MY LEADERSHIP - 2
SESSION TWO — THE ANCHOR POINT
This is a link to the ‘Principles’ tutorial video - ‘My Leadership - Session 2 - Principles’
Alongside the Principes video, I have included the ‘Activation Narrative’ that is part of this session in the self-guided workbooks. The stories I tell aren’t comfortable, nor are they trauma porn. They are designed to elicit a specific response from the reader, tied to the topic our clients are working on in this session.
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
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