WonderTour

Hello, and welcome back to Lead Wisely by Wondretour.

We're really excited.

This month we are starting a new series that we are calling Trust the Process.

So in our past episodes, we've spent a lot of time talking about leadership from the
standpoint of mentoring as sort of a personal one-on-one activity.

And at the end of the day, that's really the core of a lot of leadership practices.

But we're going to spend a little bit of time and revisit some fun movies.

and talk about the structured part of teaching or coaching about how they're not only do
you need wisdom, not only do you need attention, but often students or learners will

benefit from having a framework, having a structure, having a process around how they
learn, especially if you want to scale it up to more than one person.

So when we think about the kinds of stories that we love to watch that have a process
elements to them.

I think sports movies are the obvious analogy and of the sub-genres of sports movies,
probably martial arts movies are the classic training montage that we all picture in our

heads.

And, indubitably, the greatest modern martial arts movie is Kung Fu Panda.

Okay, I'm kidding.

This may not be the greatest modern martial arts movie, but it's a really fun way to start
off the series.

So we're going to spend some time with Jack Black in the form of Po, the Kung Fu loving
panda and all of his friendly cast of characters.

And as we always do, we're going to start off with a tough question about leadership.

Can anyone really be great, Drew?

Great question, Brian.

And this is one that Kung Fu Panda tries to address, this idea that truly anybody can be
great.

To take it back to Kung Fu Panda, at the beginning of this movie, we see Po, this panda
who is kind of unsuspecting.

Nobody is looking at him when they announce that there's going to be a dragon warrior and
thinking, this could be the next dragon warrior.

This is the one that the prophecies have foretold about.

He's going to overcome evil and establish peace in the land.

He's just a

He's a noodle boy, right?

That's what his family tells him.

He's a he's a.

is a non-traditional candidate, as we would say in the HR world, right?

Yeah, and we love him for it that he doesn't have to be the strongest or the smartest in
order to be great.

Now, I think we need to tie this a little bit back to our idea of trust the process and
why in this first episode of this series are we talking about Kung Fu Panda and are we

talking about greatness?

And to me, it seems intuitive because my view, our view, Brian, of greatness is that
greatness is not

Something you achieve by getting a lifetime achievement award or by accomplishing all of
the requirements that are in the check boxes of being great.

It's instead a internal thing.

It's something that you do every single day.

Greatness is waking up every day and doing the difficult things, making the sacrifices,
developing your character, but doing it in a loving and compassionate way, really by

serving the people around us.

And isn't that how we find Poe?

Poe is not, again,

He's kind of pokes fun at himself for not being the most in shape, more to be a Kung Fu
master, not being the smartest, but instead playing it off with humor and things like

He's kind of pokes fun at himself for not being the most in shape, more to be a Kung Fu
master, not being the smartest, but instead playing it off with humor and things like

that.

He really isn't the traditional definition of this great leader who's going to be this.

This general who's going to be the president, who's going to be the CEO or something.

Instead, he's the leader that's required, though he's the.

individual who has the character who can teach others things that they don't yet know
about themselves as we're going to find out with Shifu and his greatness pose is in his

process.

It's in the fact that he wakes up every day and despite the fact that his dad keeps
telling him you're a noodle boy and nothing more, he has this vision for something more

and he's not satiated with the current state of his being.

He's not going to be okay with just going to the Dragon Warrior Conference or whatever it
is to sell, to sell noodles.

He wants to go to that conference to speak on the stage, to be the one who, who gets to
share and serve other people with his knowledge and with his experience.

And to me, that is the story of greatness.

It's, it's the everyday pose of the world that each one of us are that we wake up, we go
for a run, we journal, we meditate, we reflect, we

prepare our family's food in the morning.

We do the difficult things that make other people successful.

That is what greatness is all about.

And that doesn't rule out being individually great at something oneself.

Right.

And so we see, we see a couple of different flavors of this, right?

We see there are, there are different things you can be great at.

There are different ways of being great at the same thing.

And there are also, I think the, you know, the key lesson from the beginning here, right.

Is that different backgrounds can still lead to greatness.

Right.

So, you know, like you say, he's the, he's the non-traditional candidate.

He has some aspirations.

He's got some things he's really excited about.

And that's, course, all of us have that, right?

Everybody has things that you could dream about.

Everybody has the passions that you maybe haven't achieved or visions of the bigger world
that you want to go live in.

But he also has the willingness to work for it.

And I think we'll see that as we go through this movie is that it's not just daydreaming,
right?

There is quite a bit of daydreaming involved here.

This is a very relatable part of Poe.

Right.

But he's also, he, he's willing to push pretty hard, right.

To get to where he wants to be.

And that's a, that's an essential piece of it is putting yourself in a position.

Like even the, sort of the comedy scene where he gets locked out of the Dragon Warrior
festival.

And so he's like bouncing around outside trying to get in and he ends up doing this
cockamamie thing with strapping fireworks to a chair, know, it gets, it crashes into the

scene.

Like it is.

humorous and unskillful, but incredibly persistent is the thing that this story is trying
to show us, right?

Is like, he's not taking no for an answer.

Like he's so excited about this that he's going to batter the door down one way or the
other.

Like he's so excited about this that he's going to batter the door down one way or the
other.

And that succeeds on one level because it gets him into the, it gets him over the wall,
but it fails on the other level is because it presents him even more in the light of like,

who the heck are you and what are you doing here?

Like you're such an outlier.

And that's so.

The challenge that he's going to run into is that both his potential colleagues, both the
potential people he could be working with and his potential leaders are all like, who the

heck are you?

So he's starting at a disadvantage.

And I think that's one of our, you know, kind of one of our recurring themes, but
something to examine with this movie is that starting from the disadvantage, you're going

to get that negative reaction.

You're going to go, well, that person can't succeed because they're so far away from.

being good and so far away from our image of what somebody who could be good would look
like.

So maybe let's contrast this.

So who's the character who should succeed?

What does expected greatness look like in Kung Fu Panda?

Yeah, of course, everybody thinks that Tigress is going to be the one who gets to be the
Dragon Warrior.

In a way, it's Tai Lung, right?

Because Tai Lung is kind of the first version of Tigress.

And so we get this expectation, the one who's the strongest, the one who's the most
skilled, the one who's the most dedicated, that is the person who achieves greatness.

But the challenge that we see specifically with Tai Lung is that he's not focused on
others.

And so by the definition that we're establishing of greatness, greatness is a process.

Greatness is waking up every day and serving somebody else.

Is that really greatness?

Yeah, he's focused on competence.

He's focused on overcoming.

He's focused on proving that he's the best.

He's, you know, in the framing of this movie, like the whole, his whole shtick is that
they didn't give him the scroll and tell him that he was the ultimate warrior.

And so he's going to prove everybody wrong.

And he kind of went crazy and whatever.

You're right.

So like, he's, he's just got the chip on the shoulder where he just keeps going and keeps
going and keeps going.

And it's all about him.

Then, so he's extremely good at martial arts.

the Tigress character is the one that is the most like him, right?

But it's kind of a slightly paler shadow copy.

And so you're really not gonna, you you're not gonna win that way.

You're not gonna win by being like not quite as focused as the threat, as your
competitors, as your enemy, doing the exact same thing that they're doing, but doing it

slightly less well or with slightly less commitment.

You know, you have to, as these movies love to tell us, right?

You know, the alternate path is often the wiser path.

So.

All right, before we get too much deeper into the story about Poe, let's go ahead and hit
the intro.

Hi, I'm Brian Nutwell.

And we are on a journey to lead wisely, to become better leaders by touring fantastic
worlds and inspiring lore by going on a wonder tour.

We connect leadership concepts to story context because it sticks to our brains better.

You can find out more at wondertourpodcast.com or on YouTube by searching Lead Wisely, all
one word.

All right, so we've got Po.

We've got this character who is resentful of his current situation.

He's in the noodle shop.

He doesn't love to be in the noodle shop.

He's aspiring to somehow just be associated with greatness.

Like he wants to be in this Kung Fu world.

He wants to be, you know, he wants to be a legendary warrior, at least get to go hang out
with the legendary warriors.

He's kind of a fan boy when he starts.

And of course, in the setup of this movie, he's put on a path where he could potentially
be great.

But it doesn't go smoothly as you would expect.

And so he's not accepted into the group by his colleagues, by the Furious Five.

He's not really accepted by his presumed master, Shifu.

He sort of blunders his way around a little bit, finds a way to at least be, you know, at
least be...

allowed to hang out by making noodles for them, sort of being part of the team.

But he's not really making progress on the martial arts thing for a good chunk of the
movie.

And so let's talk about our mountain stop scene.

What, what unlocks his potential paths to greatness here?

What's the, what's the scene where we kind of see them turning the corner to figuring out
that he might be able to move forward.

All right, Brian, our mountaintop moment for this episode.

And let's remind the audience who might be new here.

Our mountaintop moment is all about this emblematic scene that kind of ties the whole
episode together.

It's where we go to see from a high vantage point.

We were able to see a little bit more broadly.

And from there, we're able to take this specific application inside of this story that
we're looking at and apply it to our lives through general modeling and frameworks and.

even just kind of looking through the glass and seeing stories in our lives that are
similar.

So for our mountaintop this time, we're going to talk about the confrontation between
Shifu and Po, because up until the point in the movie where Uguay passes on to the next

world or whatever he's doing there, and he gives this information to Shifu that like, no,
you need to reframe the way that you're viewing the Dragon Warrior.

Up until this point,

You're just trying to put him through all the ropes, all the tests that you would normally
put a master through, and he's failing them all.

So you're disappointed in him and you have no level of belief that this is actually the
Dragon Warrior.

He's asking him to reframe it.

So this isn't the mountaintop.

This is just kind of setting up the mountaintop.

So everything to that point, Po and Shifu have just been not on the same page, right?

Po's acting one way.

He's still kind of acting like the outsider.

Like you mentioned, Shifu is acting aloof and like Po, it's not on his level.

failing and they keep setting up things for him to try to do and he's terrible and so he
keeps failing at it and so he's getting demotivated and his teacher's getting demotivated

and meanwhile the threat is looming and they're like

Yep, so they end up on the top of, what would you call this thing?

Yeah, they end up at the top of this mountain near the monastery where they're practicing
and it's great.

You get this confrontation finally where they're actually transparent with each other and
Po tells Shifu, like, how are you going to turn me into the Dragon Warrior?

And he lets it all out.

lets his emotions out.

He's like, yes, up into this point, I've just been faking it.

Yes, I don't, but I'm not growing.

I'm not learning anything from you.

And I have no belief based on what you're currently telling me that you're going to turn
me into the dragon warrior.

So maybe I should do what you've just been asking me to do this whole time.

And I should just go home.

Right.

And this is, I love this because, you know, he's, he's discouraged, right?

This is the, this is the dark moment where he doesn't, he doesn't have belief in the
future, but the reason he's so discouraged is because he does actually want to succeed.

Right.

He does actually want to be great.

Right.

And that is a thing that I think we can lose track of as leaders is that oftentimes is
that everybody wants to be great at something.

And that is a thing that I think we can lose track of as leaders is that oftentimes is
that everybody wants to be great at something.

You don't necessarily know what it is.

You know, you get figuring out how to get that aligned with what you need as a leader or
what the work, you know, what the group needs, what the company needs, what the world

needs.

Like that's still the challenge, but we often look at people who are discouraged or people
who are non-standard candidates or people who are unskillful and assume that they're

satisfied with that state.

And I really love this kind of, you know, this raw emotion of just like, you know, how are
you going to turn me into something amazing?

But the subject is because I really.

I want to believe that.

Like I'm right there on the edge of like, I'm about to quit, but I haven't quit yet
because I'm actually, I'm bought in to the idea.

I just don't see the path.

I don't see how I'm going to get there.

You can't trust the process unless you can see how the process working, unless you can see
it working for you.

And so at this point in the movie, Poe has not seen the process that they're putting him
through is the process that took infants and turned them into ninjas.

And he's not in either of those situations.

And it's just, he just keeps literally bouncing off it.

Like, it's not working.

So he can't see it working.

And so he started to get frustrated, but it's not because he's changed his high level
goals.

It's because he just doesn't know how to get.

Yeah, I think the key takeaway there is Poe does want to be great.

And inside of each of us, we believe most everybody does want to be great.

Even when they're not necessarily exuding that confidence when you're talking to them,
let's say your team members aren't necessarily coming forth to you and telling you like,

we can do great things, we can overcome the obstacles.

I know that we're budget constrained, but we can make this work.

Yet.

Each of us wants to be able to do extraordinary things.

We want to be able to overcome.

We want to be able to feel satisfied at the end of the day.

That's just inherent to what it is to be human.

And so to figure out, okay, well, if the current process isn't allowing Po to achieve that
greatness, right?

We said greatness is a process.

It's an everyday waking up and doing of the things that you need to do in order to be
successful.

But like you said, Brian, there has to be some sort of a feedback on that.

You have to get

You have to feel like you're making progress with the process that you're taking.

You have to feel like you're making progress with the process that you're taking.

So if we're not, I guess here, let me cut that part out right here because I want to just
really quickly hit the MLK quote and why Po how we are already seen despite the fact that

Yeah.

So if you're in the situation where you were a leader that has, and you have somebody
approach you with this kind of a conversation, right.

It will often sound like complaining.

It will sound like whining.

will sound like, you know, discouragement.

It'll sound like, you know, a lack of commitment potentially.

Right.

But if somebody is like pointing out that they don't know how to succeed, that's an
opportunity.

That is, they're saying that they would like to succeed.

They're saying that they would like to feel progress.

would say they would like to feel alignment and they're not there yet, but the potential
is there.

The hook is there for you to potentially get them on the path to success, get them onto
the path to a flavor of greatness that is useful for both you and them.

So, know, think Drew, you've got a quote for us that I really loved that we talked about
in the pre-show in this direction, right?

Yeah, so I want to bring in this quote here from Martin Luther King Jr., of course, quote
machine.

Yeah, so I want to bring in this quote here from Martin Luther King Jr., of course, quote
machine.

Everybody can be great because anybody can serve.

You don't have to have a college degree to serve.

You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve.

You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.

Anybody can serve.

There's a nice reframing of it, right?

I love that conflating of service and greatness.

Right.

And so, yeah, so the fun part about this from the viewpoint of the learner, from the
viewpoint of the PO in this story, right?

Is if you're, if you're in that position of...

intense frustration about not knowing how to reach your goals.

Like, yeah, that's time to have a hard conversation with your boss, with your teacher,
with your mentor, with your coach.

Like I'm, not getting there.

don't feel like I'm getting any, I'm, I don't feel like I'm getting there any closer and
be transparent.

Like, and I really want to, like I'm, it's not that I'm not willing to work hard, right?

What can we change so that I can see myself successful?

What can we change so I can feel progress?

That's the, the learner part of it.

Now, and I think we're going to spend the next episode talking about the teacher part of
it, the mentor, the coach, like what does that look like if you are in that role as a

leader?

but just for this episode, being sensitive to the fact that that's there, the sensitive,
the fact that you might have a panda that's going to be really good at Kung Fu, even if

that wasn't your expectation.

Like that's a thing.

That's a, that's a framing for every interaction that you can have with the people that
under you that may be struggling.

Yeah, to see it starts out right by seeing yourself as being able to achieve greatness by
doing the thing every single day by as MLK tells us, finding your opportunity to serve,

finding what your unique skill set and circumstances allow you to do to serve.

And so when you, you're the manager who's managing somebody who you're trying to help them
to achieve greatness, it starts with looking at how you, what you are doing to

achieve your greatness, right?

Because you're going to need to serve that person.

If you're the dissatisfied associate in the situation who's working for somebody who's
asking for help, like you said, Brian, that complaint that the current things we're doing

aren't working, that I don't have the skill that I need or whatever, it's not a, man, I
have this associate, it just doesn't do a good job.

And you know, they're always complaining.

It's like, okay, they're looking for something better.

So as that person, whichever situation we find ourselves in,

The opportunity is to see, what can I do to serve?

You know, for me, one of the things that I like to do to center myself when I feel like I
am getting a little bit aimless is, all right, well, maybe I need to stop working this

morning and I need to go serve somebody this morning.

I need to stop focusing on achieving this very specific goal that I'm frustrated with.

Or I need to stop focusing on improving myself or improving the people around me when I'm
not getting the right feedback.

And I just need to go out and hands on, you know, make a meal for somebody, serve a meal
to somebody, have a session with somebody who is really in a tough spot in life and just

listen to them and, you know, share stories with them, ask them questions, whatever it
might be, because it's that act of service that often unlocks the flow for us.

That's, that is the daily greatness and getting caught up in achieving the metric is the
greatness.

That's a trap.

Right.

No, I really like that.

That's a, that's a great, there's a great redirect there.

And the redirect doesn't have to be like, I leave the office and go do a completely
different thing.

That can be like, I'm not making progress on my thing or I'm a little bit stuck.

Can I just go help somebody else with something?

Right.

Can I make something go better in my environment?

Can I be around somebody that's good at something and sort of just, you know, provide
service where I can find it?

Right.

So the, the example in this movie is like, you know, poop.

Poe figures out that he can, hey, I can make noodles for these guys.

Like I can hang out with these great, know, Kung Fu warriors and at least I'm really good
at this.

And so I'm going to, you know, bring that as my service that sort of earns their trust and
finds me a way to have a place here while I'm figuring out the rest of my stuff.

And, you know, of course in the, you know, in the inevitable logic of the movie, then
that's turns out to be the unlock, right?

Is that once you've found that to be great at one thing, you can actually leverage that
into being great at other things.

Right?

You can, once you've learned what that repetition and skill and recognition of skill looks
like inside yourself in one domain, you can transfer it to others.

So it's super on the nose in this movie, right?

His love of food is what unlocks his love of martial arts.

But what puts him in that position is his persistence and his desire to be associated with
something greater than what he's currently doing and his willingness to be sort of humbled

in that context once he gets there.

Like I'm actually, I actually stink.

I'm actually terrible at this.

And what I'm good at is making noodles, you know, help me out.

What do I got to do next?

How do I get out of this box?

Like that humility and honesty coupled with the persistence and desire or the things that
are the unlock for him.

I suspect that that's going to be a, that's going to be a lesson we see over and over
again, but probably not a bad way to look at it.

I suspect that that's going to be a, that's going to be a lesson we see over and over
again, but probably not a bad way to look at it.

Hmm, that's great.

And in the end, is it his a little bit maybe it's his unlock of the combination of being
the noodle boy, the food guy and being the you know how that unlocks his martial arts

capability.

Like partly that is how he defeats Tai Lung.

But partly how he defeats Tai Lung is the same exact way that he approaches everything.

It's by being the servant in the situation.

At first, he's like

All right, fine.

Well, I'm useless.

So at least like, you know, Shifu doesn't believe in me and he just wants me to leave.

The Dragon Warrior isn't a real thing.

So I'm just going to go and at least like help my dad and help the townsfolk get out of
here.

Then he has that moment where he recognizes what the Dragon Warrior actually is, that it's
inside of him the whole time.

And that to be the Dragon Warrior, he has to just be himself and he has to serve
regardless of the external stimuli that he's getting, regardless of the feedback from

Shifu.

or the furious five or any of these other things or his dad for that matter.

He has to just go serve.

And that's what he does, right?

He shows up with with a very minimal plan to defeat Tai Lung.

He's like, I learned previously that I can fight for the dumpling.

So I will imagine the dragon warrior scroll as the dumpling.

And that will be step one.

But he doesn't know anything beyond that because he's he realizes that his greatness is to
just put one foot in front of the other.

and show up for the things that he's supposed to show up for, and everything else tends to
unlock itself.

Yeah, no, that's fun.

You're absolutely right.

And it's...

He doesn't presume that he's amazing at something, but he is surrounded by examples of
people that are working really hard to be amazing.

He's got that going for him, even from very early on.

He doesn't want to be great at noodles, but he at least learned his father, stepfather,
the duck that's raising him.

It's such a ridiculous movie.

But he's got this example of somebody who's completely committed to being really good at
something, and it's not the thing that he's excited about.

But again, you can sort of transfer that across domains.

Like I'm just going to be super sincere about the thing that I'm excited about and go run
really hard at it.

if it's my turn to serve, then it's my turn to serve.

OK, I guess I'm going to go step up.

I love it.

This was a great starting point for trust the process, right?

This wasn't super mechanical.

This wasn't quite the karate kid, the, you know, just follow the master and then deviate
from the master.

Instead, this is like really what can the master learn from the student?

And I think that's what we're going to talk about in the next episode.

Yeah, I think looking forward to seeing Shifu's inverse journey in this movie, which is
equally ridiculous, especially as voiced by Dustin Hoffman, but also has some fun things

for us to deduce.

So I'm looking forward to that conversation.

So I'm looking forward to that conversation.

All right, well thanks everyone for joining us as always.

We had a really good time.

We are back next week with part two of Kung Fu Panda.

And in the meantime, just remember, as we always say, character is destiny.