“I am the one and it’s not about me.” This quote sums up leadership for Amir Ghannad the author of The Transformative Leader. Taking cues from his leadership experience as a plant manager for Procter & Gamble, Amir developed a whole philosophy of leadership that he lives by and shares with the whole world. Joining Corey Jahnke in this interview, Amir shares his experiences as a turnaround CEO and educates business owners on how transformative leaders reach into people’s lives and help them develop the greatness within them. Among many other things, Amir also talks about the biggest paradox in leadership and the importance of completing the past and intentionally creating the future. Join in to get some inspiration from this incredible leadership sage.

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Listen to the podcast here:

How To Become A Transformative Leader With Amir Ghannad

I am happy to have you with me because we have somebody that I truly respect and admire. I’ve got a chance to be on his podcast and I felt connected to this man. This man is named Amir Ghannad and he is the author of The Transformative Leader: Boldly Declare, Courageously Pursue and Abundantly Achieve the Extraordinary. We are all about being extraordinary and living an exceptional life on the show and in The Successful Thinker book. I want to welcome this gentleman to our show and we’ll go through the things that he’s done as we proceed in our interview. Amir, welcome to our show. How are you?

Corey, thank you so much. I’m doing great. I appreciate that gracious introduction and it is a pleasure to be on your show.

Thank you. We are going to have a great time. Amir, can you please do us a favor and walk through with our audience how you got to the stage of life you’re at now and what brought you towards The Transformative Leader?

If I could, I’ll go way back and let you know that I basically grew up in Iran. When I was sixteen years old in 1978, there was a lot of unrest and my parents wanted to make sure that my education was not interrupted and all that. With the idea that I was going to leave the country and get my education and come back, I left Iran at the age of sixteen. I didn’t know much English or know anybody in the US. I landed in Boston and went to high school there and heck broke loose back home in Iran so I ended up staying. I moved down to Georgia, went to college, and got married when I was only nineteen. In 2021, my wife and I are celebrating our 40th anniversary.

I went to Georgia Tech, got my Master’s in Mechanical Engineering, and started working for Procter & Gamble. I worked in a variety of different roles in different countries. I was in the States, Thailand, back to the States, Germany and then we moved back. We started working for a couple of other companies before we started our own business a few years ago. How the book came about was that I recognized many years ago, the first year of my professional career before I read any leadership books, I inherently got that I was never going to be as good technically as those folks who were working “for me” because they’d been there 25 years.

In most cases, these were technicians who had done this for many years so I realized that the best way for me to lead or to make any contribution was not to try to do things for them or tell them what to do but to empower them and energize them. Even though I had a mechanical engineering background, and I spent 31 years in manufacturing and supply chain, that entire time, I was doing everything I could to feed my soul by writing, teaching, coaching, and learning about leadership and culture. That became my passion over the years and I was always writing these little Post-it notes and I had hundreds. I want to say thousands, but I’m sure it was at least hundreds, and not to count the voice notes and all of those things.

Finally, in 2015, my daughter, who’s the entrepreneur in the family, got fed up with me talking about how someday I was going to publish this book. She took over the project and gave me writing assignments, put an outline together, and designed the book cover. I got our brother involved in editing the book. It became a family project. In 2015, we published The Transformative Leader and since then we’ve shipped it to over 30 countries and the conversation that has sparked has been a wonderful blessing to us. That’s a little bit about me and my background or maybe a lot about me. That was a little bit long-winded there.

That’s the perfect amount about you. I want to underscore a couple of things that you said that I want to admire. The first of which is that you have children that believe in your message, which tells me that you not only teach the things you believe in, but you live the things that you believe in and you’ve created a lot of family respect. Congratulations on that.

Thank you.

The second thing I want to say is, in American culture, we struggle with this idea that the supervisor has to be the smartest guy in the room. When in reality, what you said, if the supervisor recognizes that he’s not the smartest person in the room, and he uses the people to their best degree, he tends to get the best results. Can we unpack that a little bit? Could you maybe give me a story or two of those times when you had to say, “You know this better than I do so let’s roll with it?”

Many times in my career, I came into those situations simply because even though I have an educational background, my passion was in organizational development. Somehow I had been deployed to several different turnarounds. The only reason that I was able to be successful in those was that I’d go in confessing my own shortcomings and rallying the troops to say, “I’m not good at this. Maybe you can help out with this.” I’ll tell you that it all came together for me in a story that fed many of the stories in the book. That is when I took over as the plant manager of a manufacturing plant in 2004. There were a lot of organizational silos within the plant and quickly that the business was being acquired as I came in, so complexity went up and all of this.

The plant had been managed in a different way in the past. As I came in, the business was growing and becoming more complex, we quickly became the worst plant in the entire company, because we couldn’t handle it, our systems and capabilities. I ended up rallying my leadership team together and saying, “We’re going to have to do this together.” We went through a series of steps and over the course of 1.5 years, we ended up going from being the worst in the company to not being the best in the company, but setting some industry-wide records on safety, quality, and many other things. To your point, it would not have been possible if I pretended I was the expert and I knew everything because that simply was not true. That’s one of the examples of how that came together for me and there are many more.

I love the basic humility that you seem to be wired with. Can you give me some sense of it or at least do you have a sense of where that’s come from?

I’m not sure exactly what the origin of it is and it might be my parents and the way they raised me. Everything about me that is good, I have to attribute to them. For the first sixteen years of my life, they built a foundation, and after that my wife took over, essentially. Between those three people, they’ve made me who I am. I’m grateful. The other thing is where this is coming from is, early on in my years in the US, I figured out that one of the best ways for me to survive and thrive is to reach out to the people around me, bring out the best in them and connect with them at a certain level. For some reason, I figured that being arrogant and trying to pretend I know everything and all that does not necessarily accomplish that. I inherently got that it’s about making people feel better about themselves and feel they can express themselves.

What was born out of that is what I call my superpower and I believe we all have superpowers. At some point, I recognized the superpower. For me, it was empathy. It was about being able to see the world through somebody else’s eyes and helping them discover their own greatness. That, in a way, became one of those things that I got hooked on. It wasn’t so much that I was trying to be humble but it was more along the lines of, “I’m interested in you getting how awesome you are. There are some reasons why you don’t see that now so let me partner with you.” Whether it was somebody at work that I was coaching or one of my friends who came to me for counseling or whatever, my mode of operation always was to have people see how awesome they were. I don’t think of it as, “I’m a humble person,” but I tried to build other people up and the result comes across as, “Amir doesn’t put himself above somebody else,” which I’m glad that’s a great byproduct.

What you’re doing is you’re creating an environment that Dr. Stephen Covey called a win-win environment. I want to congratulate you on that because what I see as a pharmacist that works in the actual field still and watching is this business of deciding that an employee is a number or that we can treat employees worse than we expect them to treat customers. What I find is that when we go ahead and we show people what you said, how great they are, it is amazing the results you can get. Thank you for sharing that. I want to also thank you for sending me a copy of your book. One of the things that impressed me in your book was there is a bookmark, which I’m going to keep with me at all times that says, “I am the one and it’s not about me.” Can you please share what you’re referring to with that bookmark?

I’ll be glad to. This is a phrase that sums up leadership in my mind because as a leader, one must embrace the accountability and the responsibility of being a leader. In the context of the transformation that we’re out to cause and the context of making our workplace better in the context of making a difference, I am the one. I declare myself the one and it’s an attitude of, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.” Yes, I need help from others, I can’t do it by myself but I take full responsibility so that’s the first part.

The best way to lead people is not to do things for them or tell them what to do but to empower and energize them. Click To Tweet

The second part is also important because if you don’t get the second part, and you only get the first part, and you say, “I’m the one and it’s all about me,” that doesn’t work. If you say, “It’s not all about me. It is about the mission, other people, and the difference that I’m about to make. The first part has to do with what Jim Collins calls his Level 5 Leadership, the professional tenacity, and the second part is personal humility. In other words, don’t get into your own head and make everything about you because if everything is about you, you cannot be the one. You’re so consumed with yourself to where you cannot possibly be the one but when you embrace both sides of what may seem a paradox that creates that balanced approach to leadership.

We’re about weeks out from the presidential election and there is a big discussion going on about who is going to be our next president or who’s going to continue to “lead the country.” My son who turned eighteen asked me who I thought he should vote for and I said that I thought he should vote for the person who is going to surround himself with the best people and use those people to the best of their ability, so now I want him to vote for you.

Thank you. I would never expose the country or myself to that.

In all seriousness, what I love about the idea that you’re presenting is summed up in the first lesson in your book. It says, “Don’t settle for managing change. Take on leading a transformation.” Please share with me and the Successful Thinkers out there what’s the difference between managing change and leading a transformation.

This is the foundational concept for me when it comes to leadership. As you read the subtitle of my book, the first part there says Boldly Declare because if you don’t boldly declare a transformative future, you’re playing Whac-A-Mole with your problems. It’s not hard to get into that mode. Most of us can go to work every day for ten years, and not have a transformative vision but still stay busy, because there’s always something to do. Managing change is a part of life that we’re not going to get away from. We better be good at managing, leading, and adapting to change, so that’s a given.

If that’s all you do, all you’re doing is constantly creating a better version of nowadays problems and as opposed to focusing on those issues that are in front of you. If you step out there and you create a transformative vision independent of today’s reality, what you can do is you have the benefit of being excited about a future that you look forward to living into. If you look back from there, maybe you can identify a few milestones that you ought to hit along the way.

If you’re truly being transformative, those milestones will change along the way but at least you put some mile markers in place. That way, as you go through your day and you’re dealing with whatever you’ve got to deal with, at least you’ve got something to look forward to and an immediate milestone to go for. The one other final thing that I will say about this is I’m not against change. I know that all transformations involve change but I also know that not all change amounts to a transformation.

That’s why I always encourage people to get the difference. Maybe 80% or 90% of the time you’re in the change mode, and you’re trying to fix, repair and tweak, that’s fine. That’s all you need in most cases, but at least have 1 or 2 things that you’re excited about. If I wake you up at 3:00 AM, you want to be able to tell me in twenty seconds flat what you are excited about. If you don’t have one, please don’t feel bad. I’m not trying to condemn anybody for not having one. It’s exciting to look for something like that. Put it out there so you can have something transformative that you’re going for.

 

It’s funny how you resonate with things that I’m thinking and going through in my mind because I was connecting with some people on LinkedIn about what do they enjoy at their job. I find it fascinating but most people can’t express a vision. It’s more like, “I don’t get to enjoy my job. I get to survive my job. If there’s anything left over, I’ll try to figure out what I’m going to do.” What I like about the way you speak is it makes me think that you’re looking at life about what I am and the people I surround myself going to become.

Yes, and that’s such an important distinction. I’m glad you brought that up because it’s not about achieving something. That ought to be part of your vision, but your vision ought to be about becoming something. If I could throw one more thing that you sparked for me. If somebody is reading and they’re like, “Good for you that you found your passion. You’re all transformative and everything, but I’m playing Whac-A-Mole with my life.”

Here’s the thing. We all have it in us. Think about three-year-olds. They want to be everything. They want to do everything. They are full of enthusiasm and sometimes the reason that we don’t necessarily feel that way when we’re in our 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s is that we have put layers upon layers of disempowering beliefs on top of ourselves. It is still in there and you can discover it but you’ve got to be intentional about it.

I love the idea of being intentional about it because a lot of people are stuck in that Whac-A-Mole mode that they don’t see that there’s more out there for them. As a coach, what would you tell someone who was what you said looking for a vision and having no idea to find that?

I always tell people that this is not some passive undertaking sitting down somewhere and hoping that something will fall on you from the sky and say, “This is my purpose.” I can tell you my own story on how I ended up getting into this practice that I absolutely love and working on every day. It is not like one day I did a 180. What happened was I tried different things and when they resonated with me, I did a little bit more. I did some training, coaching, this, that, and the other.

My advice to people is, if you have a suspicion that you may enjoy a certain work, you don’t have to quit your job and do it. You’re a great example, Corey. You’re still practicing your main profession, but you’re also making a significant contribution relative to leadership and people connecting with each other. I would say, “Experiment with some things and if it works for you, then explore it a little bit more. If not, drop it and do something else until you discover it.” You’ve got to be active in finding your purpose and passion.

I like that because one of the things that happen is a lot of people are waiting for things to change. At this point, we’re waiting for the election to see what the government is going to do for us. We’re waiting for the scientist to figure out a COVID vaccine. There’s a lot of argument in the news now about waiting for a stimulus package. What you alluded to is what I believe personally, you’ve got to make your own stimulus package. When Amir talks about this as an active process, your future, Successful Thinkers, is something you have to actively participate in. Can you elaborate on your feelings on that, Amir?

Your future is going to be there waiting for you but what it contains can either be designed by default, by the world around you or it could be designed intentionally by you. My wife and I have this habit of, on a regular basis, looking a few years out saying, “This is what we want in our life. This is what we want to have. This is what we want to do. This is who we want to be.” I tell you and I’ll give you one example of that. In 2004, my wife and I, within a couple of weeks of each other, we were living in Germany and I was working for Procter & Gamble and we had this revelation that we need to come back to the States because we wanted our kids to go to high school for a couple of years before they went off to college in the States. I quit my job. I didn’t have a job and it was a frustrating time for me. It was like, “What if I can’t find the job that I want and all this?” My wife doesn’t formally teach this stuff but she’s an absolute guru on this stuff. She was like, “You’re thinking too small. Life is going to be great.” We sat down and we wrote down a three paged document. I kid you not, it was font twelve. There were a lot of words on that document.

It’s like, “In a year from now, this is how it’s going to be. Three years from now and five years from now this is how it’s going to be.” We typed this thing up and we said, “This is how it’s going to be,” and I have no idea how. This story may sound like something I made up, but it’s the honest truth. We ended up moving to Atlanta and about three years later, I had not seen that piece of paper. Three years later, I was moving some stuff around and I found that piece of paper and I started checking the boxes. It was 80% of the boxes that pertained to the three-year mark were checked. If you revisit it from time to time, that is helpful, but even the idea that we sat down at one point in time and we said, “Our life is going to be like this,” had a profound effect on all the little decisions that we made to bring it about.

'I am the one and it's not about me.' – Amir Ghannad Click To Tweet

I love that you did that because that is where it’s at. The future can be something that happens through you or happens to you. When we look at lesson eight in Amir’s book, it’s got a great title. All of his titles, lessons, and quotes that underline them are fantastic, but I love this, “You have the right to be miserable but why would you want to be?” Tell me about that.

I tell the story of this group of friends who are on a train ride. It’s an overnight train, and everybody’s having a good time, there’s a bar, there’s a dance floor, and there’s one of them that is sitting in the corner and is sad. One of the friends comes up to him and says, “What’s going on?” He’s like, “I owe these guys some money, and tomorrow when I get off the train, I’ve got to give it to them, or else they’re going to rough me up.” The guy said, “How much do you owe them?” “$5,000.” “I’ve got $5,000 in my pocket now. I’ll give it to you. You can give it to them and you can pay me anytime you want.” The friend is like, “Are you serious? You’re going to do that for me?” “Sure, why not?”

What happens is the guy joins the party and has a good time. The next morning, they get off the train and he goes up to his friend and he’s like, “Those are the guys. Can you give me the money?” The friend is like, “Are you serious? Do you think I have a lot of that money on me?” The guy was feeling betrayed. He’s like, “Why would you lie to me? What the heck?” The friend is like, “I figured you’re going to get beat up anyway so you might as well have a good time along the way.”

I tell that story to demonstrate essentially, while the guy that owed the money might have felt betrayed by his friend. The way I position it is this way. Here’s the guy and he could have been miserable all night but his friend tricked him into having a good time. The point I’m making here is that if you declare something bold, first of all, you are going to move the needle. You are going to change your results for the better but even if you don’t, you change your experience of life in every moment, because now you’re going towards something that you want to accomplish and you’re excited about.

In most cases, people hesitate to boldly declare something because they say, “What if it doesn’t happen?” You could choose to move toward some unexciting and uninspiring future that you’re not looking forward to. You could choose to be miserable but why would you choose that route? Why not declare something bold and extraordinary that gets you excited every day? That is the point of this lesson.

Why not choose something bold and exciting that gets you energized every day? What a fantastic idea. Brian Tracy says that the difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is unsuccessful people ask, “What if it doesn’t work? Where successful people ask, “What if it does?” You did a great thing in that story because you hit upon the one idea I wanted to make sure that we talked about. It’s on page 134 of your book and it’s the successful thinker creed. It’s, “Change your thoughts. Change your destiny.” Tell me how you go about changing your thoughts when things are going haywire in Amir world?

There are a couple of things I would say about that. First of all, it’s helpful if you want to narrow down these thoughts that are pushing you towards a certain destiny that you don’t want. You’ve got to work your way backwards a little bit, the model that I have in the book. You’ve got to look at what about your character that is pushing you toward that destiny. What are some habits that you have that have formed that character? What are some actions that you take that eventually turned into habits and from those actions work backward? Look at your words, what words are you speaking, and getting in your thoughts.

The further up you go and you know since you’ve got a copy of my book, that the way I put that little curve there is that if you change your habits a little bit, you can make a shift in terms of your destiny. If you go back and even change some of your actions before they become bad habits, you change it even more. If you get to the level of thought and you begin to change your thoughts, it’s even more impactful. You can do a 180 and go in a different direction. Wayne Dyer says, “Change your thoughts. Change your life.” It’s the same thing.

One of the things that I always tell people is, “Here’s one of the ways,” I’ll share one trick with you that you can use to change your thoughts. What I found to work effectively is that when I’m speaking one stream of thought, I cannot carry on another conversation with myself in my head. When I find myself with a lot of negative thoughts in my head, I open my mouth and I begin to speak the opposite. If I’m worried about my kids, I open my mouth and say, “Thank God that I’m blessed that my kids are intelligent. They have a wonderful value system and they are making great decisions for themselves.”

 

Most of the time, that’s the case anyway but that little voice in the back of your head is always getting the best of you. That’s why I tell people when you’re in your head you need to get out because it’s a bad neighborhood. Most of the time, that little voice in the back is beating you up and painting a picture of the worst-case scenario. To change those thoughts, you’ve got to speak against them, and if you don’t want to talk to yourself, get into conversations with others.

Develop relationships where the basis of the relationship is not to commiserate. It’s not like, “You tell me how bad things are for you. Let me tell you how bad things are for me and next thing you know we’re both depressed.” Get into a conversation or a relationship where the other person allows you to vent because it’s healthy, but doesn’t let you stay there forever and ever and pulls you into a different conversation that replaces those thoughts you don’t want to have in your head.

It sparks a memory of what you said at the beginning. Your daughter finally said, “Dad, I’ve had enough of this. Let’s move forward.” That brings into another thought. A person reading is impressed with how articulate and how wise you are. After interviewing a lot of people, one of the things I know is where that comes from. I’m thinking that there are successful thinkers out there thinking, “If this works, great for Amir and Corey. They’ve got everything together and it all magically happens for them.” I was thinking maybe it would be helpful to the readers if you were willing to share a story of maybe some things that didn’t go well or decisions that you made that you had to pick yourself back up from.

I always tell people, “If I wrote a book about the mistakes that I made along the way, it would be about three times as thick as the book that I did right.” For sure, there are many things. Sometimes when we listen to somebody else’s story who has accomplished something or seems they have it together, we have all these thoughts about what their journey must have been like. It’s like, “Every day in this plant, it was the worst. Every day, I went to work and identified two things that we wanted to fix. At the end of the day, we celebrated. We said, ‘Wow. That was awesome. Let’s do it again tomorrow.’” That’s not how it works.

The stories that have a happy ending, most of the time don’t feel like it along the way. It’s one step forward, two steps back. For me, it was the same thing. I made so many mistakes as a plant manager and I’ll tell you one of those. I still have the sheet of paper that I look at from time to time and cringe. This was a sheet of paper that had eighteen different priorities that plant was working on trying to fight all the fires. As the plant manager, my contribution was, I put all of those things in a nice little chart color-coded and assigned 4 or 5 names to each one of them. They were overlapping. Everybody had seven different priorities and I blew that thing up and I’m like, “This is our roadmap to success.”

For months, I was preaching that stuff and I was making no contribution because I was not setting priorities. That was one of the many mistakes that I’ve made. I’ve made mistakes with people, not necessarily gauging their interest or their situation and things like that. All I have to say is, we’ve all made mistakes, and the only way to make sure that you turn those into learnings aside from thinking about what you learn about it and all of that. There’s one of the things that I would recommend that we all do and that is to complete the past, as I call in the book.

How you complete the past is you forgive somebody, ask for forgiveness, or let yourself off the hook on something that you’ve been beating yourself up with. If you can make it right, go make it right. If not, don’t carry this baggage into the future. We’re all in the same situation, nobody’s perfect. When you look at Instagram, Facebook, and all that, you see everybody else is smiling. They’re going on nice vacations, and you look at your own life and be like, “When am I going to be like that?” Their life is not perfect either.

Absolutely, as a pharmacist, I can pretty much tell you that everybody is a mess and if you’re not in a crisis, now you’re headed for one, or you’re coming out of one. Before we end our interview, I wanted to make sure that we had a chance to talk about the new exclusive community that you’re about to launch. Can you share that information with our successful thinkers?

Thank you so much, Corey. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about that. We’ve been working on this project for about a year. We’ve created content and it’s called On the Court and if you go to OnTheCourtLeadership.com this is where you get to sign up. We’re doing some beta work now but the way this works is, essentially you choose how you come into this community depending on your experience level. We use a basketball analogy so you can come in at 1 of the 5 levels. You could come in as a rookie. That means if you haven’t had any leadership experience, you’re a person aspiring to be a leader someday or you come in as a team player, a star player, MVP, or a legend even.

The future is waiting for you, but what it contains can either be designed by default or designed intentionally by you. Click To Tweet

You come in and as you enter this community, essentially, we give you some material, some content on the front end in the form of videos, blog posts, conversations, all of this stuff that is designed for a person in your situation. Most importantly, you become part of a community where we have these different groups that you can get involved in so there is weekly content that comes your way. I personally interact with the community multiple times every week.

We have group coaching sessions and all of that because what I’ve learned is leadership development is not about dipping somebody in something. It’s not even about getting knowledge. It’s about having that supportive community around you that continues to encourage you and/or picks you up when you have some setbacks and things like that. That is what we’ve created and we call it On the Court. On OntheCourtLeadership.com, you can get more information. There’s a little video there that tells you more about the community.

I’m looking at the website now and it’s fun.

Thank you.

Readers, it’s worth going there to see how handsome Amir is.

We’ve got to take what God gave us and God gave you a lot.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

Before we end the interview, there are a lot of things I’d love to talk to you about. The one thing I wanted to hit on was something we talked about in the pre-show part about leaders and people. Leaders are becoming part of the followers’ journey. Can you please share with me in your mind what it means to be a transformative leader? Also, how people need to be treated as people and I love this quote from your book, “Not just you’re broadcasting on TV, expecting the audience to hear you?”

I’ll start with the communication part. I learned long ago that communication ought to be receiver-based not sender-based. When you turn on your TV, whether you’re watching or I’m watching, it’s saying the same thing. When I have the luxury of getting in front of a group, and I do this to this day, when I’m speaking in front of 600 people, I at least try to look at the faces of a few people so I could get into their world. It’s much less if you’re coaching somebody if you’re in a relationship with somebody, whether you’re talking to them across Zoom or in-person. Get into their world and communicate in a way that lands the message over there as you intended to, as opposed to saying, “I’m myself and this is how I communicate.”

 

For me, the deeper the point here is the first point that you made that if you have a paradigm that says, “You get a paycheck so grin and bear it. Do your job. That’s the way it is. I’m not here to babysit you or whatever else.” That entire mindset is going to permeate the way you lead, but if you have this mindset of, “We are all people. We are all connected and I truly care about the whole person.” What happens is that doesn’t mean that you throw all the business results out the window. In fact, it’s the opposite. If you truly care about people, you’ll find that they will bring their best to work. One of the things that we did in this plant, as you saw in my book, we established a vision that we said, “We’re going to be the showcase of excellence,” which had everything to do with our results.

The second part of our vision was even more impactful, as far as I’m concerned, which was we are going to be the cradle of prosperity. The cradle of prosperity had to do with the fact that our people were in debt, they had health and relationship issues. My wife and I set out to make a difference for people in their lives. Years later, somebody told me, “When you first started bringing in the personal finance courses, you would bring in healthy food, and your wife would teach us how to cook. You were doing marriage counseling and all of that we were thinking, ‘What the heck is up this guy’s sleeve?’”

After a while, it was like, “Maybe he cares.” At that point, even though we were making changes in our systems and processes and empowering people, I believe that was the thing that made a difference for us that people truly got that I don’t view them as an instrument to get the results. I truly care about them living an extraordinary life. I would recommend that to any leader out there who wants to lead in a meaningful fashion.

I would bet that the results that you got on an interpersonal level and an intrapersonal level were phenomenal for you.

They were so rewarding. I’ll tell you one brief story. Many years after I left that assignment at 7:30 in the morning, my doorbell rings and I was like, “Who is that? It’s 7:30 in the morning.” I opened the door and it was one of the employees of this plant, which is about fifteen minutes from my house. He says, “Amir, how are you? I’m having some financial issues again. I was wondering if you can help me out.” I was leaving in 30 minutes. I said, “I’ve got 30 minutes, maybe fifteen minutes we can spend together.” He comes in, puts all his bills on my kitchen table. My wife comes on and we start talking like the old days. This was years later. These relationships that we have built are priceless. I feel completely blessed by it.

I want to thank you for your time.

It’s my pleasure.

It has been worthwhile.

Thank you.

 

Thank you. I am excited to launch this episode because it’s a fun thing to totally believe in the guests that you have on your show.

I felt the same way, certainly about you, Corey. I have to say, our conversation on our podcast was fantastic. Thank you for your kind words as well.

Any last thing you want to leave our audience with?

We’ve said plenty. For me, if you’re thinking, “Somebody else can do this but I can’t,” please let that go and start painting a picture in your own mind of how you want your life to be. I get that we’ve got a lot of issues and concerns and all of that now but what’s wrong with dreaming for a few minutes? Sit back for a moment and paint that picture and maybe there’s a part of that dream and that transformative future that resonates with you that causes you to be a little bit more excited about pursuing something extraordinary.

I’ll give a little example of what he’s talking about. After this is over, I’m about to meet with a builder at a piece of land that my wife and I own and we couldn’t find a purchaser. We wanted to sell this land so we decided, “We’ll build a house on this land,” but we know now at this moment that we wouldn’t be able to afford to do that for 2 or 3 years but the builder is going to draw us up a plan. We can put that plan in front of us so we can do those things that Amir is talking about. It’s setting that vision and planning yourself sitting there on the deck looking out at the woods so it helps you become that person that you need to be to make the dream happen. As Amir said, you might not know how you’re going to make it happen but first, let’s start with what you are going to make happen and why. Successful Thinkers, thank you for joining us. Amir, thank you for being our guest.

It’s my pleasure.

I want you all to have a great day and remember that no matter what happens, I believe in you.

Important Links:

• The Transformative Leader: Boldly Declare, Courageously Pursue and Abundantly Achieve the Extraordinary
• The Successful Thinker
• The Transformative Leader
• OnTheCourtLeadership.com

About Amir Ghannad

𝗦𝗣𝗘𝗔𝗞𝗘𝗥 | 𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗦𝗨𝗟𝗧𝗔𝗡𝗧 | 𝗔𝗨𝗧𝗛𝗢𝗥 – Leadership development specialist and culture transformation catalyst – All of our programs have been adapted to be delivered virtually.

𝗪𝗔𝗧𝗖𝗛 𝗠𝗬 𝗦𝗣𝗘𝗔𝗞𝗘𝗥 𝗗𝗘𝗠𝗢 𝗥𝗘𝗘𝗟 𝗛𝗘𝗥𝗘: https://youtu.be/rVMgpZHWu5o

𝗔 𝗙𝗘𝗪 𝗙𝗔𝗖𝗧𝗦 𝗔𝗕𝗢𝗨𝗧 𝗠𝗘:

• I spent 31 years in various leadership roles in manufacturing and supply chain with companies such as Procter and Gamble and Campbell Soup.
• I have lived in 4 countries (Iran, USA, Thailand, Germany) and have traveled to over 45 countries.
• I have a Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA in Organizational Behavior. My passion has always been to empower and energize people and serve them in a way that brings out the best in them.
• I am on a mission to put people in touch with the Transformative Leader that they already are and transform workplaces into a source of inspiration, rather than a source of frustration.
• My daughter and I started our company, The Ghannad Group, three years ago and today, I have the pleasure of working with my wife and son and daughter. We feel blessed to be working together and doing the work we love.
• My favorite saying is “I am the one and it’s not about me!” In other words, I accept accountability and responsibility AND I don’t mean make everything mean something about me and remain focused on the greater good.𝗙𝗢𝗟𝗟𝗢𝗪 𝗠𝗘 and check out my weekly blog posts and podcasts. I’d love to be your guide and equip you with the tools, skills, and the mindset to create extraordinary workplace cultures that deliver breakthrough results and unprecedented fulfillment.

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