Edoardo Binda Zane is a leadership coach and communication trainer. He provides leaders and teams with skills and tools to help them thrive in dynamic and changing markets and to increase their capability of generating value.
Throughout his career, he has been working in and heading 7-figure projects, and he now combines that experience with other areas of work to develop skills in teams and individuals.

• CEO Hack: Write down the things you're thankful for
• CEO Nugget: Nobody cares about you, people want to listen to what you can do for them
• CEO Defined: Having the enjoyment and impact of being responsible for yourself

Website: http://ebz-coaching.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edoardobinda/

 

The Snippets of Leadership Podcast: https://ebz-coaching.com/snippets-of-leadership-podcast/

Emotional Intelligence for Leaders Book: https://ebz-coaching.com/emotional-intelligence-for-leaders-book/

The course’s page: https://ebz-coaching.com/courses/emotional-intelligence-for-leaders/ The code is: IAMCEO

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FULL INTERVIEW

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Transcription

 

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00:02 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:30 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I had a very special guest on the show today. I have Edoardo Benda Zahani of EBZ coaching. Edoardo, It's awesome to have you on the show.

01:01 – Edoardo Binda Zane

Thank you very much, man. I'm happy to be here.

01:04 – Gresham Harkless:

No problem. Super excited to have you on as well. And before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Edoardo so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. And Edoardo is a leadership coach and a communication trainer. He provides leaders and teams with skills and tools to help them thrive in dynamic and changing markets and to increase their capability of generating value. Throughout his career, he has been working in and heading 7 figure projects. And he now combines that experience with other areas of work to develop skills and teams and individuals. Edoardo, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:36 – Edoardo Binda Zane

I'm excited to speak to your community.

01:39 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, well, let's do it. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to hear a little bit more about how you got started. Could you take us through what I call your CEO story? We'll let you get started with all those things you're working on.

01:48 – Edoardo Binda Zane

Well, it starts in a very uninteresting way, as in I've done the very most classical 1, and 2 steps in business school and becoming a consultant. And It's kind of interesting that 7 years in, I was actually a public consultant working on renewable energy policy. So take very complex projects, very big ones, we're talking millions. I was responsible for a bunch of people, 16 countries, all of that. And despite that is what I wanted to do. Despite the fact that I had studied my whole life to get to that point, I hated it. I really deeply hated the routine of my job and not seeing an impact. And that's the thing. The thing that killed me was not seeing an impact and realizing that I was not me as a person anymore.

I was speaking to a computer the whole time and I just couldn't do it. And then that's when things started to change because literally out of the blue, I started going like, right, I need to do something else. I'm not happy with this. Let's just start a hobby. And that hobby was improv comedy, which is a lot bigger in the States than is in Europe, even though Berlin has got quite an amazing community. I started to notice that all the training that I had just goofing around on stage, simplifying of course, was helping me out a lot, making me better in a different way than other consultants that were working with me. Like take negotiation, riffing off something that someone else has said, speaking in public, take understanding better what the other person has to say.

And that was the kind of seed of whatever I did. After I would say a couple of years, 3 years, I decided to quit my job and started what I do right now. It started off badly as in I had all this kind of dream in my head in terms of, right, I'm going to now teach improv comedy to companies and they're going to pay money for it. And then of course you realize fairly fast that whatever little story you have in your head, if it's not coherent with who is in front of you and improv in a company is really not a thing, there is no communication. So I failed pretty badly. And then what I started to do was still keeping a bit of that seed of improv like in practice, but putting up a lot more knowledge, studying, working towards it.

And now I've, let's just say I'm working around 3 areas, which is my experience as a consultant and my studies, improv still is still a big part of it. And to that, I've added a huge amount of studies. I read academic papers like there's no tomorrow. I love communication and positive psychology. I love knowing what I can do to trigger something in a leader to make the person communicate better, help others grow, and so on. I hope I answered your question. I know I tend to spin out of topic when I go, but when I start talking about the story, I love it.

05:00 – Gresham Harkless:

No, I absolutely love it too. You spun into really phenomenal things and it kind of reminds me, I think I read something along the lines of improv and how much is 1 of those, I don't know if you call it soft skills, so to speak, but it provides you that opportunity to really use things in so many different ways. And a lot of great things, sometimes it doesn't come from us having these grand ideas, but us pursuing certain interests, certain things that we think are fascinating and then just kind of snowballing from there. And kind of sounds like you have that exact same experience.

05:31 – Edoardo Binda Zane

Yeah, something like that. It starts with an idea. And then as long as you keep yourself loosely attached to that, but don't, don't be as long as you're not dogmatic about it. That's what I'm trying to say. If you allow yourself to evolve, to go somewhere else, then of course the idea evolves. It changes into something else and it can turn into something beautiful or it can turn into nothing. But at least you know it's nothing fairly fast.

05:58 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, exactly. We hope so. That helps out a ton. So I know you had started touching on a little bit on how you serve the clients that you work with. Could you go a little bit more into that and how and what you do as a coach and a trainer to help serve your clients?

06:13 – Edoardo Binda Zane

Well pre COVID or after COVID? Or It's quite a bit of a mess. All right. Let's just say by, let's just start by looking at what my core is. I think I truly deeply believe that the core of leading, of working together, of enabling better teamwork is being able to communicate. So that's where I hit on the most. If I want to sell it to a company, I put it as team building, as leadership coaching, as training the whole leadership team, you name it. But I hammer on communicating because you and I and everyone on Earth, don't take it personally, we assume that we know how to communicate simply because we've been talking to each other our whole lives. But once you start going deeper into it, once you start thinking about, okay, what does it mean to listen?

How much energy do I need to put into this? What does the other person mean? How can I take the other person's perspective? It's a lot of work. So that's where I hit on the most. In terms of what my training looks like, It's either me in a group and all sitting in a room together or standing and doing exercises. And that did happen before COVID. Now it's just not really happening. Let's just put it this way. Otherwise, I do a lot of one-to-one coaching that of course takes different forms, a different structure. It's less practical. And the third way I like to work is via online courses, or basically putting knowledge in a medium and selling that medium. So I've just written a book on emotional intelligence.

I've just released a course on emotional intelligence for leaders. So that's also a way that is more accessible for people to get in touch with me. So it's these 3, it's either one-to-one, virtual or in person, group workshops, they mainly work better when it's personal, virtual, I still have some trouble with that, or putting what I know in a medium that people can just get and see if they want to know more.

08:35 – Gresham Harkless:

Let me ask you this, would you consider that to be like your secret sauce is your ability to be able to really not just communicate with people but train people to be able to see that? Do you feel like that's what sets you apart and makes you unique?

08:50 – Edoardo Binda Zane

Yeah, possibly. It's usually think, that my secret sauce is my combination of, you know, what I said before, my experience, my improv training, and my research. But now that you say it, yeah, it does make a lot of sense because one of the things that I noticed is whenever people step into a room with me whenever I start talking maybe they consider me a big clownish this kind of hamster on cocaine going around the room and saying things. And then it happened to me with I'm not gonna say the name of the company, but a big important company was training a lot of their leaders.

And one of them, after the workshop was over, came over and said, I was extremely skeptical at the beginning with this tone like full of gravitas, of almost menacing. But yeah, I noticed that when people step into a room with me and do one workshop, whether it's a free one or one that they've been invited to by a friend, you name it, they tend to understand more and want to know more about it. So yeah, I'll take that as my secret sauce.

10:07 – Gresham Harkless:

I'm going to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So it could be like an Apple Book or a habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient. But you mentioned that speech. Would you consider that to be the hack is to really understand that speech and really be able to kind of execute on that? If you're kind of humanizing, I guess, the workplace to some degree, that's what it sounds like. Would you consider that to be a hack?

10:31 – Edoardo Binda Zane

Yeah. I mean, for me, honestly, I wouldn't say that's a hack because it's not something that you can do quickly and directly. I'll give you a hack later on. It's actually one of my favorite ones. But I do consider this to be for me foundational. I do believe that that is something that everybody should see. It takes 40 minutes. I mean you have 40 minutes to spare at some point throughout over the span of 3 days. Look up John Cleese's creativity in management and just enjoy it. Look at all the points that he can connect. I mean, he's one of my personal heroes, professionally and not. But you asked me for a hack. So for me, a hack is something extremely quick, applicable, and direct.

And since I just went down the rabbit hole and emotional intelligence and leadership, I'm going to give you this one. Most of us consider how happy we feel to be a result of, let's say, our conditions or let's say genetics, 50% and whatever is happening around us for the other 50%. And that's a fair assessment, except that it's wrong. They've done tests about it. They put numbers on it. So how happy you and I feel right now depends. 50% by your genetics, so you don't have any control over it.

10% is our context, but 40% is fully under your control. So you have direct control over 40% of your happiness. And the hack to boost that 40% when you're feeding down, when you're feeling deprived of energy when you cannot focus because of a negative event that happened in your life. The wonderful hack is to take a piece of paper and a pen and write down 12345 things you are thankful for as superficial and or as deep as you want.

12:30 – Gresham Harkless

I want to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client or if you happened to be a time machine, you might tell your younger business self time machine.

12:41 – Edoardo Binda Zane

I'll take the time machine as a fan of Dr. Who also like I'm in the TARDIS, but I think the biggest lesson that I will give myself, literally slap myself across the face is nobody cares about you. You, Edoardo, from 5 years ago have your little story, all the stuff that you built in your head about improv and your story, what you've done, but nobody cares. Nobody wants to listen to that. They only want to listen to what you can do for them.

13:16 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. Well, I appreciate that. And so now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Edoardo, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:27 – Edoardo Binda Zane

For me, being a CEO means having the enjoyment and the impact of the full weight of being responsible for yourself.

13:38 – Gresham Harkless:

Edoardo, I truly appreciate that definition. I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best they can get out of you, find out about your course and all the awesome things that you're working on as well.

13:53 – Edoardo Binda Zane

All right. Thank you very much. Well, anything I'm always open to get in touch with anyone who's got a question. The best way to contact me is via my website, ebz-coaching.com, or via LinkedIn. Pretty sure there is only 1 person in the world with my name and you mentioned my course. Thank you very much. I just launched it. It's called Emotional Intelligence for leaders. And I will actually, I would actually like to extend a discount code for anything, anyone who will be interested of your listeners to take the course. I'll pass it on to you. You can link it below the episode, I guess. And if that's something they're interested in, it's something that I'd be happy to give. Or if they also, if they prefer to read, I also have a book, Emotional Intelligence for Leaders, with somehow the same content or along the same lines. But of course, it depends on what you want to take out of it.

14:45 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. Well, we'll definitely, as you said, Edoardo, we'll have the links and information, the show notes for the book, your website and all, and then the course as well too, along with that discount code. So I appreciate you for making that available. Thank you so much for giving us so much wisdom and information about how we can improve and be better leaders and communicate a lot better in so many different aspects of our lives and our businesses. So appreciate you, my friend, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:22 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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