TLDR;
Have you ever hit a personal rock bottom that threatened your entire career?
Our guest today, Dr. Alfredo Borodowski, knows that feeling intimately. Alfredo’s story is one of total collapse and remarkable redemption. He didn’t find his way back with better systems; he found it by discovering his own forgotten character strengths.
Hello! This is Michael Hunter from Uncommon Teams, and I’d love to welcome you to another episode of Uncommon Leadership, where we explore what it truly takes to thrive, not just survive, in today’s chaotic world.
Today, I sit down with Dr. Alfredo Borodowski, who helps global firms turn organizational resistance into growth, to uncover the following:
- The crucial difference between talent and character strengths.
- How knowing your ‘Top Five’ can boost your performance by up to 18 times.
- Why the old management myths (pressure brings results!) are destroying your culture.
- And how you can navigate personal chaos and find your internal compass through self-knowledge.
Get ready to discover why knowing who you are is the ultimate secret to peak performance.
Grab a seat, welcome Alfredo Borodowski, and begin a truly transformational conversation!
—
About the Speakers
Alfredo Borodowski
Alfredo Borodowski is a bestselling author and Peak Performance expert who helps leaders harness their strengths. With over three decades of experience advising CEOs and senior leaders at firms like Motorola, his expertise lies in turning workplace resistance into tangible growth. Alfredo’s powerful personal story—moving from an esteemed rabbi to overcoming severe mental illness—gives him a unique, empathetic lens for guiding organizations through complex change, always focusing on clarity, empathy, and results.
Connect with Borodowski: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alfredo-borodowski/
Michael Hunter
Michael specializes in moving leaders “from debugging code to debugging people to helping people debug themselves.” He hosts the popular Uncommon Leadership Podcast, where he explores how vulnerability, self-awareness, and authentic connection transform teams and drive sustainable growth. His work focuses on navigating organizational chaos and turning complex challenges into stepping stones for innovation and resilient leadership impact.
Connect with Micahel Hunter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/humbugreality/
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Transcript:
Michael Hunter
Whether you want more innovation, more easily, you’re feeling burnt out or overwhelmed, or you simply know that something isn’t quite the way you know it can be. You are not alone. I hear the same from leaders every day. On Uncommon Leadership, we explore aligning personal fulfillment with business success, creating authentic teams and cultivating the resilience, adaptability, and ease necessary to move beyond simply surviving today’s challenges into thriving. I’m Michael Hunter with Uncommon Teams, and today we will uncover fresh insights into what it means to lead today. Joining me is Dr. Alfredo Borodowski.
Alfredo is an international keynote speaker, consultant and author specializing in positive psychology, peak performance, and resilience. Known as the optometrist of strengths, he helps leaders and organizations transform toxic cultures into thriving environments of growth and engagement. He has worked with companies like Motorola, major law firms, and over 50 nonprofit organizations.
Bringing clarity, purpose, and measurable results to leaders navigating change. Welcome, Alfredo.
Alfredo Borodowski
Thank you, Michael. It’s a pleasure to be with you and with your audience to share some wisdom maybe.
Michael
I am sure we will get abundance of that. When did you first recognize that integrating your whole self and bringing that into everything that you do might be a valuable approach?
Alfredo
I have a story. I think all of us have a story. Mine may be a little bit more interesting in terms of a crisis and redemption. I, before I becoming, became a consultant or, as I was a consultant, I was a rabbi for 30 years, and I was a rabbi of one of the most prestigious congregations in Westchester, New York.
I had as congregants CEOs of major companies like MetLife and Prime Media. I had a lot of Wall Street hedge fund managers, and I had top lawyers from the top firms in Manhattan. I had an office in Westchester. I had an office facing Central Park, coming from Argentina, Buenos Aires, middle class.
Sitting at my office, facing Central Park, putting my feet on my desk with a cup of coffee looking through the window. I made it. I really made it. And then, I never thought about positivity or positive psychology. Why? I was it. I was living it until everything disappeared in an instant. The morning of June 19th, 2013, when I was arrested for impersonating a police officer, and I was in the town of Mamaroneck, and a few months before that, a congregate of mine called me to the side and said, rabbi, I have something special for you. He opened his hand and he had a small replica of his badge and he said this for my closest friends and with this you will have no problems. And they, Michael, that’s when the problems began. By the way, those shields and those cards should be illegal.
What are they for, if not for getting away with breaking the law? We’re supposed to be all the same under the law, unless your friend and family of a police person. Then what happened the day after he gave it to me, I crossed the stop sign. It was late for a meeting. Police came after me. They stopped me.
I showed the badge and they basically smiled and said, go. At that point I said, wow, I am part of the club here.
And I began patrolling the highways of New York and showing people the badge and telling how to drive. Now, what happened to me also is that, I was having mania. Like having an attack of mania for a couple of months, and I went to my psychiatrist, who didn’t know me well yet, was I think the second time.
And because many people love their mania, Michael. We get energy, creativity. We don’t sleep and work all night long. Then I lied and I said to him, I was depressed. And I was very convincing. Then he gave me an antidepressant. Then I was with mania, the wrong medication and a badge. That’s when I unleashed and began patron patrolling the streets until one morning that morning of June 19th, I showed it to a young lady and she made a phone call, and a minute later I had three patrols behind me. Now, couple of months after that, I look at the restraining order she had against me and I Googled her. And I look at the picture and I almost fell off the chair. She was getting married and I look close to the picture, who was she getting married to? The policeman that arrested me.
Okay. Of all people. Then they took me to court. They accused me a felony. Impersonating a police officer. And because I was a rabbi of a prestigious congregation, it went viral and the press made a circus out of me and they gave me a name, the Road Rage Rabbi. And it became an international sensation. It was in front pages of newspapers from Ireland to Japan. Now again, I did wrong, very wrong, but I didn’t touch anybody. I wasn’t violent. But you know, a rabbi from Westchester, impersonating a police officer, the things I read that I was a terrorist, and I went into deep depression.
I was hospitalized. And during that first hospitalization, I was diagnosed bipolar, which I didn’t know until that point. Then I was released from the hospital. I was fired from my job. I was on the news. My friend stopped talking to me and I went again into the depression, back to the hospital. And when I went out to the hospital for eight months, the court cases were going on.
I was completely and absolutely depressed on a couch, on a fetal position in complete darkness and obscurity until one morning, don’t ask me how, why, I felt an energy, and he stood up from the couch and he walked upstairs to my study and on the top of my desk I found something that, again, I am not sure how it got there.
I had a yellow file folder. I opened it and I read the result of a positive psychology test I had taken a few months before and I read my top five strengths. Creativity, love of learning, curiosity, perseverance and bravery. And something turned on within me. I said, Alfredo, you forgot who you are.
And a month later I was back to school, became a social worker, did great with depression, with court cases, did great. And after I finished social work school, I said, every person should have the right, I would say the obligation of knowing the top five strengths of positive psychology. They are so powerful and people should not go through life without them.
And that’s how I’ve been doing consulting before, but that’s how I committed myself to this work fully.
Michael
You’re right. That is the story, well, yes and no. There is a story at another level from other guests I’ve had on, and it’s also not. I’ve had several other guests who have gone through similar depths.
One was arrested, in prison for several years. Several that had similar depths of depression bottoms out and everyone else, the rest of us, we have probably had, we’ve definitely had times which felt similarly deep, even if other people might not have said that they were extreme.
The strength that you discovered you had that brought you back to who you are. What was it about those that spoke to you that day when you went up to your study and opened that yellow folder and read those?
Alfredo
When I began studying the strengths, what is called character strengths of positive psychology, there are 24 of them, which are universal. They were found in every culture, stroke history, and geography.
Some of them are curiosity, as I mentioned, few more leadership, spirituality, appreciation of beauty and excellence, forgiveness, humility, gratitude. Then all of us, couple of them, but we feel authentic, motivated, and affirmed through the top fives. And what I discovered is that seven out of 10 people are unaware of their top strengths.
There is an epidemic of strengths., Blindness. And we know from studies because digital science, I work with science, with the science of positive psychology through experiments by the best psychological labs. If you know your strength, just by knowing them, you have the capacity to flourish nine times more.
And if you execute them, apply them, you have the capacity of flourishing 18 times more, which means a seven out of 10 people average are going through life nine times below what they could just by not knowing who they are. And that’s crazy. Okay, imagine just by knowing it takes, I will explain how, but it takes, it’s so easy to obtain your type results and a person can go through life without knowing them. It’s not good. It’s not that should end.
Michael
Yeah, I agree. I say that whoever we are, the world is clamoring to have us in their lives. And if we don’t know our strengths, then we’re missing a key component of why they want us.
When I did Strengths Finders and Myers-Briggs and the plethora of other personality assessments that I’ve done, it was this idea that we could quantify as squishy aspects of who we are and have a objective view of this is what I’m good at. This is what drives me, this is what is going to light me up, really blew my mind. So I hadn’t thought of it that way before. People had said, oh, think about what you love and focus on that, or sentiments along those lines.
But that’s a lot different than doing an assessment that’s been proven through statistics and getting this objective answer saying, these are things that are really gonna light you up.
Alfredo
Look, you need to use an instrument to guide you. To have the structures of how to articulate who you are. But at the end of the day, nobody knows yourself more than better than yourself.
Okay. Then the instruments help you to clear out the distortions.
Michael
Yes.
Alfredo
Are psychologically, designed to help go through the jungle of distortions. Yeah. But once that’s done, nobody knows yourself better than yourself. In fact, I use the instruments to confirm what I first explore with the person.
The discussion always begins with a face-to-face online exploration of who you are, and the instrument comes after that to confirm. Okay. And in between an instrument and what you think or feel or experience about yourself, you can before the instrument, it happens to be after working decades with instruments that most of the time, the instrument come to confirm and to articulate what the person sees about him or herself.
The character strengths of positives psychology are a little bit different from the usually strength finder that you mentioned, the Gallup strength finder. And I find this when I go to corporations, leaders, HI, HR, heads tell me we’ve done already strengths. This is different. The Gallup Strength Finder is usually about talent.
Okay? Which talent you have. Character strengths are not about talents or about how you are at your best given your virtue, goodness, and the whole of the person. That’s why it’s called character strengths, and I think that’s what is missing today in companies. We don’t have a crisis of talent. We may have the most talented people in the world.
The crisis today is about purpose. It’s about meaning. About direction. There is rampant anxiety, uncertainty, and depression. That’s what I see at companies, especially with the AI revolution. That’s not about more talent. That’s the even dimension is the mention of the humanity, not the human component of the company.
Then it is good to know your talents and it’s good to know other instruments like the Myers-Briggs with the use, and the Gallup, which is very useful. But I think that what is lacking today is character strengths and purpose.
Michael
Yes. Thank you for that clarification. It helps us know how to get where we’re going. Like, if I’m in California and I want to get to New York, I know it’s east in north. I can head that way. All I really need is a compass. Eventually I’m gonna hit the other coast, and if I have a map to use to help me get there, or I ask a lot of people along the way how to get the next bit, then I’ll get there faster.
I may find more things that interest me along the way. I may have a lot more foot on the truck and I’ll probably run out of gas less often ’cause I can plan food, replenishing my car, myself, letting people know where I am a lot more smoothly.
Alfredo
When you know your character strength, your energy basically becomes endless because as you apply them, they are like a dynamo. When you apply them, you get more energized. We get into what is called impossible psychology flow. Okay? And flow is state where time passes without us no noticing it.
We are completely involved in the activity. We are challenged by it and feel growing, but not overwhelmed. It happens a lot at sports. Okay. Or when children are playing, it is called flow, and we perform best in those immersive activities where time flies. You know what percentage of an average American at work a day is in flow state? 20%.
Michael
I’m a little surprised. It’s that high by accident.
Alfredo
Okay. Then 20% of the time, we achieve flow in our work and we know that flow is equal to performance, I do peak performance work. Then, 80% of the time is used in activities that we are not concentrating, we are bored, we are distracted.
Anything that you can think about that is outside of the flow, energy 20% is, just imagine if we bring it to 30%. I’m not talking about a hundred percent. When I go to companies, I say, let’s begin with 10% increase. You will see substantial performance increase just by that.
Okay, because it’s so low that any increase has a significant repercussion.
Michael
So what is the best way for people to get started with this?
Alfredo
I will tell you how people call listening can get it to the four strengths easily, and I will ask everybody now to listen. Take your phone. Take your phone and go to the text section and text me the word ‘positive’, after all we are talking about positive psychology.
Then text the word positive to the number 3, 3, 7, 7, 7. Yeah, very easy. Positive to 3, 3, 7, 7, 7. And I’m going to send you a chart with the 24 strengths of positive psychology and a couple of questions that are going to help you discover your top five strengths and a couple of questions of how to apply them to get to 18 times your flourishing.
And everybody, like you mentioned in the introduction that I am an optometrist of companies. That’s basically the way I see myself opening the eye to hope, to the strengths. And I go to podcasts, I give lectures with that intention that everybody has exercises, your right to know the top strengths.
And that’s very easy. Michael, I used to get my website with my name and everything. You know who can spell my last name? Borodowski. Then I made it easy, with this called text full, the system of one word and an easy number. Then that’s the best way. It’s easy.
Michael
I like it.
So once we have our character strengths, how do we use that? How do you use that to build cultures where people feel safe and empowered to bring those strengths into everything that they do?
Alfredo
Those who text me are going to get as part of the package exercises of how to do it. I’ll tell you a couple of them.
Then you have your top five strengths. Okay? Then I would take each day of the week. And intentionally use one of them. Okay, today I’m going to creativity. I’m going to do creative things. I’m going to use creativity in what I do. Then you bring them from your unconscious use to an intentional use.
Okay. The other issue that’s interesting on the other side is that when people, overuse their top strengths because they feel energized and comfortable, then if your number one strength is honesty. And I work coaching people and they have number honesty and they tell me why do people get upset with me so much at the team?
And then we begin exploring how they convey their thoughts. They’re too honest. They don’t filter things. Okay. Or when humor is your number one strength, you may say a joke in situation where I not call for a joke, but you feel legitimate and you feel yourself. Then, I don’t only work on developing the strength.
You know, strengths are situational. They depend on context. The challenge is how to use them and when. You know the fact that you have strengths as number one doesn’t validate that you use it when you want and that’s when the people get to travel at work. Because they say, how do they say this?
How do they say this? Because you were over using your strengths. Then we go into situations and we go into a role play and things like that in order to know how to contextualize them and use them in the best way.
Michael
Yes. And even while I would say humor is useful in every situation, the way to deploy humor is definitely context sensitive.
Alfredo
I think all of them are context. That would be true. Yes. Every one, 24, they’re all contextual. You have to learn to read the room, to read the situation, to read the, people you work with and you lead.
Okay. We are readers and our mind writes a story internally sometimes so many times that is different from the external reality.
You need to exercise some kind of mechanism by which they at least approximate one to the other.
Michael
Yes. When we are using our strengths appropriately, we are showing a way forward and offering to help people there or to help them find where they want to move. Their way forward. When we overuse our strengths, then we start inflicting and assuming that they want to go where we think they should go, and that is the Shell Silverstein poem says that’s the kind of help that we could all do without.
Alfredo
Yeah. Yeah.
Michael
So how do we sustain this focus on strengths when we’re at work, there’s 18 things that have to get done yesterday, the top priority changes every five minutes, and everyone is so stressed that they can barely keep track of what keeps the lights on, let alone how to do this work that can make things so much better?
Alfredo
When I work with workplaces, companies, foundations, organizations, they need to change the culture, not the person. It’s a cultural change, from the way managers supervise to the allocation of tasks. We know today that one of the best techniques to use strengths at workplace is what is called job crafting. Job crafting, in which instead of having a task and sending people according to their position in the company to do the task is the other way around. The task has to match as best as possible the strength of the person, usually work the other way around.
We ascribe to people roles for tasks. And then you go to this one, you go to this one. It is the other way around. Every task has to be in some way coordinated around the strength of people and teams has to be put together, dismantled, and put together for the task. And the manager should know the strengths of people and try as best as possible to allocate task that maximize strengths is called job crafting. That’s something that is showing tremendous results. Then, we know today that from, this is from studies from Barbara Fredrickson, who is, and Losada. Losada and Barbara Fredrickson, who are the top world experts on positivity.
We know that for one negative emotion for what you know, anger, disappointment, distress. For every negative emotion you need three positive to equate. Then the negative is much stronger than the positive. Three times stronger and you want to flourish four to five and to six, then we know today from science that evaluations by a manager had to begin with the positive.
At least three times positive. You are going to bring something negative.
Then you can begin a meeting with an assessment in which you fail the quarter, you know the quarter? The report shows. That’s a disaster. It’s going to erode trust, confidence, loyalty, motivation. Okay? Even if the person is not doing great, before you get to the problem, you have to begin with a positive.
You want the person to improve, okay? You give to the person benefit of the doubt to get better. Clearly, you want to fire the person and you’re there to fire the person when you know you’re there to fire the person. But if you think the person can do better and improve, then you have to begin with a positive, usually by asking the person, tell me how you have used successfully your top strengths last week.
Michael
I like that.
Alfredo
Okay. That’s a question that should begin. That should, begin the assessment. I like that question. The strength should be known. Okay. That’s a question to begin with.
Michael
I like that question because it assumes that they have, and it helps the person identify all the times that they have, even if they’re certain that they’ve been doing horribly. It helps them find the times where they’re doing wonderfully. And that is key to making every situation more happy is finding the occurrences where we’re already doing what we want to be doing.
Alfredo
Yep.
But you know for that you had to relinquish power. Because in the managerial leadership situation, we fall into the paradigm: if I am managing, I had to find what’s wrong. I had to fix something. What is not good management, if not fixing? Now, that’s a mentality you are, you need by necessity to find something wrong in the other.
Then the dynamic begins with a negative.
Michael
And the job crafting is something that individuals can do on their own. We don’t need permission from anyone else to look at the work that we’ve been assigned, even if we’ve had no say in what that is and connect that work with what does light us up. There’s always ways.
It may not be a hundred percent light up, it may only be five or 10%. That’s still better than zero or negative 20.
Alfredo
The answer to that is yes, but there are companies and companies and there are cultures and culture and cultures and organizations and organizations. Okay. If an organization wants to achieve peak performance, okay, and to compete in the AI era, which is a more flexible, dynamic, task oriented environment, and they don’t want to make adjustment towards character strengths, then they’re going to be in a disadvantage.
100% underperform. They will underperform. That’s what I see.
Michael
Yes, completely agree. The more that we can do this systemically through the entire organization, the better off everyone is and the more whatever metrics the business cares about are gonna shoot to the roof.
Alfredo
Then when I call by a company organization, they always, the first question is, Alfredo, where do you want to begin?
This is a mess. We try different approaches. You’re not the first one. We have a problem here and a problem there. My answer is always the same no matter the situation. You begin with this workshop on strengths discovery, okay? The workshop is only two hours long. Every participant leads the meeting with their top five strengths, a chart of how to use them, and I give a team profile of strengths.
What are the strengths of the team? We work on a actual case on the workshop using the strengths to see the difference from not using them, and already in two hours, the difference is, the improvement is enormous, and then we work in a sustainability plan. The next step is working on a concept that I didn’t mention up to now, which is called Psychological Capital. PsyCap. We know about human capital, sociological capital, all kind of capitals. There’s a new capital that came into the picture no more than five years ago. It’s called psychological capital, and it’s proven to be the cornerstone of performance.
Organizations, corporations that want to succeed need to invest in four capacities. Confidence, hope, optimism, and resilience. Okay. We have study after study at the highest level that those are the four components after you know your strengths of peak performance.
We’re going to repeat self-confidence, confidence of self efficiency. You call it both way that you can do it. You feel you can do it. Hope, optimism, and resilience. Then that’s the second phase when you know the strengths, you work on a increasing of the four components, and I tell you, everything moves towards performance. Other culture, electro toxicity.
And then the third stage, you work on purpose. When you put positivity, meaning strengths plus psychological capital plus purpose, you achieve your performance. It’s a formula I’ve seen working over and over no matter the situation the company’s in.
Michael
When leaders say, this all sounds great, Alfredo. Prove to me that this is gonna move the company forward, that I’m going to get a return on this investment. How do you answer that?
Alfredo
Look, I could spend the rest of our podcast, which I will not do, with study after study, but the number one labs in the country, McKenzie, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, showing, and also we know that’s how did Microsoft go to a, I forgot, Nadela. What’s it? The new CEO. The CEO. Now he created a employee psychology plan for Microsoft. Microsoft was falling apart when he took, I think, 2014. Okay. Now one of the most prosperous organizations, they did a positive psychology lift up. Okay. Google did the same with the Project Aristotle, in which they created a culture of teams based on psychological safety, which is also a component of positive psychology.
So the stream, okay. Who became a sensation overnight? On selling an entire globe pressurized devices for soda. Okay. How do they do it? They call a team of positive psychologists to create the culture it has, I can tell you, company after company, who are the most successful one, has been applying these principles.
Then in some way, this is not new. It is new and it is not new. It’s only 20 years old. Okay. It’s a new science. Positive Psychology was founded, created in 1998, and then it developed into organizational positive psychology. It took a few more years, but it has been used by the top companies.
It has not centered into many of the smaller companies for more traditional companies. But, I writing a book now, it’s called, it’s coming hopefully, been launched in January. The name of the book is the Human Upgrade.
Michael
Love it.
Alfredo
The new resilient leadership for peak performance in the AI era.
And on each chapter I write, I have cases from corporations applying positive psychology. Okay. And the list are non corporations, the best in the world, and the people still explaining their success because they have a good business plan. They got a good distribution chain. They have a good leadership program.
No, you look deep, they all had a cultural post psychology program. It was a character strengths program and the other things developed out of that. And it was intentionally the CEOs of those companies talk about character strengths. Okay. And, that’s the secret, which because corporations and MBAs don’t study politic psychology, don’t study the art of narrative in leadership, how to talk.
The power of narrative. They studied none of these. Neither in more executive coach programs they don’t study any of these, then, you have to be smart, know outta the box. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You have to understand how the big companies, the most successful are doing it and not to look in their own place, which is their programmatic way, but the cultural way of which the programmatic way is a reflection is other way around. Then the book is AI Revolution is bringing problems of uncertainty, disorientation, anxiety, and I am using positive psychology as a tool to make a transition into the AI world that companies preserving human upgrade and peak performance.
And there’s a chapter on what is the e-leadership. The leadership from this, how the leadership is different, should be different, how teams are made. Okay. What is psychological capital to be applied today? What are strengths will be applied today to the challenge of AR. I think that’s the next frontier, not the next frontier, that’s now. We’ve been writing this book hours and hours every day because it’s needed. I don’t have the final word, but I have methodology and that’s what I’m hearing from companies when I go that urgency.
Michael
Yes, I believe it. You’ve developed a nicely structured way to shift culture up into the right, in a way that focuses on the humanity of the company and its employees rather than any of the mechanical details involved in the company and what it does and what it builds and what it creates, that I agree that is sorely needed these days.
Alfredo
That’s the foundation. The premise of the book is that you can be nice and successful.
Michael
That’s a great summary.
Alfredo
But I bring it, I bring it a step further.
You have to be nice to be successful.
Michael
Yes.
Alfredo
Because we know today that a person who works happy, who works feeling that it’s on the flow that works respected, performs better.
Okay. Then to be nice pace. I would like everybody to be nice because it’s good to be nice, but you ask more results of businesses, and businesses need results. You have to be nice because performance increases. Okay, I will show you that. Okay. Then there is a chapter in the book, which I also do on my workshops about the myths that destroy companies.
And there are some myths, such as I mentioned some of them that I feel companies or company falls, even if they tell you we don’t do them. I spend one hour at the company and I see them in operation and one of them that’s fixing is stronger than nourishing. Okay. And we know it doesn’t. We have to move from the culture of fixing to a culture of nourishing.
The other one is that if we find a weak link, we’re going to improve. That creates blame, fear, and in team dynamics, the one who look to be the weak link, actually, they are strong in other things. Okay. That’s a complexity of team dynamics. Somebody who is, doesn’t produce a lot, maybe sustaining the motivation and humor of the team, and that’s as important for performance.
The other one, that pressure brings results. We know that it doesn’t. Okay. Resilience brings results, but not pressure. And companies confuse resilience and pressure. The thing that resilience comes outta pressure and we know that it doesn’t actually. Resilience come out of trust and they work with cultures to break that equation which is everywhere I see. Okay. Then there are all these modalities at companies that are operating the culture. The word we inherited from childhood, if you don’t suffer, you don’t succeed. Who is the weak link on the sport team?
Okay. Fix it. That you know is better, nourishing, faster to the point, and all those are tremendous obstacles to performance.
I spend a full chapter in the book, the banking, with science, and studies and examples, all these myths.
Michael
What you said that the weak link is really someone who is being misapplied rings true to me it. It’s all a matter of perspective. We’re all a weak link For someone who doesn’t understand the value that we bring, if someone isn’t performing up to expectations, they may not want to be there, which is often, again, a misapplication of their strengths, and it’s often the case I find that we haven’t tried to apply their strengths to the work that we have doing. We say, you don’t work the way I do, therefore, you’re the weak link. Rather than saying, how are you? What are you bringing that is unique to you that none of the rest of us have, and how can we apply that value to the work that we’re doing to lift everyone up?
Alfredo
That’s likely the situation that you’re describing, but the same talking I tell leaders is you give to somebody working at organization, their strengths. You give them a strength plan. You create a culture where the people can express their strengths and the person doesn’t perform, then you can fire the person.
Okay. Then I don’t want this to be taken like I am like the positivity guy, all rosy. All goes, no, whatsoever. I believe that once you endow a person with the strengths and a strength plan and the strength culture, they can they must perform better than other companies.
Yes. Oh, yeah. Then you have no excuses. I expect more performance, more commitment. If I give you all the elements and you don’t perform because you are lazy or because you, whatever reason, you don’t buy into the idea, whatever, then you go. I want to make that clear because sometimes positive psychology is confused with less affair and all goals and all positive, no whatsoever.
Once you bring all the ingredients for success, you have to succeed.
Michael
Yes.
Alfredo
Then actually I am tougher. I am tougher than others. Don’t take me and people like me who do positive psychology for easygoing, not, no, no, no, we’re tougher, but we give you the greatest opportunity to succeed. Okay. Then positive psychology is not a recipe for mediocrity.
It’s the opposite.
Michael
Yes. And thank you for making that clear that we’re not saying to bring people along, whether they want to be there or not, to bring people along who are refusing to do the work they need to do to be part of the team. What we are saying is before we can kick them out for not being part of the team, we have to give them every opportunity to understand their way to be part of the team.
And as you were saying earlier, to customize the teamwork to take advantage of that.
Alfredo
Then that’s a hundred percent. But there is a limit to everything.
Michael
Absolutely.
Alfredo
The all opportunities you give corrective direction. You give opportunities, you give tools you give. At the end of the day, something that you said at the end of the day is the person doing it and taking responsibility for the journey.
That’s a personal choice.
Michael
How do you use all of this to help people find their way through the change, uncertainty, and overwhelm that seems to be what life is these days?
Alfredo
Look, once you know your strengths, you feel energized. Usually what happens when people, I give people the strength results, they take an instrument that measures the strengths and they see the top five and I ask in the workshop, tell me the first feeling they experience and the answers are repeated. Validation, authenticity, motivation, and then the next natural question is, what do I do with them?
Everybody understands that these are strengths to be applied. It goes naturally. Knowing your strengths move you to execution. I don’t have even to bring it to the table. The teams say, what do we do with it? Then, once you know your strengths, you immediately moving to motion and motion creates energy.
We know that like a tool turbine. Then they are energetic. They’re not just to know they are to execute. You feel that you need to execute them.
Michael
For people who want to skip right past texting you and getting the assessment and get right into working with you, what’s the best way for them to get in touch?
Alfredo
The best, look they when, they do positive at 3 7, 7, 7, one thing they’re going to see at the end is scroll down is my calendar. And I always give half an hour, just get to know each other, and ask questions. Okay? No strings attached. For those who want to see all my workshops and all my keynotes and more about me and when the book is going to be released and how to get it, go to my website, you already know the first word on my website.
Every who’s listening is positive, then is positive. AB Alfredo Borodowski. Very easy. positiveab.com.
Michael
That’s great.
Alfredo
Then you go to positiveab.com, and there you have my calendar too and let’s talk. I love it. By the way, when you see my name there on my website or on the page that send you with the character strengths, I am a LinkedIn fanatic. Then you contact me on LinkedIn and say, I heard with Micheal and the Uncommon Leadership. I love what you said. I have a question I would immediately accept and I love to connect on LinkedIn.
Michael
That’s great, and we’ll have all those links in the show notes.
What would you like to leave our audience with today, Alfredo?
Alfredo
Yeah, look, you have a right, you have them already. You have your character strengths. You don’t have to work for them. Are in you, okay? Are part innate and part developed by you because that’s the way you feel who you are. But one thing is to go through life, applying them by inertia, and another way is to applying them by intention.
The difference is abysmal. Get them, don’t have to work for them, is to open your eyes and by knowing them, you’re going to flourish nine times more. By applying them 18 times more is the best deal in town. I can’t think about a better deal.
Michael
Sounds great.
Thank you, Alfredo, for being with us today, this was a wonderful conversation.
Alfredo
Thank you, Michael. I love, I enjoy it and thank you everybody listening.
Michael
And thank you, audience, for joining us today. Alfredo and I would love to know, what is your favorite strength?. Thanks and have a great day.