TLDR;
What if the things you’ve been hiding are the very things that make you an extraordinary leader?
In this episode of the Uncommon Leadership podcast, Michael Hunter sits down with Nick Goodin, a former chief product officer, to unpack a truth most leaders never discover: your personal story is your greatest asset.
Nick shares his own incredible journey—from a traumatic childhood to the sudden, unexpected loss of his job—revealing how he learned to deconstruct life’s challenges and rebuild with purpose.
Through his unique philosophy of first principles thinking, Nick provides a roadmap for :
- cultivating self-awareness,
- empathy,
- and trust as your core leadership pillars.
This is a profound exploration of how you can align your deepest beliefs with your professional impact, creating cultures where innovation isn’t just a goal, but a natural outcome of the process you follow.
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TL; DW? Here’s a rapid summary:
The Problem: Some leaders often feel they have to hide their personal struggles and conform to an idea of strength, leading to burnout and mediocrity.
The Solution: This episode offers an authentic, actionable playbook for leaders to navigate uncertainty and find their power by embracing their full, human story. Even if it’s not as heroic as you’d like it to be.
A Personal Journey: Nick Goodin shares his history of growing up with a hidden identity, which taught him the vital skill of deconstructing narratives—a practice he later applied to his professional life.
The Core Idea: True leadership is not about managing teams but understanding (and acknowledging) the human side. By prioritizing self-awareness and leading with empathy, you build trust that leads to innovation.
Key Takeaway: Your personal story, your curiosity, and your values are not just parts of your identity—they are your greatest leadership assets. It’s time to stop hiding them and start leveraging them.
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About the Speakers:
Nick Goodin
Board Member @Five Points Washington | Ex-CPO @ Ice Barrel | Author | Executive Coach | Championing Human-Centered Design & Narrative Intelligence
With a career spanning from product innovation to brand strategy, Nick Goodin is known for building spaces where both products and people can thrive. As the former Chief Product Officer at Ice Barrel, Nick has led cross-functional teams to scale new products, promoting empathy and psychological safety as guiding principles. He believes that every great innovation starts with a determination to transform uncertainty into possibility.
Now on a mission to share the insights that redefine how we create, lead, and live, Nick challenges leaders to see the world differently. He helps them navigate uncertainty and dig deeper through the power of perspective, storytelling, and intentional choices.
More on Nick Goodin:
https://www.instagram.com/nickgoodinofficial/?hl=en
https://www.nickgoodin.info/
Michael Hunter
Founder @Uncommon Change | Interlocutor / Curious Host @UncommonLeadership Interview Series | Author | Change & Innovation Partner
Michael Hunter partners with top tech leadership teams across six continents to create extraordinary cultures. With 35 years of experience at companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Tableau, he helps leaders sustain meaningful change. Michael believes that only by integrating mind, heart, body, spirit, and intuition can leaders truly navigate change safely and build a lasting legacy of impact + human-centered leadership.
The best way to connect with Michael Hunter is on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/humbugreality/
More from Michael Hunter:
https://uncommonteams.com/
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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’ll uncover fresh insights into what leadership today means. And joining me this episode is Nick Goodin. Nick is an author, thinker, and former chief product officer who has shaped industries with first principles thinking and human-centered design. Now he’s on a mission to share the insights that redefine how we create, lead, and live.
Through his writing, Nick explores the power of perspective storytelling and intentionality, helping others navigate uncertainty and unlock deeper meaning in our work and lives. He tends to challenge how you see the world. Welcome, Nick.
When did you first recognize that integrating your whole self, bringing that into everything that you do, might be a valuable approach?
Nick Goodin
There was, a couple defining moments. I think about it as like moments of evolution. But to your point, the first moment that I can look back and really recognize was, it’s probably when I was like senior year of high school or something like that. We all know this experience, or a lot of us know this experience of evolving throughout high school and maybe experiencing friendships that aren’t as reliable as we would like them to be.
People that maybe we couldn’t, we thought we could trust, and we couldn’t trust anymore. I think there was like an evolution of that happening. And then at the same time, finding like a new community of people that really spoke life into my life. And, it like awakened a sense of like me being me and not trying to serve and, appease everyone around me to try to fit in and it was like, it was like letting go of this identity I was trying to create just so I would be liked to really fully lean back into who I was. It’s not like who I was had went away, it just got tangled up somewhere in junior high and high school of, trying to navigate relationships and belonging these kind of deep universal stories that make us human.
And I feel very lucky to like, have that moment happen early in, in high school, in a way that I set my trajectory in a way that like it would keep evolving over life, coming back to these moments. But it also is, it’s hinged around this pivotal moment that’s a little more of a personal story that I could tell, that has a lot to do with identity.
And a lot to do with the masks we wear and the stories we tell ourselves. The stories that are handed down to us, the stories that are on loan to us, usually from that early holding environment. And I think to your question around fully integration, like part of realizing how disintegrated we can be, the opposite of what you’re talking about is realizing that we have these stories that are operating within us that might not be serving us, that might not be leading to the outcomes we’re looking for.
Might keep us scared, playing games, hiding, all these things that we really don’t want in life.
These stories are producing these results. And for me, my story’s a little bit different than maybe most people’s. I was, I was born into a really tumultuous time in life. My mother who, my biological mother who, who grew up in the like late seventies, early eighties, fell fast into the drug lifestyle of the early eighties and was quickly moved up the ranks and was running drugs from Chicago to Miami to the Virgin Islands, was a part of the Caribbean pipeline.
Like that was her lifestyle. Fast cars, lots of drugs, lots of just crazy parties, crazy stuff going on all the time. And she really didn’t have any need or want for kids. And her experience of life was very much a sharp turn from the experience of growing up in like basically, poverty, being ridiculed by a narcissistic father. And now she had all this freedom and all this money and all this power and all this identity. And, so many times she had, multiple times she had abortions. And she got to this place where there was this really crazy thing that went down in Miami.
A lot of people got killed and she ran, she fled and went to one of the Virgin Islands and hid out there for about nine months and got pregnant and was at a point where she didn’t realize she was pregnant until she was about six months pregnant, which is crazy, to know that and realize she can’t get an abortion.
She’s in the Virgin Islands. There’s no way that she can get rid of this baby. So I’ll just start doing a lot more drugs, like really heavy drugs. And then, after a period of time, she realizes that she doesn’t have the support network or the help that she needs. She’s gonna come back to the states or come back to the mainland and like re acquaintance herself with our family.
And get the kind of support from my grandparents that no one else is going to give her in the season. And yet, she was still like using drugs all the way up until the day I was born. Fast forward, I was born, took I don’t know, three or four days to detox, and otherwise fairly healthy baby.
But she couldn’t really take care of me in the way that she needed to. So my grandparents ended up taking me in right around that time, though, something even crazier happened. And that was the fact that she got picked up, busted, finally, after all of these crazy adventures that she had been on. And because she was a part of this specific cartel, they knew that she knew a lot of the people that were connected to the higher up the chain people that they want to get to.
So she turned on a bunch of people and, these are like federal cases that went down. It was pretty crazy. And a lot of people went to jail because of her. She also went to jail, and my grandparents adopted me. They ended up changing my last name, my middle name, and then we moved to a small little farm town in the middle of nowhere, literally to hide because of all the threats that were against her and against her family and stuff like that.
Wild story. So I didn’t know most of this growing up. All I knew is that I had a biological mother and that she was in prison and I wasn’t allowed to talk about this other person, this other mother. And, the little small town we grew up in was a very conservative, everybody, I don’t know if I knew anybody that was divorced.
They have both their parents, that was primarily white. There was no diversity. And the idea that like somebody was being raised by the grandparents is actually like an outlier. So, at the same time I was being told, Hey, we’re your parents. You can’t tell anybody, for safety reasons and for all these reasons.
And so I grew up like hiding all of these things that were really a huge part of my life. I remember going to visit my mom in prison, and the feeling of this shame and, like fear this weird place that you had to go through all of this security and you sat in this little room and you got to visit this person like once or twice a year that you really didn’t know and that didn’t really have a relationship with, and your parents didn’t really always talk very highly.
Your grandparents didn’t always talk very highly of, and let me say, like my grandparents were incredible people and they did a really phenomenal job of giving me the love and support and bringing me up in a way that like, I wouldn’t be who I am if it wasn’t for them, but their fear, and probably fear more of embarrassment, than like retaliation from like any threat from drug lords at that point. By the time I was like five or six, we could have started talking differently about it. And, even within family, it was just such a taboo thing. You didn’t talk about these things. So it wasn’t until I was in high school that, no one really sat me down and told me that whole story of what had happened.
But, along the way I started piecing some things together. Some other family members told me little bits and pieces. And finally I started to understand like this idea that I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t even be alive. Like the possibilities of me not being here outweighed the possibility of me being here.
And, for some reason I’m here. And, that like shift in perspective all of a sudden was like, I’m gonna stop hiding this story. I’m going to fully be myself. There’s some things that are very deep and true about who I am that I don’t even really understand yet because I’m 17 or 18, but I’m gonna stop being what everybody else expects me to be and I’m gonna be fully myself.
That’s the first time, I remember, this experience. But I will say this has been like an evolution of time over my lifetime of experience, of ebb and flow, right, to where you become disintegrated, and these aren’t necessarily bad things have happened. It’s just whether it’s through busyness or focus, like being super focused on a certain area of life or a project, or entrepreneurship.
And you stop forgetting some of these things that make you. And then you have some sort of moment. Maybe it doesn’t have to always be a crisis moment, but you have some sort of moment where you realize something’s missing, right? And you identify that, there’s some story that’s taken hold that you don’t necessarily need to hang onto anymore in order to get to this next evolution of where you’re going.
And I would say probably throughout life there’s been half dozen of those where I’ve reintegrated, where I’ve gone back to these kind of like fundamental things that make me who I am. And I’m like doing a reality check, are these things alive and well? Am I getting to move from these places that make me who I am, which are storytelling, unique problem solving, learning, and then like giving back to others, like investing, teaching, training, whatever that might look like. Am I getting to do those things in a very playful, curious and like fun way? And if I find myself I’m not, then I realize that this thing that really is me has slowly started to erode and some other things have taken priority and I need to like reassess.
Michael
There was a lot there. I know. That is an incredible story, Nick, and maybe the most incredible part of it, for me at least, is that at 17-18, you took all of this in and when it would’ve been so easy to say, All this means that I shouldn’t be here. And my whole life I’ve been encompassed by all of this energy saying that who I am is wrong or dangerous.
And instead, you said, All this means I have to let go of all that and just shine my authentic self because I shouldn’t be here.
Anyone here, to most people who experience even a fraction of this, don’t make it to that point, healthy body, brain, everything working at the way it’s meant to, let alone able to look at that and say, yeah, okay, so this all means that I’m just gonna stop hiding because who I am isn’t worth not showing who I am.
What enabled you then to take that road versus the possibly easier, I’m just gonna fight even more?
Nick
I think from a young age, I can look back and recognize that there were like these little moments that I had a sense that, I didn’t know what it was, but there was some purpose, for being, like internally within me. And I, as I look back on that kind of unfolding of history, of realizing my history, my story more fully, a thought came to my mind, which was responsibility.
Like I have a responsibility. If I’m here and I more than likely shouldn’t have been here for so many reasons, then I have a responsibility to do something with this life. At that point, I don’t think I would’ve used the words that I can use now. but I just felt a deep sense of responsibility to use my energy, my time in a way that made a difference.
Like I couldn’t waste it, that’s what it felt Like, I can’t waste this. This is a gift. And as you ask that question, I’m trying to reflect on were there unique principles that I grew up around with my grandparents. I don’t know. There probably was a culmination of experiences of growing up in a small farm town growing up as like an only child in a lot of ways.
Basically yes, that, and then having a lot of freedom growing up in the eighties and having a giant forest, not far from my backyard that I could disappear into. A lot of personal time, to explore. And it’s not like I didn’t have influences from friends, but, where I lived there just, it probably wasn’t until I was junior high that I really had friends that I hung out with all the time. It was really a lot of like self play, a lot of curiosity, a lot of imagination, a lot of creativity, a lot of exploring, self storytelling. So maybe, there’s like fables that I heard stories, that I grew up with Walt Disney stories I grew up with.
I don’t know, there was just a sense of purpose, like something, I can’t waste this.
Michael
What enabled you to hear that sense of purpose, feel it, and then act on it?
Nick
It’s a great question. I just have to go back to, I think there’s a lot about who we are today that is rooted in the way we experienced life growing up, in those like early years that developed how we see, perceive the world, our belief system, that kind of stuff. And, as a child, I was always extremely curious about how everything worked.
I many times got in trouble for pushing buttons I wasn’t supposed to push. I still get in trouble for pushing buttons. I’m not supposed to push, and I’m not talking just about the metaphorical ones. I’m like, I wonder what this button does. And then we have problems. Good to know. Now we know what it does.
And also that sense of curiosity led me to building and creating and making a lot, and not in the traditional way that you would think. This exploration came out in ways of, my dad comes home from work, it’s been a long day, he’s tired. The last thing he wants to do is discover something he has to like fix. And, there I am in the garage and the lawnmower’s in 2000 pieces because I’m like, what does this thing do? Well, what does this thing do? Then what’s under this and what’s inside that? And what, like deconstructing, and so that sense of curiosity and deconstructing was not a destructive behavior. It was to understand the physics, like what’s working behind all of this. it’s the way that I think about humanity today.
That’s the way I think about like human behavior and, just our, the way we make decisions in life and organizational structures and organizational behavior. All of this is there’s a way to deconstruct it. I didn’t realize at the time this is really first principles thinking, like what is, how can we reduce it all the way down?
There’s nothing more to reduce. And that also led to a lot of building. So I made a lot of things, but not the traditional way. It was some sort of cart with wheels, and motor parts that might not have worked but looked like they worked, or some sort of raft that I could try to float down this creek that was behind our house.
And just anything I could find to put together to make things go or move or be a part of, some like pulling different ideas together. So I think that ability to break things down to their fundamentals and then rebuild them back up, for me was like, I could quickly do that. So by that point in life, being able to look at this macro picture of 17 years and then have these micro moments that I could zoom in on and start to realize, hey, there’s something more here, than just a kid that had a mom that went to prison because she was a drug dealer, there’s something more here than a kid that shouldn’t be here because his mom did drugs all the way up until the day he was born. There’s something more here. And it’s like you don’t always have to necessarily get down to that first principle.
Like, you might not be able to see it, but you can see the effect of it. You don’t know what’s behind it. Like what’s causing this? I’m not sure yet. It might be multiple things, but I could see the effect. And for me, seeing the effect of my life up until this point and how I had made all these choices around me because I was hiding things and trying to be somebody I wasn’t, and trying to get people to like me and all of this kind of need, which is normal human behavior. It wasn’t creating the results that I wanted. That was it. It was like, these aren’t getting me where I want to go. Drinking and going to parties aren’t getting me where I want to go. These certain friends aren’t getting me where I want to go.
It was this reduction and then building back up from there again, I didn’t know what the future fully needed to look like, and I didn’t know all the, parts that were causing what I was experiencing, but I knew enough. I knew enough to rewire and then again, that, that kind of pivotal moment where I found out that story, it was like a slingshot, it just, it set me in a completely different trajectory.
Michael
The sense I get, as you tell this story, is that it wasn’t a isolated eureka moment when you were there in high school and the pieces fell into place and you said, Oh, okay. All this now means that I’m going to stop being who I’m not, and zero in on focus on being who I am is since I get, as I, as you tell a story is that you’re doing this in micro bits all the way through, and the curiosity that you were inhabiting through your entire growing up, everything that you took apart, everything that you took, put back, put together, and created out of full cloth.
Everything that you explored and imagined and wondered. You were doing this about yourself as much as you were doing this about the external things, you weren’t conscious of it to the level that then when all these pieces came together, you had this foundation of all this stuff built up that all of a sudden it, now you could, you had this one extra piece.
They said, oh, now I have this whole edifice that I’ve been building and this is what it enables me to do.
Nick
Completely. You, nailed it. There’s couple dozen micro stories that lead up to that moment. I think that’s not uncommon for sure. I could be wrong on that. And to your point, I think we don’t necessarily always realize those little, e. Yeah, mi micro moments are building towards something, reinforcing a thought repeatedly leads to a belief, right?
And I think I probably didn’t realize it until a few years ago, but really what I was experiencing throughout high school was this, use the illustration tearing apart of the lawnmower of my life, even at that point, and starting to look at all the pieces and starting to realize what drives this thing and what pieces do I wanna build back with?
Michael
And you’d been experiencing your entire life that deconstructing things was encouraged. Sounds like you didn’t get healed out in trouble for doing these things.
Nick
Like I said, I had enough supervision that I wasn’t, I wasn’t gonna get deathly injured or something like that, or, I probably should have been sometimes.
But not enough supervision because again, this was 1980s, and probably I was also, whatever the punishment might have been was not enough to keep me away from being curious. And, yeah. Another funny thing about where I grew up there was, there was our property, and then about a half mile behind our property, there was some like random abandoned junkyard. It wasn’t big, it wasn’t like this giant junkyard, but it was maybe about half a football field size junkyard. And, I don’t know whoever owned that, I never saw anybody there. I was always scared I was gonna get busted, but man, did I, did I learn a lot in that junkyard, tearing things apart and dragging things back to the house.
I was always told most likely to take those things back. But yeah, there was definitely a strong sense of like right and wrong. I wouldn’t say like we didn’t grow up like, or I didn’t grow up in a religious family. There was a definitely a strong sense of morality though. These things are right, these things are wrong.
But again, I’m gonna go back to this mass thing. It’s like where you have this, like paradox going on of these things are right and wrong, but we’re gonna hide these things that are like damning to who we are. That’s an interesting way to grow up, where it’s like there’s a duality that you’re brought up in.
Michael
Yes.
Your curiosity was encouraged and supported all the way through, where other people’s isn’t supported.
Nick
Or maybe, I get where you’re going, or maybe not necessarily. It wasn’t discouraged. It was probably like they couldn’t keep up with the amount of curiosity I had, but keep going, please.
Michael
That could be too, that, yeah. At least wasn’t actually discouraged. May have been. It seems to me it was actively encouraged, even if it wasn’t your grandparents sitting down with you and helping you take things apart or actively giving you kudos for taking the lawnmower apart and discovering how all these things worked, and then helping you put it back together. There wasn’t the, some kids took the lawnmower apart, and parents came in and they got sent to the room and grounded, and all these other things and had experiences that told them curiosity was a bad thing, and you, at the very least, were never told it was a bad thing.
And I’m pretty sure were supported and encouraged that in at least subtle ways, if not overt ways.
So I’m not surprised then that even that late teenage when it’s so hard to understand who we are, let alone to act on that, especially when that’s different from everyone around us, that you were able to build on that and make that decision that, Okay. Yeah, being who I am isn’t working, I’m gonna go do, try being who I am.
And maybe that’s at the very least, isn’t gonna work worse and maybe it’s gonna be better.
So this is a big part of how you have felt, why you feel, have felt safe and empowered to bring your unique talents, everything that you do. How do you help people build cultures where they and their people feel safe and empowered to bring everything they are into everything that they do?
Nick
Yeah, let me back up in. And tell, on myself a little bit before stepping into that, which I think goes to this idea of how to build, I’ve always been a student of leadership. I didn’t even realize that. But I’ve always watched people that led, whether it was a director of our theater and musicals in high school and just studied how she led and how she invested in the high schoolers that she had the opportunity to care for and all the way through, the leaders I most recently worked alongside of, I’ve just always been a student of that.
And the one thing that I will say that is key in my experience is self-leadership. I think there is a direct correlation between the level of your own leadership for the others that you’re in, you’re entrusted with. It is directly correlated with your level of self-leadership. This could also be, like how well do you know yourself?
Like, just to simplify self-leadership. How self-aware are you? What kind of work have you done to become aware of where you get stuck? Where you know, your fear kicks in and, you hide, and we could go on and on. So I will say, to tell on myself would be to say that, the ebb and flow of this fully integrated self.
This, like for me, curious and full of creativity and wonder and possibility. There’s definitely been seasons of life where I’m intimidated and I’m scared and there’s stories in my mind about how I’m not good enough or I’m not smart enough, or I don’t have that education, or this engineer knows way more than I know, so I probably should be quiet here.
And those like self, recognizing that for myself is directly correlated with my ability. And there’s another piece here with my ability to hear and listen and have compassion for others. The other piece to that is honestly just sitting and being with other people and letting them tell their story and hearing who they are and creating space for them to feel safe.
And acknowledging the fact that we all have different beliefs, we all have different perspectives, we’ve all had wildly different experiences. And so really building up that acumen of self knowledge and knowledge of like how others tend to operate. There’s a wild gradient of how people tend to operate, but the more we’re aware of how people operate and back to this first principles thing, then we can start to try to get underneath of it and understand what’s blocking that level of curiosity, creativity, like what’s holding that back, and that also plays a huge part in the type of team that you can build, or organization, but, layers of teams.
But I think it, it first starts with, whatever, if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re building a team for the first time, or you’re in an organization and you have a team that’s amongst many teams, it starts with understanding who you are, who am I, and where do I trip myself up?
You’re not gonna know at all. And, what do I normally miss? What am I not aware of? What am I like? What are my biases? Where do I tend to not slow down enough to listen. Where are my weaknesses? We can call ’em that as well, to where, like other people’s perspectives. Let’s say I’m real risk tolerant, like I love risk.
There’s gonna be people in my sphere if I built a great team, there’s gonna be people in my sphere that are a little more risk averse or maybe way risk averse, but we actually need each other. There’s a better world that we build together than just my way. Just the way I see the world.
But as a leader, sometimes at the same turn of that coin, the paradoxes is that sometimes there is things that you see that you envision that the team might not be able to see, and that you have to create an environment where they’ll come along with you. That there’s enough vision that they see that they can imprint their perspectives.
Their ways of doing things into it and come along with it instead of it being so intolerable, or uninteresting or even worse, it’s just mediocre because they’re just doing what you told them to do instead of the level of enrollment that, that they take ownership in it, that they want to see it just as much as you want to see it.
And actually, your vision is lacking because you don’t have their vision as a part of it yet fully. So all that’s to say is, if I had to like peel that back a little bit, summarize to your question. It’s, it starts with self-awareness and then building a practice of active listening with empathy and compassion.
Those are two different things. Empathy is, I can see and understand what you’re going through, right? Compassion is the etymology of the word. Compassion is to suffer with. So I’m gonna come and sit in it with you. I’m still not gonna fully understand it ’cause I don’t have your life experience.
But I’m gonna sit in it with you in a way that I might be able to even repeat it back to you, in a way that actually describes it maybe better than you’ve described it to yourself before. that, that’s the ultimate level of understanding, being able to mirror it back.
Oh, this is what it, sounds like I’m hearing, blah, blah, blah. It builds trust. Trust is this ultimate thing. But these components of knowing yourself and being able to like, really listen, be able to understand and see people where they are, who they are, and really get. I’m not asking, I’m not saying everybody has to become a psychologist, but we can all be better listeners and we can all slow down and hear. And what happens is when that happened, that hearing happens, that scene, like I feel seen and I feel heard and I feel understood, like someone actually understands me, maybe even better than I understand me, that all of a sudden there’s a sense of like the walls coming down a little bit and trust going up the walls of I need to protect, I need to look good.
I need to be in control. I wanna feel good. All those different things that we’re trying to do to stay safe, start to all of a sudden quiet down a little bit and then there’s some trust extended towards the team or the leader. So, building trust. So that people can be seen and can be heard, that I can share something with you that might be tough, but I can be here for where it’s tough and like actually let you go through the: I didn’t really like how you said that. That’s okay. Like, I have enough self-awareness to go, Oh yeah, that’s probably not feeling very good for you right now, and that’s okay too.
So I’ll pause there because I’m unpacking a lot, but the key three ideas, self-awareness, listening through empathy and compassion, and then building trust.
Michael
Yeah. You are showing them that you’re on this journey, understanding yourself better, filtering away aspects of who you thought you are that aren’t helping anymore, that helps them feel safe in doing the journey themselves. And then you encourage and assist that by helping them on that, through that journey, however much they’d like you to help.
Nick
And here’s the thing, we spend a hundred thousand hours, I don’t know if it’s true for everybody, but let’s just say on average a hundred thousand hours in this work environment, in our lifetime, more than probably most other relationships that we have in life, and we’re a group of people, let’s just keep it to the team level of like, a department or, just for, simplicity. We’re a group of people that are working towards an outcome, a vision, a result, or set of results on any given project. And a lot of times multiple projects at once. And we’re a group of people with different perspectives, experiences, beliefs, and our own versions of fear and safety.
So my opinion is that as a leader, if I think that this group of people is just gonna get the work done, and none of these like human things are gonna happen, then I’m deceiving myself. And if I want to be a great leader, a leader that builds innovative, curious, high performing teams, then I have to understand first how humans work, period.
If you’re a product person, great. Go become a human person. If you’re a designer and you got promoted to be a leader, great, fantastic. Go learn how humans design their worlds. Like whatever discipline it is, go learn humans that all of a sudden is your responsibility because you have this group of people they’re spending most of their time.
Doing something that I think, for the most part, they hope feels significant and meaningful to them, and they’re doing it with a group of other people, and all their stuff is going to come up in that process. So you can either choose one of two doors. And I don’t like to be very binary, very often, but I think there’s one of two doors here.
Door number one is compliance. You guys be quiet and get the work done, which we all know leads to mediocrity, like fighting, sabotage on the team. All kinds of just BS starts showing up, which affects the outcome that you all said you were working towards. I’m not even talking about getting innovative and creative.
I’m just saying baseline, here’s the goal. That starts being affected. We’re not up here in this higher level of intelligence, which has nothing to do with like intellectual intelligence. It has absolutely all to do with emotional intelligence. So as a leader, I have to operate and lead up here so that all of this other stuff, the skills and the metrics and the KPIs, the team’s gonna take care of those things.
If I live up here and take care of these things up here, they’ll start moving up towards those, they’ll start uncovering these things that are holding them back, and I’ll start creating systems and opportunities for those who are stuck to be able to take a stepping stone towards a better, more creative way of doing something, a way that unlocks whatever it is that’s holding them back.
Even if it’s just simply, they don’t want to talk, they don’t wanna speak up in meetings. But they have great ideas and they always email you the great ideas afterwards, right? Is my job, is my responsibility to tell them to speak up in meetings or to slow down and understand why they aren’t speaking up in meetings? Why they aren’t bringing these great ideas into a group of people where it can start to build, iterate, at speed within an half an hour, whatever amount of time we have together?
Instead of this one-off email, now it’s just like off in the corner, and we have to pull it into the light instead of that moment where it was alive in them. As a leader, that’s my responsibility, that’s my work, is to identify these areas for these humans that are giving their lives over to this work.
To help them grow and grow into creativity, grow into imagination, grow into innovation. And the really fun part, and I’ve experienced this time and time again, is that if you do that work, this isn’t about, sure, the results of the project you’re working on, like those are amazing and everybody knows it.
Everybody sees it. Pat on the back, great job. The real results is that person’s life changes. They start showing up different at home. And in the relationships they start seeing themselves different. They start taking risks that they weren’t taking before. They start considering possibilities that they weren’t considering all because you slowed down and you listened and you created space for them to share where they’re at.
And again, the self-awareness part of this is that. You can either do it two ways. You can do it from, I’m gonna use a word that doesn’t get used in, business very often. You can either do it from love or from transaction. I need this person to do things better so that we can get better results on the project.
Of course, that’s there, that is, but the end goal is like this, let me help this human, this other person, just for the sake of helping them, and the results will work themselves out on the project for sure. But if I choose the transactional thing where I’m actually using the person to get what I want, because I’m afraid, that’s that self-awareness thing.
Again, if I’m not aware of what I’m doing, I might be manipulating, coercing, or trying to, and people will know it. People will feel it and they won’t trust you.
Michael
Yes, a hundred percent. What we’re doing is not just helping them grow through past their comfort zones and into where they might be even more who they are.
We’re also helping them integrate in as a team so that if right now, to use your example, person is not comfortable speaking up in meetings and is only comfortable sending an email afterwards, part of our job as a leader is find a way to integrate that into the way the team works so that those ideas sent through email after the meeting.
’cause some of us need time to think, it’s always gonna be an hour or a day or a week later that our great ideas show up, have a path to being engaged into the team just as much as the people who have brilliant, who have ideas popping off left and right all the way through the meeting. So that everyone where they are right now is able to work the way that they work best and weave that into how the team works. And then also we’re encouraging, assisting, supporting everyone growing towards whatever their growth edges and so that they’re working. Becoming more who they are, bringing more of that into the workplace and then we’re evolving that integrated, their evolving selves, integrating all that day in and day out into how the team works.
And for everyone who’s listening, if, oh gosh, this is so much I, it’s just, there’s no way I can do it all. It’s too overwhelming. I’m not even gonna try to start. One thing I love about all this is don’t have to do all the things ever. If all that we do is help ourselves do this, I’ve think talked a little bit more, then that really taught to everyone else.
It helps everyone else do this for themselves, a teeny, tiny little bit more, even if they don’t realize they’re doing it and that then has snowball effects, ’cause every day you’re a little bit more, you’re helping, they build a little bit more that helps everyone. They interact with be a little bit more.
And pretty soon, just by working on ourselves, we’re helping the entire universe be more who every piece of that is.
Nick
That’s right. It’s easy to hear the point Z of the story and you feel like you’re not even at A, and go, that would never work in my organization or I’m just trying to figure out how to make enough revenue. And I have three people on the team. We’re just trying to make enough money to like actually keep this thing alive.
And we keep dipping into our savings account and borrowing money from our family to keep this thing alive. Oh, I don’t, how do I even start to think about this kind of stuff. But I like your point. It starts with you. If you’re hearing this, it starts with you. And it doesn’t have to be this like huge aha moment that shifts your life in this, altering trajectory kind of way.
It can just be recognizing that at this moment there are opportunities for you to know yourself. Like how do you work as a human? How do I make decisions? What are my beliefs? What are my values? Like those kind of simple questions. Taking 10 minutes one morning or afternoon and just, but for nothing but the exercise of rattling it down, putting down those simple things.
My favorite two questions to unpack this is, what do I stand for and what do I stand against? The stand against thing is actually really important because there are things that we, that actually, we feel a deep sense of injustice or, or a sense of need for justice. And that stand against thing, to clarify that, especially if you’re having a hard time clarifying what I stand for, that stand against comes pretty quick.
We can make a list, and start to identify those things that list of those two questions. If you’ve never done anything like that can be just the start of some breadcrumbs that start leading you down a trail of wondering, how do I operate as a human?
Michael
And for people who are uncertain how to start, you aren’t sure what they stand for or against.
Start with something way less fraught than what you stand for/ against. Start with things like, what flavors of ice cream do I love and which do I despise?
I like it. Which just search in general do I love versus despise? What colors do I love and which do I despise? Starting with these things that can seem silly, it helps us bring our creativity in, play into it, and it helps us get over the, I have to be right, I have to know the answers. I have to be perfect, and let’s just start writing things down.
So if I get which ice cream I like wrong, it’s no big deal. I might go buy some stuff and then I eat it and I’m like, Nope. That I hate, it’s way less scary, way less potential impact than my values, my beliefs, how I worked best.
Nick
Yeah, I love that. It reminds me of, there was a movie, this must have been in the nineties or early two thousands, and it had, Julia Roberts in it, and she was a bride that kept running away from her weddings.
I dunno if you remember this movie. And, there’s a scene where she realizes that every person that she had been engaged to, she adopted whatever eggs they liked. She didn’t even know what eggs that she preferred, and she goes through this exploration of figuring out like what she likes and what she doesn’t like.
I think that’s such a great illustration of how our preferences, sometimes, we don’t own them as much as we think we do. And like you said, just be willing to be playful about it. Taking the stakes down, like finding ways to approach these kind of questions where there is low stakes. I’m not gonna die.
My identity’s not on the line. I’m not, it’s fine. It’s just play, just playing with ideas.
Michael
We’ve talked about this some already. Is there anything more from what we’ve talked about so far of how the more we and all the people we work with and lead, bring our whole selves to work, the more we have the energy and creativity and play to solve the problems that are there to solve, is there anything else that is important for the business value of creating these cultures, doing this work?
Nick
I guess it depends on what, I mean, it’d be idealistic of me to say, every business would want to have high performing teams that, that are able to exceed whatever results that are determined at the beginning of a quarter or beginning of a year, whatever it might be.
Again, this is where my investigative hat comes on. It’s there’s actually probably things that just, to be aware, and this might be a little complex, but there are actually things that a lot of times leaders, business owners, want more than that.
It might seem a little controversial to say, and I just want to add a framework to think, this way or to explore this question. And again, I’m gonna go back to your ice cream thing. This is a little bit of an ice cream question. It’s gonna seem complex, but I need you to be like ice cream level playfulness.
One of the things we used to say at iceberg all the time, one of our core values was being playfully curious. And, how I explain that value is that, we all operate from judgment a lot. And, judgment of ourselves, judgment of others, judgment of the situation, judgment of the project, whatever we’re judging.
And if we can just kinda lower that down and just become playful, like it’s, it like let’s lower the judgment of it. Like it, let’s take the weight off of it. Let’s relax a second. So to be able to do this exercise, we have to relax a little bit with our mindset. you gotta do a little breath work and go for a walk.
Maybe you have to do the exercise with somebody, but let’s say that you’re not getting the results you want to get, and I’m talking as a team. Let’s say the result is you want people showing up to work, fully integrated and full of creativity and curiosity. Like really feeling like they’re making their most meaningful creative efforts happen but that’s not happening. One exploration you could do and you’re the leader, right? So like you can’t really blame the team. One exploration you can do to uncover any kind of hidden value, motivation, payoff is the word we use a lot in coaching. Payoff would be like I’m getting a reward by keeping it the way it is, to ask this question, what am I getting out of keeping it the way it is?
Or another way of asking that question, why do I like it this way? I don’t like the results. What are you talking about? I don’t want the team to be this way. No. Wait. Why do you like it this way? If you can just slow down enough to like what would I actually be getting out of keeping it this way?
I actually don’t have to confront people. Oh, okay. cool. I would have to actually start delegating stuff and right now that what I’m getting out of it is that I can stay in control of the outcome, so I’m getting control out of it. What if it goes bad? Okay. If it goes bad, and I try to do all this work with the team and really invest in them, and then my CEO comes to me and says, Hey, the performance on this team is looking really rough this quarter, what is going on? Okay. All of a sudden, I’m gonna look bad. I could lose my job. I could, this decision could, I’m getting something out of it. If you’re not seeing the change that you’re looking for, then there’s probably some benefit. I know I’m overstating this, but this is an exercise that most of us are not experienced with playing with, but it is the exercise we need to do.
It is one of the exercises we need to do to be able to determine, okay, what is actually the benefit that I’m receiving for keeping it this way? And if I can see that you can’t transform what you can’t see, if I can see that, then I can look at it, and I can be like, all right. Do I value that more than this result?
And the answer might be yes, ’cause obviously the results are telling you right now that you value that. How would I begin to value that more? How would I devalue this? What risks would I have to take? What would I need to explore? What questions? And you just work those back. I’m gonna go to the CEO and explain to, Hey, look, I believe investing in the team this way, but I’m gonna need to take like 10% of our time to actually build this the way we need to build it 20% of our time and is probably gonna make the results look a little funky for a month or two.
’cause we’re gonna be experimenting, we’re gonna be in, are you open to this? Like test that assumption that the CEO is gonna be mad, get in front of it, have the conversation, which you are probably, there’s a payoff on not having that conversation too, right? You get where I’m going, all of these things that we’re not doing, there’s something, and, look, I’m, there’s something that we’re getting out of it.
And that doesn’t mean we’re wrong, bad, or broken. You’ve probably heard that before, ’cause I know you’ve interviewed Adrian and Chad, and those are phrases that they’re very well acquainted with. But that’s normally where we go, is that something’s wrong with us, and that’s normal.
That’s human. But lower the judgment, be playful with it. Explore if I’m not getting what I want out of my own life or out of the team, what am I getting out of keeping it the way it is. Does that make sense?
Michael
The value that you’re getting, as you said, not only is it not wrong, it doesn’t necessarily need to change.
If the value you’re getting out of the way things are is something you wanna keep and you want to make the change, then start searching for ways to get that value from the new thing. So there’s prob almost always a way I like it. So it’s not that you have to give up your chocolate ice cream to be a pile of in person.
You can have both.
Nick
I love it. In this playfulness mindset, which I can tell you operate from a lot, it has to do with growing from a very binary. A kind of ones and zeros mindset, and starting to feel safer and safer, moving away from that to more of a paradoxical mindset. Like two things can be true at once, and then more of a multi-doxical, meaning that you can have binary sometimes binary, you need a one and a zero. You need it to be clean and clear, and sometimes it’s going to be a mix of things being true at once. And, you could have value here and build new value at the same time. It’s this rigid ones and zero only thinking that really gets us stuck and not allowing us to play with ideas.
Like you just expressed this idea that two things could exist at once. Like I could get this value out of this, while it’s transitioning to this and it becomes this over time. I love it.
Michael
Yes. Almost never is, does it have to be either or? Almost always. It can be, yes, and.
Nick
Yeah, almost always, look, we only understand 95%, sorry, we don’t understand 95% of the known universe. I say this to my kids all the time: 95% of the known universe is still mysterious to us. That is the known universe. We’re not talking about the unknown universe. So even of that 5%, it’s not binary, still, there’s a lot that we still it’s still a little mysterious, and so we’re wrapped in mystery, but yet we’re conditioned for certainty, predictability. So we live in this tension between these two truths that we as humans we feel really safe when there’s certainty and predictability. Some of us that may have grown up in some like tumultuous, like kind of crazy times, we might actually like a little uncertainty that actually feels safe.
But for most of us, like that is a form of certainty too. But we’re wrapped in mystery every day. There’s mysteries around us everywhere. And this is a lifetime of letting go of certainty while holding onto it. I pulled this terminology a lot out of quantum physics of this idea of the, Oh, I can’t think of the term right now, but I use a lot and it’s, it’s, escaping me. Superposition, where it can be multiple things at once. And there’s more things in reality that are in super position than we perceive.
And so if that’s true, can we, wherever you’re at in your experience, can you begin a journey can be anchored. Uncertainty. It’s okay to need that, but also have a leash, some room to drift into uncertainty and explore possibility and curiosity. And know that like for the most part, there is enough certainty that you’re gonna be safe, that you’re gonna be okay.
Michael
We’ve talked a lot today, Nick, about ways that people can take all the change, uncertainty, and overwhelm that seems to be everything life is these days. And make those less scary, less impactful, less coercive, transform them into opportunities to explore. Is there anything else that comes to mind or that you find especially helpful in helping people make that transformation?
Nick
Yeah, I’ll tell a little story and then I’ll unpack these in real time as they’re showing up in my life today. You mentioned in the intro, former Chief Product Officer, for the last three years, I’ve had the opportunity to work alongside some incredible team engineers across the world, and building some really complex systems.
And, as a part of being a part of any startup, there’s always surprises that you did not anticipate. And, January 18th, January 19th, something like that, of this year, 2025, I got a phone call, and my whole team was getting disbanded. And I was a part of the company going into some acquisition and long-term exit strategy for the founders and stuff like that.
I knew this was somewhere on the horizon, but it came out of nowhere in my impression, my team’s impression came outta nowhere. Not only did I have to walk away from work that I, loved and a team I loved, and a team that really flowed from creativity, possibility, pushing on each other, really leaning into each other’s strengths, but also, like pulling out new possibilities out of people. Not just like leaving them where they were, watching engineers grow from each other by creating the right environment. It was like, to me. The products that we built. Love it. That was amazing. But the most important product we built was that team. And, it was very meaningful to me to be a part of kind of two different teams.
I sat between marketing and brand and product, which is a kind of unique space to be in, to really tie things together. But the experience of being a part of those really incredible teams all of a sudden disappeared, within a few days. And I, I felt like just this sense of the world’s all of a sudden coming apart, what am I gonna do?
I gotta think about my family. I gotta think about what does this mean for this team? I was spending a lot of time thinking about what this means for this team. What are they gonna do? What are they gonna end up? frustration, some anger. A little bit of dread, a little bit of, a whole lot of fear.
A whole lot of fear. And I won’t say that lasted like, a normal time for people. I feel like it was abnormal how quickly I moved through that. But within, let’s say that was a Wednesday that happened by Friday morning, I woke up and I said, I am going to choose hope. I can choose fear, but I’m gonna choose hope.
And that’s a choice. I have that choice. I’m gonna choose hope. Okay. What does hope look like for me? I’m starting to unpack this. Well, hope looks like I don’t have to be afraid of what happens next. I have agency, I have authority, I have access, and I’m not just talking about me. We all really have agency, authority, and access more than we realize.
But, and I still feel like there’s a ceiling on that, like in my mind, right? There’s a limiting belief there for me. And, but I, I have these things, but I have my family, I have all the skill experience, and I have a really great community. Okay? I have these things I already know. I have hope.
I’m gonna choose hope the next week, kinda. The weekend goes by, it’s Monday. And what am I gonna do with my time? I could spend my time trying to satisfy myself, trying to satisfy my fear, trying to like, solve all the things that I’m afraid of as fast as I can. Like making sure that I’ve, I get another position that’s greater or equal value. Making sure that I have access to the kind of teams and the kind of work that I really enjoy doing.
And I don’t have to go backwards and will I have to end up like, finding some like local construction job in the mean, I can wrestle all of these thoughts and try to solve all of this, right? And that would be totally normal and those are normal thoughts to have a normal experiences.
My thought was to slow down and listen to my heart. What’s, what is my heart saying? What is my gut, how should I use this attention, this energy that I have? I remembered that I was already choosing hope. Now, how does that play out? And I chose generosity next. Like kinda two things at once, but I chose generosity next.
I was like, okay, before I like try to solve things for myself, how can I show up generous? And like I mentioned, I had the have this team that now all of a sudden has to figure out what’s next for them, and might not have hope, might not have the same perspectives that I do. And so it’s like I’m leaning in, I’m gonna invest in this team.
I’m gonna spend the first half of my day, that first week, the first half of my day. How can I serve the team? How can I help them with what they need before I serve myself? So I’m gonna show up generous. And it looked a lot like a lot of phone calls, a lot of listening, a lot of hearing where people were at, just as much as offering solutions.
’cause I didn’t have a lot of solutions. I had some ideas, but really what people needed to know that they were heard and that they belonged still, and that they were going to be supported. So that’s what like half my time and that also was coupled with this other phrase that I think goes right along with generosity is, gratitude.
So what do I have that I can be grateful for right now? Not just these things that make up my identity as like my job or my title. Like I might not have those, but there are things that are about me. That are my creativity, my curiosity, that are my sense of wonder. Like all these things that make me uniquely me.
Doesn’t matter what job I’m in, right? I have my family. I have a house that I’m living in. I have clothes. I’m warm, I have food. I can really get down into the weeds. Like I have air, we have water, we have sunlight, and get really these big macro things. I’m grateful. I have all this stuff to be grateful for.
And, there’s like tons of studies around gratitude and around generosity of how it just shifts, the neurobiology of your brain away from fear. Like you, you focus outside of yourself. And in doing that, releases dopamine and serotonin into the system and sense of calm and peace.
And out of that, the last word I’m gonna use in this, in this season of life that anybody might find themselves in that might feel similar to where things feel, unprecedented, unexpected, maybe they feel like they’re in liminal space between the now and the not yet. I chose creativity. So generosity, creativity and gratitude.
And creativity for me looked like, Hey, I have all of these principles. I have all of these behaviors and values and philosophies, all of this stuff that I put into the work that I do, and constantly get feedback from team members or, people that I report to of, Hey, that’s really unique. We love that.
How do I do that? How do you think that way? And a lot of that was giving that away into a certain project or a certain team. And in a way that was very practical, obviously we’re working towards this, so let me help you understand this, or let’s build this strategy around this, or, this is my mindset, but, never really unpacking kind of the why and the philosophy and maybe the neuroscience or, whatever it is that’s like underneath these behaviors that people saw that they were like, Hey, can you teach us how to do that?
Oh, we really like that. or, another example of that is, is that, quite often we would have other brands or other companies, organizations that would be in parallel to us, come to us and say, Hey, whatever you guys are doing there is really incredible. How do we do that? How do we do that on our team?
How do we do that with the way that you guys show up? How do we do that? And so for me it was like, let’s take all of that and let’s try to be generous, grateful that we’ve had that experience, grateful that I have that in life, and let’s be generous and creative and let’s put something out into the world.
So it looks like a lot of writing right now, and posting and trying to share some of these concepts and ideas with people that are interested. So I think the reason the creativity part is important is you gotta do something and that might be that, like, you just do something different at work that might look like.
If you have the means, you’re bringing donuts to the office on Friday just because you wanna brighten everybody’s day. Like you, you really lean into these kind of inklings that are inside of you. Like when you get into a very creative, generous, grateful place, these kind of creative ideas start to bubble up to the top.
And these kind of caring, compassionate, like support others bubble up to the top. And there is a reciprocity that I can’t explain. It’s like probably some sort of quantum level thing going on, to where, when you’re doing that really out of love, out of this heartfelt place, things come back along the way.
Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but down the road, and when you’re doing it, not so that it comes back, but really just like I feel compelled like I have to share and give and do. There’s a reciprocity that comes back, and this isn’t just a human thing. I’ve actually done some study on this and in nature and in animals, they also have an altruistic nature of generosity.
There’s some plants that will suppress some of their root growth when they’re growing right next to their kin. So they don’t overtake the nutrients that are in the ground or overtake their canopy, overtakes their kin, so they don’t allow for photosynthesis inside of their kin. There’s tons of stories and primates and vampire bats and rats doing these like generous acts that don’t have a, seemingly outside of supporting the general community.
They don’t seemingly have a, I do this for you and you get this back for me. So this is a thing that’s a part of nature. And so when I think about these times that are like a little bit more tense, troubling, overwhelming, uncertain, unpredictable, what can you do? What agency authority and access do you have to, and can you do some practices of gratitude? Just writing down some things you’re grateful for? Take that a step further. Take out your phone. Text five people about what you’re grateful for about them.
Make it go out into the world. What can you be generous with? How can you show up generous? Even if that’s just instead of sitting alone at your desk eating lunch, go sit with somebody that, and just listen to their story, not just because, just listen to their story. Don’t need anything from it. And what can you create?
What can you do? What can you put into the world that makes a difference? And I think that shifts back to what you said earlier about this idea that, maybe you can’t make this global effect in your company. Maybe you can’t make this effect in your community. Maybe you can’t make this effect in the nation or maybe the world.
But if we all start doing those things in small ways every day, the effect is compounding and exponential.
Michael
Yes. All we ever need to do, and we always can do, is make a conscious decision to focus on that. Accelerating beliefs and habits rather than interfering beliefs and habits and approach it with a sense of wonder.
Yeah, I love it. For people, Nick, who would like to find all the writing you do, talk with you about how to bring a sense of wonder into their particularly fraught situation, find their next tiny step on how to move forward, and a scenario where it seems like they have no way to move that is productive, what’s the best way for them to find you?
Nick
Sure, yeah. Two places. One, if you wanna stay anonymous and not reach out and just absorb some ideas, you can go to nickgoodin.com. I’ll spell that out here in a second. Slash blog or just nickgoodin.com, and you’ll find the tab for the blog. All of my writings are there, posting roughly five days a week and in the vein of a lot of things we’re talking about here today.
But with a level of depth and usually trying to support these ideas through psychology and neuroscience studies that have been done, as much as possible. And, that’s Nick, NICKGOODIN.com. You can check that out, or you can go to nickgoodinofficial on Instagram and DM me. So again, Nick Goodin, G-O-O-D-I-N, official, on Instagram.
Michael
Thank you, Nick for being with us today, sharing always amazing stories
Nick
And thanks, Michael
Michael
And thank you, audience, for joining us today. Nick and I would love to know where are you bringing your creativity, how can we help? Thanks, and have a great day.