us know in your review. And if there’s any topic or question that you’d like us to cover, we ask that you send us a note and please send that over to us on our website, which is. “www.tesseleads.com” and [00:28:00] where you can apply also if you’d like to be a guest. So thank you so much, Martin, for coming on the show. Thank you. 

[00:28:08] Tesse: Martin, you’re special. Thank you so much. 

[00:28:12] Martin: Thank you for inviting me.