In this wise episode, Scott Mautz, Owner of scottmautz.com, shares how you can become a mentally strong leader simply by changing a few key habits.
You will discover:
– What the number one trait is that top-performers seek out in a leader
– How you can workout your mental muscles and improve your mental strength
– The most direct pathway to growth for you and your leaders
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to The Secrets of the High Demand. Coach and I am here with yet another Scott we have with us today. Scott Mautz, who’s the author of The Mentally Strong Leader. He’s also the founder and CEO of profound performance, a keynote training and coaching company. Scott is a former Proctor and Gamble executive who successfully ran four of the lar the company’s largest multi billion dollar businesses. He’s also a multi award winning author of Leading from the Middle, Find the Fire and Make it Matter. Scott has been named a CEO thought leader by Chief Executives Guild and a top 50 leadership innovator by inc.com he’s a faculty member on reserve at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business for executive education and a top instructor at LinkedIn learning. And if that wasn’t enough, he is here with us today. Well, Scott, thanks so much for being here. What a privilege and an honor having you. Welcome to the show. I want to dive straight in, if that’s okay with you, and talk about this idea that you’ve laid out of meant being mentally strong. And as I was researching, as I was reading a little bit through your book, I came across this statistic that you laid out in there about what folks tend to appreciate most in a leader. And I think it would be surprising to a lot of folks. So what are some of the key traits? What is the key trade, even that folks appreciate in their leaders?
Scott Mautz
Yeah, it’s, well, as you say, Scott, it’s in the title of the book. You know, the Mentally Strong Leader. And I think what’s probably easiest to lay out is to start with the definition of mental strength, if I may. You know, metal strength is, let me start with what it’s not. Metal. Strength is not just EQ, which, of course, is something that everybody appreciates in their leader. EQ being emotional intelligence. It’s the ability to get your emotions working for you versus against you. The thing we’ve been hearing about more than any other leadership discipline for the last decade, right? EQ is just a slice of the broader umbrella of what our research has shown us, people really appreciate about their leaders, especially in times of adversity, mental strength, then by definition, is the ability to regulate not only your emotions, Scott productively, but also the ability to regulate your thoughts and your behaviors despite The circumstances, even in adversity, and I would argue, especially in adversity, it’s how we manage internally, so that we can lead better externally, at work and in life. And to get directly to your question, what we saw in our research is that mental strength exists of six core mental muscles, fortitude, confidence, boldness, decision making, the ability to make great decisions and to be decisive. Goal focus, the ability to stay focused on your goals and keep the troops focused on their goals and messaging, the ability to stay positive minded, even in the face of negativity. So that you know the vibe you’re sending out to the troops is a is a positive one. It’s the collection of these six mental muscles that equates to mental strength, and we have found it to correlate uniquely with the organization’s ability to win, especially in times of adversity, right? Does that make sense, Scott?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. It’s fantastic. So, you know, it’s, it’s one of those things I’m trying to remember who it was. I think it was the guy who much of Band of Brothers was based on. Could be getting this wrong, but he said, you know, everyone to hear until the bullets start flying, right? You don’t know what you’re made of until it gets hard. And it was the thing that I appreciated as I was looking at this, is it’s it’s not just being smart when things are going well. It’s not about being a brilliant strategist, although that’s a function of it. It’s how well does that hold up under stress? And so why is it in your work? Why is it that adversity is such a big piece of the equation?
Scott Mautz
Well, I think it’s because of the work world we live in, you know. And as you think about it, Scott, I think you your listeners, we all intuitively understand that if you want to succeed at working in life, you have to be able to self regulate. You have to be able to regulate your emotions. You can’t just emote whatever you want and let that convert right into action. You can’t just do whatever you want. You can’t just think anything you want and convert that into your behaviors. We all know that you have to self regulate to be successful at work and life. But here’s the thing breaking news for you here, it’s really hard to do that, really hard to self regulate. It’s what why it requires building up the habits to do so over time and in today’s work world. Here’s the thing, mental strike is only going to become more and more important because there’s only going to be more and more adversity we live. In a country now where some could argue that we have a hard time agreeing on what the facts are. We live in a world where there’s more and more distractions every single day. There’s more and more opportunities for us to lose our focus, more and more chances for us to feel a spark of self doubt deep within side of us, for whatever reason. And it’s not just my opinion. It is fact. It is behavioral economics. Fact, we can see the world is getting more and more tumultuous, more and more opportunity for adversity and setback faces us than prior generations, and we have to work through all of that with mental strength. It’s what makes, in my opinion, Scott mental strength the leadership superpower of our times. I believe it is the next EQ that you’re going to be hearing about for the next two decades, especially because EQ is just a slice of the broader, more empowering benefit that is mental strength.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, you mentioned something in there that everyone resonates with, but I think feels like they’re the only one that resonates with it, and it’s this, the presence of self doubt. There are so many executives and entrepreneurs and founders that I work with that are just massively successful individuals, and you get just a step behind the curtain, and it’s all kind of, you know, hanging on a thread right, that they deal with imposter syndrome on a daily basis. Why is it that self doubt is so prevalent in leaders today?
Scott Mautz
Ah, because of because of this. Scott, we make a well meaning mistake, well intended, but we’re we’re not aware that we’re doing it. And I say we the collective population, your listeners, all of us, most people, again, this is not my opinion. This research backed, most people mistakenly believe that confidence is the absence of doubt. It is not confidence is your ability to manage your relationship with doubt, because we all have that relationship. Scott and I have interviewed 1000s and 1000s of executives for the mentally strong leader of the book, and I could tell you with great with great certainty, that not even the mentally strongest, most confident leaders that I interviewed, not even them, would say, oh, doubt is never present. It’s just completely absent. Yeah. So we self generate doubt because doubt is present, and we assume because doubt is present, we must not be confident, and because we assume we’re not confident, that creates more doubt, and it creates a vicious spiral when, in truth, doubt is always there for all of us. It’s how we manage our relationship with it.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, wow. I absolutely love that. So as you’re talking about becoming mentally stronger, I keep getting this like, picture of like, Jack Bauer. You remember 24 and he’d always find himself in really bad situations. You know what? I mean, they’re trying to break him. And everyone has a number. It’s like, is that how we get mentally stronger? You know? Is that what it takes? What do we actually do to build those core mental muscles?
Scott Mautz
Ah, the first thing to do is to understand where you’re starting from, Scott and in the mentally strong leader in chapter two, actually, the reader could take a mental strength self assessment. It’s 50 questions that I work with the data scientists to took me several years to develop and to codify so that you can understand by the time you’re done, all it takes is 15 minutes of quiet reflection. And all that I ask from the reader is that they’re honest and that they’re vulnerable in their answers. And after that 15 minute 50 question self exam, you get an overall mental strength score, and you could see what tier you fall in. And then you also get a score by mental muscle. So I was saying before the six core mental muscles are fortitude, confidence, boldness, decision making, goal, focus and messaging. You get a score by each one of those so that you could then determine what muscles do I want to level up, which ones do I just need to maintain? And here’s the thing, Scott, I think this is really important for your listeners to understand. That doesn’t mean that your job is to attack every single muscle all at once. Think of your mental muscles like your physical muscles, right? If you’re going to go to the gym, and let’s say you decided you’re going to go tomorrow, 8am you wouldn’t spend 16 hours in the gym, Scott, working every single muscle in your body, you’d be exhausted. That routine would get old real quick. Wednesday might be back day, Thursday’s leg day, Friday’s arm and stomach day, I don’t know. But so what works with your mental muscles? You work them over time. You you create your own customized regimen, mental strength training regimen, by using the book The mother strong leader to figure out what muscles do you want to level up, which muscles you want to maintain. And then the beauty of it is, Scott is you could take the assessment repeatedly over time to see where you’re improving. Yeah, but it starts by knowing where you what your baseline is, and then using the host of habit building tools in the book over 50 plus tools to develop each mental strength, muscle.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, I love that you brought that up, because I’ve found a couple of things. One, I’ve found that it is very similar to strength training in the gym, and that the energy it takes to maintain is so far less than what it takes to build those in the first place. And I think one of a key reason for that, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, because it was a big part of the book. A key reason for that differential is that when you do it right, when you build the right habits, it takes some work to get those habits in place, but they can become nearly automatic when we move to maintenance mode. Is that what you found? And if so, what are some of the kind of Keystone Habits around mental strength.
Scott Mautz
Yeah, so Scott, so for example, you know, we all know that, you know, I set up the premise that we know we have to self regulate. I think people may not understand how important mental strength is and is becoming. I really believe it’s the leadership superpower of our times. You’re going to be hearing about it more than anything else in the next 10 years. That said it’s hard, we established that the help, the arm around you, that help is habits, and the whole book is imbued with habit building science. And I’ll give you just three examples of that. So for example, I mean, if you think about it, Scott, what is a habit? A habit is really repetitions, doing the same thing repeatedly until you don’t even have to think about it anymore. It almost becomes part of your muscle memory. And so the book contains systems and frameworks to help you get those repetitions in place. So when I say, you know, loosely, oh, there’s over 50 plus tools in the book, what I mean is there’s over 50 plus systems, frameworks, step by step methodologies to help you build the habits to become mentally strong, and then each habit building tool has a set two sections that are straight from habit building science. First one is, what is your first small step that you’re going to take to build this particular habit? What’s that first thing you do, because we know Research shows us that many habits never form. Scott, because people don’t know how to get started. Likewise, with the second thing that’s included in every single tool in the Maui strong leader, which is a section titled in moments of weakness. What do you do in moments of weakness when you can feel things starting to break down. We’ll go back to the confidence muscle again as an example. You know, I was recently working with a client who was pretty darn confident, and they experienced a major setback. They were in a session at work, a meeting at work, that was a really big it was a big deal for them. There’s a big presentation, and it didn’t go well. The boss asked questions that they weren’t expecting. They weren’t prepared for these particular questions. They came out of that meeting with their confidence spiraling. And it took, you know, some time for me to help them tell help him get back to okay, this is a moment of weakness, and let’s understand this. Here are the things you need to do to get right back on track, to keep that muscle strong, we need to know what to do with that and each habit building case, right? Does that? Does that make sense, Scott?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it does. It’s so profound. And I think many times what’s, what gets us off is we just, we don’t ever prepare for those right? We think like if a moment of weakness comes, but in reality, it’s when the moment of weakness comes and it will come, yeah, and it will come. I absolutely love that. Give us an example, if you don’t mind, of one of your favorite habits that you uncovered in the process of writing this book.
Scott Mautz
Oh sure, yeah, there’s, oh gosh, there’s so many. I could pick so many, but I’ll, I’ll just share one that’s that’s pretty easy because it also has a fun story behind it. So in the boldness muscle section, right? Boldness is a key part of mental strength, and maybe not the first one you always think of. But you know, when I say boldness, I’m talking about, you know, boldness, Scott, is something that pays it’s a direct pathway to growth, right? It forces you, if you’re have a bold mindset, it forces you to push your thinking. Get out of grooves. Get out of ruts. Take risks. Not always easy for us to do. Some of us are just inherently not risk takers. So I’m gonna tell you a quick story about a thing that you know I came across, that you can do too as a leader, to create a spirit of risk taking and thus boldness and create a mentally stronger organization. So I’ll start with a quick story. Let me ask you this, Scott, have you ever been to a casino before?
Scott Ritzheimer
I haven’t actually.
Scott Mautz
Oh well, if you know, you’re not missing much of my opinion, but you know, whatever. So I had a, let’s say, a keynote and a workshop with a casino company in Las Vegas. They called me in and I was going to dinner with the executives on that team the night before, I was going to give my keynote and do my workshop for this leadership team. And we were having dinner and over, you know, drinks and such, they were telling me about a throughput problem that they were having on the casino floor, meaning there was one game. Particular on the casino floor, where the ratio of people standing around watching the game, not spending money on it, to the number of people that were actually spending their money on the game, it was so out of whack that it was causing an unproductive bottleneck in the casino floor. Wow. Now, because you were on, you know, you’ve never not been a casino. I’ll cut to the punchline of this the game was called, is called craps. Craps is a game you play with dice. You roll the dice into a pit and you bet on the outcome. And for listeners at home, if you Google what a craps table looks like, just go Google craps table and you see it. It is incredibly intimidating, very confusing to look at. There’s a box, all kinds of boxes and squares and check marks and places that okay, place this bet here, place that bet. And it’s very, very intimidating. What the casino executives were learning was that people were literally not stepping up and rolling the dice. And if you ever heard that term, it comes from Las Vegas, it’ll step up and roll the dice. They were not stepping up and rolling the dice and spending their money because they didn’t understand the rules of the game well. Meanwhile, back at the office, Scott people will not step up and roll the dice. They won’t step up and take risks. Yeah, if they don’t understand the rules of risk taking. Yeah, there are 20 questions in the book The mentally strong leader that you can use as a leader to spell out to your organization the rules of risk taking. For example, okay, what does a good risk look like? Define it. What does a bad one look like? What happens when you succeed with a risk fail with a risk? Who needs to approve what level of risk, and so on and so on and so on. Once you spell out these are the rules of risk taking. You will have a mentally stronger, more bold organization that feels more empowered to take the risks that you want them to as a leader.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow. Remarkable, remarkable insight. I absolutely love that. So Scott, there’s this question that I like to ask all my guests, and it is this, what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all. What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Scott Mautz
The thing I wish I knew earlier in my career? Scott, which is, stop chasing approval, start chasing authenticity.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. So good, so good. So, Scott, there’s, there’s some folks listening today, they’re just resonating with every bit of it, right? They recognize they’re not the only one who self doubt. They want to build a bolder organization. They want to become a mentally stronger leader. What can they do? How can they find more out about you, the work that you do, and get a copy of your book?
Scott Mautz
Yeah, you can go to scottmautz.com, and you can find out about all my books there, including the mele strong leader, the workshops I do on mental strength, the keynotes I deliver on mental strength. And also I put together a premium, kind of a free giveaway for your audience today, if your audience is interested in a free 60 page PDF that includes the mental strength self assessment that I was talking about earlier, as well as questions to help you, prompts, if you will, to get the most out of the book The Mentally Strong Leader, just go to scottmautz.com/mentallystrongbook, and you can download that 60 page PDF for free. Again, that’s scottmautz.com/mentallystrongbook. Oh, excuse me, I said mentally strong book. It’s mentally strong gift, my bad. Scottmautz.com/mentallystronggiftIf you want the free PDF.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic. We will get that in the show notes, the right URL, so everyone can get to that easily. Scott, before I let you go, is one question I want to ask, because we’ve got a lot of folks who are in a similar space to you and I, they’re coaches, consultants, speakers. What’s one piece of advice that you’d give to another coach or consultant listening today,
Scott Mautz
I think Never underestimate the value that you bring to people and for coaches out there, I’ve always found just a very practical kind of tip. I’ve always found it very helpful to don’t get into the game where you’re negotiating on an hourly basis. Sell a benefit to the client. So dear coaching client, you want to become more confident, okay, you want to become mentally stronger. Okay, you want to be promoted into that role. That’s the benefit you sell. And then you tell them how many coaching sessions it will take to get to that benefit, but you’re selling your price based on the benefit, not individual outings for coaching. That’s my personal opinion. I found it to be helpful.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s fantastic. Well, Scott, thank you so much for being on just a privilege having you here today. For those of you watching and listening, you know that your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Scott Mautz
Scott Mautz, author of THE MENTALLY STRONG LEADER, is the founder and CEO of Profound Performance™, a keynote, training, and coaching company. Mautz is a former Procter & Gamble executive who successfully ran several of the company’s largest multi-billion dollar businesses. He is also the multi-award-winning author of Leading from the Middle, Find the Fire, and Make It Matter. Scott has been named a “CEO Thought-leader” by The Chief Executives Guild and a “Top 50 Leadership Innovator” by Inc.com. He is a faculty member on reserve at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business for Executive Education and a top instructor at LinkedIn Learning.
Want to learn more about Scott Mautz’s work? Check out his website at https://scottmautz.com and get your free PDF and assessment at https://scottmautz.com/mentallystronggift/
Podcast Booking Status: Open
We are looking for podcast guests, and we want to share your story.
Are you a coach, consultant, or advisor for entrepreneurial organizations? If so, let’s do a great show together – and we can promote you to our audience on all our social media channels, website, and email list.
Guest requirements:
- As a coach, you should be experiencing some very good momentum AND be grossing $100K or more annually. We’ll be talking about how you help your clients achieve extraordinary results.
- Consider yourself as equally people and results-oriented in your mission.
- High-authority expert management and independent coaches who work with founder-led entrepreneurial organizations of 40 or more employees. We also encourage guests that are operations/strategy and culture consultants, advisors, and leadership coaches to be guests (no specialties in marketing, branding, sales, or IT, please
- Please, no new coaches (under 3 years), published authors, non-independent coaches, or non-business coaches/consultants.