John and Ash have a conversation with Steve Cockram about the transforming power of knowing who you are by Nature. Steve is co-founder of GiANT Worldwide and is dedicated to empowering the leader in everyone. He is an international speaker, author, and consultant to top-level executives and leaders around the world. He is a subject matter expert on personality and wiring, organizational leadership, emotional intelligence, and interpersonal communication. Steve is the co-founder of GiANT Worldwide, a global leadership consultancy. He is also co-author of the books 5 Gears and 5 Voices.

• I think that when people take tests, the test doesn’t tell you automatically who you are by nature. I think that’s the most important thing for people to grasp is, every assessment in the world is more limited than the person who wrote it would like you to believe, because in effect, what it’s giving you is an indication of what you think you ought and should be. – Steve Cockram
• So your nature is different from your nurture, is different from choice, and all three, make a huge impact in why you choose to behave the way you do.  – Steve Cockram
• So Ash really has spent a lifetime learning how to play a role that others needed her to play; that’s nurture and choice. What happened that morning, I believe, was I actually showed her a little bit about that, going, “That may be how you’re choosing to behave, and choosing to function, but, you know, you’ll find it exhausting and you’ll find it very tiring. And ultimately, not as rewarding, because you’ve never had a chance to be the way you were made at your best, to be.”- Steve Cockram
• you can be a leader that has been really incredibly successful, and use your gifts in all these different ways, and have been exhausted doing it, never know who you really are. – John Marsh
• We all have both tendencies, but a lot of times, people have spent their whole life learning to write with their non-dominant hand, and they’re better at it, but it’s still a real struggle.- John Marsh
• if I watch you with your family at home, having dinner, you can’t for male leader, if you have a liberated wife, I’ll promise you, that tells me more about that individual than just about anything of what they have on their resume or what they’ve achieved. – Steve Cockram
•  I didn’t know how addicted I was to the speed and velocity of decision-making and excitement.- John Marsh
• most people do that their whole lives, John. I would say that where you are very different in personality to your spouse, what tends to happen is, we live at best parallel lives. Children give in many ways, the perfect excuse to almost live parallel lives that intersect occasionally around a family vacation or an event.- Steve Cockram
• about that 50 yr old phase, it’s usually the time when you watch either people, the kids are grown up and they either diverge and they sadly break, the marriage breaks or they recommit and double down as it were to go, we’re going to do something together, or I’m going to make sure there is a lot more intersection of the way that we live and do life, and ministry in the next season of our marriages.- Steve Cockram
• to trust, the trust factor was huge for whether or not I could really be that individual that I am by nature. Not just with the room or the environment I was in, but in myself, to trust myself that it’s okay for me to really say how I feel, what I think, what I need.  – Ashely Marsh
•  I can be more who I am, and I can apply it to be a service to myself and to others. Because ultimately, that’s what I want to do, is I want to love myself so that I can love others. But that’s been my journey.- Ashely Marsh
• Extroverts recharge in the external world; people activity, doing things, like thinking out loud. They do as much as they can in the world, they find it energizing. Introverts recharge internally, often away from people, away from the noise. They usually need space and a chance to go in here, and reflect and think. – Steve Cockram
• I have a daughter who’s an ENFP like you John, but you both show up very differently in the world, because you may share the same nature, but you’ve had very different nurture, upbringings, cultures, gender, ethnicity, successes, failures, and you’ve made different choices. Some of them good, some of them not so good. – Steve Cockram
• So each individual is truly unique, even if we share a similar nature. And I think that’s the bit where for me, it’s trying to create liberation for the people, where I’m saying, “This is a coat to try and not a box to live in.”- Steve Cockram
• But you can’t multiply unconscious competence. Everyone looks at it and they go, “Wow, that’s incredible,” but they’ve no idea how they would go about learning it. So in a sense, the only way you can multiply unconscious competence is to make it conscious. And for me, I usually need apprentices and people who are learning with me because they have to be able to ask the question, which is, “I don’t understand why you did that,” or, “Why did you say this?” or, “Why did you say that?”- Steve Cockram
• Most people, John, die with the real gold in their pockets. It’s not their money by the way. They usually spend a fortune working out how to do estate planning, inheritance planning, but the reality is most people die having never multiplied their unconscious competence.- Steve Cockram

• Steve Cockram – About
• Giant Worldwide – 5 Voices
• 5 Voices – Assessment
• Allie Throwbridge – LinkedIn
• Cooper Books – Website
• Pollen Street Social – Website

What have you read that we should read?

• Making Room for Leadership: Power, Space, and Influence by MaryKate Morse

Who do you know that we should know?

• Allie Trowbridge

Where have you been that we should go?

I would say that basically, I say, if you took mountains and mealtimes out of the Bible, we’d have 50 pages left. So everything, everyone remembers happened, either on a mountain top experience or around a meal table. So what I would say is to go, and I learnt a lot from Jeremie is that if you combine those two things, you create a life-changing memorable moment for somebody around an amazing meal, they remember that for the rest of their lives.

So that’s the bit for me, that having somebody who is a genius at what they do. So I love doing the wine tasting with you guys in Opelika with Nelson, because you’ve got somebody who is like, they absolutely love what they do, whether it’s food, whether it’s wine, whatever it is, and actually create an experience and a memory that has food and drink involved in it.

I still remember drinking the whiskey flights later on in the evenings. I don’t quite know how I got home completely, but it’s that creating memories with people around food and wine, and those are the things that people always remember. And I think they’re the things that when you write the highlights of your life, you usually remember the mountain tops and the mealtimes. And if you can make them together, then actually that’s a really precious thing.