“The New Leadership Blueprint: Wisdom Over Intelligence with Brian Gorman”

In this episode of Career Coaching Secrets, host Rexhen welcomes Brian Gorman, leadership coach, author of Leading Into the Age of Wisdom, and host of the Quonversations podcast.

Brian shares his powerful insights on the evolution of leadership — from the industrial age’s command-and-control model to an emerging Age of Wisdom, where discernment, connection, and collective intelligence redefine success.


Connect with

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briangorman07030/
Website: https://transforminglives.coach/

Transcript

Brian Gorman: 0:00

Artificial intelligence has the ethics that we build into it. Artificial intelligence has the biases we build into it. Artificial intelligence is big data based on the past. And so the question really becomes for us: do we want to just continue evolving from what the past we've done in the past collectively? Or are there areas where we want to transform into something different? And again, that's human wisdom. Wisdom comes from heart and gut. Intelligence comes from the head. So artificial intelligence can beat the pants off of us as far as intelligence is concerned. But it's not very wise to allow it to become the decision maker as we move into the future.

Davis Nguyen : 0:49

That's it for this episode of Career Coaching Secrets. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode to catch future episodes. This podcast was brought to you by Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to $100,000 years, $100,000 months, or even $100,000 weeks, all without burning out and making sure that you're making the impact and having the life that you want. To learn more about our community and how we can help you, visit join purplecircle.com.

Rexhen Doda: 1:56

For nearly two decades, Brian has coached executives, entrepreneurs, and change makers. His recent work focuses on guiding them beyond industrial change control and digital age speed into what he calls the age of wisdom. He emphasizes discernment, connection, and collective intelligence, enabling leaders to build organizations where belonging, rhythm, and resilience foster sustainable success. And it's a pleasure for me to have him on the podcast today. Welcome to the show, Brian. It's great to be here, Regin. Thank you. It's a pleasure for us. And I actually wanted to go back a little bit on in time and talk about the beginning of your coaching experience. So, first of all, what inspired you to become a coach and then start your own coaching business?

Brian Gorman: 2:43

I worked for a coach for many years. In fact, I worked with my coach from 2007 till he retired in December of 2024. And back in 16, he said to me one day, there's an upcoming coaching program. I have no idea if you're interested in becoming a coach, but I think you'd meet some really interesting people and learn some very interesting things that would be helpful to you in your career. I signed up the first morning and our program began with a week-long retreat. The first morning before lunch, I said to myself, this is what I had been preparing my whole life to do. And this is what I've been doing ever since.

Rexhen Doda: 3:25

Beautiful. And so when we think about the people that you're working with right now, we did also mention this on the intros. We're looking for executives, entrepreneurs, change makers. Now, our audience in the podcast is made out of two groups of people. One group is other coaches who are listening to learn from other coaches' journey, uh, based on what we ask here. And then there's also another group, which is uh the audiences of the coaches we've had on the show before, like I mentioned to you earlier. Uh right now uh we should have reached 400. So we've had many guests on the show. So we might have the right people listening to this. How would you describe the ideal climb profile for you? Is there a certain demographic industry? Do they have some common goals or other commonalities that you're seeing?

Brian Gorman: 4:18

Yeah, let me start with the label leadership coach. It's a label I used for years. Then very early this year, I was talking to a colleague and she said, tell me what your niche is. And I said, I'm a leadership coach. To which she immediately responded, Yes, you hundred, you and 379,842 others. You need to be more specific. And for the coaches in the world, I would recommend what I do for the leaders in the world. What I'm going to tell you will tell you whether what I have to say is for you or not. I went into ChatGPT and I said, these are the characteristics of the clients that I work best with, that I make the biggest difference with. What would you call my niche? And please give me three to five different titles. One of them just rang the bell for me immediately. I'm a Maverick coach, yes, with leaders. And I work with leaders who are seeing that the old ways of leading, whatever those might be for them, some of them are no longer working. And they are ready to let go of those things that aren't working even when they don't have role models, even when they don't have the answers to how to replace them with things that are working. So Maverick Coach.

Rexhen Doda: 5:40

Cool. So just for me to understand a little bit um because I'm European and Maverick is not a very common word for me. What does it entail exactly?

Brian Gorman: 5:52

Well, let me give you a few examples that wrap around that idea of leading into the age of wisdom. Historically, we have set time parameters on the people who work for us. They need to be in the office or they need to be at their computers at a certain time. They need to remain there for a certain amount of time. And so we tend to have these cultures in our organizations that are very time-driven. And Regin, you and I know we can spend lots of time at our computers and not be very productive at all. In fact, during the pandemic, there were companies that implemented software that would track keystrokes from people working from home, that would monitor the websites that people would go to during their workday, that would randomly turn on their cameras to see if they were in fact sitting out at their computer. None of those things is an indicator of actually bringing value to the work that I'm doing. So Maverick leaders are seeing that and they're focusing instead on results. They're focusing instead on energy. If if I have a certain task to do, how long it takes me depends on what kinds of energy it's going to demand of me and how complete my energy tank is around that. So when I'm working on my book, that takes mental energy, it takes spiritual energy because my book is coming from my heart, it's coming from my gut as well as coming from my head. So I do that best earlier in the day. If my work required more physical activity, that would be something I would want to focus on in the middle of the afternoon. And so Maverick leaders realize that they need to know about the energy of the people that they are leading. They need to know that they can make tremendous energy pushes to get things done, but then they need to ease that rhythm off to give people a chance to recharge. Another example, Maverick leaders know that not all the wisdom resides in the leadership team. And so they are looking for ways to capture and use the wisdom from the frontline workers who probably have the best insight as to what the customers, what the clients want and need, what they are getting, where the gaps are, what's working, what's not working, and so forth. So Mavericks are those leaders that are aware of what's working and what's not, and look for ways to make sometimes 180 changes.

Rexhen Doda: 8:28

Interesting. You bring a good point that the employees working on the front lines do have a lot of awareness and that needs to be brought up in the leadership as well.

Brian Gorman: 8:40

If if I can just jump in on that for a moment, what you're saying is a piece of the catalyst for writing my book. And the other piece of the catalyst was the voices we are hearing more and more saying we no longer need those people because we can put AI to work. And yes, we can put AI to work, and if all you are doing with your frontline people is treating them as pieces of a machine, AI can replace them. But if all you're doing is treating those frontline people as pieces of a machine, you're missing the wisdom that they're collecting. Absolutely. That is such a good observation there. And when is the book coming out? Before we hit record, I was working on preparing the final everything to send off to the publisher. So it should be out no later than a week to two weeks from now.

Rexhen Doda: 9:30

Cool, great. And just since this podcast episode will also take a week and a half to two weeks to go live, maybe people who listen to this later on might the book might have already come out.

Brian Gorman: 9:41

What is the title exactly it's Leading Into the Age of Wisdom, Reimagining the Future of Work, and it will be available through Amazon in both soft cover print and ebook form?

Rexhen Doda: 9:53

Cool. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing that, Brian. And so another topic that I wanted to touch upon is, and this is a topic that coaches who are listening are gonna find interesting because it goes into what is working marketing-wise. Is there, in your case, from your experience, have you seen any patterns in terms of that marketing? Is there any marketing channel that seems to be working very well for you?

Brian Gorman: 10:18

For me, it has shifted over the years as my area of focus, if you will, has shifted, as my niche, if you will, has shifted. The one constant thread is referrals. Because when somebody introduces me to somebody, they're saying I trust Brian. I've had experience with Brian. He has brought value to me personally andor professionally, and I believe he can bring value to you. So referrals are by and large the number one source. Because these days I am really setting pace, if you will, as a thought leader. I have found it very helpful to go to those thought collectors, if you will, those thought tanks that leaders would go to. So those, in my experience, are LinkedIn and Substack. And so I have, I am posting daily on LinkedIn. I am posting a bi-weekly newsletter called Enlightened Leadership on LinkedIn, and just recently started a Substack that addresses all of these age of wisdom topics, if you will, that is quickly building its followership as well. Do this build presence, build credibility, get customer. Every Friday at 10.30 Eastern, I open my Zoom room for anyone who wants to drop in and talk about anything except religion and politics. And that has led to some great introductions of people to one another who might never have met otherwise. It's led to great conversations, and sometimes it leads to new clients.

Rexhen Doda: 12:00

They're a real testament of your work. People are putting trust in you by referring you, and the ones that are receiving that referral also trust the person that is mentioning your name, LinkedIn.

Brian Gorman: 12:12

Substack readers tend to be more thoughtful, tend to be looking for things that make them think rather than just have them. And so much of what's on LinkedIn is let me tell you how great I am and what a wonderful thing I did, and and those kinds of things. The other thing about Substack is there is no algorithm. They find you through um recommendations, systems, if you will, to help you grow both your readership and the um reading that you're doing, the sourcing that you're looking to do. Do you have any specific goals or business goals that you're working towards? I absolutely do. One, obviously, is to continue the coaching and to continue to build that coaching business. There are two additional services that I'm adding, and and I've just started to update my website around these. The first is advisory services. I mentioned before, if the people in your organization are just there because they do certain things and they can be replaced by a machine. Our historical organization structure since the start of the industrial age has been the top-down hierarchy. And the top-down hierarchy is a scientific management model, a command and control model, a model that places decision-making wisdom at the top of the organization. In the age of wisdom, when we talk about wisdom across the organization, when we talk about how do we address issues of engagement and performance and retention and so forth, it is possible that a very different organization structure would serve the organization, the clients, and the people in the organization much better. And so those are conversations with leaders, um advisory types of conversations rather than coaching. So that I'm adding. The other thing that I'm adding that that directly ties to this is the facilitation of wisdom circles. Wisdom circles come out of indigenous practices from around the world that bring people together, bring diverse groups of people together. So the CEO might be sitting in a circle with frontline workers, with level managers, with salespeople, with finance people, and so forth, collectively taking on a challenge and working out a solution to it, or uh taking out an opportunity and working out a solution to it. Among the things that I have learned along the way, I've been certified as a circle keeper, and I am offering wisdom circles to leaders who are looking to bring the collective wisdom of their organization to how they move forward. The third area of growth beyond the coaching is speaking. I've done a lot of speaking over the years, but I've never put myself out as a speaker. And I believe that in a way, since I have raised this thinking about intelligence versus wisdom, and I want to come back and talk about that for just a second, but I have a responsibility to get the word out in every way I can. And speaking, whether it's on podcasts, whether it's keynotes, whether it's inside of organizations, is another piece of growth for me. What I wanted to say about intelligence and wisdom, ChatGPT actually was my best brainstorm buddy when I was writing this book. Not that I believed everything it had to say, not that its priorities and what it said were always my own, but it was a good source of stimulating my thinking. And at some point I asked, so what is the difference between intelligence and wisdom? If I'm saying that wisdom is so important, it is stated in several different ways, but the short answer is intelligence can tell us how to do anything we want to do. Wisdom can tell us whether or not we should be doing.

Rexhen Doda: 16:06

And it's so interesting. So I don't know, like obviously in US, there's a comedian called Seinfeld. I don't know if you've heard of him before. He likes to make a note of this saying that we build AI, we were smart enough to build AI, dumb enough to need it, and so stupid we don't understand if we did the right thing or not. Say, when you say um wisdom is about deciding whether this thing should be done or not, that makes so much sense to me. And it just reminded me of what Seintel said.

Brian Gorman: 16:39

Yeah, that there are several things that we really need to be aware of about AI. And we saw a piece of this with Grok earlier this year. Artificial intelligence has the ethics that we build into it. Artificial intelligence has the biases we build into it. Artificial intelligence is big data based on the past. And so the question really becomes for us: do we want to just continue evolving from what the past would have done in the past collectively? Or are there areas where we want to transform into something different? And again, that's human wisdom. Wisdom comes from heart and gut, intelligence comes from the head. So artificial intelligence can beat the pants of us off of us as far as intelligence is concerned. But it's not very wise to allow it to become the decision maker as we move into the future.

Rexhen Doda: 17:39

Absolutely. So right now when thinking about your goals as well, and you mentioned speaking to, do you mean like you want to do more speaking engagements? Absolutely. So where do you see the challenges thinking about your goals? What are kind of like some of the challenges that you're facing with these goals?

Brian Gorman: 17:54

Well, they're fairly new to me because they're all evolving around the upcoming release of the book. If we think, however, about any significant change, and and the one that probably most people globally are familiar with is the introduction of the smartphone. But we can go back to the introduction of the car or the introduction of the telephone. There is a curve of acceptance. And one of my challenges, which is another reason to talk about Maverick leadership, one of my challenges is that not everybody is willing to step forward and make significant change because it's working okay now. It may not be working as good as it was a year ago or five years ago, but it's still working. So why am I going to disrupt what's working? So my biggest challenge is really getting in front of those people who are the innovators, the the very early adapters of different types of change around technology, around organization, around leading, and and so forth. And they don't belong to a single club. They don't carry a single title, and they don't necessarily say in their LinkedIn profiles, I'm an early adopter. Yeah.

Rexhen Doda: 19:09

So I want to switch topics a little bit on this one and want to talk to you about investments. You have been coaching for two decades now. In your coaching business, what have been some investments you've made that you feel really good about? Either you learned a lot or got a good return from, and what have been some investments that you would have preferred to have avoided if there's any bad investments as well? And when I say investments, it could be investments of time, money, or both.

Brian Gorman: 19:35

The first investment, I'm glad you made that distinction of time, money, or both, because I was going to make it, is my investment in learning. I'm about to turn 76. Many of my peers have said, I'm done, I'm retiring, I'm done trying to keep up with things. I'm done. Well, the truth is you can be done. You can stop learning, you can stop trying to keep up with things, but the world around you continues to change. And so by default, your life is being changed more by not learning new things than by learning new things. I have invested significantly over several years now in my podcast. Um, 11 years ago, I decided that it was time for me to be very intentional about sharing back what I have learned along the way. My podcast is one way of doing that. Coaching is another way of doing that, speaking has been and will continue to be another way of doing that. One of the great things about my podcast is, and I'm up to 140 episodes in this podcast, probably 300 between other podcasts that have co-hosted, that I've shared hosting duties with, or that I've appeared on. I get to talk with people and learn all the time. What has been very powerful for me around the Conversations podcast that I host now is I have a number of public relations agencies that are reaching out with me and saying, we have this author who has written this book. Is this something you'd be interested in? And I have met some incredible, incredible people that way. And what I've discovered along the way, and your podcast is different, but for those podcast hosts like myself who take on book authors, what I've discovered, I recorded one yesterday, or not yesterday, I'm sorry, last week, with an author who said he has recorded about 60 podcasts. I was the first host who he felt had read his book cover to cover. But that's my commitment to learning. That's my commitment to my listeners. Because I can take the PR notes, I can take the book jacket notes, but I can't relate them to the people that are listening to me. So that investment in learning is one that I I will never stop making. An investment that I made that I don't regret and I wish I had handled differently. A former colleague of mine started a coaching company as as co-founder back in 2000. And I became one of their first coaches and eventually grew into the role of vice president for program development for them. And it was very lucrative until they closed their doors a year ago because they ran out of money. And I had invested my time virtually a hundred percent in their companies, found myself with relatively little little notice, having allowed my own business in terms of building other clients, building market presence and so forth, to have fallen away. And so have now had to spend the last year working on regrowing it. Continue to learn, continue to consistently build your visibility and your pipeline, if you will.

Rexhen Doda: 22:56

And I'm yeah, definitely strong lessons learned there. And for sure, with your own coaching business, you feel like you're making a probably a better impact, bigger impact this way with your book coming up. So I feel like in a way it worked out for the better. It allowed you to move on to your own and focus your time where I feel like you can provide most value, from my perspective at least.

Brian Gorman: 23:18

Yes, Ed. Because I'm a single father with a disabled adult son, paying the bills is still important. Yeah.

Rexhen Doda: 23:25

So I want to ask you one final question, and that is for the coaches who are listening again that want to, just like in your case, want to scale their impact. They want to make a bigger impact with your book. You're also because you can make as many copies as you want. Obviously, you're scaling your impact without you having to be on a call just like we are right now, directly with people 101. With the book, you can touch more people. Now, for coaches want to scale their impact. Is there any advice you'd like to give to them?

Brian Gorman: 23:56

Do it on your terms, do it as you. Not everybody is an author, not everybody is a speaker, not everybody is a groundbreaker, and that's great. That's fine. Don't try to be something you're not, but really look at how I can take who I am and deliver that value in a broader way. So as a coach, it might be group coaching, it might be developing online learning programs, it might be aligning with one or more different coaching platforms. And again, do that as you. One of the biggest challenges for me has been in doing the homework to say, I see where you are as a coaching platform, for example, and this is not the one that I was associated with, but more than one of the others, ethically, I don't align with who you are and what you're bringing to market. And so I am not going to compromise who I am in exchange for the opportunity to appear on your platform. So be yourself, spend some some time reflecting on what is the value of, spend some time, whether it's chat, whether it's thought, what whatever that AI is, spend some time exploring how might I separate myself from the masses who use the same executive coach, the same leadership coach title that I am trying to build a market around.

Rexhen Doda: 25:22

And then once you have that, leverage it. Thank you. Thank you so much, Brian. Thank you so much for coming to our podcast today. For anyone who is listening, um wants to connect with you or find you, they can easily go into LinkedIn, look up Brian Gorman, they'll be able to find your profile. And if I'm not mistaken, the website is transforminglives.coach. Is that correct? That's correct.

Brian Gorman: 25:45

Cool. I'll add one more. The podcast is conversations, and that is spelled with a Q instead of a C. And that's a separate story we don't need to go get into now. But it is a focus on leadership and leadership challenges and approaches to addressing leadership challenges. That's probably 90 some percent of the 140 podcasts that are out there. There are also some interesting personal stories along the way that we can all draw lessons from.

Rexhen Doda: 26:15

Thank you, Brian. And we'll put the link for everyone that's listening. We'll put the link to the description of this podcast so you'll be able to find it easily. Like I said, LinkedIn as well. And yeah, it's been great. So thank you again, and thank you for coming.

Davis Nguyen : 26:31

Thank you for having me, Reggie. That's it for this episode of Career Coaching Secrets. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode to catch future episodes. This podcast was brought to you by Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to $100,000 years, $100,000 months, or even $100,000 weeks, all without burning out and making sure that you're making the impact and having the life that you want. To learn more about our community and how we can help you, visit join purplecircle.com.