IRISH MUSINGS #3

I spent a lot of my life surviving and doing hard manual labor. I’m 54. and am well past my sell-by date for manual labor. But I still have muscle memory from the decades of hard work that were my early years. If you didn’t work hard back then, you didn’t eat. It means I have almost no tolerance for those who are lazy. It’s not fair, and often not accurate, but it is like fingernails on a chalkboard watching someone shuffle around a grocery store or lean on a shovel while the road crew is wrapping up for the evening. Every team I’ve led knew the two questions they had to ask when they ran out of work. “Who can I help? How can I help?” By the time you had asked yourself those two questions, you would have found something new to do.

Lazy people cause a gag reflex. It’s not their fault; it’s me. I am utterly intolerant when it comes to work. I’ve done a lot of shitty jobs in my life, and I always tried to do them as if they were the most essential thing in the world. Why on earth are you still reading this blog is a mystery to me, but if you are still here, let me explain. The session today is about extrinsic bias. Not prejudice, just bias. I value people who work hard. I’ll hire the hard worker every time, even if what I really need is a highly technical operator. I’m terrible at hiring white-collar staff. Thank God that is behind me, and I can trust other people to hire contractors! Hope you enjoy this session…..

SESSION TWO — THE ANCHOR POINT

Objective Assessment

The Second Golden Rule:

“Bias is a good thing, but ignorance often means your assessment isn’t always aligned with what you are selecting for.”

― Robert (Sherpa) Millar

PRINCIPLE — NAMING MY BIAS

Session two finds two words that best describe the two most common subconscious biases you activate when you begin to make an assessment using your fast-thinking subconscious leadership sequence. 

Once you set a goal, you immediately begin scanning for potential resources to help you achieve it. That requires you to assess and identify the most effective potential among all the people, parts, and places you can use as your resource base. I often get asked to describe the difference between bias and prejudice. My answer is this: Prejudice is an unconscious habit of judging someone or something based on a subjective assessment of their intrinsic value. Bias is a subconscious tendency to judge someone or something based on a subjective assessment of their extrinsic value.

If you are an instinctive leader, then you have biases. As you were developing a way to build those first towers of wooden blocks, you stumbled upon a winning solution, which was affirmed by the authority who was helping you learn to lead. It worked reliably in subsequent leadership experience. Whatever biases you developed in those early years have now become the default. Now, we need to identify those biases, assign two words that best describe them, validate them through lived experience, and then incorporate them as the second of five snapshots of you as an instinctive leader.

"The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend."

- Robertson Davies

It is October 2025, and my son is eleven years old. He has chores and occasionally does yard work for us and a neighbor, but most of his days are spent with friends, having fun, playing sports, and playing video games—the typical idyllic life of a middle-class kid in a safe neighborhood. It's a stark contrast to me at eleven. I started working at a very early age, and by eleven, I’d learned many tough lessons about who to team up with to get things done. Every year at harvest time, we’d jump on the farmer’s trailer and hitch a lift to the fields to gather potatoes. It is back-breaking work, and how much you got paid depended on how many bags of potatoes you gathered that day. That amount depended on a few variables, but the key was to be given as large a slice of the drill as possible without holding up the tractor. Additionally, being alongside the right people was crucial, as they could slow the tractor, thereby limiting the number of drills that got plowed that day. I graduated from the fields into sales in my teens, then to manual labor at 16.

Over time, I left my working-class roots far behind and have earned my livelihood in the white-collar world for more than half of my life.  However, my leadership sequence began to take shape in those fields, and I realized that how much you could earn was directly tied to how much you produced, which created subjective biases in my assessment process. As I grew older and began leading teams, these selection biases became my default tools for evaluating any potential resource tied to an extrinsic goal. I still instinctively want to see two things when I make an assessment. What those are is irrelevant to this exercise and will only distract you when you enter the profile section and work on feeling your own top two biases. Suffice it to say, those two biases, along with all the other lesser biases I have coded in my sequence, have only gotten stronger as the years have passed.

You will need to take the next step up the wall, attaching your core anchor points. Like session one, this will probably still feel uncomfortable for many of you. I have never met an instinctive leader who lacks anchor points. I created this program and have worked with individuals from over 30 nationalities, representing all genders, generations, and industries. I have always been able to stimulate a reaction when attempting to trigger one while looking for subconscious bias. So, you, too, have these avatars of virtue that secure you to every goal you set for yourself as a leader. Remember, you must ‘feel’ your way to an expanded awareness of your subjective, fast-thinking biases in assessment, before you can think about that expanded awareness.

In the next post, we'll explore the third link in what we call our instinctive Leadership Kill Chain—the decision-making environment.

— Robert (Sherpa) Millar