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Live Like a Leader with John Bates

Live Like a Leader with John Bates

Di: John K. Bates
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A proposito di questo titolo
 Live Like a Leader is where accomplished leaders explore what it takes to communicate with clarity, earn trust, and move people to meaningful action. L=f(c): Leadership is a function of communication. Great leadership is a function of great communication. Hosted by John K. Bates, executive communication coach, keynote speaker, TED/TEDx speaker coach, and founder of Executive Speaking Success, the show features candid conversations with NASA astronauts, Navy SEALs, global executives, entrepreneurs, authors, and other remarkable leaders. Each episode turns lived experience into practical insight you can use to communicate with greater clarity, credibility, humanity, and impact. John’s WHY is to bring out what’s awesome inside every person so it can live in the world and make a real difference.John Bates Economia Gestione e leadership Leadership Management Successo personale Sviluppo personale
Episodi
  • Tracey Ivanyshyn: Turning Grief and Kindness into Leadership Strength

    Tracey Ivanyshyn: Turning Grief and Kindness into Leadership Strength
    Oct 28 2026
    Today, I sit down with Tracey Ivanyshyn, a serial entrepreneur, culture builder, corporate grief educator, death doula, and co-founder of Kindness at Work. After more than 25 years leading purpose-driven businesses and a team of over 100 people, Tracey has turned her attention to helping organizations build trust, belonging, and the capacity to meet loss with greater humanity.Tracey and I met on Necker Island, where a remarkable group of people came together around Richard Branson and the work of Virgin Unite. We begin with some joyful memories from that time, but our conversation soon becomes deeply personal. I share what it was like to lose my father while I was struggling with clinical depression and anxiety following a serious infection. Tracey offers a thought that’s stayed with me: grief tends to wait. When we can’t face it immediately, it doesn’t disappear. It waits until we’ve got the capacity to feel it.That understanding leads us into Tracey’s work helping companies learn how to support grieving employees. Most leaders haven’t been trained for these moments. They feel responsible for finding an answer, yet grief can’t be fixed. Tracey explains that often, our task isn’t to solve anything. It’s to witness, listen, and build systems that prevent a grieving person or overwhelmed manager from having to invent a response in the middle of a crisis.We also explore her work as a death doula and the “goodbye year” she shared with her mother. Tracey helps families ask the questions we tend to avoid, preserve their love stories, and thoughtfully shape the final days of a person’s life. Her reflections raise two questions worth asking long before the end: Am I loved? Have I loved well?What really stands out to me is how naturally this connects to leadership. Tracey draws a sharp distinction between being nice and being kind: niceness avoids friction, while kindness tells the truth with care. She saw that principle create loyalty, strengthen culture, and increase the value of the companies she eventually sold.Now she and co-founder Fiona Stevenson are bringing that mission to the inaugural Workplace Kindness Awards, hosted at Nasdaq MarketSite in New York City on November 12, 2026, with Claude Silver as keynote speaker. Key TakeawaysI was struck by Tracey’s insight that grief tends to wait. When other circumstances prevent us from processing a loss, the grief often returns when we’ve finally got room to feel it.I learned that leaders don’t need to fix grief. They need the courage and presence to witness it, ask caring questions, and stay with someone in an experience that doesn’t have a simple answer.Tracey’s framework moves organizations through three stages: grief awareness, grief literacy, and grief readiness supported by training, policies, and practical systems.I loved her idea of creating an employee “operating manual” before a crisis, including how each person prefers to communicate and be supported during difficult times.Small signals can remove enormous uncertainty. A blue or white flag on a desk or video-call background can tell colleagues whether a grieving person needs space or welcomes connection.Tracey showed how remembrance can become part of workplace culture through the story of a two-sided memorial bench: one side for quietly connecting with a colleague’s legacy, the other for signaling a need for companionship.Her work as a death doula demonstrates that thoughtful questions about sights, sounds, people, stories, fears, and unfinished conversations can bring greater intention to the end of life.The questions “Am I loved?” and “Have I loved well?” aren’t just questions for our final days. Asking them now gives us time to change the answers.I came away with an even clearer distinction between niceness and kindness. Niceness avoids discomfort; real kindness means telling the truth with care.Tracey’s business experience shows that a people-first culture isn’t separate from performance. The loyalty and trust her companies created contributed directly to their value when she sold them. Addressing Relevant IssuesThis conversation matters because grief enters the workplace whether or not our policies, managers, or cultures are prepared for it. People don’t stop being human when they arrive at work, and loss doesn’t remain neatly outside the office. When leaders avoid grief because they’re afraid of saying the wrong thing, grieving employees can experience that silence as isolation.Tracey offers a more capable model of workplace leadership. We can prepare managers, create humane bereavement practices, learn how people want to be supported, and give colleagues simple ways to communicate their emotional capacity. None of this requires lowering standards or avoiding difficult truths. It requires greater skill.The same principle applies to kindness. I don’t see kindness as politeness or conflict avoidance. Real kindness makes honest ...
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    1 ora
  • From Near-Death, Extreme Sport, and Bullying to Building Character in 10,000 Children a Week with Sebastian Bates

    From Near-Death, Extreme Sport, and Bullying to Building Character in 10,000 Children a Week with Sebastian Bates
    Oct 14 2026
    Today I sit down with my dear friend Sebastian Bates. Seb and I first met when he was a client of mine, and from the beginning, I was deeply impressed by him—by his drive, his heart, his courage, and the sheer scale of what he is building in the world. He is one of those rare people who combine intensity with purpose, and ambition with service. I respect him tremendously. In this conversation, Seb shares the extraordinary story of a wingsuit BASE jumping accident in the Dolomites that nearly killed him and left doctors telling him he would never walk again. He takes us inside the physical agony, the long rehabilitation, the identity shift, and the fierce defiance that helped him come back from one of the lowest points of his life. From there, we go back into his childhood, including years of bullying and the role martial arts played in helping him develop the confidence, discipline, and character to stand up for himself. That early pain became part of the seed for what would later become Warrior Academy—now the largest martial arts academy in the Middle East, serving more than 10,000 children every week. We also talk about fatherhood, purpose, and the moment Seb realized he could no longer live only for adrenaline and adventure. After becoming a dad, he redirected that same intensity into business, leadership, and service. Out of that journey came not only Warrior Academy, but also the Bates Foundation, which now serves thousands of vulnerable and at-risk children each week in some of the toughest environments on earth. One of the most powerful parts of this conversation is Seb’s conviction that everything is downstream from character. If you can help a child build confidence, emotional intelligence, resilience, focus, and self-respect, you can help change the decisions they make—and in many cases, change the course of their lives. That philosophy is now reaching children in slums and deeply impoverished communities, where the Bates Foundation is combining martial arts, mentoring, nourishment, and hope in ways that are deeply moving and profoundly practical. We also spend time talking about communication and storytelling—how Seb refined his message, what happens when a great story is truly shaped to land with an audience, and why the smallest details in delivery can create a nonlinear leap in impact. That part of the conversation meant a lot to me personally. Most of all, this episode is about what can happen when pain becomes purpose, when adventure becomes service, and when leadership becomes something much bigger than personal success. Key Takeaways A near-fatal accident can become a turning point rather than an ending.Character development shapes decisions, and decisions shape lives.Martial arts can become a vehicle for confidence, self-respect, emotional regulation, and leadership in children.Bullying often cannot be solved for a child; they need support, tools, and character to overcome it themselves.Fatherhood changed Seb’s relationship to risk and redirected his life toward service.The Bates Foundation is built around a powerful idea: help children build character, belonging, and hope—and you help change their future.Great storytelling is not just about having lived through something extraordinary; it is about learning how to bring others into the moment so the story serves them too.Small refinements in communication can create a dramatic increase in impact. Addressing Relevant Issue This conversation touches on several issues that matter deeply right now: childhood bullying, mentorship, ADHD and identity, emotional resilience, absent support systems, fatherhood, vulnerable youth, and the importance of building strong inner character in a world that often fails children who need support most. It also speaks to a bigger leadership question: how do we turn our pain, our setbacks, and our gifts into something that serves others? Why This Episode Matters I really, really like Seb, and that comes through here. He has become a dear friend, and I support his mission tremendously. What he is doing through Warrior Academy and the Bates Foundation is not theoretical. It is practical, courageous, compassionate work that is changing real lives. If this episode moves you, I hope you’ll do more than listen. I hope you’ll check out the Foundation and consider contributing to the work. Next Steps Learn more about Sebastian Bates, Warrior Academy, and especially The Bates Foundation. And if you’re in a position to support meaningful work in the world, I encourage you to take a serious look at what Seb and his team are doing. Connect with Seb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastian-bates-4b70412b/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Seb_bates Warrior Academy: warrioracademy.ae Visit livelikealeader.show for more episodes and resources. Ready to make your communication a match for how good you really are? John K. Bates provides private executive communication ...
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    1 ora e 6 min
  • Matt Hunter: How to Be Tough Enough Without Becoming a Jerk

    Matt Hunter: How to Be Tough Enough Without Becoming a Jerk
    Sep 28 2026
    Today, I sit down with Matt Hunter, executive coach and co-author with John Baird of Tough Enough: How to Lead a Team to Greatness Without Being a Jerk. Matt and I met several years ago on Necker Island, and I’ve liked and respected him ever since. When I saw what he and John were taking on with this book, I wanted him on the show.Because they’re walking straight into a leadership question I care about enormously.We’ve all seen the examples: founders and executives who produce extraordinary results while leaving a trail of exhausted, intimidated, or unhappy people behind them. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others have reinforced an uncomfortable idea for generations of ambitious leaders: maybe being extraordinarily demanding, even brutal, is simply what greatness requires.Matt doesn’t dismiss that evidence. That’s what makes this conversation interesting.His argument is that toughness really does matter. Bold missions require conviction. High-performance teams require standards. Leaders sometimes need to make difficult decisions, push people beyond comfort, and remain steady when everyone around them is scared.But toughness and cruelty are not the same thing.Matt and John Baird have identified seven habits intended to help leaders become what they call “tough enough”: highly demanding while retaining compassion, respect and humanity.That leads us into one of my favorite parts of the conversation: vulnerability.I’ve spent years thinking about the difference between indiscriminate vulnerability and what I call Insightful Vulnerability™. A leader blurting out every fear before the team charges up the proverbial hill may technically be “authentic,” but that doesn’t necessarily make it good leadership. Vulnerability becomes valuable when it serves the people listening, builds trust, and creates Emotional Credibility™.We also get very personal about the cost of toughness. Matt and I both experienced serious health consequences after intense startup chapters. That takes us into a much more useful question than work-life balance: How do you lead relentlessly without destroying your capacity to keep leading?This conversation isn’t an argument for being softer.It’s an exploration of how to become tougher in the places that matter, compassionate in the places that matter, and intentional enough to know the difference. Key TakeawaysI think we have to stop treating toughness and compassion as opposites. Matt’s central argument is that leaders can set extremely high standards, pursue bold goals, and make difficult decisions without treating people badly.I came away appreciating the distinction between being “tough” and simply being aggressive. Toughness can mean conviction, endurance, accountability, and an unwillingness to abandon the mission when things get uncomfortable.I believe vulnerability only works in leadership when it serves a purpose beyond relieving the leader’s own emotions. That’s the distinction I make with Insightful Vulnerability™: share something because it helps other people trust, learn or act, not simply because you happen to feel it.I think admitting a mistake can increase rather than diminish a leader’s authority. Saying, “I screwed this up, here’s what I learned, and here’s what I’m changing,” can create trust that defensiveness never will.I was struck by Matt’s framing of relentless leadership as an endurance problem rather than simply a work-life balance problem. Ambitious people will push. The question is whether we understand our capacity, recovery, and rate of exertion well enough to keep going.I know firsthand that there is a danger zone. During my startup years, years of extreme stress and inadequate sleep contributed to a serious autoimmune illness. Matt shares a remarkably similar experience.I think every leader has to choose where they want to operate on the toughness spectrum. There is no requirement that you build your company, career, or life the way Elon Musk does, simply because his approach produces certain kinds of results.I like the high-performance sports team analogy for culture. People can be treated extremely well while still being expected to perform at the level the team requires.What really stands out to me is the false choice Matt is trying to eliminate. Compassionate leaders should not have to choose between being good human beings and being formidable competitors. Addressing Relevant IssuesOne reason I think this conversation matters right now is that leaders are receiving contradictory messages.We’re told to be empathetic, emotionally intelligent, vulnerable, and human. We’re also surrounded by highly visible examples suggesting that extreme demands, relentless pressure, and even fairly awful behavior can produce spectacular business results.I don’t think pretending that contradiction doesn’t exist helps anyone.The more useful question is: How do I lead a high-performance team without ...
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    50 min
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