How can we make our common road lead to a world of hope and joy? Our guest today is Gunnar George, author of the book Aha... Wow! Yes, and leadership development expert.

Gunnar George believes that the most effective leaders are those who are compassionate, inspirational, and have a vision that promotes hope, joy, and sustainability. He challenges the notion of transactional communication in business and personal interactions, advocating instead for authentic and emotionally engaging exchanges.

By developing others and maintaining a vision that encompasses societal and global impacts, compassionate leaders can play a significant role in creating a better world.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast platform to learn how to become an authentic and emotionally engaging leader.

Subscribe to Pity Party Over for more insightful episodes. Questions? Email Stephen Matini or send him a message on LinkedIn.

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TRANSCRIPT

Stephen Matini: The first question that I have for you, being someone who wrote a book, is how is the whole experience of writing a book? How your idea for “Aha... Wow! Yes.” came by?

Gunnar George: Oh, the whole experience. It's a long experience, actually. It started many years ago. I thought I wanted to write a book. And I also worked in a company that had a different way of leading. We were consultants working with strategy and big transformations.

And we had a different way of leading change that most of the traditional consulting companies had in those days. So we said to ourselves that we need to write this down sometime. And I had that in the back of my mind for many years. And then I've worked a lot with leadership development programs lately.

And one of the things that I realized is that the more you share, the more you get and sharing is sort of the sharing of knowledge and experiences and views and so on. It's really what that is the core of leadership development.

I met so many fantastic people and been part of extraordinary things in meetings with companies and transformations in big companies and so on. So I thought I need to share myself what I've experienced and what I've noticed and observed. But I didn't want to share it sort of to give advice, more to sort of to share my observations and my reflections on that.

But it is a fantastic experience to see it grow and to see it take form. And then also, another thing is that the people you have around you and the people you meet, as soon as you start to talk about it a little bit, people want to contribute.

And I have a friend who likes Paulo Coelho and he often quotes him and says that you have to be careful what you dream of because universe will conspire to make it happen. And that is sort of joked a little bit about it sometimes. But when you write a book, you see that almost like this is true because people come from suddenly from nowhere and say, I can help you or I can do that.

So it's an amazing experience in that way.

Stephen Matini:When you thought about writing a book, what was your initial biggest wish for the book?

Gunnar George: I wrote it in English, in a simple kind of easy to read English. So I wanted to reach out to as many as possible in the world, not only to English native speaking countries. That was one of the thoughts I had.

And then one of my wishes also that people start to think more about, “Aha... Wow! Yes,” which is the title of the book. That is sort of if we need more emotions in business, we need more emotions in society and positive emotions. And often when we structure things or do strategy work or communication work, whatever, we use why, what how as a structure that is sort of, you check that you have covered, why, what, how?

And my thing thought with it, my wish with this was that “Aha... Wow! Yes,” would be the new why, what, how. So that is also a wish that I had. So I have in the book, I had sort of this “Aha... Wow! Yes,”, circular that I spoke about many times in the book.

Stephen Matini: One thing that struck me when you and I met, you were talking about the importance of contributing to create a world of hope and joy, which, you know, these days, it seems to be so important to do, considering all that is happening, all the negativity. How do you keep that hope and joy within yourself?

Gunnar George: I try to find it in the people I meet. I see sort of the positive things and heard an interview with the previous foreign minister of Sweden the other day. And he said that he had hope for, he saw hope in the world because we haven't done the transformation with women. Women has sort of, that is still a big transformation for the world.

And he saw a lot of hope in that sort of, because it is a man's world. And this transformation is to make it a balanced world with both men and women is, he saw a lot of hope in that. And I agree totally with that. And I see that type of messages and people who think like that, that just brings me hope.

And also the young generation. Every time I talk to them, I get amazed a little bit because I think back when we were young, were we that clever and that did we see so much? Did we see the world with that clear? Do we have this engagement or not when we were young?

Stephen Matini: And to keep that youthful approach to things, I believe is really important. You know, like I believe for you, one of the key points is learning. And learning for me is one of the components that probably keep me positive, but keep me wanting to keep going. Absolutely. You said a few times the word transformation, which seems to be such an important word to you. What does transformation mean to you? 

Gunnar George: For me, transformation. A lot of people talk about change and transformation and it's sort of, and everybody have their different definitions about it. I see transformation as a bigger type of change than just improvements.

So transformation for me is a radical change. And you often start from the future and look back. What type of future do we want? And then you look back and say, what do we need to make happen in order for this division to happen, so say. And transformation is also more, it covers both the mindset and the system and the culture of a company or a society. So it's a very thorough change. That is the way I see it.

And I think you mentioned learning and learning, I see, is the big way to get there, learning and seeing different perspectives. And I have in my book, I have one of the longest chapters about learning, actually, how to learn faster, faster than the speed of change.

Stephen Matini: A lot of people say around learning, oh, I don't have time. I'm busy. I don't have time. I don't have time. So how can you keep what they say? A growth mindset, you know, a learning mindset, despite the fact that so many of us are super busy. How do you carve that time in your opinion?

Gunnar George: Yeah, that's the biggest challenge, I guess. I think we need to add the inspiration part to the learning. We need to talk much more about inspiration. And if we are inspired and curious, we will learn much more. And we will create the time. You can see yourself. You have a lot of mails and messages coming all over.

And then suddenly one of them, you can spend quite a long time on that. And then you can also say, why do you do that? And I think it has to do with you get inspired or you get, this is something that attracts you. And suddenly you create time. You don't have time, but maybe you spend half an hour or something, you didn't think that you were going to spend half an hour. And there was something that triggered that. And then to learn for half an hour just because it's really interesting.

We have a limited amount of time during the day. So I think also we need to set aside learning as part of our work. So we have you answer a lot of emails. That does a chunk in your daily work. But you also need to put in maybe one hour or two hours a day just for learning. I mean, if you take a writer, for example, many writers, they read a lot.

And so they have before lunch, they read or after lunch they write or vice versa. And that is about learning and getting new inspiration, new perspectives on things. In business,