The modern workplace has created an epidemic of burnout that’s quietly destroying careers and companies alike. Many professionals are quietly battling anxiety, sleep disruption, and physical exhaustion while maintaining a facade of having everything under control. TA leaders are currently navigating AI adoption, defending budgets, managing anxious teams, and are still expected to fill critical roles faster than ever.
So what kinds of systems can you put in place to prioritise your own wellbeing, while still making a lasting impact in your business?
My guest this week is Chris Ducker, a serial entrepreneur and bestselling author. Chris suffered a severe burnout in 2021 and has used the lessons it taught him to develop a Life Operating System that sits at the centre of his new book “The Long-Haul Leader.” I’ve known Chris for a while now, and the advice and insights he offers are very much grounded in the reality of modern working life
In the interview, we discuss:
• Building long-term business impact in disruptive times
• Why self-care is strategic
• The myth of work-life balance
• Recognising the warning signs and avoiding burnout
• The four key areas of the Life OS and how they intersect to drive results
• The power of creative hobbies
• Why data and what you do with it is so important
• AI, friend or foe?
• What does the future of work look like?
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00:00
Matt Alder
For TA leaders, the current market isn’t just disruption, it’s exhaustion. Between AI transformation, budget cuts and talent shortages, burnout is a real possibility. So what can you do to build a sustainable career that creates a lasting impact rather than burning out in all of the chaos? Keep listening to find out. Support for this podcast comes from smart recruiters. Are you looking to supercharge your hiring? Meet Winston Smart Recruiter’s AI Powered Companion. I’ve had a demo of Winston. The capabilities are extremely powerful and it’s been crafted to elevate hiring to a whole new level. This AI sidekick goes beyond the usual assistant handling all the time consuming admin work so you can focus on connecting with top talent and making better hiring decisions. From screening candidates to scheduling interviews, Winston manages it all with AI precision, keeping the hiring process fast, smart and effective.
01:05
Matt Alder
Head over to smartrecruiters.com and see how Winston can deliver superhuman results. Hi there, welcome to episode 726 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Recruiting Future helps talent acquisition leaders drive measurable impact by developing their strategic capability in foresight, influence, talent and technology. If you’re interested in finding out how your TA function measures up in these four critical I’ve created the Free Fit for the Future assessment. It’ll give you personalized insights to help you build strategic clarity and drive greater impact immediately. Just head over to Mataulder Me podcast to complete the assessment. It takes less than five minutes. This episode is about foresight and talent. The modern workplace has created an epidemic of burnout that’s quietly destroying careers and companies alike. Many professionals are quite battling anxiety, sleep disruption and physical exhaustion while maintaining a facade of having everything under control.
02:38
Matt Alder
TA leaders are currently navigating AI adoption, defending budgets, managing anxious teams, and are still expected to fill critical roles faster than ever. So what kind of systems can you put in place to prioritise your own well being while still making a lasting impact in the business? My guest this week is Chris Ducker, a serial entrepreneur and best selling author. It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. I’ve known Chris for a while now and the advice and insights he offers are very much grounded in the reality of modern working life. Hi Chris and welcome to the podcast.
03:28
Chris Ducker
Thank you very much for having me.
03:29
Matt Alder
Matt, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you quickly introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
03:37
Chris Ducker
Yeah, sure. So, Chris Ducker, after 22 years of starting and building businesses, I now focus on investing, advising and coaching business owners to help them be able to scale with balance, not burnout. That’s my whole thing.
03:50
Matt Alder
Fantastic. And yeah, that’s exactly what I kind of want to dig into. So I’m particularly excited to have you on the show because we’ve been working together for the last 18 months. So I’ve been part of your fantastic mastermind with a brilliant group of people and been working with you as my coach. And through that time you’ve got a new book coming out in a few weeks time and really I’ve sort of seen the latter stages of that book production and that journey and I think there’s just so much that, you know, my audience can learn from your book and the way that work. I was just really keen to have this conversation. So let’s start by talking about the book. What’s the book, why have you written it and what can people get out of it?
04:32
Chris Ducker
Yeah. So it’s called the Long Haul Leader and it’s a collection of strategies put together into a four step framework that allows people to ultimately go the distance in work and life. Right. So you hear a lot about work, life, balance and I don’t believe in that. I think it’s a bit of a myth quite frankly. I think, you know, the days of 9 to 5 and sort of going home and not having to worry about, you know, work and everything is sort of very much over. You know, we’ve got folks like BlackBerry and Apple to thanks for that. Times have changed a lot. Right. And so, you know, it’s not about work, life, balance, it’s about priorities.
05:12
Chris Ducker
It’s about putting yourself, you know, at the center of everything that you do and you know, understanding ultimately that self care is not selfish, it is actually quite strategic. And you know, if you want to go the long haul, if you want to be around for a good while doing what you’re doing, whether you’re a business owner or a C suite executive or CEO, cfo, cmo, you know, head of any department in any large business, you should be looking at, you know, what it really means to become a long haul leader and more importantly, what that means for the folks that you lead and that you surround yourself with day to day.
05:51
Matt Alder
Absolutely. And I want to dive into the operating system and a lot of the detail around this in a second. Before we do, though, give us a bit more of your sort of personal backstory about why you felt the need to write this book.
06:04
Chris Ducker
Well, I mean, so I hit. I’ve hit burnout twice in my career. So I’ve been building businesses for 22 years, almost 23 years, three very successful businesses, two of which have been acquired, the third one of which we still run. And in 2010, I hit that first burnout, but it was more physical than anything else. I was able to kind of get back to it, so to speak, pretty quickly after taking some time off and kind of just recalibrating, recharging my batteries a little bit. But in 2021, I hit burnout again and this one was a little different. This one hit both from a physical standpoint and from a mental standpoint as well, and probably a certain amount of emotional standpoint at the time. I kept it all in. I didn’t talk to anybody about it, not even my wife initially.
06:58
Chris Ducker
She eventually figured it all out and sort of took me to task and sat me down. But ultimately I was diagnosed with anxiety, depression and phase three adrenal fatigue, which, in layman’s terms, it’s about as close as you can get to a clinical burnout diagnosis as possible. If you go to here in the uk, maybe different in the us, but in the uk, if you go to your GP and they tell you that you’ve got, you know, phase three adrenal fatigue, they don’t really have a plan for that. They don’t really kind of look at that and say, oh, you’re burnt out. But ultimately, your adrenal glands, which sit on the top of your kidneys, they produce cortisol, which is your stress hormone.
07:46
Chris Ducker
And if you produce too much of it for too long, your adrenals just put their hands up fundamentally and say, no, I’m done, I’m not helping you out anymore. You can deal with all of this on your own now. And that’s basically where I was. I’m not there anymore now, right, fast forward four years later in a much better place. But it was a pretty big wake up call. And through the combination of recovering from that burnout and by the way, I should say, in 2021, we had an amazing business year. Multi seven figures. I was ultimately enjoying the work I was doing, but I was doing too much of it. I wasn’t looking after myself properly. Simple as that. But yeah, you fast forward now, you know, in a much better spot. But generally I, you know, I didn’t see it coming.
08:38
Chris Ducker
And as part of recovering from all of that, I did a lot of deep research. I spoke with a lot of great people, a lot of experts, a lot of doctors and functional medicine people and all that kind of stuff. And I started kind of making all these notes, and before I knew what was happening, they were kind of going into four pretty major buckets. And those four buckets became the LIFE OS or the LIFE operating system inside of the book. So, yeah, the book came about from nothing but my own horrible hardships, quite frankly. Yeah.
09:12
Matt Alder
And I think lots of people who are listening could probably really empathize with that, actually, because I think burnout is just sort of widespread, I think, and people don’t even know that they’ve got it or it’s happening to them. You know, I think that we’re. It’s a particularly kind of, sort of stressful year for businesses. It’s particularly disruptive in my sector at the moment. And this kind of all feeds into this for people. So let’s just talk about burnout a little bit, just in terms of how do people know that they’ve got it and what are the most important things to do to make sure that you don’t get to that stage?
09:45
Chris Ducker
Well, the thing is, it’s different for everybody. And this is why it’s so tricky to kind of quote, unquote, diagnose. Right. You know, some people are burnt out because they’ve had a specific period of what I would call a season of hustle, Right. And where basically they’ve just put their foot down on the gas for too long. Let it be three months, four months, six months, maybe a year. They’ve had a big project, they’ve been kind of trying to land and finish. Maybe there’s a, you know, a flood of deadlines have sort of hit one after another over the course of, you know, a short space of time, and they burn out at the end of it. You know, they’re tired, they’re kind of exhausted. Then, you know, you say, God, I need a holiday kind of thing, you know. But that.
10:26
Chris Ducker
That kind of burnout is relatively, you know, temporary. And it can almost always be overcome by having a really good holiday, like really resetting, recharging batteries. But then there’s deeper burnout. Right. For some people it is, you know, and I. I didn’t see the. I didn’t see the end, the anxiety and the depression thing coming my way at all. I’ve always been a very kind of get up and go kind of guy like super proactive, relatively type A extroverted individual, you know. And so if you’d have asked me, you know, seven, eight years ago, do you think you’re going to ever be on antidepressants, Chris, I would have call you a madman, but I was for 18 months. Right. So, you know, I think that it’s different for everyone. However, there are warning signs.
11:17
Chris Ducker
And these warning signs are generally felt by most people that are going through it. And we did a lot of research on this subject because I wanted to get it right for the book, obviously, and not just sort of talk from personal experience only. And I was pretty amazed to see 68% of C suite leaders in the United States. And this is from, this was from a Forbes survey that was done. 68% of C Suite leaders claim to have felt burnt out in the last 12 months. And actually for entrepreneurs, people who are running their own businesses, that goes up to 78%. So it just goes to show you how tired we all are of being hyper connected all the time and not having the right time off in not taking care of ourselves properly. Too much pressure at work, et cetera, et cetera.
12:11
Chris Ducker
Right? So the big warning signs is three of them. First and foremost is your sleep is disrupted. Now some people say, well, I don’t particularly sleep very well anyway. I’ve always been like that. That’s fine. Some people only need six hours sleep, others need eight or nine hours sleep. Right? But if, let’s say, for example, you’re a six hour kind of person and you’re having problems getting those six hours every single night, just as much as you would do if you were a seven or an eight hour person, then that sleep issue is going to cause you to get more and more tired, more and more stressed, more and more agitated, more and more anxious, et cetera. Right. So the first one is sleep. So, you know, looking after our sleep habits is really, really important.
12:53
Chris Ducker
I was awful with this and I’m pretty sure this was a big major contributor, particularly as that burnout came in 2021 when were in the middle of the pandemic. There wasn’t much going on. I was probably drinking a little bit too many cocktails during the week. I was, you know, no doubt, you know, watching too many movies late at night and not getting enough sleep and so on. So that’s the first thing. Second thing is diet. Two big things that we researched that we found out about diet. First and foremost, the dependency on caffeine is huge for people that are in burnout. And the reason why it becomes a true dependency is because what caffeine does is it acts as that stimulant. It puts a massive amount of pressure on your adrenals to create more cortisol.
13:37
Chris Ducker
But the problem is if you’ve already got depleted adrenals and your cortisol levels already low, ultimately what the caffeine is doing is strangling your adrenals in the submission. So it makes the problem even worse. So it’s kind of one of those horrible life cycles. Right. And then the third one, the really important one was dependency on sugar. So this obviously has like more issues connected to it than just getting quick sugar fixes through the day for energy. But, you know, rates of obesity and rates of, you know, everything from, you know, heart palpitations, right the way up to, you name it. Right. So there was a lot of that goes into it. But ultimately you probably burnt out if you’re feeling honestly that like you need a really nice long vacation. That’s the short and the end of it, really.
14:26
Matt Alder
Is that six months or something like that?
14:28
Matt Alder
Yeah.
14:29
Matt Alder
And I think the, you know, the crux there is what you were saying earlier that with things like smartphones, with the way that works, it’s very easy just to be working all of the time. And we don’t have a kind of a model, you know, we’re still working on a very kind of outdated nine to five way of thinking about work. So there isn’t that sort of switch off time if that just kind of floods into the evening and the weekends and things like that. You mentioned the kind of the framework, the life operating system. Talk us through that in terms of, you know, how that can help address some of these issues.
15:04
Chris Ducker
Yeah. So like I said, when I was kind of recovering and I was doing lots of research for myself personally, not for the book at this point, I noticed that things were dropping into four main categories or four buckets. The first one was in regards to relationships, funnily enough. So it was a lot to do with our relationships that will, you know, either help us get through a tough time or obviously it can go in the opposite direction as well. Right. So kind of relationships with one. Second one was the work that we do and how we do it, who we do it with and so on. The third one was just general kind of like personal mastery, as I call it. So it’s looking after yourself.
15:43
Chris Ducker
It’s making sure that you continue to learn and upskill and all that kind of stuff as well. Staying inquisitive and turned on to the idea of learning new things, putting yourself in new situations and so on. And then the last one, and this one came to me as a real surprise. And every time I’ve talked about this, it’s always struck a massively loud chord with people, and that is hobbies. I did not see this one coming at all. But it was really interesting because hobbies and pastimes are incredibly important for our recovery away from work.
16:19
Chris Ducker
Whether you’re a business owner or, you know, like a high powered executive or even just kind of like a middle level manager or whatever, like if you don’t have hobbies, if you literally don’t have hobbies, that will cause you to not recover properly during the bouts of work and time off. So we did a lot of research on all these things and ultimately what happens is, and this is where it gets kind of, I kind of geek out over this stuff a little bit and get a bit excited about it. But where your personal mastery and your hobbies kind of almost overlap, the time that you spend on yourself and doing the things that you enjoy when represents that balance that we want to have between our self improvement and obviously enjoying ourselves. Right?
17:05
Chris Ducker
So super important for recovery where hobbies and love and relationships kind of overlap and meet up. What’s happening here is memories that are created then reflect the experiences that we’ve had with the people by obviously pursuing our passions and nurturing those relationships that we care most about. So that’s a happiness score factor right there. And then when we get a little bit more kind of tactical delving into work relationships and the work that we do and who we do it with and why we do it, and so on. What happens is it shows that the meaningful work that we do enables our personal freedom to grow and therefore it strengthens the relationships that we have at work as well.
17:57
Chris Ducker
And then finally, and this is where it all kind of meets up in the middle, once you start to get the intersection between personal mastery and impactful work. And this kind of, if you imagine a bit of a Venn diagram here, you get all that in there. And what happens is the clients that you end up working with, they reflect then the value and the influence that you generate and you exude by applying obviously your expertise in work itself. So once you combine these four things, like I was thinking, somebody asked me, why do you call it the Life os? I’m like, well, if your computer has an operating system, if your phone has an operating system, why don’t you have an operating system? Why don’t you have an os? So that’s why we called it the Long haul Leader Life os.
18:45
Chris Ducker
And really, once you combine those things together, things should be a lot better for you.
18:51
Matt Alder
Yeah, and I think it’s just such an important thing, you know, that kind of balance. And I think the hobbies thing driving it is fascinating because I realized that my hobby is podcasting because that.
19:03
Matt Alder
Was originally what it was. So while I’d sit there and scoff.
19:07
Matt Alder
At people who go, I, my hobby is work. I realized, well, actually mine was as well. So I think that’s interesting.
19:13
Chris Ducker
You see, now I’ve got a friend of mine who also is a very popular podcaster and he loves podcasting for his work. But then, you know, he was telling me about this maybe a year ago and I said to him, well, what you want to do is you want to detach podcasting from work. You can still get involved with it from a hobbies perspective, but it needs to be completely unbusiness related. You do it entirely for the love of doing it. Come up with another podcast that’s based around something that you really enjoy doing and inspire other people in that way. And so he did. He started a LEGO podcast because he’s big into Lego and it’s gone off like it’s Lego geeks.
19:56
Chris Ducker
You know, he sits and talks for 40 minutes about the latest LEGO set and reviews it and what it was like to build and where he’s put it on in his house. And all these things are like, I.
20:07
Matt Alder
Could think of 10 people already who’d wanted to listen to that. Right?
20:09
Chris Ducker
There you go. When I was doing the research for the book, I came across one particular thing that I really needed to kind of get home. The fact that high level executives need hobbies as well, to be able to kind of switch off from what they do and not just take their work home every night. Right. And so I found out as this one particular gentleman under the name of David Solomon. And David Solomon is the CEO of Goldman Sachs. Right. It’s a big company. Okay. Massive company. David Solomon on the weekends is known as DJ D Sol. And he is one of the most sought after dance and party DJs in America. It’s insane. So if the CEO of Goldman Sachs can have a hobby like DJing, there’s no reason why you, me or anyone else can.
21:03
Chris Ducker
But here’s the big one as well. A final point on this topic, hobbies that are classed as creative hobbies. So things like DJing or, you know, building little toys, plastic toys or painting or, you know, for example, I, I’m a bonsai practitioner. Right. So anything kind of that creatively stimulates your brain away from work. It’s actually been proven. And again, this was another Forbes survey. It’s actually been proven that it will boost your overall performance at work by as much as 30% if you engage in those creative hobbies for a minimum of two hours a week. It really is. So if you think about it from a logical perspective, you can perform an average of 30% better at work by having a creative hobby on the weekend or in the evenings. Go get a hobby. Plain, simple. That’s the postcard message.
22:06
Matt Alder
And we kind.
22:07
Matt Alder
Of move on to the next topic. I wanted to kind of just circle back and pick up on the thing that you were talking about in terms of sleep, because I think also one of the interesting things for me has been to start measuring various aspects, measuring more aspects of my health. And until I started measuring my sleep, I thought that I got great sleep and I was a great sleeper.
22:26
Chris Ducker
But I remember this conversation.
22:28
Matt Alder
Yeah, yeah, it’s awful. So I got a kind of a whoop band, which I’m wearing here to measure it. Other sleep trackers are available and I just couldn’t believe how poor the quality of my sleep was. And it’s a bit of a journey to improve that. There’s still lots of things that, lots of improvements to make, but it’s definitely getting better. How important is data in all of this, in terms of actually really understanding what’s going on with your health and various other aspects of your life?
22:54
Chris Ducker
I think different people are going to handle this in different ways. For me, it’s become almost like not an obsession, but it’s become something that I take very, very seriously. For the longest time I’ve been saying the numbers never lie. Look at the numbers, look at the data, look at the. You know, why. Why is your website not converting new visitors into paying clients? Well, I haven’t got enough website visitors. Well, then the numbers don’t lie. You need to drive more traffic to your website, so on and so equally. There’s no point in wearing a sleep tracking device or a health device, Apple watch, you know, whatever you’re wearing. There’s no point in wearing something like that. If you’re not going to take the data pretty much at face value as what it is, right?
23:40
Chris Ducker
So, you know, I think what it is, the big issue here is that being busy is a bit of a trap. We’ve been taught to kind of keep our schedules quite busy, not only at work, but also in our private lives as well. But here’s the thing. We shouldn’t be confusing motion, doing stuff for momentum, right? And I think that’s a really key, important part there because when I look at the data and I, I and it takes, you know, a while to wear any of these things until the data kind of like, you know, balances up a little bit and gets to know you and your habits and things like that.
24:15
Chris Ducker
But for example, I wear a whoop as well and I know that even if I have one glass of wine with dinner, just one glass of wine with dinner, I know that will affect my sleep quality because I’ve got the data to back it up. It’s no longer a coincidence, it’s actually data driven. So if I’m out and I decide to have a glass of wine, maybe it’s celebration or something like that, then, you know, by all means, enjoy the drink, that’s fine. But no, that you’re probably going to get a, you know, a lackingly decent amount of sleep, you know, through that evening. Likewise, I also know, and this is different for other people as well, I also know that if I exercise past noon, then that will usually attribute to bringing my recovery score down as well.
25:10
Chris Ducker
Whereas if I exercise first thing in the morning, it actually has the direct opposite effect and actually boosts my recovery score. So again, no point in looking and wearing something like this and getting the reports and getting the notifications unless you look at it and you say, Okay, that makes total sense. That makes total sense. I did something about six months ago that has revolutionized my sleep and it was as simple as buying some nose strips and putting these nose strips on the bridge of my nose. It kind of just open up your airways a little bit more. My level of deep sleep when I wear one of those no strips is, is noticeably higher compared to when I don’t wear a nose strip. And they’re like, I don’t know, 10 peach or something, the equivalent thereof or whatever it is.
26:05
Chris Ducker
So I just, I have a, I now have a recurring subscription on Amazon once a month. I get this little box of no strips arrive and I use those because again, if it helps me get, you know, if I get Say seven hours sleep and three and a half, four hours low sleep are decent restorative sleep. I know I’m going to have a much better day ahead of me.
26:24
Matt Alder
You know, one of the key parts of the book comes in there, the notion of the long haul. And I know that lots of people listening really want to have, they want a long term career, they want to have a long term impact on the business that they’re working in the, in the discipline, they’re working in all those kind of things.
26:43
Matt Alder
But we live in a very short.
26:45
Matt Alder
Term world where it’s all about do this today, short term numbers, short term budgets, all that, you know, all that kind of thing, news cycles that the craziest things that will happen, which 20 years ago would have dominated the news for a year, but the next day we’re on to the next crazy thing. How do you build a long term impact in the crazy sort of short termistic world that we seem to live in?
27:09
Chris Ducker
Well, I think the issue is that we’ve been programmed, whether you’re working for a business or a company or whatever, or if you’re running your own one, we have been programmed into the ideas that hustle, right quote, unquote is a really good thing. But hustle culture is not good at all. And in fact, actually the introduction to the book is entitled Hustle is a Season, not a Lifestyle. And the general kind of message behind that is that it’s okay to hustle, to work hard, to go the extra mile, to put your foot down on the gas or pull back on the throttle a little bit harder than usual for a certain period of time, but it’s not sustainable. So the goal shouldn’t actually be to hustle harder, it should be to last longer.
28:03
Chris Ducker
So the hustle might get you through a big deadline at work or something along those lines, but it’s going to be the habits that you incorporate into the way that you do your work and obviously live your life that will help you actually last. So we want to build a career that ultimately doesn’t break you bit by bit, slowly but surely over a period of time. But also we want to be able to have in that career building us up bit by bit, right? So short term wins are really good. Don’t get me wrong, like I’m, I love those quick wins, as you well know. But it’s the long term impact that kind of quietly kind of whispers and whispers until it starts roaring. And that for me is the real game that we should all be playing.
28:53
Chris Ducker
It’s about patience and consistency and showing up even when it’s not kind of flashy or sexy, you know, it’s. It’s about doing the unsexy work when no one else is looking. That enables you to have that compound factor right, like bit by bit over a period of time in these little micro moves, as I call them. 1%, 1 hit, 1% here, 1% there. And that for me is. Is the best way to build a career or build a business or whatever it is that you’re doing for the long haul. Long haul, rather than just trying to get after those quick wins as and when they’re presented to you. It’s not about, you know, some people call it the whole kind of get rich quick kind of schemes and things like that. No one ever got rich quick, ever.
29:39
Chris Ducker
Like, I don’t know anyone who is rich that got rich overnight. I literally know nobody that is financially comfortable because they did one thing and it just kind of blew it up. I know nobody liked that. They all did something really well, really consistently for a certain period of time before it really flew.
30:01
Matt Alder
Yeah, a million percent agree with you. We were talking about smartphones earlier and the way that they changed work in a way that humans still haven’t quite adapted to. We’ve got at least 25 minutes into this podcast without mentioning the word AI, but it’s illegal to do.
30:16
Chris Ducker
Congratulations, I’m really pleased with myself.
30:20
Matt Alder
It’s illegal to do a business podcast without talking about it. So, just one simple question.
30:25
Matt Alder
AI.
30:26
Matt Alder
Friend or foe?
30:27
Chris Ducker
Friends, I think. Ultimately, I’ll say that with a slight caveat, though. We’re still really early on in the development in AI, and I’m no AI expert at all. I do know, however, that companies and individuals who run and manage those companies are in a bit of a tailspin right now as to whether or not they get behind it, they use it, they don’t use it, they ignore it, whatever it is. My gut feeling tells me that if you ignore AI even at this very early infancy stage, you will probably likely do so at your own peril in some way, shape or form in terms of the development of your career or the scalability of your business or whatever the case may be.
31:17
Chris Ducker
Now, like I said, with that caveat, we don’t know what’s going to happen in the next two years, three years, five years with this thing. So, you know, I err on the side of caution with everything, but I’m definitely utilizing it rather than ignoring it, put it that way.
31:36
Matt Alder
Absolutely. And as a kind of a final question, we talk a lot about the future of work. Over my career, I’ve seen work change a lot, sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better. But we’re still sort of fundamentally in this position where work is burning people out. And, you know, companies will make, will talk lovingly about culture and caring for their employees and all that kind of stuff, but this is still happening. What do you hope that the future of work is going to look like?
32:04
Chris Ducker
That’s a really good question. My hope is that, you know, the leaders in our corporations not only take care of themselves and get a little selfish about that, because a lot of them don’t, quite frankly, but equally that they, you know, One of the KPIs that they look at is how happy somebody is in their work, you know, and it’s not just about hitting sales targets or, you know, minimizing churn and turnover of employees or whatever the case may be. It, it is about happiness. It is about somebody being fulfilled and content, doing what they’re doing for whoever they’re doing it for. And, you know, I thought a lot about using the word leader in the title of this book because when you put the word leader on a book title, it instantly gets categorized as a leadership book everywhere.
33:01
Chris Ducker
Ultimately, I did it because I really, truly believe that leadership isn’t necessarily about being everywhere at all times. It’s actually about being where it matters at that particular time. So you don’t need to be in every room, in every meeting, on every call. But ultimately what we should be doing as leaders is to choose, I guess, the moves that we make in the presence of ourselves. We should be choosing those with intention, not insecurity, if that makes sense. Like, I’ve worked with people before in the past who wanted to be in a meeting just in case somebody said something bad about them. Well, holy moly. If you’re that insecure, then maybe do stuff that makes sure that people won’t speak badly about you when you’re not in the room, you know.
33:53
Chris Ducker
So I think it is about leading with intention and coming from a place of intention and caring rather than just insecurity. And, you know, all of that stuff drains somebody, you know, slowly but surely. I think if you can be a little bit more positive, a bit more happier about things, everything works out.
34:12
Matt Alder
Absolutely. And lastly, where can people connect with you? Where can people find the book?
34:18
Chris Ducker
Well, I mean, I’m Hrisducker on all the socials. I’m on ChrisDucker.com as well. But if they’re interested in the book prior to September 2nd, which is the official launch day of the book, if they go to longhaulleader.com and pre order their copy there, they’ll get $600 worth of training bonuses as well. So we’ve got downloadable stuff and training, video training and all that sort of stuff as well, but ultimately you can get it in all good bookstores and all good online retailers. Just search for Long Haul Leader Chris.
34:53
Matt Alder
Thank you very much for talking to me.
34:55
Chris Ducker
Yeah, it’s all my pleasure.
34:57
Matt Alder
My thanks to Chris. You can search through all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com where you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter Recruiting Future Feast and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Just head over to Mataulder Me Podcast. It only takes a few minutes and you’ll receive valuable insights right away. You can search through all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com where you can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter Recruiting Future Feast and get the inside track on everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
35:51
Chris Ducker
This is my show, Sam.
