IAM1484 – Coach Helps Leaders in Making Sustainable Changes in their Thinking, Behaviors and Actions

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Recognized by the TIMES Group as the most influential leadership speaker and executive coach, Payal Nanjiani is an Indian-American globally acclaimed leadership expert, executive coach, and author.

With a mission to humanize leadership, Payal has popularized the concept of Success Within Leadership with the primary focus on leaders making sustainable changes in their thinking, behaviors, and actions.

She has spent over 2 decades helping leaders achieve a massive leadership breakthrough, get to their next level, and achieve extraordinary levels of success for themselves and the organization.

For almost 21 years, Payal has been a highly sought-after leadership speaker for organizations and conferences that have chosen Payal for their most important events. Her talks and training help people achieve leadership breakthroughs like never before.

• CEO Story: When Payal started working in corporate America, it shocked her that 75%-80%  of the employees were working so hard and stuck in the mid-level and yet only 15% went to the top. That made her begin to research and find answers, and that’s where success within leadership was born.
• Business Service: Coaching. Helping clients move up from where they are and that the client must be ready to make some changes.
• Secret Sauce:  Passion for serving people. Transform the thinking and behavior of people.
• CEO Hack: Reading. The more you read the more you feel connected to serving the people.
• CEO Nugget: Take care of yourself physically, emotionally, financially, and spiritually. You can only play your role and win the game if you have a stable knowledge of all dimensions of your life.
• CEO Defined: Service to the people. Keeping the power within you. Helping people achieve great results, and goals into realities.

Website: www.payalnanjiani.com

Linkedin: payalnanjiani

A New York award-winning author, Payal’s books help you be a peak performer and reach your next level.

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Transcription

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00:18 – 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 Harkness 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.

00:45 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Payal Nanjiani of payalnangiani.com. Payal, it's great to have you on the show.

00:56 – Payal Nanjiani

Thank you so much, Gresham. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here with you.

01:01 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, it's a pleasure. It's definitely all ours and I love all the awesome things that you're working on. So before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about PAYOL so you can hear about some of those awesome things. Recognized by the Times Group as the most influential leadership speaker and executive coach, Payol is an Indian American globally acclaimed leadership expert, executive coach, and author. With the mission to humanize leadership, Payol has popularized the concept of success within leadership with a primary focus on leaders making sustainable changes in their thinking, behaviors, and actions.

She has spent over 2 decades helping leaders achieve a massive leadership breakthrough, get to the next level, and achieve extraordinary levels of success for themselves and their organizations. For almost 21 years, Payol has been a highly sought-after leadership speaker for organizations and conferences that have chosen Payol for their most important events, and her talks and training help people achieve a leadership breakthrough like never before. She is a New York award-winning author.

Payol's books help you to be a peak performer and reach your next level her new book, When the Leadership Game Every Time, is gonna be something that we're gonna touch on a little bit today. So Payal is excited again to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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02:14 – Payal Nanjiani

Thank you so much. It's an honor to be here.

02:16 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, well, let's jump in then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to kind of rewind the clock a little bit, and hear a little bit more about how you guys started, what I call your CEO story.

02:25 – Payal Nanjiani

Oh, okay, that's an interesting question. So let me just give you a little bit of my backstory. So I come from a very loving family, you know, where education has been given prime importance. And so after completing my undergraduate, in fact, after completing my undergraduate, I went into the B school and I did that not because I had a passion for, you know, studying more or something, but purely because I was just seduced by the way the culture and the society placed MBAs and, you know, made their life very easier. And so later on, when I entered the workforce in corporate America, what I saw around me just blew my mind off. Okay, there were people working hard around the clock, putting in the effort.

And, you know, billions of dollars were being spent in corporate America on training and development. And yet we were seeing the majority of the people, like the 75% of the people in the organization, you know, working hard, but not getting there. They were not achieving what they wanted to achieve. And they were not living a life of significance or a fulfilled career life. And so I think that became a big question in my life that why do we have only 15% of the people in any organization reach to the top whereas we have 75 to 80 percent of them stuck in the mid-level and I think that you know that became a huge difference in my life because I wanted to make that change. I wanted to get into the core of it.

And that's when I began the research, I began to see what's missing. And that's where success within leadership was born from. You know, it encouraged me to leave corporate America, get into doing what I'm doing, and coaching and speaking with people, and making them realize why the gap exists between where they are and where they want to go. So that's where it all started.

04:28 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. Well, I truly appreciate you kind of sharing your story and your journey and all of those things. And I love, like I always say in true entrepreneurial form, you see that there is a gap, that there's something that needs to be fulfilled. And rather than saying, hey, somebody else needs to fulfill it, it sounds like you've been able to kind of dedicate a lot of your gifts, your abilities, your talents to being able to kind of help, not just, I think, let people know about it, but probably help them execute as far as like being able to fill in that gap.

04:57 – Payal Nanjiani

Yes, absolutely. And I think, Like I said, the gap always exists. There will never be a time in your life when the gap will not exist. Today, whatever you have, you will always want to get to the next level. And I think that's what we are all created for. That's what we human beings are created for. And the more you are able to know how to fill those gaps in your career life, the easier it becomes for you to move ahead and lead that fulfilled life. Otherwise, it's going to be a life where you go 9 to 5 paycheck or you're doing your business, but it's not giving you the results that you want.

So I always believe, Gresham, that each of us here in our career life, whether you're doing a business or you're working in a corporation, we are really not here to survive. We are here to thrive. We are here to succeed. And I believe that we are all born for success. So yeah, what you said is correct. We just move on to fill that gap.

05:53 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I know you touched on a little bit on how you work with clients. So I wanted to drill down more and hear a little bit more about that. And of course, want to hear more about your newest book and what you're talking about there.

06:04 – Payal Nanjiani

So how I work with my clients. Okay, I think that's a very simple thing for me to do because to me, the clients who come to me, do not come to me for any motivation. I expect that they are already motivated enough to give their best and take themselves to the next level. So once they know that this is where they want to reach, they would, you know, either they have heard about me from somewhere or whatever. What we do is wherever you are, we take you up from there. The idea is not to tell you what I know. The idea is for me to know what you know and where you want to reach.

So that gap that is filled in their life is based on three things. One is they should be, they are coming to me so that they can lead themselves better. Second, they should, you know, they are willing to change their behaviors so that they can adapt more quickly to the changes in the business environment that's happening around them. Number 3, they really want to change their thinking. They want to upgrade their thinking, and they want to make sure that they can think in terms of not just the environment, which is outside in business terms or in terms of ranking in money or something, but more in how do I change my thinking so that I can lead the company and grow the company.

So these three aspects are what they would be looking for when they want to come for coaching. They don't want inspiration. They don't want motivation. I'm not here to motivate anybody. I'm not a very great motivational speaker either. But if you're looking for results, if you're looking for taking yourself ahead, because here's my big belief, this being a CEO show, I think everyone who is either in the corporate or is leaving their own business, we need to hear this out that businesses don't die. It's we as a leader who dies from within. Because businesses never slow down. It's we as a leader who slows down.

So we need to be very clear on this aspect that when they are reaching out to me or when they are taking coaching from anyone for that matter, we are ready to change ourselves. That is the core of every coaching session that you must take. It's a very simple message in the book that winning does not discriminate between genders or color. Okay, so winning is for everyone. It's for you. It's for me. It's for every person in the workplace. And people in the business have somehow forgotten the win.

08:46 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, aw you consider to be what secret sauce? This could be business or a combination do you feel kind of set here to win? Awesome. O what would you consider t to call your secret sauce yourself, the business ar of both. But what do you apart and make she needs?

08:55 – Payal Nanjiani

Basically, I think it's serving people. I think it myself. I have dedicated 21 years now doing what I'm doing, but I've really dedicated my life to helping more and more people become successful in their work life and to really become world-class leaders without really stressing too much about it and taking a different route, not the same route of training and getting into the same game like everyone else. So that's what I think sets me apart. What sets my business apart, I think, in a very simple one-liner, I would say that you know, today in the business world, we have plenty of training, but we don't have anything that transforms people, because transformation is what leads to real results in the corporate and business world.

So my work is to transform people, their thinking, and their behaviors that can lead to a huge change in their results and their actions. And that's what I think puts me apart.

10:02 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely, appreciate that. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. You might've already touched on these, but it could be an app, a book, or even a habit that you have, but something that makes you more effective and efficient.

10:16 – Payal Nanjiani

Reading, I love to read. So I think every day I dedicate more than 50% of my time purely to reading and people absolutely do not believe that because they know my schedule is very tight and they feel that how can you read? And I think that's one hack that I have done is that the more I read, the more I feel connected to serve people. So reading is one thing I have incorporated into my life for many, many years.

10:43 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this is a little bit more word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It could be something from your book, but it's something you would tell your favorite client or something you might tell yourself if you were to hop into a time machine.

10:56 – Payal Nanjiani

You know, you take yourself with you everywhere. So please take care of yourself physically, emotionally, financially, spiritually. You know, you can only play your role and win the game if you feel stable, and nourished in all dimensions of your life. And if not in all, at least in the majority part of your life. I'm seeing people rushing through their day, rushing through getting their outcomes, wanting to do more, achieve more, progress more, and have more success. These are wonderful things to have. Everyone wants it. I want it, you want it, everyone wants it. It's great. You should be the one who is an achiever, but do not make it at the cost of your health You know if that goes you have nothing left. You're no good to anyone. Let me tell you that, you know.

So don't feel that it's your company your boss, or anyone you've got to work more on yourself than you can work on your job. Working on yourself starts with, how you take care of yourself in all these areas, physically, emotionally, mentally, financially, and spiritually. So that would be my biggest nugget which I have also learned in my life. It's also I have written it in one of my books. I don't know which one that health is the biggest wealth that you can have if you want to run in this game and you want to finish and you want to play long in this game.

12:20 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And I think as soon as you learn that it's a marathon, you start to get that realization that you have to take care of yourself in order to do that. And I appreciate you breaking down each of those different aspects because I think automatically when you think, we need to take care of myself, that just means that, oh, I need to make sure I get 8 hours sleep or I just need to make sure I eat those things. But the financial, the spiritual, the health, all those aspects worked in so much in tandem, like the legs of a stool, where if you don't have one of those things in place, or they're very, very weak, the entire stool can topple over, and all those things that you're striving and you invested in can kind of fall from there.

12:59 – Payal Nanjiani

True, and when you said about sleep, I always feel that it's really not the number of hours of sleep that is important. It's the quality, you know, you may be sleeping for 10 hours, but yet the quality of the sleep was not that great to give you tremendous energy to capture your day. Whereas a person might be sleeping just for 4 or 5 hours a day and in the night and waking up with utmost energy and passion. So taking all your problems with you in bed is no good. You need to have someplace where you can deposit them.

And I'm telling you by morning, those problems vanish because you've got to take them out of your brain of your mind and put them somewhere and have a peaceful and restful sleep I can almost assure you by the time you wake up in the morning, not only is that problem disappeared, you've actually woken up with new energy. And if the problem still persists in your life, you have a solution to it now because your mind is fresh.

13:59 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping that different quote-unquote CEOs on this show, so Payal, what does being a CEO mean to you?

14:09 – Payal Nanjiani

From the time I have done what I'm doing in the role of a CEO, for me, it is service. 2 things, one is service to the people, more than anything else. And the other is keeping the power within you. Just like I say, the success is within you. You have to make sure that when you are playing a role as high as a CEO. Now, some people take CEO in different phases. I do take it as a role, as a responsibility. You cannot allow anyone else to determine your worth. You cannot allow someone to tell you exactly where you are, or what you're doing.

You have to have a lot of power within you to build your intuitiveness. You have to know how to guide yourself in the right direction. So to me, a CEO means anyone who is helping people get there, getting their people to achieve great results, and is able to convert their goals into reality sooner than anyone else.

15:10 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Well, Payal, I truly appreciate that definition. And of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I wanted to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best people can get out of you, get a copy of your books, and find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.

15:28 – Payal Nanjiani

The book is available on Amazon worldwide, and it's also available on my website, which is PayalNanjiani.com. And it's got a section of books. You can order it from there. And I love to keep in touch with people. So they can always reach out to me by saying that they heard me on this show and you know they can reach out to me on Instagram or on LinkedIn by just mentioning this show on LinkedIn or on Instagram you can just follow.

15:58 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Payal, I truly appreciate that We will have the links and information in the show notes as well too, so that everybody can get ahold of you, connect, and find out about all the awesome things that you're working on. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:09 – Payal Nanjiani

Thank you so much. It's really an honor to be on this show.

16:12 – 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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