Embracing Choices And Acceptance With David Lancefield

Life is full of tough decisions, and sometimes, the hardest part is accepting that the best choice might come with sacrifices. In this episode, Tony Martignetti is joined by David Lancefield, the CEO of Strategy Shift, as they delve into the theme of choices and acceptance. David reflects on the profound influence of his grandmother’s ambition and resilience, his journey through personal and professional challenges, including a major breakup and his son’s brain damage, and the difficult decisions he faced in leaving a prestigious partnership to pursue a new path. With candor and humility, he provides a fresh take on how we grow, adapt, and build a fulfilling life even when life throws us curveballs.

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Embracing Choices And Acceptance With David Lancefield

Introduction

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest today, David Lancefield. David is the Founder and CEO of Strategy Shift. He's worked with more than 50 CEOs and hundreds of other C-Suite executives to design bold strategies, supercharge their leadership, and transform their cultures in more than twenty countries. He's a contributor to Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Review, and Strategy and Business. He's a guest lecturer at the London Business School. He's the former Senior Partner in Strategy& at PwC. It is my honor to welcome you to the show, David.

Thank you very much. What a generous introduction and I'm looking forward to this conversation.

I'm looking forward to it too. I feel like it doesn't do quite justice. There's so much more to you than what we've shared. An amazing soul and someone I've enjoyed getting to know over the past years or so. I’m looking forward to sharing you with my audience. We're going to do that through what we call flashpoints, these points in our journey. They've ignited our gifts into the world. What do you think?

I'm excited and a bit scared, but that's probably a good thing.

A little bit of fear is a good thing. What are the flashpoints? These are points in our journey that ignite our gifts in the world. What I want you to do is I want you to find the points that you're willing to share. These stories have made you who you are and have brought you to this point where you're making an impact on others. Along the way, we will pause and look at the themes that are showing up and we'll explore deeper from there. Take it away.

Childhood Memories

I thought there would be some obvious ones and then I don't like obvious answers, but people would say, “When you became a partner at 32 and then realizing that was the beginning of the next ladder in the organization in life.” That's an obvious one. A less obvious one would be spending quite a lot of time with my dad's moms, and my grandmother as she was getting elderly. It was a flashpoint because for somebody who's humble, came from a pretty poor background, lived in rented council flats, used to put 50 pence or $0.15 on the meter to put the electricity on because she was scared about the bills. That is the mindset. The thing I took from her, amongst many other things, was she had a brilliant sense of humor, even in conditions that weren't necessarily great to live in at times.

Secondly, she had an ambition. My dad grew up on the council of the state, didn't have a lot of money, was hungry from time to time, genuinely hungry and yet she wanted him to get into the best school. She was very ambitious for him to get into a school called Christ Hospital in the UK, which on a full scholarship, she couldn't pay for it. She taught me a lot about how it doesn't matter where you are, you can think and dream big. That's not trite. It's genuine, but you have to work at it daily and find the right route. She was relentless in that even though she came from a background herself. Spending time with her was very inspiring.

First, this is amazing. I love that you went here because I think there's something about the foundation in the world you are brought up in and the people who influence who you are that make a big difference. Feel free to share more. I love this.

I've looked at this again because I had my 50th birthday and my sister and mom gave me a present, which was a box of 50 small boxes and in each box was a memory, some words, and a photograph. Their memories are brilliant. Mine is not. It's a good way to prompt some of this. This is quite live. Otherwise, I'm not quite sure. The other thing I'd take away from her was she had her own community. She would never talk about community, but I remember walking we lived in Dorset, which was a two-hour driveway. We'd go out and drive on the motorway and get there. The doors have seemed to be always open on this corridor.

We walked past and we'd get there. There's an Irish chap in his white string vest. Candidly, and I'm not making any judgment about Irish people, but he always had a drink in his hand any time of day. I'm talking about him specifically, not the whole population. He gave us a big hug with a big beer belly. It's amazing that he was always there and always welcoming. I didn't realize until later, apparently, my grandmother supported him when he first moved over from Ireland. He didn't have much money and she certainly didn't. She supported him with food and a bit of money. There's a lovely community there. That was one of them.

Dealing With Breakups

Another one was around when I had my first major breakup. I was with a woman who was wonderful and still, we're not in touch, but she dumped me ungraciously. It petered out. That shook me, not because anything bad happened, but because I thought that we were going, we're going to go and get married and have that life then it wasn't working for her, and candidly, it probably wasn't working for me. Life stopped at that point for quite a few months where I was thinking, “What am I here to do? Why did I work hard? Was that the cold weather?”

We went through a whole list of causes, and I still don't understand, it’s not something I hasten to give since I’ve been married for a long time. It’s not something I think about every day, but I didn't quite get it and I'm not sure I ever will understand what happened. That was my big lesson in terms of thinking things happen, whether for a reason or not, depending on your faith. Sometimes, it'll be clear what the reason was. Sometimes it just happens and you have to live with it.

Depending on your faith, you may believe things happen for a reason. Sometimes, the reason is clear; other times, you simply have to accept it.

One of the things that's starting to show up is a theme that I'd like to reflect back on because I love the stories you're sharing. It's a sense that because of the background you are brought up in, you want to make sure that things happen for you. You hold onto them tightly and you work hard to make them happen. You have to let go at some point and say, “This is not for me. It's not working out and I have to be ready for whatever's next. I have to be ready for whatever's going to show up next,” because if I dream big as your grandmother told you, that's what's going to bring that next thing to you. You have to let go of what you already have. It's like letting go of the reigns.

It's easy to talk about after the event. I decided to let go, but at the time I didn't at all. That was one example, but in other things, I was enjoying it. It was all great then suddenly this shock comes. As always, these shocks are not something you predict, otherwise, it wouldn't be a shock. You think, “It was a good chapter in my life that closed and then I opened another one at the time.” It was brutal, awful, and painful. Other flashpoints would be times when career-wise, I've talked about the partnership, it wasn't so much getting a promotion. That was great and I got promoted very young, but I remember certain moments in it where I remember having the partner interview and these are pretty big events.

Everybody thinks it's writing your check for the rest of your life. I can tell you there's no tenure model in partnerships, unlike academia. Lucky them. You can get hired and fired even though people don't talk about it. It was a pretty big moment. Three partners, an hour and a half and you're going to get grilled. It's not destructive, but it's certainly not a, “Please tell us about this.” It's a pretty demanding interview. I remember walking outside the office near the river in London. It was a sunny day which is a miracle. I remember calling my mum and saying, “I'm not sure I'm in the best form. I'm a bit late to the process. I was a late entry.”

She said, “It's not life-threatening, is it? Just tell them how great you are.” With hindsight, you think that's obvious, two sentences, but at the time it freed me up. I didn't go in there thinking, “I don't care about this.” I still had prepared quite a lot, but I went in there thinking, “I'm going to give everything I've got. If it works out well, fantastic. If it doesn't, I'll be disappointed, but this is who I am.” I found that quite liberating. One of the partners asked, and I did quite a lot of those interviews later in my career, he asked some pretty silly questions that he knew I didn't have the answer to.

“What's the size of this market?” A classic strategy question. I said, “You and I know that we don't know the answer, but I'll tell you a bit of my thinking.” We had a bit of a laugh, which is, you've got to be serious in these discussions, but not that case. That was another pivotal moment where there was something about somebody opening my mind a little bit and freeing me from all the tension that had gone into my shoulders and to my head.

That's the word that kept on showing up for me. It was this sense of when we hold on tightly, it's tension. We feel like things have to be a certain way, but it's like with strategy, which you spend a lot of your years dealing in strategy. We think it has to be a certain way. The reality is it could be completely the opposite of that. It's like letting go of preconceived notions of what things are and saying, “What if we stop trying hard at that and instead let go of all that and try to go the opposite direction?”

Challenges At Work

Another flashpoint would be one where when you're in any big organization or you'll know this from your own career and often big picture things are happening that you have very little influence over, whether it's cost-cutting or alliances or acquisitions we bought a business called Booz and Company. I won't talk about the merits of that. I'm still a former partner. I have to be careful what I say. The reality was I was running my own team, we were doing very well, and had a certain path, and then this acquisition happened and all this stuff came out nowhere where we had to in a way make our case again for who we were, what we were doing. My first reaction was, “You've got to be kidding. We're growing. We're profitable. We're a star in the portfolio.”

The point was the portfolio in the landscape had changed overnight. In a way you can fight it for the first few moments and then you realize there are these new shiny little things that have come in and everyone loves them. You have to eat some pretty big humble pie and then effectively work this new system. There were a few of those flash points where I was aware of the context, but the more senior and the bigger the roles you get, the more that it hits you straight in the face and you have to move quickly.

I saw quite a few colleagues effectively were in denial for quite a long time thinking, “I don't care about that over there. We were here fire at first. How dare you.” Frankly, they were considered the old guard very quickly. There's something about waking up, smelling the coffee, moving, and then trying to find a new, create a new path with some new friends, many of whom became good friends and colleagues.

Tell me about that particular part of the journey because you started to go on a different path on your journey with a smaller group. Tell me about what that was like. Was it scary at first to go smaller?

A whole range of emotions. I don’t whether it was grief, but there were certain elements of that grief because I was creating something then effectively within days, if not weeks, I thought I would get one of the bigger roles. The reality was it couldn't be somebody from the Inquirer. It had to be from the Inquirer Business for political reasons, yet our business was bigger, more profitable, and stronger. It was a bit of denial, frustration, a bit of anger. I thought, “This new entity could be a vehicle for my old group. We have bigger people around us” It sounds easier when you look at it this way, but I try to reframe it as, “What's the best possible outcome from this new context I'm operating and how do I make it work?”

Frankly, there was a little bit of a personal aspect to this or deeply personal. I thought I could spend my days feeling frustrated and disappointed. It won't be much fun. I still had moments like that or I can try and make it work, try and be positive. It felt better. I had to bite my tongue on a few occasions, but it meant I was going with the flow and sometimes creating the flow rather than being that person on the side chipping away or being the drag on what was happening. It was going. The juggernaut was moving and you got on or got off.

There's something about leaning into the learning that you're going to take with that is like if you're part of the journey and look at it from a growth mindset. It's like you're allowing yourself to say, “I may not love all the things that happened from here on out, but I'm going to learn as much as I can from this process. I'm going to not be a begrudging be like kicking and screaming or saying this will never work because that's only going to make my own experience worse.” You can embrace that sense of like, “I'll either learn a lot in this process and then maybe someday I'll leave. At that point, at least, I’ll have all of this great experience under my belt of working with the integration, working through this challenge,” even the good and the bad becomes a positive.

That's a great way to put it. That flashpoint was a moment where I realized my responsibility to others, other people whose literal jobs were not necessarily on the line, but they were concerned about jobs because when they think of M&A acquisitions and integrations, one of the first things people think about is, “We'll take out some costs.” How I acted day-to-day people were watching me a lot more. That was another learning.

At the same time, I had an opportunity to focus people in the right direction. It's amazing in our case, when I said to people, “Let's start collaborating with new teams on clients, focus on the clients. Don't worry about the back office stuff or the internal stuff. That's a distraction. Focus on clients.” Secondly, given all the bags of tools that they brought, what are the bits that could effectively improve the way you do whatever you do? Two simple lenses and people started going, “That's my client. How do we win more business at that and focus the energy?” All of a sudden, they are muttering and die down a little bit for a moment as they focus more externally.

It's a great shift. As you said, a reframe but also a reframe for the organization to focus on the customers and on creating as opposed to competing or trying to defeat each other through negative words or negative energy. Focus the energy on the best use of our time here while we're here together.

Coping With Personal Tragedy

It's remembering what motivates people, which in the business I was in and many businesses, which is doing great work for customers. It's not just in the textbooks. It's what people feel. Secondly, they want to create great products, services, and IP or Intellectual Property, get back to that and then push them in the right direction, and then bring them with bright people. You do get competition, but it's great to see a fission of ideas. Another one and it's an obvious one because I do talk occasionally and selectively about my son's brain damage, which happened in 2012.

The birth of my son in 2012. He was born and had encephalitis for seven days. He got a temperature of 39.6, which is normally fatal, and then got some brain damage because they didn't treat him with the right medicines. He's a severely mentally disabled twelve-year-old boy, very tall. He’s going to be taller than me I think. I'm 190 centimeters. He's physically able, but he doesn't talk. He's severely disabled. He'll need care for the rest of his life.

That's a pretty big flashpoint and it's made me learn sometimes on my own volition, sometimes by the circumstances and by the encouragement of others to create a completely new life. Some people say to me, “You have a lot of wisdom about this.” It's like, “Let's be clear. If this didn't happen, I'd probably stay in my old job. I'd probably done X, Y, and Z and would've loved quite a lot of it. But I had to create a new path by necessity.”

The flashpoint one was dealing with the crisis and I dealt with it badly. I didn't feel safe. Some of that is in my head. Some of it is in the context. I was safe enough to express how I was feeling and how I was doing while we were in the emerging ICU the high-intensity unit for many weeks as we were wondering whether he was going to survive. I was working, going to work, coming back, doing one or two hours of sleep while I was doing that for many weeks. That was partly me being driven, partly me not feeling safe and insecure in myself.

Partly the fact that I looked around and thought, “If I had that conversation, who would I have it with?” I don't blame anybody in particular, but I didn't feel safe. It wasn't like I was playing golf for my wife and somewhere in the hospital, but there were moments I thought, “Surely you should drop things and do it,” and I didn't. That's pretty hard work doing that for months on one or two hours sleep. That was my first flashpoint.

I want to dive into this a bit more because it's such a powerful flashpoint, but I wanted to start with something about this type of moment. It has you leaning into the things that you know how to do as opposed to the things that you're navigating to an unknown. Not a lot of people know how to navigate having a child who's going through a touch-and-go life-and-death situation. What you sometimes lean into is work is comforting. It's almost the only thing that you can do to feel like you're still contributing in some meaningful way.

The act of doing keeps your mind from processing all of that. I'd love to know if that's what was going through your mind at the time. One additional point on that is to say usually, especially men, we are not equipped with a lot of the tools and teachings to express emotions in the right way. We arrived at a crisis moment. It's hard to express. I think now we're in a better place. Back when this happened to you, I'm sure this was traumatic.

There’s a lot of kindness and wisdom. Work was a comfort to a degree, perhaps there's a normalcy to it. I think it was the fact that I didn't feel secure enough and I was thinking about the next project and client when we had targets to hit. It was a little bit of ambition but it was a bit like, “What if for the next few months, I'm off track, what will happen?” That was a little bit of the culture of the time. I don't generalize to the whole organization, but that's how I felt I think. I remember being in one room with my son who was very ill and being on my own. I think I was present through the pre-birth process and so on.

My sister has had three children. I was very present with them. I remember thinking, “What the hell do I do?” It wasn't like, “What the hell do I do with, the medicine or anything specific?” I was there and my wife was very ill at the same time. This is my experience, I hasten to add big caveats like a consultant would that most men still struggle to talk about situations of family and the heart. They don't have the vocabulary. They don't think that's their role I find women in my experience tend to find and make it easier. I've got very close friends.d I do talk about it occasionally, but I also don't want to become a single-identity person.

I don't want to become a disabled dad as much as I love my son because 1) I have multiple identities. 2) I found professionally some people who frankly don't matter. I shouldn't listen to or think about them marginalize you or assume that you can't do as much because he's like a carer. I know a lot of carers have this as well. I'm a carer. That's a label. I don't mean a child with mild special needs. That can be challenging as well. I'm talking about a son who needs day-to-day nighttime care 24 hours a day and will do for the rest of his life unless a miracle happens.

They say, “Because you are a dot, dot, dot, you can't do.” It has for a number of reasons reduced the number of hours I work and the flexibility I have with those. I would say, this is a matter of fact and based on the feedback from clients, collaborators, and my own inner voice, which I have to keep tapping up occasionally. I think I've got many, many more skills, more resilience and fortitude, and more experience to bring in where it's relevant. It strengthened me even though I don't have as many billable hours to put on the clock, which is the culture I came for.

I love that you went here because the thing is you don't come from a place of weakness now. It's coming from a place of strength because you've been able to design and create a world out of necessity, but also because you are smart and you know how to do this is you figure out, “How do I make sure that I continue to show up powerfully for others because I know I need to show powerfully for my family and I need to be able to accomplish all of these goals and not show up as this person who's asking for charity from everyone or asking for sympathy.” You're not looking for sympathy from everyone. You are someone who people rely on as a rock in many ways.

Insights And Learnings

Whether it's learnings or hash points, knowing what others want to give to you and what you should expect from them has been highly illuminating. What I mean is I shouldn't expect others to be always supportive to be my amateur therapist. They don't want to and are not able to, but they have another role. It's easy you effectively have a narrative, which is, “Every time you see David, he's going to talk about this,” and that becomes dull and overwhelming. Understanding and sometimes talking about it with people. This comes to a business lens of, “What's the nature of your relationship? What should you expect from each other?” That's been one aspect.

The other one is this is not some one-off thing that you suddenly do, “You learn your lessons. You craft a new life.” It is a daily iteration where, “Yes, I've crafted a new life. Am I frustrated very regularly that I can't work a lot more and I can't fly around the world as much?” Yes, absolutely. If my wife was chipping in from the corner of this conversation, she'd say, “That comes up a lot.” It comes back to choices.

You say, “You are a strategist. You should know about choices.” I do, but some hard choices are sometimes made for you and you have to make them. I could put my son in a boarding school and many children with his makeup and characteristics are in boarding schools. That's a different topic for another day. I would have a lot more time on my hands and so forth. I don't want that. I’m not saying others who do are wrong, that's not for me.

Some really hard choices are sometimes made for you, and you have to make them.

The point is there are real choices that then have implications. I don't think you can have everything. There are real choices. They're not all paradoxes. There's something around doing as much of what you have as you can and being ambitious still, then taking moments. I've got a lot of good friends around me who say, “You can't figure everything out. You can't solve everything.” I cannot solve his brain damage. I cannot pay every bit of money. I've got to fix it. I wish I could, but I can't. There are big frustrations and complexities where you have to say there's still sitting there and think there may be medical advances. He may develop in certain ways surprising and we hope for all of that, but you have to go with it.

If you let it dominate you, it brings a cloud over your life. Similarly, if you don't recognize it, I think you can easily get into this slightly naive world in Nirvana world where you never know what might happen or let's hope for the best. I need to make sure that my son has care and financial support for the rest of his life long after I've died. There's no debate about that. That's a matter-of-fact judgment. Most people don't have to think about that. There are other things where you think, “What if this happens? What if he starts talking?” Wonderful. I'll be crying my eyes out, no doubt be on the floor and fainting, but it's unlikely to happen. In a way thinking about scenarios, and situations, making hard choices, and then being comfortable with the very uncomfortable regularly.

Two words that come to mind, acceptance and choice. Accepting what is and being okay with the fact that the reality is the reality of what is going on right now and being able to adjust course to that. You have choices. The message you're sending to a lot of the people you work with now is to say, “Don't accept everything at face value. You have choices and you're making choices all the time. Even not choosing is a choice.” Ultimately, what you model very well is you can choose to design a life around what you do and create a path that works for you. You're also making choices that sometimes you're like, “I wish I could do things differently, but it's accepting that I do make a choice based on what I most want, which is I want to be with my family. I want to be there for my son.”

Acceptance is something that in my case needs a lot of work. I had a lot of advice from people who've had none of this experience. They normally have none of this experience but are very generous in giving their advice normally as for lecturer type of tone, “Let me tell you how you should think.” I was like, “I'm going to listen to this. I've had quite a lot of that.” They think that the acceptance part of whatever and when you have a big shock or a crisis. There's a period of time where you accept it, then you move on. Have I accepted this happened? I have. Does the grief do pop its ugly head up? Absolutely.

It's a little bit less frequent. You learn how to deal with it better, but it's not gone completely. The other thing that I have to be more disciplined about is self-help. It is about comparison. When I look at the world that we operate in, if I had more time, I'd have written a book by now. I feel as though, “You haven't got a book now.” Nobody's saying it because well then they're not that interested in me. Secondly, they've got their own stuff going on. I would love to have written a book. I would like to be a keynote speaker. I'm very good at speaking. People tell me. I can't do it unless I make very hard choices that I don't want to make right now.

Linking to that, there is another flashpoint, which I left the partnership in 2020 after 14 years as a partner. It's quite rare for people to do that. Normally they leave to go to a competitor or they go to a client. Those are the two routes. Generally, they don't leave to do their own thing. It's quite unheard of. I left for positive reasons and not just because of my son, which is people who say, “You did it because you want to spend more time at home.” Actually, no. I wanted more flexibility.

I had no issues with clients. Not one single client ever said to me this, but I used to get a lot of comments as you walked in through the office at 10:00 in the morning. I've been to a client beforehand, but they say, “Half day today.” It's funny the first time but about the tenth time. That happened a bit. That was a little bit of a nag but not the real reason.

I wanted to try some new stuff. I've been in the same organization for 24 years, done lots of different roles, and worked in lots of different places, but it is the same play as it were in different guises. I got to the point where I thought, “I don't want to be that person,” like a future self when you are a time traveler model where you think, “In five years I'm probably going to be richer financially probably a bigger role and probably a bit dulled and bored.” I don't need that person. Not everyone is, but I could see myself.

One is the recognition of that. Secondly, how to make that decision. I'm giving up quite a lot. We're not hedge fund managers, but partners are reasonably well paid and you take on quite a lot of risk as well. I did the financial calculation thing. I'm giving up quite a lot here because I could easily have another ten years on top. The one lesson I took from it was I reached out to about fifteen people and I couldn't predict their answers to these questions. When you see me at my best, what do I do? Who am I? Where do you think I'm distinctive and what's your advice for me?

Every single person gave blunt often difficult to hear advice. I didn't go to people out where I knew them as close buddies because I knew what the answer was. It's comfortable, but that was that at the moment, then I found a partner. I won't name him, but he was brilliant. He was a very busy person as we all were. He made time he did not come loaded with implicit or explicit questions or judgments. He sat there listening. I cried in front of him. You might think, “That's a repressed. They don't cry.” We do, but in that culture, perhaps other places.

He held me psychologically. He didn't hug me, but held me in that, “I'm here to listen.” At that moment, I made my decision to leave. It was a beautiful moment for somebody who had no direct vested interest in me. Perhaps that was the reason. He wasn't going to lose me. Also remember he made 1 or 1.5 hours of his time, which is quite valuable thinking, “You're not going to get anything from this directly.” For other people I spoke to, I struggled to get twenty minutes to talk about leaving the firm after 24 years. I remember them too, by the way. I'm not bitter, but that moment of being held and that the care, I'll never forget for the rest of my life.

It's beautiful because first of all what you most want to give other people. It is this sense of showing them compassion and care and also the space to share. I don't necessarily want to give you advice. I want to be able to give you space and time that is valuable. It's valuable because you took the initiative to reach out and talk to me. That's beautiful when you see that in return. It stays with you to this day. Not every conversation does that, but I think when you do have a conversation like that, you know you've had a meaningful connection with that person.

The gift of giving absolute full attention is quite remarkable and profound. I don't mean beyond the visible signs of attention, i.e., they're not checking their phone or looking out the face-to-face meeting, looking out the room. That's the obvious stuff. When you look at them, you think, “You're in tune with me,” not necessarily agreeing with everything I'm saying. They're challenging me in the conversation, but in tune.

The gift of giving full attention is quite remarkable and profound.

Once I made that decision, the other thing I'd say as a flashpoint would be the realization that when you start a new role as an advisor coach, some bits of the past are very relevant and I shouldn't lose those because I mean everyone seems to be a coach at the moment. I had a lot of experience that however I badge it, bring to the table working with big organizations, leaders, and so forth, as well as realizing that the role I play is different effectively on a one-to-one or a one-to-team basis as opposed to big teams leverage and so on. That comes with being a partner and a big consultancy.

The flashpoint was realizing that not I had a sudden moment of, “I don’t what I'm doing,” but realizing that, “This is new. This is not rebadging my old role with David Lancefield and so on.” New skills. Some clients will not come with me because whether I like it or not, they came to me primarily because of I'd hope because of me, but largely the organization I was with. Many former partners struggle with that, “It's all me.” No, it's not. Secondly, realizing that the type of work and the type of questions and situations I operate in are different.

At the beginning, I was like, “The emails were all gone. I'm not getting many responses. The pipeline is zero,” then luckily I had a very good friend, Joel Siegel, who's another former partner who slowed me down a bit and said, “What's the rush?” Once you're in that you're institutionalized into a frenetic pace the whole time. He goes, “Slow down.” Secondly, you've got options. Start exploring them as opposed to thinking about what are you trying to prove to yourself. I didn't have hundreds of emails in my inbox. Most people think that's wonderful. In the beginning, it was like, “Nobody loves me anymore.” That realization of crafting something new takes time. It means letting stuff go as you mentioned earlier. It also means that there are moments of discomfort when you're trying to figure it all out. That takes a bit of time.

It takes time but I think there's something about what you're sharing, which is the freedom to be fully you. That's one of the things that you're leaning into now, which I think is amazing, is a sense you fit into a lot of different boxes along the path that you've been on, but now you have the chance to embrace all the full aspects of who you are and that integration of all those parts allows other people to experience you fully. That's the beautiful part of this, which is some people go into business and they think for themselves and they try to keep all the polish on. They say, “I've got to serve these clients with all of these tools and what they want.” In many ways, it's being you and sharing who you are is the true gift of what they receive, with all the integrations of the things that you've done.

That's a beautiful way to frame it. I'd hope I give more of myself and it's quite liberating. It doesn't mean I suddenly shoot my mouth off, but it means I can say what I think with, perhaps with greater clarity and purity, not thinking of all the other elements because this is what I see, observe, and advise, whether it works or not. It means also that there's no hiding and you'll know this. It's you. There's no, “Where are they?” No, it's you. At the same time, when it does work, you also feel a greater sense of fulfillment.

We could go on for hours because I feel like this conversation was amazing so far. I do have one last question I need to ask you the question I ask every guest, which is, what are 1 or 2 books that have had an impact on you and why?

I had a difficult relationship with books earlier in my life because I remember being in a classroom where this is in my primary school we had this test, which sounded a bit cruel at the time, but we had to read out some pages of text, literally on a little stage in the classroom to state schools, primary school. Whether I struggled to read, I wasn't very confident, I wasn't very eloquent, I got put into the second class. It was a filtering mechanism. When you're on the sports field where they picked the 1st and 2nd team then point at you, that moment.

For quite a few years afterward, I had a real issue. That's not me bluffing so I don't give you the answer, but essentially, I had a difficult relationship with reading quite a while after that. Rather than business books, two spring to mind, one is The Narnia by CS Lewis the Lion, Witch and Wardrobe. It was the first time I enjoyed immersing myself in a book. It takes you into a new world where you are in a completely new space. It piqued my imagination in a way where when I was in it, I think that there could have been thunderstorms, the house shaking, or something and I would've ignored it. The second one would be Lord Of The Flies by Golding, a book we studied at school.

I enjoyed it because we had a fantastic teacher who analyzed the book and what it meant rather than reading it and writing a summary, we took each element and then we had to act out some of the book as well. I can still remember moments of it. I still remember watching the film. It's quite a disturbing film in many aspects and the book is quite disturbing. It was the first time where I thought I understood the craft of an author.

Both of those books are amazing because they have not been mentioned, I don't think yet over 250 episodes I have not heard either of those books mentioned. They heard some classics that I loved reading. Lord Of The Rings Flies, I would venture to say I would go read that again because I would probably have a whole different perspective on that book having read it now as an adult.

Isn't that the brilliance of the book? I can still remember the book. I heard it was a white book. I can still remember the color of the book that I read from and I'm not sure I could do that on many others.

I want to honor your time. Thank you so much for bringing yourself into the space and sharing what you did. You've got many great insights and stories you've shared that'll have an impact on a lot of people who are reading. Thank you. Before you go, I do want to make sure people know where to find you. What is the best place for people to learn more about you and to connect if they'd like to connect with you?

Thank you. That's very kind. StrategyShift.co.uk is my business site. I then have a separate site because I'm greedy, DavidLancefield.com, which features more about me. I'm reasonably active on LinkedIn, which I now enjoy as a place to share, comment, and have a bit of fun with most people and ignore some too for that. I'm active there.

Thank you so much and thanks to our audience for coming on the journey with us. I know you're leaving with many things to think about. Go reach out to David, you won't regret it. Have a great evening or day, wherever you are. Take care.

Important Links

• Strategy Shift
• The Narnia
• Lord Of The Flies
• DavidLancefield.com
• LinkedIn - David Lancefield

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