#25. Gabor Holch: The Conflict Within
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What's up, everyone? Welcome back to The Honest Drink. I'm Justin. You can almost reach us at thehonestdrink at gmail.com. And if you've been enjoying this podcast, go ahead, rate, comment, or subscribe. Now, our guest today is what is known as an intercultural leadership coach. He has given TED Talks. He has coached public leaders, CEOs, and all types of high-level decision makers.

In addition to leadership coaching, he is also a consultant, public speaker, and author. This was an extremely insightful and fun conversation for me. This man has such a wealth of knowledge and life experience. He has done some incredible work throughout his life and has worked with some incredible people, from emergency responders to diplomats to high-level executives of some of the largest multinational corporations.

We talked a bit about the coronavirus, social media, culture and mindset, leadership, personality types, and the midlife crisis. It was a pleasure and honor to have him on the show. And FYI, it was just myself hosting this episode. It's great to be back. So without further ado, please welcome Gabor Holsch.

Gabor, thanks for coming.

Very nice to be here. Thank you for having me. Yeah, thanks for being here. It's a little awkward during this time because of the coronavirus, of course, but I've seen recently on Moments you've been putting out some tips, some advice for people. What's the kind of advice you're telling people for staying indoors? It's actually an ongoing article on both WeChat and LinkedIn. I have noticed that one of the big

problems with people these days is just being confined and a lot of people are being confined with people that they usually don't spend hours and hours and then like their kids and husbands and wives and mothers-in-law and so on and actually it came from social media posts that my wife was looking at I will tell you my favorite one of the guys I don't know if in Shanghai or Beijing was so bored at home that he started fishing in his own fish tank

And confinement itself can be a problem. It drives you crazy, I guess.

So it happened quite often that even for days, sometimes for weeks, we were not allowed to leave home for security reasons and so on. Oh, wow. And then you learn from senior people over there, and some of them were like hardcore emergency responders, like policemen, like army and so on, how to stay sane, how to stay productive, and how to even stay happy if you're locked up in 60 square meters and you cannot go out. So these are the posts that I started writing

applied to this situation. So obviously you don't have to be worried about having water or ammunition, but you do have to worry about binge watching and then binge posting. - And binge eating, maybe. - Yes, that is another one too. - Because there's low activity, people aren't really getting out to exercise or walking around as much.

That is one thing. And the other thing is that we live in a world where commercial messages just keep coming to us and they expect us to respond. And if we are not careful, then we will spend our life responding to them. And there is always something popping up on the screen or popping up on the TV set. And all we are going to do is just invest our own time into running these programs.

commercial products, basically. So I think that is quite a danger in this kind of situation. So what is the usual length of time where you find it starting to get dangerous for people to stay indoors?

I don't think it's dangerous to stay indoors at all because there are people, if you talk to people who let's say live in Finland, then they spend entire months mostly indoors. But what can be dangerous is having the wrong mindset about it.

And basically mentally pressing a pause button when something like this happens and normal life and all the responsibilities with it get suspended. So normally what happens to you? A lot of people work dictates their routines that give structures to the life. If it's not work, then it's study.

So basically the clock ticks and you tick with the clock. You just go ahead as you are supposed to go ahead. And then when your routine gets disrupted, that's when problems can arise, right? When the routine gets disrupted... You don't have that structure anymore. Basically you shelve your responsibilities. You don't have to get up on time, so you don't get up on time. You don't have to look after others. You don't have to communicate with others. So you stop doing all of those things. And then the problem is eventually you are going to start hating yourself because there is a...

a little voice in your head which knows what's right and what's wrong. And if you sit on the sofa and just watch one TV show after another, have crackers and, I don't know, drink sodas, then the first thing that is going to happen to you is that you are going to accumulate a lot of sugars, you are going to slow down your blood circulation, and eventually you just feel like a loser.

And then the other thing that's going to happen to you is you look back and nothing happened to you for days. Nothing to keep you happy and nothing to keep you even sad. And all of these things have functioned. You start thinking about what you are supposed to be and what you are supposed to do. So what I recommend in these updates is it's perfectly fine to watch movies. It's perfectly fine to play video games. But you have to design this kind of curve.

that keeps you up, down, up, down, both physically and mentally. So you deliberately interrupt yourself at certain intervals. Usually they say an hour, hour and a half is a good interval to interrupt yourself. If you are on a couch, pull yourself up. If you're on your feet, sit down.

And then you can create a quite pleasant routine. I mean, I'm not following ironclad self-discipline. It's something that you need in order to even enjoy the show that you're watching. I'm sure that everybody who is listening knows this experience when you, let's say, you watch or you play a video game for hours.

And then after an hour and a half, two hours, this voice starts like shrieking in your head, like, what are you doing? You should be getting up. Yeah. Right? And you cannot enjoy the show either. Yeah. It starts being self-defeating just to sit there and keep watching. So this is what I'm trying to help people prevent. I see. Well, Gabor, cheers. Cheers. Welcome again.

That's got a good note to it. So we're drinking today William Grant & Sons Rare Cask Reserves. It's a 21-year-old blended scotch whiskey. You know, usually we kind of introduce the whiskey we're drinking at the top of each show. I heard. And I don't know, what do you think of this whiskey? Well, first of all, I love a scotch that's old enough to have its scotch, you know, as they say.

And then the second, it's spicy. It is a little spicy, right? It has a spicy note. It's got a little kick to it. Well, you know, I'm somebody with a short attention span, so I like things that stand out in one way or another. And this whiskey definitely stands out. Yeah, it's got spicy notes and a lot of nutty aroma, I feel, kind of, a little bit. Or grass. I don't know. It's pretty good, though. Mm-hmm.

I usually try to stay away from these very sophisticated descriptions because I can only do it if I read it from the bottle. Well, I'm just pretending as well. I'm just trying to sound like I know what I'm talking about. But people who listen to this show know that we know nothing about whiskey. I have a friend who is a wine connoisseur and wine trader. And one of the things that we do when we meet is, what was the latest stupidest wine expression that you picked up at parties or something like this? Some of those things that make no sense at all.

So not to linger on the subject for too long, but because of your previous experience, I'm wondering, have you ever dealt or known anyone that's dealt with cabin fever? Is that a real thing, cabin fever? I hear that. It is.

So can you explain that? What is it and how serious is it and how often do people get it? Cabin fever, as they say. When we say cabin fever, it's a word that we don't use too much anymore. It's a little bit like...

In an earlier stage of medical science, they said things like melancholy and hysteria, and they actually thought it was a medical condition. And finally, we found out that it's, how do you say, it's a label that we stick on certain kind of medical conditions that we understand much better now. So if you look at cabin fever, it's a self-defeating vicious circle of a lack of activity and a lack of impulse and the depression itself.

that comes out of that. And of course, when you enter a cycle of depression, then the new cycle of loneliness, isolation, monotony hits you much harder. And then it goes around and around. And spirals out of control. Yes, exactly. It can spiral completely out of control to the point of, I don't know if you know that opening scene of Apocalypse Now. Yeah, I do. But when I think of Cabin Fever, the movie reference I think of the most is The Shining.

Right, with Jack Nicklaus. Yes. Like, it's, oh, Nicholson, not Nicholson. Nicholson, the golfer's Nicholson. But I think of the movie The Shining where a guy goes crazy, you know, in the snow cabin and kills his whole family. Like, yeah, that's what I think. But I'm sure that's just Hollywood kind of exaggerating. No.

Not really. I mean, of course, in The Shining, first of all, the cabin is quite big. And secondly, there is the spiritual element. So he's supposed to be under a curse in that building. But if you mentally connect one scene when he's just throwing a small ball against the wall for hours and hours, apparently, and then the other one when he gets to this point where he's just staring out of his head...

and there is George Ligeti's music playing in the background, that is what cabin fever can be like. But then you can take it to the next stage when Martin Sheen breaks mirrors and pours whiskey into his own mouth. So at one point, you basically, if you don't have...

information from the external world that guides you, you can completely lose your sense of reality. So you can actually start hallucinating and you can start having crazy thoughts about yourself and the world. Now, that is, of course, a very severe case of cabin fever.

what people are experiencing because of the coronavirus is not so bad. But since we live in an age where we are not subjected to dramatic things, you know, most of the males like you and me, we haven't been in the army, we haven't seen horrible things that would have taught us how to deal with extreme situations. Babies are delivered in hospitals, unlike at the time when the expression cabin fever comes from. So for example, women,

They learned how to deal with trauma. They learned how to deal with very stressful situations from things that happened every now and then, every couple of years in every family. We don't learn that anymore. We have very comfortable, fairly hygienic life. And then suddenly even a mild trauma like this hits and some people can lose it completely. The interesting things are...

I just posted a couple of tips just to give listeners a little bit of an idea. There are four behavioral types, like four kinds of actions in human life. At the beginning, you set goals, you push, and then you interact, and then you help or provide service to others, and then you evaluate, organize, and so on.

And I shared a couple of tips for each of these and start with organizing. Look at if you are locked down for a couple of days, look at do you have enough water? Have you got the medicine that you need? Do you have food and so on? So going around in these circle of these four types of activities.

And they are quite useful because if you follow step one, two, three, four, then you can build yourself a routine that takes you through a day at the end of which you're going to look back and say, well, actually, this lockdown is not too bad. Now, you can't imagine the kind of questions I got after I posted each of these episodes. So I start getting questions like you mentioned in one of the first posts, I mentioned if you need medication, just look at have you got the medication that you need?

Let's say you are going to stay at home for a week. If you need any kind of medication, make sure that you have got it. If you need water, make sure you have water and so on. And then I start getting these messages. What kind of medication you recommend I buy? And I said, listen, it says if you need medication, then buy medication. If you don't need medication, obviously don't. The other day, one of my friends from here in Shanghai said,

She texted me and said, "Do you think I should buy a lot of batteries for my torch, for my flashlight?" I said, "Come on, the virus is not going to kill the power stations." So I think sometimes people don't feel this borderline between inconvenience and disaster these days. And this is what I learned when I worked in places like Bosnia, Cambodia, which are really on the brink of collapse at certain times.

There are people who are like air hostesses, you know, when the plane starts shaking and so on, you always have to look at them. If they are calm, you can stay calm. If they start like rapidly looking left and right, then you know there's a problem. That's when you freak out. Exactly. Cheers. Cheers, cheers. Yeah, I really like what you said about like,

how for most of us living in modern society now, we haven't really experienced a lot of the hardcore traumas that a lot of the earlier generations or people living in other regions of the world have to face on a daily basis or have faced at all in their lives. So when a little bit of kind of crisis hits us, we kind of verge on that line of panic, right? And even your friend who asked you like how many batteries should she get for her flashlight or whatever,

I mean, these are kind of self-explanatory questions. Like they're just common sense kind of things. You don't need to ask someone about those kind of things. But I think they ask you because there is that little sense of panic. So they're trying to reach out to other people to reconfirm to themselves if they're making the right choices. You know, does that make any sense? Yes. Like in the physical reality that there must be a borderline between now I'm inconvenient and now I'm in trouble. Yeah.

if you see what I mean. It's a little bit like you told me that you also like martial arts. So somebody punches you and then mentally, you know whether it's an inconvenience, it's pain or it's an injury. If it's pain, you go on. Or even if you're a runner or even if you're doing something else, like you play tennis.

And then you feel this pang, you know, and sometimes it's just pain and then you push through it and you go on. Sometimes it's an injury, then you have to stop. This is a very important differentiation, you know.

It's the experience to be able to know the difference between the two. Yes, exactly. Now, I think in the society that we are living in now, and the younger the people we discuss, the more true this is becoming, is not just this kind of perception between the two is disappearing completely.

that people don't always know if it's an inconvenience or a disaster, if it's pain or an injury. So I don't know if you...

trained with older people, younger people, you know that there is an older generation in all kinds of sports who have a tendency to push through the pain and then younger ones, they have a much higher awareness of when do you have to, how do you have to breathe. Okay, one of the examples that I love is the heartbeat counter. It's a fantastic thing in certain sports, but now even amateur runners who run like 2K, they started wearing these things and they are checking on their smartwatches what their heartbeat is. I mean,

if you run three or four K, who cares what your heartbeat is? You're not going to get into a zone where you have to worry about it. - You know what, I kind of agree with you. Even though all my friends who are amateur, you know, they run as hobby, you know, they all wear that. They all track. - They do. - They track their vitals, they track their heartbeat. And, I don't know. - Yes, that's a gadget. That's a gadget. And that's when the borderline starts disappearing between you have to know or you want to know.

So this is also with things like the cabin fever because of the coronavirus. Some of the questions may come out of genuine concern, but some of the questions may come out of interest that people think is genuine concern. Do you see what I mean? So somebody is sitting at home and it's like, okay, Gabor says you should prepare for this situation, but I look pretty much prepared. So what else can I do? Or I do a lot of corporate training.

Some people ask questions because they need the information. Some people ask questions because they want to look smart. And if you look at what's happening on social media, I think now the bigger half of people who comment or ask questions on social media do it because they want to look smart. Absolutely. I agree 100%. So these kind of situations also give people a topic to discuss, right?

But a very important thing to keep clear in your head is now I'm discussing or now I'm preparing, solving a problem. These are two completely different issues. So somebody who messages me, what kind of medication do you think I should buy in preparation for, you know, staying at home for a couple of days because of the coronavirus, I

I sit and I say, well, listen, either you're asking this because as a kind of intellectual exercise and then, okay, let's talk about this. But if you ask because you have a genuine medical need,

I am an intercultural leadership consultant. Why would I be able to say, look at the post, what does it say? It's behavioral help. It's like mindset and routine and self-leadership. It says nothing about biochemistry. I don't know anything about- Well, I think because you coach leadership, so they see you as a leader yourself. So they look towards you as almost an authority figure in terms of information management.

and things of that nature. - Yes. - Where they don't have the confidence in themselves at that moment in time because maybe they're panicking, they're scared, whatever it is, that they're looking outwardly for answers. - Yes. - Instead of kind of entering the questions themselves.

- I do believe that's true and I also believe that is the reason why if you put anything out there these days, you have an enormous responsibility, including this podcast, including social media, because it's so easy. You can make opinions about anything. On this podcast, we could start giving advice about the coronavirus, about things that we don't know anything about. Now on the other end of the line is the same thing.

People, if they, I don't know, they zero in on Oprah or they zero in on Conor McGregor, then they take advice from those people on everything because those people are icons. And sometimes I'm listening to these things like, I don't know, somebody who, a golfer started a channel on something completely unrelated.

And they cluster together brands and so on. I find it very interesting that people don't think about what they are doing there. Commercial products, commercial information has kind of blended together with medical advice and news and all of those kind of things. And moments like the coronavirus outbreak, they are the moments of truth. Because for example...

A lot of people started blogging about quasi-medical issues because of this. How dangerous this whole thing is. Should you take it seriously? Should you stay home or go to work? And a lot of people re-comment on it and so on. And every now and then there is a voice who comments on one of these posts like, dude, what do you know about these things? You're not a doctor. And I have a very big respect for people who do that.

Because first of all, they expose themselves. They open themselves up for attack. Exactly. And because they are the lone voice of reason at a time where everyone's kind of... And you know this expression, hater? Yeah, of course. That is labeled very quickly these days. If you're a showstopper, if something is beautiful happening here, there is like a cooking blog and then people who follow it started...

If you're not marching along to the beat with everybody else, like blindly just marching along and going within, hurrah, then all of a sudden you're a hater. Yes. And one reason, let's label them haters. One reason why I have a high respect for those people is because they do it.

because they raise a hand and say, "Wait a minute, he's a chef," or "He is, I don't know what, a musician. He's not a medical professional." But the other thing is that I myself don't bother to do it. You just watch this social media stream like The Matrix in the movie gliding in front of your eyes, and then you say, "Ah, you know, these people are crazy." And you don't do it. Maybe because we are afraid of the repercussions, I don't know.

But you let it roll, basically. Well, talking about social media, what's your view or perspective on social media today and its role with kind of blending or promoting culture and getting people to have more exposure to kind of cultural differences with different cultures and different countries, different peoples?

Do you feel it's more divisive or do you feel it's helping? Oh, that's a great question. So there are two kind of qualifiers that I would like to mention before we start talking about this. The first thing is that generally speaking, I think any tool, any medium, any communication forum does what people always do. Maximum, it just magnifies it.

And I think social media is one of the examples. I don't think people will fundamentally behave differently because of social media. I think just they will be louder and their voices will go farther because of social media. So this is one thing. The other thing is that my forum is face-to-face.

So when I do my work as a speaker, as a consultant, then I face the people that I talk to. It can be a keynote and there could be 300 people in the room, but I still read the room. I still say something and I see the vibe. I see if people frown or people lean forward.

If I do a corporate workshop or if I do individual group coaching, that's extremely interactive as a genre. So sometimes I step into it even not quite knowing what I'm going to do because at the beginning people bring up issues and I reflect on them. And when you write, it's also something like this because another forum is my blog, my books and so on. And then you hear a lot of stuff, you write it down and then you reflect on it.

So I'm not really an intensive social media guy. For me, social media is a little bit like a billboard. I create them, but I don't really read them. I use an app to do my social media work. I sit down once or twice a week

And I kind of preload my social media for 10 days, and then it kind of trickles out. So I'm not the kind of person who would, if you comment, then I would re-comment in a couple of hours. But having said that, and then you can see that I keep a little bit of distance from it, I think there are two things that social media does to people. The first thing is that people switch to a reactive mode.

most of the stuff that goes on on social media is a reaction to something. And people who designed Facebook and lots of other like Twitter, and I don't know if the Chinese apps are a bad example because then social media was already mature. But certainly if you look at the history of Twitter and Facebook, the original idea was that the original non-moving mover is an individual, right?

But what happened is that most of the time corporations throw up the ball at the beginning of the game. And then individuals start responding to it and trying to play the game. So literally people don't have time to think when they do their social media. I don't know if you know this feeling when you read a book and then you have to put it down and think about what you read or you have to flip back. You cannot do this if you're sitting in a movie theater. Right.

If you watch a movie alone, you can pause the movie. And sometimes we do. We do this with my wife. They make a reference and then either I don't understand it because it's Asian or she doesn't understand it because it's European. Then we pause and say, well, the reason why he said that is. If you're in a movie theater, the movie just keeps going on and you hope you will remember what you wanted to say or think. In social media, that happens at like 10 times the speed. So you have to react. You have to just respond, respond, respond.

And the faster we need to respond, the more we rely on our reptile brain, so to speak. Like reflex, just like knee-jerk reaction. Love, hate, defend, attack. And that's the second thing that social media does to us. It makes the discourse terribly emotional. So these are the two things I say. Now, this could be a good thing or this could be a bad thing, right?

When you talk about culture, how it spreads culture. So we know about things that we would never know about. Let's say the same natural phenomenon happens. Let's say pollution. And then we know how Chinese people react to it. And let's say how Swedish people react to it instantly. And that is a great thing.

Because we can compare how people think and we can compare how the reactions are completely different from each other. And that can be a great thing. Of course, the emotional part as well. I mean, people give emotional support. People love things that they couldn't love otherwise. When something like this happens, people can post, we pray for you, we support you.

If Wuhan people start singing in defiance of the problems, then people can sing along with them on the internet. But this can also turn around, right? So it's just a magnifier. It's not a game changer. Because there's a lot of, I think there's a lot of ignorant opinions, right?

on social media as well and there's a lot of misinformation out there as well so it's the problem is like the good it's it's good and evil at the same time because you have to you have to kind of do enough of your own research and use your brain enough to kind of to siphon through all the kind of bad information that's there but you never really know yeah i mean like i'm not smart enough to always know like some things i i get it like okay i i kind of ignore i know that's bad information

But I'm just as vulnerable to misinformation as anyone else out there. And I consider myself a relatively smart person. I mean, I think I am. I mean, I hope I am, right? So that's where it gets really shady because there's really, nowadays, there's almost no way to tell the difference. I think there is. Just think for a moment about what is the map that you laid out here. So I think those stupid opinions have always been with us.

But now people have a platform. Before, you would never hear those opinions. Exactly. But now they have the platform, so you hear. Now, the question is, you can look at it as a good thing or bad thing. But let's say it's always a good thing and a bad thing. Just let's look at what it means. So I'm going back to my childhood. I grew up in the 70s. I was a teenager in the 80s.

Those stupid opinions have always been there. I mean, you just had to go to a hairdresser, right? Those were the people who always knew about everything, how to win a World Cup, how to solve problems between countries and so on, and taxi drivers, and all of those people who have an opinion about everything. The big difference between social media and back then was that people didn't have a voice. Where did those people speak? They just spoke to each other. There was no forum. There was like a speaker's corner in some of the parks, but otherwise...

- Those people just influenced, let's say, the two dozen people around them. Today they go onto social media and that is a big difference because if they want to or if they have the voice,

then they can influence hundreds and hundreds of people. Or thousands. Or thousands of millions. That's right. It's getting scary. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing because this is the kind of world we live in. And these are the millions around us. So if somebody says, just put any name of any famous person in the blank, XYZ is an idiot, right? And lots of other people respect that XYZ.

And then 2 million people instantly reply, I perfectly agree with you. I think we have to know that.

Because there are, you know, just imagine how history worked for a very long time, how leadership worked for a very long time. Leaders were extremely surprised that the majority was against something because before that they didn't know. Exactly because those people didn't have a voice. Now they do. Now all those people do have a voice and they can share it. So a huge difference is that for a very long time, communication, writing, printing, even recording was a tool for the elite leaders.

to influence the masses, right? And suddenly it turns topsy-turvy

And the masses start influencing the elite. And just look at it. I don't want to make it very political, but look at which societies love these developments and which societies just cannot accept it as a new reality. That's very telling. Come on. Who are you to make an opinion about this thing? You can stop people by opinions. You can stop people by technically stopping them from posting it.

So, actually, if you want me to take sides, I still take the side of those cultures who say, you know what? Fire away. Just do it. Brexit became official two days ago. And a lot of people say it's completely stupid. Those people who voted for Brexit, they had no idea what the European was. They had no idea what Brexit means. But they have to live with it.

You see what I mean? I mean, all those people who have money to buy real estate everywhere, the politicians and so on, they are protected. They have enough money. They have enough resources, even if Brexit turns out badly. But those people who drive the taxis and work in the factories and so on, they wanted the Brexit. Let's see what they are making out of it. Well, so they have to live with the consequences of their own actions. But what you're saying with social media is like you're saying that the good outweighs the bad. Mm-hmm.

I do think so. Yes, I do think so. Because I would much rather live in a world where I know what all of those people think. And I can try to add my own voice. And of course, sometimes I can see hundreds or thousands of people shoot themselves in the foot. That actually happens. But number one, they wanted something. They gave it a try. They took a risk and they shot themselves in the foot. This is number one.

And number two- So you're saying it's more of like a learning experience? It's always a learning experience. So they come out at the other end better and smarter and just more aware? Okay, just let me go back a little bit into my own life. So I grew up in two countries which were not on the enlightened end at that time. So I grew up in Hungary and Iraq.

Knowing how those societies work, I would say that in comparison to that today, if there is a kid who is smart enough and interested enough and ambitious enough, I would much rather live in a society where that kid can get any kind of information he or she wants to and then do whatever he or she wants with it, rather than living in a society where everybody's protected from certain kinds of information, including those people who could be.

become amazing doctors, musicians, politicians, engineers, and so on, unless they don't know what engineering is, or they don't know how to write a book, if you see what I mean. So I think it's still that social media, of course, there is an awful lot of rubbish. There is an awful lot of hurtful things. But then again, that is just information that would be there anyway, except it wouldn't be amplified. Right.

I get you. I get you. But do you think that there is, because going back to what you said about, you know, look at the cultures that really accept the kind of new innovation and technology, especially social media and the ability for everyone to kind of freely broadcast themselves and their opinions and look at those that kind of try to control it a little bit, right? Yeah.

Well, do you think there's a responsibility for developing nations or developing cultures, whichever direction you want to go in, for them to kind of protect themselves from themselves, right? Because in a developing country, let's say,

let's kind of relate it to like a body's immune system, right? Well, in the developing country, the immune system is still weak. It's still a child. It's still growing. It's still learning to be robust from all sorts of threats, both domestic and foreign. So do you feel that there is a sort of justified reason in certain cases for

for certain countries to kind of control the social media a little bit, to kind of control the spread of having just everyone be able to voice their opinion, no matter how reasonable that opinion is. I absolutely love your metaphor. I love it that you compare it to the immune system of a living organism. Why? Because the immune system is a self-managing mechanism.

So it's not something that you can or should influence too much. So if you look at the immune system, let's say you have a headache, then a lot of people would pop a pill to get rid of the symptoms, right? And a lot of people would say, all right, let me go online and see what are the two major causes of headache. And then what they will do is they will go online and they will find out that there are two very frequent reasons for headaches.

One of them is dehydration and the other one is fatigue. And then there are lots of other ones, like for example, bad eyesight and so on and so forth. So facing the symptoms, my head splits and then trying to get rid of the underlying causes is one way to approach it. The other one is popping the pill. I think when an authority, and you don't have to think about countries, there are corporations who do this to their employees. There are families that do it and so on.

I think that's like popping a pill. You temporarily get rid of the symptoms, but you don't deal with the underlying causes. So yes, public opinion is like the immune system. If people hate something, they will voice it and then they will get rid of it. And then if they miss it, they will bring it back and so on. Give it a chance. Let it play out. And especially because I work with high-level decision makers. So I started off as a junior...

I worked with governments. I worked with politicians, diplomats, and so on. In 2002, I switched to corporate consulting. Most of the time, I work with executives, but I still work with international organizations and so on. And this is what I tell leaders. Don't try to act like the switch. Don't like to act like that pill.

that allows certain effects to play out and doesn't allow others. Because you're not much smarter than those people who are posting on social media. You just have more information and more resources. So why do you think that what they don't know, you know? Why do you think that your decision would be the right decision? So to translate it into the language that you used, what gives you the right to protect people from themselves?

I really don't believe in that. If you're a parent, I don't believe in it. If you're a boss, I don't believe in it. If you're the head of a country, I don't believe in it. When you put it like that, it makes a lot of sense, I have to say. Because when you bring it down to the kind of individual level and the family level, right? And you compare it and it's kind of the same dynamic at play, it makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense. You know, going like what you do, the work that you're in now really...

I find really interesting because weirdly enough, it touches upon a lot of the things that we discuss on the show actually. So you're an intercultural leadership coach, right? - That's right. - So if we break it down, first the intercultural part. So obviously on this show, we talk a lot about the differences in culture between Western culture and Eastern culture, primarily here in China.

So that's that aspect. And then there's the leadership coach part where I was really pleasantly surprised to kind of learn through watching your videos and your coaching and your interviews

to learn that you're extremely human-centered in your approach. You're very individually focused in your approach. And that ties right into a lot of things that we talk about on the show, which is kind of self-improvement, how to better yourself, how to make better decisions, think better, things like that. So you talk a lot about, I feel like, empowering the individual to make their own choices in life and to make better choices.

And then all at the same time, having said all that, you work with some of the world's largest multinational corporations and companies. I guess you coach them and you consult with them or they consult with you.

So that seems to be a far departure from a very human-centered, individual-centered kind of approach. So my question is, are these isolated individual pursuits in your own work? Or does it all tie together in a single larger overall message that you're trying to promote? - First of all, I'm absolutely delighted that it came through from all those things that you saw online.

And yes, it comes together in a message. And I think every message is a story. So the story for me is that I started off with studies in philosophy, like many other people who don't want to grow up because they don't know what they want to do with themselves.

And philosophy makes you think a lot and try to put everything into a kind of global or what is a holistic perspective. And then, of course, that didn't take me too far. So I went on to study international relations, diplomacy. I became a diplomat. Eventually, I came over to China. And then basically management consulting found me. That was a fantastic opportunity. That was 2001.

to when I arrived in China until 2005, when I started the company that I still run. And I still do most of my work through that company.

And eventually, I did a degree in management consulting as well. And most of the people I started working with, they are the kind of strategic consultant or strategy deployment consultants who would help you on how to implement Six Sigma, how to create a new strategy for your firm and so on. And I didn't really find my place in that world because one of the things that I saw is

We took a system. It can be a CRM system, you know, a customer relationship management system, which is basically a software. Or you can look at Six Sigma. You can look at designs thinking. You can look at the performance management or the hiring system of a company. And as a management consultant, very often what you do is you basically hammer people into the system.

Or if people don't accept the system, then you try to build a better system. This is the McKinsey type of management consulting work. And I looked at what we were doing and I said to myself, we have been kind of fine tuning these systems for years now, but I think the system is fine. That's not the problem at all. The system is, as you noticed with a very keen eye,

I think the problem is the individuals. So if you look at, for example, and I can translate it into another metaphor, I think the traffic code and the traffic lights and the signs, that's fine. We don't need to change those, but we need to change the way people drive.

And that's why I started focusing on the individual because every time a company tried to either introduce or maintain one of these extremely complex system. And, you know, the stakes are very high, not only because there are billions of dollars at stake, but also because these are the companies that make our pills. These are the companies that make our homes. I mean, if they screw up, we will pay a very heavy price. And now...

I found that the problem is not with the systems. Many of these systems are crafted by overeducated, overpaid individuals who do an amazing job. But that at certain junction points, there are gatekeepers who are just not convinced that this system makes any sense at all. And basically, they put out their foot every time somebody crosses their path, right? And that's what became extremely interesting for me as a kind of professional mission.

And then afterwards that I started dealing with this and I started learning systems that explain human behavior, that's when I stumbled onto culture as one of the keys to understanding why people resist systems that are otherwise quite workable. And you know it because you also stand between cultures. So sometimes there is a new boss and then he tries to maintain certain things and people simply say, that's not the way we do things around here.

Every time I hear it, I feel like an archaeologist when you know the ground that the construction site kind of caves in. And it reveals this whole hidden...

Because very often it's like, that's not the way things are being done in here. The clue to that is you are German, I am Hungarian, you are Chinese, I am Japanese, you are from the south of the country, I'm from the north of the country, you work in the public sector, I work in the private sector. So this translates.

into cultural gaps. And this is, again, a very emotional topic. People sometimes even don't admit it, even to themselves, that the reasons... They try to rationalize it. You know, we need a little bit more time to introduce this. We have to hammer out some bugs. But actually, at the core of it, it's a kind of...

visceral resistance to something I don't understand or don't agree with. Well, because it's part of your identity. You know, growing up, you identify with where you're from and your ethnicity and your culture. So when you start talking about these things, I think it's very natural for people to take it very personally, right? Mm-hmm.

Well, I don't know if it happened to you when you were younger, when you were a kid or a teenager, that your parents or your family gave you an item of clothing as a gift and you hated every single molecule of it. And the family said, why don't you just wear it for a while and give it a try? So intercultural work feels like that.

So you get like a sweater or you get a cap or you get a pair of shoes and it fits for size. But you say, you know, this is so not me. And oh my God, if you are worried, what will my friends think about me? And if somebody takes a picture, will I look stupid or...

And then suddenly you start hyperventilating because of an issue that otherwise doesn't matter so much. Rationally speaking, it's your mother's voice. Just wear it for a day or two there. And then you see if it grows on you, right? But in the meantime, there is this emotional part of your identity, as you say, which is self-constructed, by the way, your identity, which says, this is not me. I don't want this. I want to get out of it.

So this is actually the kind of mindset that I'm dealing with in large organizations. So what are the problems you typically run into? Is it the friction in...

different cultures bumping up against each other or is it just a general lack of understanding? Like what is it usually that really, what is it really that causes the problems when it comes to culture? - Yes, so now again, that is a fairly abstract statement which is true as such, but let me bring it back to the individual because that's where the secret is as you observed.

So at the beginning of this whole issue, I have to sit down with an executive who is the key to the success or failure of a corporate venture. And that venture can be the smooth running of a factory or 20 factories, or it can be introducing a new leadership system or

or a performance management system, or it can be starting a new branch for a large multinational company. So I sit down with this person. And usually the way it starts is extreme confidence or extreme lack of confidence in a certain situation. I started working as a management consultant

with high level executives of European multinational companies in China. So that was my bread and butter for a very long time. And then I stepped over to not just China, but East Asia and Southeast Asia. And then now I do it the other way around. I even work with Chinese executives in international companies who are promoted to a global role. But let me give you two very specific examples. So extreme confidence and extreme lack of confidence.

Both of these people are CEOs. Both of them, the way, I don't know if our listeners will know it, but by the time somebody gets to becoming CEO, there is like a half a year vetting process. The company starts observing like 10 people six months before even the job comes up.

And then eventually they shortlist and then shortlist and then they tell you you're one of the five and then they start making these people compete with each other. So I sit down with this German guy and then he was just promoted to this role. He had been there in this role for about three months and it's not going well. There is a lot of resistance from his mostly Chinese but also international team. And there are projects that ground to a halt because of this.

So the Chinese team wants the boss to tell them what to do. The boss wants the Chinese team to tell him what the problem is. And then it's a kind of like in the First World War, two trenches and 100 yards from each other, but there is nothing happening. So I sit down with this person and I said, what do you think the problem is? And then the CEO says, the problem is they don't do what I tell them to do. So I say to the CEO, so it's a delegation issue.

You want us to improve your delegation skills? He says, no, no, it's not that. My delegation skills are perfect. The problem is that they don't do what I tell them to do. So at that point, I think from an external perspective, you see the paradox. But they don't because it's in their head. So I said, could you please repeat that sentence for me? And he said yes, because of course he assumed I didn't understand what he meant.

So he said, yes, my delegation is perfect. The problem is they don't do what I tell them to do. And I had to ask him to repeat again. And the third time when he started the sentence, in the middle of the sentence, he literally slapped his forehead. There is this sound. I don't know if they can hear it. But he says, so you are saying that if people don't do what I want them to do, then my delegation methods cannot be perfect.

And then I told him, actually, I never said that. But yes, that's the point. That's why we are here. So then we say, in my profession, we say you have to build awareness first. And then you can move on to skills. So this is one extreme example. The other extreme example is also a European gentleman. He was promoted to CEO in China for a large industrial conglomerate. And then when we sat down for the first time,

I asked him again, so why do you think we are here? What is the issue that we are working on here? And he said, Gabor, I don't think my bosses who hired you to coach me know this, but I think they made me CEO by mistake. I don't think I'm cut out for it. I don't think I'm ready. I don't think I have the skills. I think this is going to become a disaster.

Spoiler alert, it turned out not to be a disaster. He did a very good job. But that person was like a fist, like a clenched fist. There was not one loose muscle in his body. So that is extreme lack of confidence. Now, both of these states of mind are a problem, but they are not problems that you cannot manage. It's simply that that kind of executive appointment is such responsibility that

that people give extreme reactions to an extreme situation. So say, you know, I'm currently coaching a Chinese gentleman that the company said, in a year, we want to scale up the business from 200 million to over a billion. You know, these kind of things. It's really crazy. I help lots and lots of top-level decision makers. I would never want to do the jobs that they do because it's extremely stressful. It's like being a top athlete, right?

It's like being a boxing champion and now everybody wants to beat you. - Of course, you're at the top, right? - Absolutely. - And you have tremendous responsibility. - Yes. - And tremendous goals set on you, heaped on your shoulders that you have to achieve or else otherwise your job's on the line. - Yeah, exactly. And from the human perspective, because I think most of the people who are listening to us, they have no idea what the CEO does. I mean, we know about CEOs that they are overpaid and we hate them.

But just imagine that somebody, let's say, is a mother or father with three kids, right? And then does an excellent job. So somebody from another parent from the school says, you're such a fantastic mother. We would like you to organize a birthday party for 20 kids. And then you do an excellent job on that. And then somebody says, now we would like you to manage a school with 20,000 students. So this is what happens to these people, right?

And of course they don't want to say no because this is what they have been preparing all their careers. But the step up can be intimidating. It's not cut out for a human being under normal circumstances to take that kind of leap. Yeah. Well, it's like being the president of a country. Like no single person I think is...

is qualified to do that one job. It's a ridiculous thing. Yes, yes. And that's extremely important and it goes back to what we said about social media and it goes back to what we said about people being the showstopper and people...

let's say, protecting other people from themselves, is that you can look at the institution of the Pope. You can look at the institution of the president of a country, a CEO, the head of the United Nations. You peel away these layers and layers and layers of power and ritual. And in the middle of it, there's a human being, exactly like you, who gets up in the morning and sometimes asks himself like,

fuck am I doing here? You know, it's, it's who am I? Why me? Or what if I had chosen another kind of life and I would read the newspaper in the morning and then look after my roses. And so, so, uh, there is so much doubt and there is so much, uh,

Insecurity? Insecurity. Thank you very much. In every human being, even if you put all these kind of shiny armor on them and they look inviolable, they look infallible, but nobody is. Absolutely nobody is. I absolutely believe that. I go around, you know, I've adopted a...

a principle in the way I kind of view things and going through life that I feel has helped me is that I feel like no one really knows what they're doing in life, right? No one really knows. We're all just guessing as we go along. We're all just learning as we go. Some people learn faster, but we're all just learning nonetheless as we go. No one has it all mapped out and nothing ever really goes according to plan. Right.

So we're all just trying to tread water, so to speak. And there's this idea that the world is not built

Like, we like to think that the world around us is built by these giants, right? And that they're untouchable, these giants, and we can never really aspire to be them. And, you know, we just live within their rules and the worlds that they built for us to live in, right? They're the gods. But when you realize that the world around you is built by people just like you and me, you know what I mean? And sometimes not much smarter, you know what I mean? Yes.

So you begin to kind of empower yourself to be like, well, I can affect change. I can do things. I can step out and do something that means something and that has an impact here. You know what I mean? And you give yourself that confidence to move forward when you kind of start viewing the world that way, whether it's true or not. But once you start viewing the world that way, it empowers yourself to be able to kind of do things that you might not have expected.

thought possible before. Yes, that's right. And when you do, it's usually because of other human beings. This is something that a lot of leaders don't understand, is that I love playing with language and I love observing the connection we organize

and organization. So basically when you organize, let's say if you look around this studio and then you say, oh, what a mess. I have to, actually it's not a mess. It's very ordinary. But let's say one day you come back and your dog made a mess and then you say, I have to put everything back in place. I organize it. You don't create additional value by adding things. You create additional value by putting things in place. So it's the same elements, right?

It's just you fight the entropy of the environment and then it becomes more efficient and it becomes nicer and it becomes more hygienic because you organized it. And then comes organism that we, you know, every individual human being is made of carbon and a couple of other things. And then we are so amazing and unpredictable and creative because this matter is organized in a certain way. Now, that's also true about organizations.

Organizations are more than the individuals because people inspire each other. The interesting thing about my profession is that a lot of leaders forget about this.

You know, when you're a management trainee, you admit that most of your accomplishments are because of people around you. And when you are a member of an amazing team, you have no problem admitting that what you achieved is mostly because of the team. But then when you become a leader, a lot of people have this kind of, what do you call it? This kind of obsession that it must be them. You know, I must add individual value. Yeah.

But no, I don't think so. If you look at it and you ask the ultimate goal, it's very difficult to answer the question of purpose on any level. Organizations, of course, make out this kind of mission statements and so on. But ultimately, if you look at it, an organization, just like an individual organism, the main goal is to perpetuate itself.

Right? So if you look at individual human beings, what is your life purpose? People will say things about health. People will say things about family. People will say things about work. What is that? It's just keeping things in order to make sure that you last for a longer time than if you didn't take care of these things. So to me, it's absolutely amazing. So do you believe in the saying or the idea that, you know, the best leader makes himself unnecessary? Yeah.

Like the goal of a leader is to make themselves unnecessary. I don't really believe that. You are a musician as well, and I can see guitars hanging on the wall and LPs everywhere and so on. I think it's no easier for a leader to make themselves unnecessary than for a musician. So if you look at who is your favorite pop star or musician at the time? I like The Weeknd.

All right. So just imagine the- He's a hip hop R&B guy, yeah. Okay. So Weeknd, just imagine the Weeknd saying-

The people who follow me, I look at their social media posts about my music and I realize they know more about my music than I do. They understand music more than I do. I'm just singing, but they know so much about music. I don't think I'm necessary here anymore. I think you, dear fans, are much cooler, much more brilliant than I am. So I retire, right? This is not something that you would like. No, you are in the middle. You owe everything to your audience, but you still have a function there.

And I think leaders are absolutely the same. There is a reason why leaders get to the point where they get. It can be the leader of a sports team. It can be the mayor of a city. It can be the CEO of a company. It doesn't have to be a CEO. It can be just the vice manager of finance in one of the companies. But there are going to be a lot of people who will gain inspiration from you, who learn from you,

who get up in the morning and the only reason why they drag themselves into work is because I don't want to let Lucy down. And leaders are supposed to be that force which represents something, just like a leader or a king or, it's not them, it's what they represent. It doesn't mean they cannot make a mistake. It doesn't mean they are perfect. It just simply means that they, if I may use this kind of slightly emotional word, they serve, if you see what I mean. Yeah.

And then I think what I can do for them, going back to that four factor system that I mentioned in the context of my LinkedIn post, is that I help them learn about themselves. How can you do this? How can you inspire? How can you serve? How can you help being yourself? Because another big challenge that we all face, but in the case of leaders, it becomes magnified, is that you try to play a role.

And most of the time, that's copying somebody else. Well, I'm glad you're bringing this up because I want to bring this up first, is that I really, really enjoyed the TED Talk that you did. Thank you. I appreciated it a lot. I found it very inspiring. I found it very personally relevant to myself, actually. And one thing that I feel from you is

is that when we take a look at the word leadership, oftentimes the generic meaning is a leader who is leading others. But I feel like you apply it to the individual as well in the fact that it's self-leadership. Be a leader for yourself. Listen to yourself sometimes and don't just...

and take instructions or advice from others that might not be fitting for your character, right? And find, be like what you said before about being aware is the first step. Self-awareness is almost the first step. And if you can achieve self-awareness

then you can start leading yourself better to find things that you really actually want to pursue, to find things that fit your personality type better so that you can work more effectively and you can just live more effectively instead of in constant conflict with who you are at the core. And that's what I really loved about the TED Talk that you did. You were talking about how personality was kind of the missing link between passion and profession.

And then you also went to the four circles that you keep going back to. So it seems like those four circles...

I'm not really clear on the four circles, but the four circles are kind of, kind of tie into a lot of aspects of your work. - Right, right. Well, the four circles, so let me just clarify a little bit. It's an ancient system. It goes back, as I said in my talk as well, it goes back to the ancient Greek doctor slash philosopher, Hippocrates. And it says that basically there are four ways to engage the world. One of them is to fight, to push, to compete.

This is what we usually call red in the system that is based on the DISC model. The second one is to celebrate, to innovate, to become a little bit silly. And that's what we call yellow. And in the DISC system, that was red is D and yellow is I. The next one is to build empathy, to listen, to support, to help, to serve. That is green.

the S, and then finally there is to plan, implement, organize, reduce risk. And that is the last C. So D-I-S-C. And what color is the last one? It's the blue. And also there is a symbolism in the colors because red is the color of revolution, fire, and so on. Yellow is the color of attention, sunshine, and so on. Just imagine somebody dressed in these colors.

Green is color of relaxation, nature, and blue is associated with order, the police, steel, the sky, the order of things. In Chinese, we say tian shai, you know, everything under the sky, which is basically how things work.

Now, everybody has all of these four elements, but because of our chemistry, our brain chemistry, which is sometimes also called personality, some of these things jump to the foreground. So if you have any kind of problem in the world, so just imagine that you need help. Let's say you have to move this apartment, right? We both live in Shanghai, and sometimes the landlord says you have to move out in a month. So you want to get help from your friends.

Four different people would get this in four different ways. So people whose personality is dominated by the red, by the pushing style, they would look at this as a challenge, right?

And then they would organize, maybe they would pay somebody to do it, or they would say to a friend, you owe me. They would use authority, they would use hierarchy. They would get their employees to do it. So they'd be more aggressive about it. Aggressive, competitive, but also aggressive is a judgmental word. And these kind of systems, we don't use judgment because all of these systems work if you use them the right way. You see what I mean? So let's say if I am Bill Gates,

And then you are my third cousin or you are one of the people who follow me on Instagram. And then I say, you know, I need a favor. Would you do me a favor? Would you help me with this and that free of charge? You can look at it as aggressive, but I would be very happy to help. And I even tell my friends, it's so cool. Bill Gates asked me for a favor. You see what I mean? Yeah.

And then the second one, if you are, if you are, um, uh, now I'm exaggerating for facts here, but let's say if you are dominated by the yellow, by the, by the eye, that playful in innovative color, then you would turn it into a game. You would, you would inspire people to help you. And in the, in the green, first of all, I would, I would hesitate to, to burden you with it, but with some kind of indirect message, I would ask for help. I would rely on the community.

And then finally, the blue one, what is the proper way of doing this? Who is supposed to help me? Who owes me a favor? And so on. So all of these are there. Now, a lot of people are a little bit confused and they think one of these mental models or behavioral models are more suitable for leadership than the others. And most of the time when people think it is because of a personal role model.

because they want to be like Bill Gates or because they want to be like their boss or they want to be like their grandfather. And they copy actions instead of copying, how can I say it, purpose. So here, the job is always to move the flat. It's not to call your employees or to turn it into a game. That's just a tool to get where you want to go. So all of these different so-called leadership styles work.

I help people to discover what is your personal leadership style, your natural leadership style that comes from your genetic code, that comes from your upbringing, from your native culture, whatever it is, which one is it that you are most comfortable in? We do interviews, we do assessment, we do all kinds of things. I have been trained in reading body language, in listening to the kind of words that people say.

You get clues. And then I feed this back as feedback and I say, as far as I can see, you are trying to be a high-risk, pushy, competitive leader, but your nature is being a disruptive, creative, passionate kind of leader. So I suggest you rely a little bit more on your natural style. So that's a yellow trying to be a red? Yes, in this case, yes. I would assume that most people would think

that a leader should be a red. I would think that would be the general assumption. - Absolutely, yes. And then you can bring up, there's one exercise that you can do with people is that read up on famous leaders and try to guess their natural color, so to speak, their natural style. So everybody's composed of all the styles, but usually we have a primary and the secondary styles. So you can be like,

Your natural leadership style can be green and red, green and red, or blue and yellow. And then if you, let's say, if you come from the United States, then I would make you read up on presidents. And you have very successful presidents from each style. So you get George Washington is a blue style person, very organized, a little bit emotionless, but things always work because every detail is checked. Right.

President Obama is red style. Theodore Roosevelt was yellow style and so on. What's Trump? Trump's red, right? I think Trump is yellow. Yellow? Really? Yes. I think Trump is yellow. I mean, I don't have data, but just watching his body language and listening to what he says and how he says it, he talks an awful lot about making people happy, which is happy is one of his favorite words. Legislation will make people happy. Yeah.

than state visitors, for example. He keeps talking about how much Xi Jinping liked the chocolate cake that was served in the White House. And generally, he's quite emotional. I mean, red doesn't rely on emotions as much as yellow does. And if you watch his general demeanor and you see how he engages with people, one of the typical clues that somebody is dominated by yellow is a short attention span.

And this is a big difference between the red and the dominant pushy style of leadership and the passionate, inspiring kind of leadership. - But do you find that most people you come across are living in their wrong colors, so to speak? You know what I'm saying? Are kind of living a life that's not their natural kind of characteristic? - It depends on lots of things. So I don't want to overcomplicate it, but for example,

You are much more likely to live in your natural color, first of all, if you are senior and

When we are younger, we usually don't live in our natural colony. So you're senior in terms of age, not authority? Yes, both, both. So if you're senior in terms of age, then you just start not giving a shit, basically. You don't have that much to lose. Either you made it and then you can rely on yourself or you know that you're not going to make it and you just want to have a decent exit. So then you start doing things in your own way. If you are senior in terms of age,

then you can do things your own way. You can even reshape entire organizations to your own style. So that is another way. Also, it depends on where you live. In many societies, you are supposed to follow the tradition much more closely than other societies. Societies that basically give you a coin and say, flip it. Then you

you are much more likely to find your natural style, your natural color, so to speak. Societies that say, this is the time to get up, this is the way to dress, this is the way to eat, this is the way to get married, then it results in less struggle about how to live your life, but it also results in much more self-tormenting because this is not the way you want to do it. A very good example is religion.

Religion is a good example because it dictates people's daily lives, even down to the very minute details and very intimate aspects of your life. And if you're not happy with how you should be, then it triggers guilt. So that's why it's a quite tough system. But there are similarly tough systems because of national tradition, because of corporate culture, and so on and so forth.

This is a second. And also, you have to look at things, for example, in many societies, men are much more likely to do things their own way than women. That is also quite important. There is a biological difference between genders, which means there is a color difference between genders.

Do the same colors apply to women or do women have their own set of colors? No, no, no. This is about human behavior. So men and women, it's the same system, but gender is relevant because if you look at how the human hormones work and influence the brain and the brain influence your behavior, then there are certain trends.

So naturally speaking, men are more likely to fall into the red dominated category, for example, because it's associated with the hormone testosterone, which is statistically just men create more of it than women. And then the blue color is related to the, they are not hormones, they are neurotransmitters, but it's called estrogen and serotonin. These are the blue and the green.

So women are naturally more likely to fall into those two categories. But of course, there are men who would have a profile that's similar to women and then the other way around. Let me give you an example. Women in corporate leadership jobs.

That's a huge issue. It's not just an ethical issue. It's also a legal issue. For example, in the European Union, now there is a quota for certain companies to have a certain percentage of female leaders. Hmm.

there are large investment companies who said, we are not going to invest in your company unless it has certain number of women on your board. So it's like forced diversity. It's forced diversity. Now, the question is, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Because I don't think it's a big secret to anybody that the corporate world is a man's world. It's the values of competition, right?

the values of meritocracy, the values of hierarchy, they are much more typical for a macho kind of thinking than, let's say, a motherly kind of thinking. And I worked together with a scientist from the Max Planck Institute who said that they actually screened very successful female executives. And as a trend, they found a higher testosterone level

those individuals than the average female population. So basically it means that in order to survive in this men's world, which is corporate leadership, you have to be a woman which has certain traits, which are normally associated. Male traits. Yes, exactly. So I don't want to be that simplistic, but traits that are normally associated with male behavior. And then it's not just enough to put women into these...

corporate positions and let them fail, which is going to happen if the game is a man's game. What you have to do is you have to change the game itself. And that is a very difficult thing to do. So it has very far-reaching relevances. And I find this absolutely fascinating. Yeah, it is very fascinating. The idea of, I mean, when you talk about forced diversity, you know, this is a common popular topic, I think a lot of people, especially nowadays, right?

And it's the idea that if you're, personally, I believe if you're forcing diversity, that's not the answer. That's not going to work. Because by forcing it, you're inevitably going to be replacing people who are more qualified for their job than others just for the sake of whether this person is a male or female, whether it's an ethnic issue or whatever it is. It doesn't work that way. Diversity has to be

Has to be by free will. Otherwise, it defeats the whole purpose. And the real issue is if we're talking about inequities in society, then we need to start at the root. And that's not at the corporation level. That's not at the executive level. That's from the very beginning when you're talking about inequalities and equities in income and in neighborhood, poverty levels, education levels, health levels.

all these things feed that. And if you don't stem that at the source, then you're always gonna have inequities at the top. Well, let's translate this into something that everybody can understand. Just imagine that there is a schoolmaster who looks at the football teams in the school. And he says, it is so unequal and so unfair that in most football teams, there are no girls and no nerds.

So what we are going to do is we have to make sure to include nerds and girls in the football teams. What would happen in those football teams? You're going to lose every game. Not just lose. You would get beaten up. Hurt. You would get hurt. Those girls and nerds, they would start absolutely hating football. And then the schoolmaster says, okay, I have the solution now. Let's create nerd teams and girl teams. Right? And those teams would lose the championship. So this is what's happening in the name of...

of inclusion and equality and diversity these days. So that basically they keep the game untouched, but they include pockets of inclusion here and there as a kind of favor to those people. And they don't realize how much they lose with this.

Because, of course, if you look at it, look at sports, look at athletics as a movement, for example, of course, nerdy kids need fitness as well. They have to stay healthy. For example, in the United States, what is happening with the women's football team, right? There is, if you look at commercial potential, if you look at just the passion that it creates in the society, right?

There is a lot of lost opportunity if we don't include those people. But you have to do it in a way that actually makes sense. So this is what actually, in older times, there was a certain wisdom to athletics. That's why, for instance, I am Hungarian by birth. And in our country, one of the very popular, slightly weird sports is pentathlon.

I don't know that one. Yes. So actually, I don't know if it's still the case, but for a very long time, Pentathlon is five different events which came out of medieval chivalry.

So it includes horse riding and it also includes chess. That sounds awesome. Yes. So just imagine if the schoolmaster said, you know, we are going to create a kind of Olympiad for people where we have three events, right? There is football, there is chess, and there is stage performance or something. So we create a diverse rounded stage, right?

And then obviously the Boise boys are not going to win every single time, or they are going to give it a go at chess. This is how inclusion looks like in corporations as well. So that's an example of changing the game, right? Well, we have to change the game because a lot of times exactly the companies that try to be more diverse are the companies that are struggling.

Because the general public, they want to relate to these companies. I mean, we have to take this very seriously. Brands are brands because people love them. They identify with them. Companies like Uber, companies like Google, companies like Apple, people follow their stories like they follow the story of a football team. You know, it's very emotional and people learn about life. They draw inspiration from it.

And we have to make sure that people don't draw the wrong inspiration from it, if you see what I mean, what's happening in terms of

gender equality in companies like Uber, in companies like Google, right? You can actually become the wrong kind of influence in society if you're not careful with it. And maybe what you are doing, some of these companies, what they are doing is not illegal. Actually, if they want to, they can get away with it. It's just unpopular. It's just unpopular, exactly. Because you don't want to be that company that fires somebody for a certain reason and that person starts blogging

And we are back at the social media. Full circle, yeah. Full circle of social media. And there are 3 million people say, really? They fired you for that? What bastards. And everyone starts broadcasting and chirping. And then it hurts your business. And then the pressure. That's where the pressure comes from. Exactly. Yeah. It comes... Yeah. Social media is really changing the game in terms of how companies act. But...

In my opinion, it's also changing the individual. And what I mean by that is a topic, you know, we started off talking, not we, but the show in the first few episodes started talking about was the idea of the individual going through a midlife crisis, right? And I'm getting to that age where I think that might be the case with me. I'm not sure. It doesn't show. It doesn't show. Thank you. Thank you.

I think that social media, because it's such a new phenomenon, right? That there's this new term now called early midlife crisis. They have to put an early in front of it because I think people...

are getting, are running into or experiencing that midlife crisis earlier and earlier than traditionally. And I think that has a lot to do with social media because every day you're bombarded by people posting these great lives and these great moments and these awesome pictures and great things that they're doing. And I think that's adding, and in an era before social media, you would never have known about that. So it would never have affected you.

But now it affects you every day if you're into social media. And that causes a lot of insecurity, right? And I think that drives or sparks that midlife crisis a lot earlier in people now. And I don't know if that's true, but I'm thinking that that could be very possible. What do you think about that? Well, you have to look at what midlife crisis means. So let's look at the midlife part first.

I think the friends that advise you on this, they have a very strong point about the early midlife crisis. Because let's say as you approach 50, historically, that's a grandparent's age. That's the time when you would start being part of an extended family. And this is the way it worked for 10,000 years. One of the reasons why we have the midlife crisis these days is because we live in atomized societies.

So we don't live together with multiple generations in the same home anymore.

organizations where we work, they are based on individual performance rather than seniority in the organizations. In traditional societies, for example, very often they write about Japan, that in traditional Japanese companies, they still use the kind of seniority system where every five years you would get a big promotion. So if you do live long enough and you do stay in the same firm for long enough, then by the time you're 50-something, you would basically guaranteed a senior position.

And in a Western style meritocratic system, that is simply not the case. So if you are left alone when you're 50 something, and if you are still not senior enough, not successful enough in the kind of game you're playing, obviously you look into the mirror and you have some very difficult questions to ask to yourself. So this is the midlife part. Adding to this problem is that because of the advance of medical science, people live longer.

Let's look at how many countries these days they have presidents in their 70s.

In a way, that's weird. So just think about it, whatever your age is, I'm not going to ask you, but whatever your age is, just do the maths and just imagine that your big chance comes when you're 70 years old. Just like many of the people who run some of the biggest countries in the world. It's a little bit freakish, isn't it? That is a little bit crazy. I never really thought about it that way. That is really crazy. So as we imagine ourselves in our early 60s, there's already kind of cooling off.

But those people, these are extremely ambitious people. They may be wrong about lots and lots of things, but they are right about one thing. Your life is not over when you reach retirement age. You can still do great things for you and for yourself and for other people as well. And then let's look at the other part. And what is the crisis all about? The crisis is a kind of identity crisis. Yeah.

Who am I and what do I want? And what have I accomplished? What have I accomplished? Did I use my time well? Now, this is a hugely cultural issue because certain cultures just simply don't allow you to ask these fundamental questions. And if you, I don't know, if I go and I train management teams in countries like Pakistan,

or in some Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia and so on. Very family-centered, usually large families, usually religious, very strong tradition. And also there is a certain calling associated with all of those things. So it tells you when you're a good person, when you're a bad person, what you should desire and shouldn't desire. Many of those people don't have a midlife crisis, right?

because you are surrounded by people who depend on them. So if somebody from a traditional society with a home with three generations in it

If he keeps staring at himself in the mirror for 10 minutes, asking himself, what have I achieved in my life? There is going to be a knock on the door because he has to wipe the nose of one of the grandkids or somebody forgot something in the bathroom. You don't have time for this. There's going to be something to disrupt that chain of thought. Exactly. Something is going to disrupt the chain. Now, is it a good thing or a bad thing? I'm not really sure because it's also true that

In comparison, if I compare Western, let's air quote Western society, United States, Western Europe, and also societies like Singapore, New Zealand, so on, their people are much freer to choose their calling, their passion and profession. Whereas in traditional societies, it's more like a train, you know, you have the rail and you can choose the speed. But it very much depends on who you want to be and what surrounds you.

And I think in midlife crisis, we have to face these two realities. Number one, thanks to medical science, we will live very long. And number two, this kind of curve that we learned from previous generations doesn't apply anymore. You know, like my father retired in his early 60s. And after that, he is like doing his gardening and lives for his hobbies. But he can do it because he retired on something that

He sustains him. He's not going to get rich on that. Now, the good news is that this kind of curve that we are trying to maintain is only about 100 years old. If you read a little bit of history or if you watch a historical movie, watch or read about the everyday life of people on all levels of society 300 years ago. People didn't have jobs then.

People had professions. - They had trades, right? - Trades. In German, they call a job, a profession, , which basically means, what do other people call you? - Not what you call yourself, it's what you're kind of known as to others. - Yes, yes. So even in German, even today, it's like, , is what do other people call you? And the traditional answer was, I'm a cobbler, I'm a gardener, I am the king.

So people didn't think about it as jobs as something that you enter in the morning and then you hang up on the coat hanger at six o'clock in the morning and you go home. Actually, most of the time in human history, people chose something that became their identity. And then you did it until, I don't know, until you couldn't move anymore. And if you look at the new economy of gigs and self-employment and doing what you do right now,

That doesn't need to stop when you're 60 years old. Why should it? You can just go on. I mean, you can sit in front of a mic and do podcasts or you can drive taxis or you can break bread or you can lead a country until you're very advanced in years. So what's the best piece of advice you think you can tell somebody that let's say is getting towards midlife, right? Getting a little up there.

And is just innately unhappy with what they're doing. But they find it too daunting or too scary or too risky to kind of just change professions altogether or do something different or pursue something that they're passionate about. Right. Like, what do you say to that person?

I would say to them that you did something for a very long time that you consciously chose and you put a lot of energy and time and sometimes even money to be able to do that. And you were hoping that that will answer most of your questions in life. And it didn't. So now you, on one hand, you are panicking because all of those questions are still there. And on the other hand, you are sad because it's very hard to let go. Yeah.

An obvious metaphor would be a marriage. So it could happen that you were together with somebody for, let's say, 20 years. And interestingly, many of the senior professionals that I work with, and this thing comes up, they are also senior in their marriage.

And it can also be a very tricky thing because kids grow up and then sometimes you become very senior. Many of the executives now, they have a more flexible lifestyle. Sometimes they are even advisors and so on. They spend more time at home. And then they simply realize, you know why my marriage worked? Because I was never at home.

And now suddenly I'm not really sure, do I want to be locked up with this person on the horizon? So you thought you checked that box or those boxes. And then you suddenly realize, I haven't. And that is a scary thought. Now, just like in a marriage, it can happen that actually that was the answer. You just didn't approach it in the right way. In terms of mindset, you mean? In terms of mindset, yes. Because when you...

Let's say if a married couple has a spat, they have a fight with each other and one of them just kind of throws it at the other one's head. You know what? Let's divorce. Right. Sometimes it's genuine intention. Sometimes it's just a quip to hurt the other person. But then you stop and you say, is this situation repairable?

Is this something that I want to keep doing? It's just not going the way I hoped. This is one possibility. The other possibility is this is beyond repair. And then you have to make the tough decision of moving on and creating a new chapter. Midlife crisis is exactly the same thing. I think two thirds of the cases is actually what I do, I do well. I have the experience. People like me to do it. They need me.

It's just the juice, the passion is gone from it. So all I have to do is rekindle that kind of thing inside. And actually, we can look back at traditional wisdom and very often the answer to that question is to pass something on to the next generation because this is what we are biologically, we were coded to do, for example. So let's look at the positive example that it's repairable. So am I a senior salesperson, but it doesn't give me any, any,

joy anymore to land multi-million deals. Maybe my next chapter is to become somebody who prepares salespeople for the success.

Or am I in any kind of profession? Maybe my calling is to write it into a book. Maybe my calling is to start an internal team that makes sure that this kind of institutional learning goes on. Just like in traditional societies, I am not a fighter or a hunter or a gatherer anymore. I am a caretaker.

Now, one of the reasons for these blues that we feel in midlife crisis is because I would like to go back to the hormones and neurotransmitters of the four colors. And if you imagine a kind of matrix in front of you where the red and the yellow are on top and the blue and the green are at the bottom, that what happens in our life is we have a certain gravity of hormones.

The fighting hormones, the cheer hormones are emptying out of our system as we get older. And the responding hormones, the caretaking hormones, the listening hormones are becoming stronger and stronger. And especially men, that creates an identity crisis because suddenly you feel like you are

You are not what you used to be. You don't have the charisma, you don't have the drive, but that's perfectly normal. Life is just preparing you for a different role. - That is pretty profound, I think. I never thought about the kind of shift in terms of if you look at the four colors, the older you get,

the yellow and the red start dropping down, like you say. - It does. - And you start naturally becoming, whether you're male or female, whatever, you start naturally typically becoming more blue and green, right? - Yes, that's right. Now, very, very simple things. Just imagine that you are talking to a 50-something-year-old man, and then he starts complaining, "You know what is happening? "I start losing my hair."

I start being frightened when people raise their voice. The other day I cried when we watched a film. Do you know what all of this is? This is all the toning down of the testosterone in the male system. And the testosterone is associated with the red color in the four-color system. But people just simply think, this is not me. No, no, no, it's still you. There is an expert called Helen Fisher.

She is quite well known. Started off as a medical doctor, brain scientist. Then he became a tech entrepreneur. Then now she's a management consultant herself. And she trained me in one application of this four-color system. And then she brings it back to ancient human societies. Man had to give way for the next generation.

Man used to be hunters and explorers and fighters and so on. But if these fighting hormones and exploring hormones, these kind of aggressive competitive hormones, they don't start toning down with age, then you never let the next generation take over. Just like you see in the animal kingdom, you know, the alpha male often kills the young adult males because he wants to keep being a leader. Human societies don't work like this. Human societies thrive on diversity.

So in ancient societies, when males got to their 40s and there was the next fight, it was the 30-year-olds, just like that 40-something was 30 once, who said, let's get the buster. I want to go. Give me a lens. I'm going to... And the other one said, you go and fight. I will make the lenses and I will give you advice. Wow. Because that changes the whole perspective of how...

I look at the midlife crisis because before we were thinking, well, I was thinking the midlife crisis was kind of outward pressures of society telling you something, therefore you're reacting to it and then you go into a midlife crisis. But what you're saying there is the midlife crisis has nothing to do with society. It's really a biological change that people go through. It's a response to the biological change.

So it's inner. So it's a physical change you're going through. Yes, yes. Stress, sadness, depression. These don't come from the outside world. No, no, no. These things are responses. You cannot blame the outside world for these things. Stuff happens and then you respond to it. You could imagine somebody exactly like you who would respond completely differently to the same kind of input.

But you respond this way and you worked very hard to build up your identity and you're not happy that you have to let it go. But actually, what we have to realize is that

how do you say, the death of an old identity is the rebirth of a new identity. It's a little bit of boxing champion to boxing trainer. - But are you saying that the death, the thing that changes, that causes the death of the old personality and the rise of the new personality is actually a biological change happening within our body? - It's a response to the biological change. - It's a response to the biological change. - Yes, the biological change happens anyway. - It's a symptom of the biological change.

let me put it this way and the biological change happens anyway everybody gets older but you can choose do you want to be in in your life whatever the profession or what you want to be a nicholas cage or you want to be a george clooney you see what i mean so meaning nicholas cage tries to play the same role over and over again even though now he's kind of aging out of that role

And George Clooney becomes a producer, becomes a director, becomes an entrepreneur, becomes a... Do you see what I mean? So is Nicolas Cage is... Sorry, Clooney is not on screen as often as he used to be. Is he a loser?

Obviously not, right? Exactly. So that's more akin to him taking on more caretaker kind of roles. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And he just takes all the experience that he accumulated as an actor, but you don't have to cling to that identity as an actor. And all of us are like this.

And nature does this to us because your role in society has to change. Otherwise, you are becoming a hindering factor. You are becoming that strange old guy who doesn't want to give up the department even when you're already half blind and you cannot contribute to it anymore, if you see what I mean. Well,

That was awesome. Gabor, do you have... Gabor, I'm sorry. Do you have any... Are you working on a new book or anything like that? Yeah, so I'm working on a book right now, which is... It has no title and it has no publisher yet, but both of them are in the making, so we have a couple of options. So I...

I cannot speak about it in very concrete terms. Okay, we'll keep it a secret for now. But it is going to be a book about basically China through the eyes of expat executives, foreign executives in this country. So you're going to have a lot of firsthand accounts, firsthand stories kind of in that book? Yeah, exactly. It started off with having to listen to so many stories as a coach and a trainer and an advisor. Yeah.

But of course, I cannot publish those things because they are confidential because of the nature of my potential. Well, can you publish them but just change the names? Well, what I can do is that I can go back to the same executive at another time and tell them, now I'm officially interviewing you for a book. And there is a legal disclaimer for that. And what I can say is I can listen to them and I can throw certain things in. Like once when we worked together, you said this and that. Would you like to comment on that?

So I interviewed about 25 high-level executives from all over the world living in China. But I also don't just want to ask them. I also want to ask others who understand their situation. So I interviewed medical doctors who are specialized in mental health for foreigners. I interviewed headhunters. I interviewed human resource specialists. I interviewed people who work in

with executives, meaning their clients. One of the big issues in China is that are foreigners going to start leaving because of the way the situation changes. So I talked to chambers of commerce, to legal experts, to real estate experts, and so on. So I would like to create a rounded picture. And above all, I would like to create a book that also entertains. It's not a business book. It's something that

you can read and you can enjoy even if you never want to go to China. Well, people have to be able to finish the book, right? So it has to be entertaining. And you don't have to be a businessman to approach to it. So my first book in English, which is on Amazon, but I wouldn't recommend it to many people to read it because it's so technical. It literally doesn't say anything to people who are not in international relations or economics or international business.

I want to bring this topic closer to people who read for fun, basically. Well, please tell me when that book comes out. I really want to read it. I can't wait. So thank you, Gabor. I mean, Gabor. I keep getting your name. Gabor. It's a Hungarian name. It's not easy. Thank you, Gabor, for being on this show. That was an awesome conversation. I had a wonderful time. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. It was a pleasure. Anytime. Cheers. Cheers. All right, guys. Bye. Bye.

Bye.