A New Direction

Interviewing Best Selling Authors from around the world for success and leadership in business, life and career.

A New Direction is a business podcast hosted by Jay Izso, with 300 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Jay Izso hosts A New Direction, a business show with 300 episodes published.

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  A New Direction

  AI Doesn’t Have to Replace You – You Re-Place You

  Sep 30, 202658 min

  “Is AI going to take my job?” It’s the question I hear most from executives, business owners, and parents. Kari Zeller , author of Re-Placed: Answering the Call of Leadership in the Age of AI , says it’s the wrong question. She asks a harder one: Is work our buffalo? For the Crow Nation, the buffalo was more than food. It was identity, daily rhythm, belonging, and meaning. When it disappeared, a whole way of life disappeared with it. For many of us, work plays that same role. It’s where we matter. So when people fear AI, they’re really asking, “Who am I going to be?” Kari calls this ontological vulnerability, the moment the ground under your identity and purpose starts to shift. AI isn’t only changing what we do. It’s shaking our sense of place in the world. Kari’s answer comes down to a hyphen. Being replaced by AI is passive. It happens to you, and it’s about becoming irrelevant. Being re-placed is active. You step into a new place, a new context, a new role where your contributions, your relationships, and your story matter again. In her words, being re-placed “is the antithesis of being replaced.” That difference decides whether you lead through the AI transition or get swept along by it. As a coach, this line gives me hope: “Identity, unlike skill, can be reinvented.” The idea I found most useful is context. Circumstances are just circumstances. Context is the meaning we give them, and it decides which actions we can even see. Kari argues that many companies that seemed to “fail at strategy” really failed to notice that their context had become obsolete. Here’s the good news: AI can only operate inside the context we give it. Humans can create new contexts. We decide what matters first, and then we put AI to work inside it. Her challenge is to become a context creator, not a context prisoner. But before we can create a new future, we have to complete the past: honor what worked, own what didn’t, and grieve what’s ending. Otherwise we keep living out a future built for a world that existed before AI. In the end, Kari says AI can fix breakdowns, solve problems, and spot patterns faster than any of us, but AI cannot care. Care is still ours. The leaders who will thrive aren’t the ones who know the most about AI. They’re the ones who know what people care about underneath the fear: dignity, belonging, contribution, and mattering. Her advice is simple: use AI, don’t be used by AI. As Kari writes, “The future will not be managed. It must be led.” So here’s my question for you: are you waiting to be replaced, or are you ready to be re-placed? Watch my full conversation with Kari Zeller on A New Direction with Coach Jay , and pick up a copy of Re-Placed . It’s one of the most important leadership books you’ll read this year. Kari Zeller ‘s book, “ Re-Placed: Answering the Call of Leadership in the Age of AI ” is a book that is going to challenge you. It is going to make you question what you believe about you in this new age of AI, and what mindset you will need to adopt to make AI work for you. There is no doubt that AI is a changing the playing field. And what the future of AI will be will be left to the wildest imagination. Kari, implores us not to ignore it or avoid it, but asks us to look at it, understand it, and find where we fit in, in this new world of AI. Ultimately we must discover what makes us unique. The crux of the book is that we often times lose our identity because our work can be our identity. However, if we lose what we do to AI, we must have a mindset change from being replace, to being able to re-place ourselves, and find deeper meaning in our being not in our doing. The book is challenging, but don’t the point of the book is not to focus on the doom that AI may present, but to focus on our own self-awareness of how we can become even more valuable because of our humanity. And as leaders who embrace this change we have to take a human approach with our people to help them change by following Kari’s prescription of the ERA Methodology. I loved this book. It is valuable to everyone and how we need to change our context and our mindsets when it comes to the new age of AI. Especially for those of us in leadership where we have to be more interative mentally, emotionally, and dare I say spiritually. Great read! Get your copy of “Re-Placed” by clicking here! Please reach out to the sponsors of A New Direction . Thanks to their financial support, we are able to bring you these great experts and their books to help you live the life you always dreamed of. Lin da Craft Team, REALTORS , for more than 40 years the choice of thousands of buyers and sellers when it comes to real estate. And regardless of where you live, you can meet with them…even virtually! They have been on the bleeding edge of technology and AI, and yet their focus is taking a human approach to helping people around the world find the very best professionals to help sell or buy a new home. And if you live in the Greater Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina you can get the one-on-one, face-to-face service that has made Linda Craft Team Legendary! Their clients call Linda Craft Team customer service “legendary”. Find out why by going to www.LindaCraft.com Your Business Isn’t Broken. It’s the Person Running It. The marketing is fine. The team is capable. The market is there. And the business still won’t move. You’ve read the books. Hired the consultants. Rebuilt the org chart twice. None of it touched the actual problem, because the actual problem was never in the business. It’s fear. It’s ego. It’s the story you keep telling yourself about what you can and can’t do. It’s the “personal stuff” you’ve been leaving at the door every morning — except it doesn’t stay there. It walks in with you and runs the company. I’m Jay Izso. I’m an Executive Performance Coach, and I work with CEOs and founders of $5M–$50M companies who’ve hit a wall they can’t explain. I don’t fix algorithms. I fix the behaviors and mindsets that are strangling your growth. No Motivational Platitudes I find the personal behavioral pattern that’s driving the business dysfunction. Then I help you disrupt it so the company can actually grow. That’s the whole method. No vision boards. No affirmations on the monitor. Diagnostics, intervention, results. If you want to feel better about your business, hire a hype man. If you want it to change, keep reading — because where I learned to do this isn’t a place most coaches have ever set foot. Raised on the Farm. Trained in Psychology. My approach comes from two places most coaches never set foot in. The farm. I grew up a farmhand in Ithaca, Nebraska — population 100. I started working at nine. By fourteen I was castrating boars, and nobody was coming to do it for me if I froze. By the time I left for college I’d spent a decade learning that you can’t cheat the harvest, that pain is part of the job, and that the work gets done whether you feel like it or not. That’s not a charming childhood story. It’s why I don’t flinch when a CEO’s real problem turns out to be uglier than the one they hired me to fix. I’ve done harder, dirtier work than a hard conversation. The forensic unit. In graduate school at Washington State University, I trained under Dr. Thomas Brigham — co-author of the Handbook of Applied Behavior Analysis — in a human behavior lab built around real-world problems, not theory. I followed that into a Clinical Psych II role at Eastern State Hospital in Medical Lake, Washington: a forensic setting, evaluating people charged with the most serious criminal offenses. Sixteen months reading human behavior at its most extreme teaches you one thing fast: how to get past what someone’s telling you and see what’s actually driving the decision. That’s not a metaphor I use with executives — it’s the literal skill I use on them. Most consultants react to what a CEO says the problem is. I was trained to find what’s underneath it. How the Work Actually Happens We find the pattern. Not “leadership style” — the specific behavior that shows up under pressure and quietly runs the company into a wall. The decision you keep re-making. The hire you keep avoiding. The conversation you keep having in your head instead of in the room. We name it, out loud, without the corporate padding. Then we disrupt it — deliberately, on purpose, on a schedule — until the new behavior is the automatic one. Not a seminar. Not a one-time breakthrough you feel good about for a month. A rebuilt habit, tested against your actual business, week over week. If you also want to hear how this plays out in other people’s companies before you talk to me, that’s what the show is for. Every week on A New Direction , I sit down with CEOs, founders, and the researchers behind the science of leadership performance — the decisions that built their companies, the mistakes that nearly ended them, and the breakthrough that changed everything. The podcast is where you can watch the diagnosis happen to someone else first. Who This Is For This works if you’re the CEO or founder of a $5M–$50M company, you already know — or strongly suspect — that you’re the bottleneck, and you’re willing to look at that directly instead of managing around it. This doesn’t work if you want a quick fix. I can’t help you if what you’re after is a pep talk before your next board meeting. I work with people who value authenticity and effort. If you’re ready to dig in, find the root cause, and grow — keep reading. Your Growth Journey Starts Here Big idea, bold goal, or a wall you can’t explain — start the conversation. Schedule your audio session and tell me the one thing about your business that doesn’t add up. I’ll tell you, straight, whether it’s a business problem or a personal one wearing a business costume. Thank you everyone for listening to A New Direction with Coach Jay. Please tell your friends. Give us a thumbs up on YouTube. Wherever you may be listening…please give A New Direction with Coach Jay a 5 star review.

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  A New Direction

  Time Management Is a Myth: 5 Rules to Own Your Focus

  Sep 23, 202657 min

  Time Management Is a Myth: 5 Rules to Own Your Focus Here’s the truth nobody selling planners wants you to hear: time management doesn’t work, because you can’t manage time. Time is outside of you. It doesn’t care whether you run a company, lead a sales team, coach athletes, or are trying to get your kids to practice on time. Everyone gets the same 1,440 minutes a day. Nobody gets more, and nobody owns them. On this episode of A New Direction with Coach Jay Izso , I sat down with Ron Lieback , author of Time Management Inverted: Live with Intentional Focus, Become the Best You . His core idea changes how you look at your day: you don’t own your time, but you do own your focus. When you start managing focus instead of time, you do better work in less time, with less stress, and you have more of your life left over to enjoy. Here are five rules from Ron’s framework that apply to anyone: a business, a team, or just you. Rule #1: Stop Trying to Manage Time. Manage Your Focus. Ron writes that time is a perception, and our emotions control it. As a psychologist, I can confirm it. Ten minutes in the dentist’s chair feels like an hour. Three hours doing what you love disappear. So the real time management question isn’t “How do I get more time?” It’s “Where is my focus going?” For most of us, the answer is somewhere we never chose: The average American spends 4 hours and 37 minutes a day on their phone. That’s about 70 days a year . Boston Consulting Group found the average worker loses nearly 30% of their productive time to digital distractions. Once you’re pulled off task, it takes at least 20 minutes to fully get back. Our minds wander 47% of the day, according to Hyperfocus author Chris Bailey. You don’t have a time problem. You have a focus leak. Rule #2: Flip the Pyramid and Start With Your Grand Vision Most time management systems start with a to-do list. Ron’s TMI (Time Management Inverted) framework starts at the top with your Grand Vision , the big result you’re after. That might be building a business, winning a championship, getting healthy, or running a marathon. From there the pyramid narrows: Grand Vision: the big goal, usually on a one-year horizon Realignments: planned room to pivot Monthly goals: milestones that support the vision Weekly tactics: the actions that build momentum Daily tasks: the intentional focus that makes it all happen Ron also recommends setting a Grand Vision in each area of your life: health, relationships, business, and finances. His test for whether one is worth chasing: Is it so meaningful I’ll remember it on my deathbed? The piece I love is realignment . When a plan stops working, most people either quit or push ahead on blind optimism. Ron says “100% optimism isn’t possible. Or wise.” You stop, figure out what went wrong, and adjust. I teach the people I coach to treat life as an experiment. A result you didn’t want isn’t a failure. It’s data. Clean up the variable and run it again. Rule #3: Focus on No More Than 3 to 5 Things This is the heart of the framework, the BIG 3-5 . At every level (monthly, weekly, daily), you focus on three to five priorities. Never more. Past five, the mind loses concentration and the work gets sloppy. For daily tasks, Ron says three is plenty. To make it stick: Plan your week before it starts, Sunday night or Monday morning. Leave buffer time. Something unexpected will always show up. Do a Friday review. Ask three questions: What went well? What didn’t? How should I pivot next week? Try the time compression test. If you only had four hours a day starting tomorrow, what would you focus on, and what would you cut? You can’t cheat the harvest. Three focused tasks done every day will beat twenty half-finished ones, whether you’re in a boardroom or a locker room. Rule #4: Protect Your Focus. Every Yes Has a Hidden Tax. Ron uses a term everyone should borrow: Creative Units (CUs) . At 100 CUs your energy is fully charged and your best work comes faster. Near zero, everything takes longer and what you produce is forgettable. The biggest drain isn’t the clock. It’s overcommitment. Every yes comes with a hidden creative tax. Every “quick call,” every “got a minute?”, and every obligation you didn’t need to take on draws from a limited supply of mental energy. Warren Buffett said the difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything. To keep your focus sharp: Do your most demanding work during your peak energy hours Save the busywork (email, errands, admin) for lower-energy windows Track your energy for a few weeks to find your own peak, because there’s no one-size-fits-all time Brain-dump daily. Get unfinished thoughts onto paper so they stop taking up space in your head Rule #5: Unplug Completely and Enforce Downtime This is the rule driven people resist most: the belief that more hours equals more productivity needs to end. Ron points to the burnout, broken relationships, and unhealthy habits that come from being “always on.” I’ve seen it with executives, and I’ve seen it with young athletes who never get to rest. His answer is a cold turkey digital detox . No social media, no texts, no email, no calls during focused time. Start with a few hours a day, work up to a full evening, then a full day on the weekend. The rule that matters: when you’re off, stay off. Pair that with enforced downtime : short breaks every day, longer ones every week, and real time alone. Ron also points to what Chris Bailey calls “scatter focus,” letting your mind wander on purpose, which helps you recharge, plan, and come up with fresh ideas. If you can stay fully focused for even two hours a day , you’ll get better results with less stress, and you’ll actually enjoy your time away. The Bottom Line on Time Management Real time management isn’t about cramming more into your calendar. It’s about deciding where your focus goes, protecting your energy, and saying no to everything that doesn’t serve your Grand Vision. Ron closes Time Management Inverted with a line worth taping to your mirror: Don’t settle for average. Ever! Frequently Asked Questions What is Time Management Inverted? It’s Ron Lieback’s framework, built as an upside-down pyramid: Grand Vision, realignments, monthly goals, weekly tactics, and daily tasks, with only 3 to 5 priorities at each level. Why doesn’t traditional time management work? Because time is outside your control. Focus isn’t. When you manage your focus, what you do with your time changes, and so do your results. How many things should I focus on each day? Three to five, and Ron says three is plenty. Past five, concentration and quality drop. How do I start a digital detox? Start small. Block a few distraction-free hours each day and stay fully offline during them. Then build up to a full evening and a full weekend day. Watch or listen to the full episode of A New Direction with Coach Jay Izso with Ron Lieback on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts, and grab a copy of Time Management Inverted: Live with Intentional Focus, Become the Best You . Ron Lieback’s book, Time Management Inverted: Live with Intentional Focus, Become the Best You is an absolute eye opening read. Like many of you are probably thinking, “Oh great it’s another ‘time management’ book…you would be wrong. This isn’t about time management this is about reaching the goals you set through managing your focus. I read this book twice. The concepts are not difficult, but there is an internal resistance to doing them. Why? Because we have been taught the wrong thing for years when it comes to achieving our “Grand Vision” that the majority of us never achieve it. This book changes that. It challenges you in ways you may not be prepared for but the Time Management Inverted (TMI) framework process works. Because you focus on the process, not the results. The results take care of themselves. This book is practical. Every chapter ends with a summary and steps that you can take immediately. And he even provides AI prompts to help you think about what you are doing when it comes to achieving your “Grand Vision” in a slightly different way. Are you looking for greater success? Do you want to eliminate your bad habits? Are you ready to be more productive in less time? Do you want to achieve greater things? Then Time Management Inverted: Live with Intentional Focus, Become the Best You is for you. Get your copy of Time Management Inverted: Live with Intentional Focus, Become the Best You by Clicking on the link. Please reach out and say thank you to the financial partners of A New Direction Show : L inda Craft Team, Realtors® for more than 40 years they have helped 1000’s of people make a smooth transition when it comes to buying and selling real estate. A boutique firm with a global reach. Unaffiliated with any national or international brand, Linda Craft Team, REALTORS® is recognized as one of the leaders when it comes to residential real estate. Being unaffiliated is an advantage for you! Because if you need a referral in your area, you can be confident knowing that her recommendations do not come from within some international or national affiliate, but because she has connected with that absolute best agent in your area. If you are local, you can also be assured that the money stays in the community and is not being paid to a franchise for a franchise fee. We are big fans of supporting local, we trust you are too. So before you buy or sell, start with the “Legends” at Linda Craft Team. Just click on over to www.LindaCraft.com Your Business Isn’t Broken. It’s the Person Running It. The marketing is fine. The team is capable. The market is there. And the business still won’t move. You’ve read the books. Hired the consultants. Rebuilt the org chart twice. None of it touched the actual problem, because the actual problem was never in the business. It’s fear. It’s ego. It’s the story you keep telling yourself about what you can and can’t do. It’s the “personal stuff” you’ve been leaving at the door every morning — except it doesn’t stay there. It walks in with you and runs the company. I’m Jay Izso. I’m an Executive Performance Coach, and I work with CEOs and founders of $5M–$50M companies who’ve hit a wall they can’t explain. I don’t fix algorithms. I fix the behaviors and mindsets that are strangling your growth. No Motivational Platitudes I find the personal behavioral pattern that’s driving the business dysfunction. Then I help you disrupt it so the company can actually grow. That’s the whole method. No vision boards. No affirmations on the monitor. Diagnostics, intervention, results. If you want to feel better about your business, hire a hype man. If you want it to change, keep reading — because where I learned to do this isn’t a place most coaches have ever set foot. Raised on the Farm. Trained in Psychology. My approach comes from two places most coaches never set foot in. The farm. I grew up a farmhand in Ithaca, Nebraska — population 100. I started working at nine. By fourteen I was castrating boars, and nobody was coming to do it for me if I froze. By the time I left for college I’d spent a decade learning that you can’t cheat the harvest, that pain is part of the job, and that the work gets done whether you feel like it or not. That’s not a charming childhood story. It’s why I don’t flinch when a CEO’s real problem turns out to be uglier than the one they hired me to fix. I’ve done harder, dirtier work than a hard conversation. The forensic unit. In graduate school at Washington State University, I trained under Dr. Thomas Brigham — co-author of the Handbook of Applied Behavior Analysis — in a human behavior lab built around real-world problems, not theory. I followed that into a Clinical Psych II role at Eastern State Hospital in Medical Lake, Washington: a forensic setting, evaluating people charged with the most serious criminal offenses. Sixteen months reading human behavior at its most extreme teaches you one thing fast: how to get past what someone’s telling you and see what’s actually driving the decision. That’s not a metaphor I use with executives — it’s the literal skill I use on them. Most consultants react to what a CEO says the problem is. I was trained to find what’s underneath it. How the Work Actually Happens We find the pattern. Not “leadership style” — the specific behavior that shows up under pressure and quietly runs the company into a wall. The decision you keep re-making. The hire you keep avoiding. The conversation you keep having in your head instead of in the room. We name it, out loud, without the corporate padding. Then we disrupt it — deliberately, on purpose, on a schedule — until the new behavior is the automatic one. Not a seminar. Not a one-time breakthrough you feel good about for a month. A rebuilt habit, tested against your actual business, week over week. If you also want to hear how this plays out in other people’s companies before you talk to me, that’s what the show is for. Every week on A New Direction , I sit down with CEOs, founders, and the researchers behind the science of leadership performance — the decisions that built their companies, the mistakes that nearly ended them, and the breakthrough that changed everything. The podcast is where you can watch the diagnosis happen to someone else first. Who This Is For This works if you’re the CEO or founder of a $5M–$50M company, you already know — or strongly suspect — that you’re the bottleneck, and you’re willing to look at that directly instead of managing around it. This doesn’t work if you want a quick fix. I can’t help you if what you’re after is a pep talk before your next board meeting. I work with people who value authenticity and effort. If you’re ready to dig in, find the root cause, and grow — keep reading. Your Growth Journey Starts Here Big idea, bold goal, or a wall you can’t explain — start the conversation. Schedule your audio session and tell me the one thing about your business that doesn’t add up. I’ll tell you, straight, whether it’s a business problem or a personal one wearing a business costume. Thank you everyone for listening to A New Direction with Coach Jay. Please tell your friends. Give us a thumbs up on YouTube. Wherever you may be listening…please give A New Direction with Coach Jay a 5 star review.

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  A New Direction

  A New Direction with Coach Jay Hits 400

  Sep 16, 202656 min

  Inside Episode 400: What A New Direction with Coach Jay Uncovered About My Life, Values, and Purpose Four hundred conversations in, A New Direction with Coach Jay finally turned the microphone around on its own host. For episode 400, Steve Riddle — founder of CoachStation and author of Falling Into Leadership , and a two-time guest on the show — sat across from me and asked the questions I usually ask everyone else. Not softball ones, either. Steve went after my life, the challenges that shaped it, and the choices that took a farm kid’s kind of grit and built it into the coach, speaker, and podcast host I am today. From there, the conversation on A New Direction with Coach Jay moved into the work itself — my coaching philosophy, and what actually holds it together. Stev e pushed past the surface and asked what writing four books taught me, what my philosophy has meant in practice, and how that philosophy shows up when I’m working with a competitive youth athlete or a business leader trying to find their footing. Coaching isn’t a technique you apply the same way twice. It’s a set of principles you adapt to the person in front of you, and Steve made me articulate that out loud, maybe for the first time this clearly. The heart of the episode, though, was core values and purpose — the two things every guest on this show eventually circles back to, whether they mean to or not. Steve asked me directly: after 400 conversations, what do I actually believe drives people? I talked about the values that have anchored me through every version of this business, from A New Direction with Coach Jay to Real Estate Right Now to the coaching work with business execs and owners to young athletes, and why purpose has to survive contact with hard seasons or it isn’t real purpose at all. Then Steve turned to the pattern recognition — what 400 interviews across authors, entrepreneurs, and leaders have taught me about people and business that you wouldn’t expect. A New Direction with Coach Jay has never been a highlight reel, and this episode wasn’t either. It was a direct look at what changes in you when you’ve spent years listening for what makes people tick, and what that means for anyone building a business, a team, or a life on purpose. Please thank the sponsors of A New Direction Podcast – Jay Izso Linda Cr aft Team, REALTORS® when you are looking to sell your home or buy a new home for more than 40 years Linda Craft Team, REALTORS® is there to help you! Their thousands of clients call them “The Legends of Customer Service”. They will also tell you that the relationship is their first priority. Whether you are in the Greater Raleigh Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina or anywhere in the world, they can help you with your home dreams. Contact our friends at the Linda Craft Team at www.LindaCraft.com Your Business Isn’t Broken. It’s the Person Running It. The marketing is fine. The team is capable. The market is there. And the business still won’t move. You’ve read the books. Hired the consultants. Rebuilt the org chart twice. None of it touched the actual problem, because the actual problem was never in the business. It’s fear. It’s ego. It’s the story you keep telling yourself about what you can and can’t do. It’s the “personal stuff” you’ve been leaving at the door every morning — except it doesn’t stay there. It walks in with you and runs the company. I’m Jay Izso. I’m an Executive Performance Coach, and I work with CEOs and founders of $5M–$50M companies who’ve hit a wall they can’t explain. I don’t fix algorithms. I fix the behaviors and mindsets that are strangling your growth. No Motivational Platitudes I find the personal behavioral pattern that’s driving the business dysfunction. Then I help you disrupt it so the company can actually grow. That’s the whole method. No vision boards. No affirmations on the monitor. Diagnostics, intervention, results. If you want to feel better about your business, hire a hype man. If you want it to change, keep reading — because where I learned to do this isn’t a place most coaches have ever set foot. Raised on the Farm. Trained in Psychology. My approach comes from two places most coaches never set foot in. The farm. I grew up a farmhand in Ithaca, Nebraska — population 100. I started working at nine. By fourteen I was castrating boars, and nobody was coming to do it for me if I froze. By the time I left for college I’d spent a decade learning that you can’t cheat the harvest, that pain is part of the job, and that the work gets done whether you feel like it or not. That’s not a charming childhood story. It’s why I don’t flinch when a CEO’s real problem turns out to be uglier than the one they hired me to fix. I’ve done harder, dirtier work than a hard conversation. The forensic unit. In graduate school at Washington State University, I trained under Dr. Thomas Brigham — co-author of the Handbook of Applied Behavior Analysis — in a human behavior lab built around real-world problems, not theory. I followed that into a Clinical Psych II role at Eastern State Hospital in Medical Lake, Washington: a forensic setting, evaluating people charged with the most serious criminal offenses. Sixteen months reading human behavior at its most extreme teaches you one thing fast: how to get past what someone’s telling you and see what’s actually driving the decision. That’s not a metaphor I use with executives — it’s the literal skill I use on them. Most consultants react to what a CEO says the problem is. I was trained to find what’s underneath it. How the Work Actually Happens We find the pattern. Not “leadership style” — the specific behavior that shows up under pressure and quietly runs the company into a wall. The decision you keep re-making. The hire you keep avoiding. The conversation you keep having in your head instead of in the room. We name it, out loud, without the corporate padding. Then we disrupt it — deliberately, on purpose, on a schedule — until the new behavior is the automatic one. Not a seminar. Not a one-time breakthrough you feel good about for a month. A rebuilt habit, tested against your actual business, week over week. If you also want to hear how this plays out in other people’s companies before you talk to me, that’s what the show is for. Every week on A New Direction , I sit down with CEOs, founders, and the researchers behind the science of leadership performance — the decisions that built their companies, the mistakes that nearly ended them, and the breakthrough that changed everything. The podcast is where you can watch the diagnosis happen to someone else first. Who This Is For This works if you’re the CEO or founder of a $5M–$50M company, you already know — or strongly suspect — that you’re the bottleneck, and you’re willing to look at that directly instead of managing around it. This doesn’t work if you want a quick fix. I can’t help you if what you’re after is a pep talk before your next board meeting. I work with people who value authenticity and effort. If you’re ready to dig in, find the root cause, and grow — keep reading. Your Growth Journey Starts Here Big idea, bold goal, or a wall you can’t explain — start the conversation. Schedule your audio session and tell me the one thing about your business that doesn’t add up. I’ll tell you, straight, whether it’s a business problem or a personal one wearing a business costume. Thank you everyone for listening to A New Direction with Coach Jay. Please tell your friends. Give us a thumbs up on YouTube. Wherever you may be listening…please give A New Direction with Coach Jay a 5 star review.

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  A New Direction

  6 Pillars of Leadership Where Most of Us Struggle

  Sep 9, 202658 min

  6 Pillars of Leadership Most Bosses Get Backwards You can’t cheat the harvest. Not in farming, not in funeral service, and not in leadership. That’s the line I kept coming back to after tonight’s conversation with Jay Jacobson , author of Lead by Legendary Example — a book forged inside a profession with zero room to fake competence: funeral service. Forty years of leading people through the worst day of their lives taught Jacobson something most executive coaches never pick up in a classroom. Leadership isn’t a title, a slide deck, or a TED Talk. It’s what you do when nobody’s applauding. Jacobson’s framework rests on six leadership pillars — Integrity, Presence, Vision, Servant Leadership, Adaptability, and Mentorship — and the mistake most bosses make is treating them like a checklist instead of a practice. They chase vision before they’ve earned presence. They demand loyalty before they’ve modeled integrity. Tonight, Jacobson walked us through a grandfather-and-grandson story that reframed what dignity in leadership actually looks like, and a piece of his own history — assisting families after the Sioux City air disaster and later testifying before the U.S. Senate — that shows exactly what these leadership pillars look like when the stakes are real and there’s no script to follow. Here’s the part that stuck with me most: trust isn’t built in the big speech. It’s built in the routine call you actually prepared for. I tell my coaching clients and hockey parents the same thing — character shows up in the boring repetitions, not the highlight reel. If you run a team, a business, or a household, this episode hands you a mirror. Which of these six pillars are you skipping because it’s inconvenient, and which one is quietly costing you the trust you’re trying to build? You don’t have to take my word for how it unfolds — watch it yourself. The full replay of tonight’s episode of A New Direction with Jay Jacobson is live now on YouTube and available everywhere you get your podcasts. If you lead people — at work, at home, or on a bench — block out 45 minutes and let Jacobson’s version of legendary leadership put yours to the test. Then tell me in the comments: which pillar are you getting backwards? Jay Jacobson ‘s book, “ Lead by Legendary Example ” is a combination of real stories, and practical psychological and behavioral practices that anyone can employ right now. You don’t have to wait to make things happen with these 6 pillars of leadership, you can start today, this very moment. This book is also special because not only is it a book that you will read, but at the end of each chapter he has simple practical exercises that you can do to change you. And the second half of the book are 10 sessions that you can even train your team on. The real point of the book however is one that many of us struggle to comprehend. Change does not come from performing better, real change occurs because we changed our internal selves. We make a choice through our mind, will and emotions to change the way think so that we can become the leaders and practice the leadership that can be within all of us…if we make that choice. I loved this book. It read so fast. The stories are real and the insights that Jay Jacobson pulls out of them are relevant and poignant. This book is for everyone. Not simply “business leaders” it is for all of us who interact with others, because we are all leaders in one way or another. This book is for you and me! Get your copy of Lead by Legendary Example by clicking here. A New Direction is so grateful to our sponsors, please reach out to them and tell them thank you, and please LIKE their social media pages. Linda Craft Team, Realtors for more than 40 years their customers call their customer service “legendary”. Linda and her team built their business on building relationships and understanding your home is full of memories that are important to you! It is about the relationship, not the transaction. So if you have a question, want a free market analysis of your home just click on over to www.LindaCraft.com and Check out their Facebook Page ABOUT YOUR HOST Meet Jay Izso Executive Performance Coach | Host of A New Direction Every week on A New Direction , I sit down with CEOs, founders, and the researchers behind the science of leadership performance. The conversations go deep. We talk about the decisions that built companies, the mistakes that nearly destroyed them, and the personal breakthroughs that changed everything. But here’s what most people don’t know about me: the show is an extension of the work I do every day with executives behind closed doors. Who I Am I’m an Executive Performance Coach. I work with CEOs and founders of $5M-$50M companies who have hit a wall they can’t explain. The marketing looks fine. The team is capable. The market is there. But the business won’t move. The problem, almost every time, is the person running it. I find the personal behavioral patterns that are driving the business dysfunction. Then I help the CEO disrupt those patterns so the company can grow. That’s it. No motivational platitudes. No vision boards. Diagnostics, intervention, results. Where This Comes From My approach comes from two places most coaches never set foot in. The farm. I grew up as a farmhand in Ithaca, Nebraska—population 100. I started working at nine years old. By the time I left for college, I’d spent a decade learning that you can’t cheat the harvest, pain is part of the job, and the work has to get done whether you feel like it or not. I was fourteen the first time I had to castrate boars. Nobody was going to do it for me. That lesson never left: sometimes you have to do things afraid. The forensic psychology unit. In graduate school at Washington State University, I trained under Dr. Thomas Brigham—co-author of the Handbook of Applied Behavior Analysis —in a human behavior lab focused on real-world problems. I then served in a Clinical Psych II role at Eastern State Hospital in Medical Lake, Washington, a forensic setting where I conducted psychological evaluations of individuals charged with the most serious criminal offenses. Sixteen months assessing human behavior at its most extreme taught me how to cut through defenses, identify what’s really driving someone’s decisions, and see what they can’t see in themselves.

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  A New Direction

  Mastering the $250,000 Interview

  Sep 2, 202658 min

  Mastering the $250,000 Interview: 4 Lessons From Our Conversation With Craig A. Fleming What actually separates the candidate who walks away with a $250,000 offer from the one who walks away with “we’ll be in touch”? That’s the question we sat down with on this episode of A New Direction, talking with Craig A. Fleming , author of Mastering the $250,000 Interview . You can catch the full episode now on your favorite podcast platform. But whether you’ve already listened or you’re catching up now, here’s what the book — and the conversation — comes down to: the interview most people prepare for isn’t the interview that’s actually happening. Here are just four of the ideas and thoughts Craig shared. 1. The Interview Starts Long Before You Sit Down The biggest myth about high-stakes interviewing is that it’s a performance you can improvise your way through if you’re smart enough or charming enough. At the six-figure level, nobody wins an interview by winging it. Preparation and rehearsal aren’t about memorizing a script — canned answers get spotted from a mile away in an executive-level interview. They’re about doing the unglamorous work beforehand so that, by the time you’re in the room, you already sound like the answer to a question the company hasn’t even asked out loud yet. The candidates who get the offer aren’t the ones improvising the best answers. They’re the ones who rehearsed until the room had nothing left to catch them off guard. 2. Every Question Has a Question Underneath It Here’s where a lot of good candidates lose a great interview: they answer the question they were asked instead of the question that was actually meant. Craig give us insights that you must build skills around the idea that reading between the lines is the real skill — figuring out what a company is genuinely looking for, versus what the job posting says on paper. The book points out as well as Craig does on the show, it is rarely about whether you can technically do the job. It’s about whether you can solve the specific problem that’s keeping someone up at night. That means the strongest interview answers aren’t the most polished ones — they’re the ones that show you actually understood the problem behind the posting. 3. Your Résumé Isn’t Your Life Story — It’s a Sales Document One of the more useful reframes in the book: stop treating your résumé, and the interview itself, like a formality where you simply report your history. Start treating both like what they actually are — a sales pitch. The résumé’s job is to get you into the room. The interview’s job is to close. That shift changes everything about how you prepare. You’re not there to be interesting. You’re there to prove, point by point, that you’re the fix for a specific, expensive problem. Every answer in a $250,000 interview should be doing sales work, whether you think of it that way or not. 4. It Doesn’t End When You Leave the Room Maybe the most eye-opening piece of Mastering the $250,000 Interview: the evaluation doesn’t stop at the door. Long before — and long after — you sit across from a hiring committee, there’s a silent search running in the background. Your social media. Your online footprint. Everything a company can find about you without ever asking you a single question in an interview. The book’s point isn’t to make you paranoid. It’s to make you aware. What shows up in that silent search can either back up everything you said in the interview or quietly undercut it. Either way, it’s part of the interview now, whether it’s on the official agenda or not. Listen to the Full Interview We covered all four of these in depth in this episode of A New Direction with Coach Jay Izso — why interview preparation matters more than raw talent, how to read what a company is really asking, why your résumé and your interview answers should both be doing sales work, and what the silent search means for how you show up online long before you ever get invited to interview. If you’re heading into an interview where real stakes — and real money — are on the line, this is worth the listen. Find the episode on your favorite podcast platform — Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen. And if this hit home, share it with someone who has a big interview coming up. They’ll thank you for it. Craig Fleming’ s book, “ Maste ring the $250,000 Interview: A Step-by-Step System ” is simple the best book on interviewing I have ever read. And I have read dozens of books on the subject and have taught interviewing at the college level. While the book may be geared toward the executive interview, the lessons and structure can apply to any interview situation. Every chapter is filled with practical guidance from the psychology of how to read and interpret the job listing, to the psychology of how the interviewers think, to what your online brand and reputation may say about you that is holding you back from getting that next level job or promotion. Craig touches on topics like spending days preparing for the interview, how to express confidence without being over confident, demonstrating your value so you can demand the best salary and benefits, how to turn your resume from experience to a story that demonstrates results and so much more! This book was quite convicting for me, because I say in myself that I have developed habitual words and phrases that are not helping me in my communication. That if I were in the interview situation would probably disqualify me pretty quickly. If you want the edge in your next interview you must read this book. Get your copy of Mastering the $250,000 Interview by Clicking Here. Please reach out and like A New Direction sponsors: Linda Craft Team, REALTORS – w ww.LindaCraft.com Linda Craft Team Facebook Page – Click Here For 40 years helping people all over the world make a transition in life. They take the stress out of the home selling and home buying process. When you are looking for consistent, top of their game, professional real estate service with a track record of successfully helping 1000’s, check out Linda Craft Team, REALTORS . Hey…do me a favor and please tell your friends to subscribe to A New Direction on their favorite podcast platform and give us a 5 star rating we are so grateful when you do! ABOUT YOUR HOST Meet Jay Izso Executive Performance Coach | Host of A New Direction Every week on A New Direction , I sit down with CEOs, founders, and the researchers behind the science of leadership performance. The conversations go deep. We talk about the decisions that built companies, the mistakes that nearly destroyed them, and the personal breakthroughs that changed everything. But here’s what most people don’t know about me: the show is an extension of the work I do every day with executives behind closed doors. Who I Am I’m an Executive Performance Coach. I work with CEOs and founders of $5M-$50M companies who have hit a wall they can’t explain. The marketing looks fine. The team is capable. The market is there. But the business won’t move. The problem, almost every time, is the person running it. I find the personal behavioral patterns that are driving the business dysfunction. Then I help the CEO disrupt those patterns so the company can grow. That’s it. No motivational platitudes. No vision boards. Diagnostics, intervention, results. Where This Comes From My approach comes from two places most coaches never set foot in. The farm. I grew up as a farmhand in Ithaca, Nebraska—population 100. I started working at nine years old. By the time I left for college, I’d spent a decade learning that you can’t cheat the harvest, pain is part of the job, and the work has to get done whether you feel like it or not. I was fourteen the first time I had to castrate boars. Nobody was going to do it for me. That lesson never left: sometimes you have to do things afraid. The forensic psychology unit. In graduate school at Washington State University, I trained under Dr. Thomas Brigham—co-author of the Handbook of Applied Behavior Analysis —in a human behavior lab focused on real-world problems. I then served in a Clinical Psych II role at Eastern State Hospital in Medical Lake, Washington, a forensic setting where I conducted psychological evaluations of individuals charged with the most serious criminal offenses. Sixteen months assessing human behavior at its most extreme taught me how to cut through defenses, identify what’s really driving someone’s decisions, and see what they can’t see in themselves.

  ListenShow Notes

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