Leadership Starts in Your Head

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Listen to this week’s podcast episode, Ep.174: Leadership Through Kindness, Confidence and Good Decisions with the Mindlocksmith, Matt Sturgess using the player below, or click here.

Stress Makes You Stupid. Seriously.

Matt Sturgess, known as the Mindlocksmith, isn’t a mindset coach who speaks in riddles. He’s a former CEO and engineer who looks at leadership like a system. And one thing he breaks down clearly is this: when you're stressed, you can't think straight.

That’s not just a feeling, it's biology.

Stress pulls blood away from the front of your brain (that would be the part you need for solving problems and making good decisions, sounds important…). If you’re stressed, your IQ drops, you get forgetful, you repeat bad habits. Your body even slows down in ways that make you tired or sick.

So when leaders push teams harder and harder thinking they’ll “get more done,” the truth is they might just be making everything worse.

During this week’s episode of Leading with Integrity, to illustrate this point, Matt tells a story from his days in engineering where he solved a major production line issue in under an hour. His boss was frustrated because Matt was laughing and joking at the time, which to a certain kind of manager can seem like ‘slacking off’, but in truth it was that relaxed mindset which helped him fix the problem as fast as he did. If he’d sat there in “sheer terror,” he says, it would’ve taken three hours.

That's the job of an effective leader. Not panic. Not fear. Not creating stress.

It's staying calm and helping other people stay clear-minded, too.

Kindness Isn’t Weak, It's Leadership.

Another example Matt shares, from a different stage of his career, and a crucial life lesson: “Kindness is just a big thing for me… but my toxic boss thought kindness was weakness.”

Kindness doesn't mean you say yes to everything or let problems slide. It means you treat people like humans, even when the conversation is tough. Matt believes (as do I!) real leadership starts with how you choose to respond. He teaches leaders to slow down, notice habits, and rewire how they handle fear, pressure, or bad news.

He also talks about something he calls ‘bounceability’, sounds fun, but it’s his way of describing what most people would call ‘resilience’. Instead of getting knocked down and standing back up, bounceability is about having the ‘mental cushions’ in place so you don’t fall too far in the first place. Resilience has been a recurring theme on the podcast this year, and Matt’s expertise offers some great insights into what leaders, managers, and entrepreneurs can do to build more resilient teams.

Some of the tools he shared:

• A gratitude journal to train your brain to look for good things

• Giving people real feedback often, not just during annual reviews

• Creating space for silence in conversations so people can think and reflect

It’s about building habits that help you think clearly and help others do the same.

Culture’s Not About Snacks and Slogans

Your people are your business, and if you're not paying attention to those people, you're not running a business. You’re just spinning plates.

Here again, the Mindlocksmith has a powerful story to underline the point, telling us how he once walked into a company with a toxic culture and turned it around in five months. No gimmicks, just back to basics leadership, done properly. He held regular 1-to-1s that never got cancelled. He gave praise out loud and in writing. He made sure that values weren’t just words on a wall. He talked about them. He lived them. He told his team, “Hold me accountable to these too.”

One toxic person can drag the whole business down. You know the one. The person everyone avoids. The one who doesn't align with the team but sticks around because they ‘know things.’ Matt calls these folks "terrorists" and says if you don’t talk to them, challenge them, or remove them, they’ll pull everything down to their level.

New leaders and founders need to know this: culture isn't built by slogans or job ads. It’s built by how you act when things go right. How you respond when they go wrong. How you talk to people when you’re tired, busy, or frustrated. To quote former guest Scott J Allen, culture is how we do things around here. That’s what sticks.

And as Matt puts it: "Businesses are people."

If you're not leading the humans well, what are you leading for?

Closing Thoughts, Next Steps, And so on….

Thanks for reading, here’s the link to this week’s podcast interview with Matt again, and if you’d like to dig into resilience a bit more then check out this playlist as well: Resilience and How to Bounce Back.

Until next time… Be a Leader, Not a Boss!

- David

In case you don’t know me that well, I’m David Hatch and I’m here to help new managers and first-time founders with their leadership skills, so they can become leaders not bosses, lead with integrity, and build happier, higher performing teams, more effective organisations, and, ultimately: successful businesses.

If you’d like to join Integrity Leaders, my online leadership community (solopreneurs also welcome 😉) and participate in live member-only workshops, sessions/events, and access an ever growing list of leadership resources as well as get early access to podcast episodes, you can be part of it now. If you want to learn more about leadership and have a health love of sci-fi and fantasy, this is the place for you.

Here’s the link:
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(Quick Tip: There is a new, zero-fee membership tier: ‘Leadership Explorers’. Listen to the podcast and you’ll also hear all about a listener-exclusive discount code!)