Powerful And Unpolished

Welcome back to Powerful and Unpolished. I'm Tim Salmans, your host. Just a reminder: Powerful and Unpolished is sponsored by Insights for Choice, bringing power to purpose. That's what Insights for Choice is about. I'm looking forward to today's guest. We have a variety of different guests, and today is one that I'm excited about.

His approach to leadership, his background, his skill base—I think you'll find it very interesting. Our guest today is Christian "Boo" Boucousis. I actually like your call name, Boo. I dig it. I don't think anyone calls me Christian, mate, so Boo's fine.

Boo is a former fighter pilot, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and CEO of Afterburner. After his military career was cut short by an autoimmune condition, he rebuilt his career in the humanitarian aviation sector and helped grow a company operating in Afghanistan into a $200 million enterprise.

Today, Boo helps leaders and organizations improve decision-making, communication, accountability, and execution under pressure through leadership principles used by elite military teams. Welcome to the show, Boo. Thanks, Timothy. I appreciate the opportunity. I'm very honored to be considered a useful guest for you.

What I love about this is we learn about people's businesses, but I call it life with a slice of business. We learn about you, we learn about the people behind you. My guest last week was a professional stuntman, and a couple weeks ago was a spiritual leader. We cover the spectrum. I'm going to jump in here because your background and expertise is in leadership. How did becoming a fighter pilot support you in developing your leadership skills? I'm sure you were a leader before then.

It's interesting. I wish I had expertise. I think the minute you start to think you've got expertise, you're setting yourself up to fail. I consider myself a leadership observer and practitioner. If you look at a fighter pilot in Australia, unlike the US, you can become a fighter pilot without going to college. I barely got through high school, and I have fairly chronic ADHD.

I'm not very good at structure or behavioral learning. I like to really understand the essence of things rather than just parrot back a process. For me, I always found school a little too fast. I was like, "Hey, whoa, just slow down. I need to look at this problem in 20 different ways. I can't just take what you're telling me."

That's not good for school, but it's been handy for life. It takes a little longer to learn things, but once you've learned it, it locks into a steel trap. If you think of my journey: high school kid, I go to join the Air Force. I'm in the recruitment process at 18. I join when I'm 19, and I'm selected to be a pilot.

I don't have to worry about whether I'm going to be a pilot. It's just up to me to pass the course. I was put through our officer training school at the age of 19. I did a few leadership roles at school, but leadership when you've got guns is a completely different leadership model than being captain of the rowing team.

It was unlike business, and I think this is a real challenge for business: you learn to be a leader first, and then they skill you up afterwards. If you don't have the characteristics of a leader, you don't progress through the system because they don't want a great pilot that's a terrible leader.

We understand that to be a good leader, you need to be a good person. You need to have good self-leadership and self-governance. When you go through officer training, it's three months. We call it the knife and fork school because they teach you how to eat a meal properly.

You go through the process and do a lot of exercises. You're learning about real entry-level leadership: self-leadership, making your bed every morning, passing inspection every month, cleaning the toilet with a toothbrush. All that good character-building stuff.

We have this idea in Australia called the SLJ, which is the shitty little job. They load you up with SLJs to make sure you're not too big for doing the basics, because survival as a fighter pilot is wholly dependent on investing in the basics and doing simple things exceptionally well.

You kind of start that journey out in the mountains in the snow, running through different scenarios, protecting a base with people shooting at you and bombs and grenades going off everywhere. For a 19-year-old, it's a big step up from what I was used to.

From there, I go into pilot training. When you're trained as a pilot, the course is oriented towards training a captain. They don't want you to graduate without the ability to be a captain—if you go into transport, to be a captain of a transport airplane, or if you're a fighter pilot, to be the captain of the airplane since you're the only one sitting in it. That leadership ideal is instilled early on. The core practice in all air forces, not just Australia but here in the United States as well, is that the best way to lead is to embrace criticism and challenge and to be a growth-minded person.

If you're committed to growth and open-minded and always committed to learning, leadership sort of looks after itself. There are approximately 400 missions to become a fighter pilot—training missions that start with up, down, left, right, fast, and slow. That's GF1, general flying one, the first mission you fly. All the way to the mission you graduate as a fighter pilot: four airplanes in contested airspace dropping two 2,000-pound bombs on a target. Each one is incrementally more difficult than the one before.

Business recruits talent and skill set. The Air Force recruits mindset because no one has the skills or talent to be a fighter pilot until you're in the system. As you go through the process, there are a lot of questions: How much do you want it? What sort of work have you done? What have you done to prove yourself worthy of being given a seat in a $50 million jet? For me, my parents owned a supermarket. I was working as a 12-year-old packing and unpacking boxes. I worked at Blockbuster Video when I was 14, worked at a bar, mowed lawns. Every cent I earned went into flying. Before I joined the Air Force, I'd already flown a Cessna solo when I was 15 years old.

We talk a lot about a life of purpose and a fulfilling life. They're not actually connected to leadership—they're two very different things. All of the stuff I did and the hard work and effort to become a pilot is sometimes the opposite of leadership because it's very selfish. You want to be a pilot. It's highly competitive. You need to get in the top two or three percentile of the program to be a fighter pilot.

What's interesting is you have a system built to absorb that selfishness because the way we lead is highly structured. If you think of a fighter pilot, we always operate as a pair, as a minimum. There's always two: a leader and a wingman.

Your wingman's job is: don't hit lead, don't hit the ground, don't run out of gas. In a way, that's leadership—you're responsible for that. I want to jump in on that idea: from my experience in dealing with leadership, really good leaders know how to be good followers.

From my experience, it's the aspect of understanding that I can see what the lead is doing and I can support the lead in doing what it needs to be doing. Yeah, and it's true. It's actually a chapter in my book, Afterburner Advantage. We talk about followership, and every leader follows.

There is no supreme leader. You're always the meat in a sandwich somewhere, right? Even Elon Musk has to answer to someone. The thing about being a good follower as you walk through the rungs of leadership is that because you followed well, you understand the problem you're solving as a leader. We see this disconnect all the time in large enterprise with Afterburner.

It's the people making the decisions and building strategy who haven't actually done the job for decades. They're completely disjointed from reality. As a fighter pilot, we have this practice called debriefing, and debriefing is really useful because in that conversation you connect aspiration with reality every day.

The method we crafted at Afterburner is called ORCA, O-R-C-A: objective, result, cause, action. When you're having conversations, you need to be objective. You need to talk and engage in a way that's driven by metrics and driven by fact.

You define the future not by intention but by destination. The R is reality—the results, the honest look of where we are. One of the things we see a lot with my team is companies telling themselves stories. They create myths. They say, "This happened because of this," and we ask, "Where's the evidence of that?" It happened once seventeen years ago, and suddenly you say, "We don't do that because of this." There's no context to fear. It's just, "Everything is difficult and everything can go wrong, so let's not make any decisions."

The great thing about ORCA is the first thing it does is frame up the context where we're going and the reality where we are. In that gap we can embrace curiosity, and that's what the C stands for—cause or curious as to why there's a gap between aspiration and reality.

In the world of fighter pilots, this conversation is a self-assessment. You're in a room with your peers, very experienced people, other leaders. What they're looking to understand is your level of competency by self-diagnosis, and then if there's a concept or something you don't understand, they step in and help you out.

But they don't divorce you from the self-discovery journey. That's what true learning is. ADHD people do really well as fighter pilots because they're given the framework to really be curious and truly understand why they do it this way, not just do what you're told. Most people think in the military you do what you're told.

It's actually the opposite. It's be creative, figure it out yourself, and achieve the mission. Until you actually question whatever's before you, whatever the situation is, it's not yours. You can't own it. Just doing what you're told doesn't mean you're operating on an optimal level of engagement.

There's the aspect of really learning to have that insight. When you talk about being curious, the one thing about being curious for an individual is you're open to receiving. We're also in a world right now where a lot of people are in reaction. They're stuck in reaction.

There's a common energy they're responding to, and that gets in their way. They're not genuinely curious. They're curious about feeding their existing biases and beliefs. People think they're curious, and it's like, well, if you read the same book and look at the same feed on your social media, you're telling me you're curious?

Look, I read all these books, I do all of this. But it's all feeding what you already believe. You're not genuinely curious. When's the last time you read a book on spirituality? When's the last time you read a book on whether angels really exist? That's what curiosity is.

Then the A in ORCA is the action, and that's the most important part. You can't think your way to growth. You grow through action. That's the piece missing in most people and most organizations. We're pretty good at raking over the coals, assigning blame, and telling everyone the world's just too hard.

But we don't do anything about it. As a fighter pilot, the way you become better is by applying the lesson you learned the day before. That's the key—and being given the leeway to make the mistake. You never come back from a mission as a junior pilot and get told, "You're a loser, you're an idiot, you didn't do the job." There's just an expectation that you did your best.

That's the contract as a fighter pilot. I'm not going to tell you that you need to learn 228 checklist actions. The expectation is you know those actions by heart to be a competent fighter pilot and be the best fighter pilot you can be. So it's up to me to go and deliver on the aspiration.

That's very engaging. We accidentally in business drive accountability to the business. We don't allow people to design accountability for themselves. Accountability is wonderful because if you're accountable for something, you can do something. If you're accountable to a generic goal that relies on other people, we create the Swiss cheese where the mouse can hide in the organization.

If you were to really define the difference between a fighter pilot and everyone else, it's that we're completely reprogrammed as a human being. That's the reality. No one's done an fMRI on a fighter pilot's brain. I really want someone to do it. I can't find any.

But I would guarantee you almost that it operates differently from the average person because everything has to land back in the factual world. We never accept an opinion. We never accept a point of view. It has to be grounded in reality. You can have an opinion, but it has to be fact-based and peer-checked to be valid.

That makes life easy because you don't really get caught up in the BS that gets flung around. I have conversations with my kids and my wife, and they'll see something on social media, and I'm like, "Find me the paper. Who wrote the paper on that? Go find me the peer-reviewed study. Run the physics of what you're telling me." If you think that's a chemtrail coming out of an airplane, not condensed water, and it's a contrail, show me the proof.

Humans operate at the generic level. We have 11 million bits a second of processing in the brain and we've got to make decisions, so we have to look at the world with an overly simplistic view. Otherwise, life will crush you. There's truth to the statement that ignorance is bliss. But unfortunately, ignorance doesn't build community, doesn't build people, doesn't allow debate, doesn't let sunlight into your blind spots. It doesn't open up to possibility.

On one level ignorance is bliss, but if you're just sitting in a burning house, that ignorance isn't going to last very long. After I had my business in Afghanistan, I'd been doing it for about three years, and I almost made a decision to be ignorant. Because the amount of complexity we deal with every day was making my head spin. There are so many moving parts. We would have Afghan nationals working for us, Nepalese, Indians, Americans, South Africans. Everyone's different cultures, different religions, different problems.

People getting blown up in IEDs. I had PTSD after I got home because you're just in fight mode. You've got the body armor on. Every day is a fight. But that's what happens to people when you're fully engaged in every aspect of life.

There's a lot to process. Let me ask you this: how did you manage the PTSD when you got home? Self-awareness, I guess. Without sounding arrogant, me and my business partner, Tom, at the time, we were so effective at what we did.

We were really good because there was a massive vacuum. Basically, you didn't have to be that good to be really good. Every conversation and everything you did had impact on someone's life. Even just building the Kabul to Kandahar road—we didn't build it, but we were part of the project. That opened up a trade route that allowed the economy of Afghanistan to thrive. The problem was Hamid Karzai stole all the money, but you can't control that. You're employing hundreds of Afghans, paying salaries, giving people a life. They're feeding their families.

I remember when one of my first team members was killed in a roadside bomb, and I had to fly to Nepal and meet his family. This guy was supporting 30 people on his $6,000 a month salary. Now he's gone, and I'm responsible for making sure we set his family up with a trust and the kids can be supported.

I think why the world was so good after World War II is everyone had that experience. There's only a few of us that have it now. But when you understand the fragility of life and humanity and how quickly it can spiral if you don't respect a human being as an entity, humanity becomes more than an abstraction.

Ten years ago, you'd go for a run, you'd go for a walk, everyone would say hello. In Australia, you'd drive your car and you'd see someone and raise your finger, and they'd raise theirs. There'd be an acknowledgement that there's another human in my space.

Now it's just eyes down, look at the road, don't talk to anybody. It's like we've closed off to other people around us. We're afraid, or we perhaps lost the skill set through COVID of being social. My kids, particularly my daughter, who was prepubescent during COVID, had three years of dislocation without community, just sitting at home. They don't know how to function as a community.

That's what's inspired me to build this practice called Flawless Leadership. It's deeply human-centric. It acknowledges human-machine fusion, and that's not going anywhere. But if you're not careful, if you rely on technology too much, you're going to get killed.

You've got to understand that technology is an enabler, not a driver. If you have your notifications on your phone and your PC, the technology's driving you. You're reacting to it. If you turn it off and make a choice to go in and read things, you take control of the situation. These are the nuances we share because there's a lack of awareness.

I think the vast majority of the population are really good, wonderful, kind people. But technology is masking that a little bit because they don't have the mental capacity to demonstrate to others that they are that way. I'm in such agreement with you. I think people have the information, but they have it on such a generalized, elevated level that it gets taken for granted in who we are as human beings.

At the end of the day, every human being has an expiration date. Everything in this lifetime is temporary. So what are you doing in your experience, in your engagement, in your consideration of your fellow man and yourself? We learn so much from people being different. We learn so much by giving people space to engage and learn about each other. We get tripped up by this technology—what I call being stuck in headspace. We're almost like heads on a platter. These people know so much, they're processing so much, things are so great, but where's the heart?

We have a lot of leaders accomplishing great things, but internally they don't have the response of fulfillment. It's the human conditioning where we get stuck. There's a reason these algorithms have us: because we create the algorithms. We talk in generalities like, "Oh, the algorithm did this," or "The algorithm did that." It's like you told the algorithm what you do, so it's your algorithm. These technologies come in and affect who we are, and we don't realize this is the culture we're propagating for our own personal experience.

We're getting the dopamine hits, the serotonin hits. We're chasing those bumps. It gives leaders like you and me a responsibility to sit here and say, "This is great."

I use this analogy a lot. It's great that you can be a leader, but if you're in a horse race and you win at all costs, but you have to shoot that horse at the end of the race, you're not much of a leader. You might have been a leader in that one experience, but if you're on a horse where you pull out performance because you have such a balance and symbiosis with the animal, where you get it through a season or two of great races and then it goes out to pasture to stud, that's the sign of a real leader. That's the leader who wins the war as opposed to the leader who wins the battle.

I like to look at it through the lens of if-then. Every decision you make has a consequence. If I whip this horse to within an inch of its life, then it's going to die. I get the result, but is that the consequence I want for the win? Or if I invest in its training, diet, the whole deal, and I build a sustainable stable of horses, then within there there's going to be winners and losers. It's the constant pursuit of perfection, thinking you've got to get the juice out of the lemon all the time. Often you can't. It's just not going to happen.

When it doesn't happen, we get emotional and disappointed rather than accept that's just part of it. There are winners and losers. My job as a leader is to create the rising tide where there are more winners than losers, but it's going to happen and it's not the end of the world.

You mentioned something earlier about leaders being removed from the base level, the disconnect between the story and belief system and the reality. What is that disconnect? There's a lot of times that middle management, which is supposed to be the link between upper leadership and the ground level, becomes managing rather than leading. What are your thoughts around that?

They're not the same thing—management and leadership. I map that to mindset. If you're a manager, you're a fixed mindset. You're managing what exists. A leader is moving into a future that's unknown. You're going from here to there, and between here and there is unknown.

In the corporate world, unknown is considered a bad thing. It's risky because it's unknown, hence labeled as risk. You end up with very qualified, intelligent, highly paid people that are reasonably ineffective because anyone could do the job—they're just really doing what they're told.

I don't think that's by design. I don't think anyone sets out to create that culture. But the reality is that humans tend to lead in a way where they want the big ideas and they want a team to do them. They don't want to do the work anymore. They just want the big ideas, tell people what to do, and have the freedom and control that comes with leadership.

That leadership model is deeply human because it comes from our survival drivers. To survive, you want to accumulate as much stuff as possible because if something goes wrong, you've got a lot of stuff to live off. We have a culture where we don't understand why we always need more. Why do I need so much stuff? Why do my kids need 50,000 toys? That's an unconscious bias: "To survive, I need a lot of stuff."

That creates scarcity as you lead because there's only so much stuff to go around. I call it the avenger leader, where the leader has a team and lets them get on with it, but at the last minute they swoop in and save the day. Often they create the crisis they solve as a superhero.

We understand culturally that superheroes are rewarded. Boring people that don't have any problems make the world function. No one wants to listen to their story. There are all these programs, the human autopilot that sets us up to not be a great leader.

The studies show it: 70-plus percent of employees don't trust their leader. 69% think a leader's in the role for what they can get rather than what they can give. There's an excuse: that's how we're designed. When there's an existential threat, we come together. But there's not really an existential threat anymore. We're very comfortable.

There's a book written in 1996 called The Fourth Turning. It talks about how every fourth generation basically blows everything up. We're in the fourth turning now post-World War II. The first turning is the growth engine. The second turning is the custodian. The third turning is when selfishness starts to kick in. The fourth turning is revolution. I got nothing, you got everything.

We're in the fourth turning, and it's prescient that this book forecasted in the 2020s, back in 1996, that there's going to be some pushback, and we'll become a little more human again. When's the last time we had a crisis of humanity—Spanish flu, plague, World War? It's been a long time. Here we are in AI, and that's probably going to generate the biggest crisis for humanity since humanity started walking.

You're right about that. It's rich. If you think about World War II, Germany came out of World War I and had the Treaty of Versailles. They felt suppressed for many years, right? You can almost understand a population feeling so disgruntled they're never going to get out of this, so why not resort to somebody who gives you an illusion of power?

But in recent years, in the US it's like we're different. We've really pulled out the victim card, and our sense of entitlement has gotten so big. Someone's coming up to get me or something, playing this whole victim scenario because the rhetoric and propaganda buy into it. You're looking at your screens, all this news, and you're righteous about living in fear.

You need to show me the fact, show me the essence. If you want to change your world, go speak with your neighbor. That's your world. Go help a stranger, even someone who's not like you, even someone who's not in your line of thinking, but someone who's still out there living the human experience trying to get through today, trying to get through next week.

When you have somebody who puts themselves out there in their everyday life, that's where you change the world. It's so baffling how we've gotten so entitled and played the victim card in the last handful of years that it's going towards that cataclysmic thing.

People are willing to go into self-destruction just to be right rather than say, "Wait a minute. I'm human. They're human. We're all growing. We're all struggling." That's the heart of the opportunity. For leaders like you and me and other people, we get to sit here and say, "You have a lot of smart information. Where's the humanity in it? Where's the heart? Is there a heart in the process?"

It's very hard to engage the heart when you're always in the mind, which is what technology does. You can't have a roaming conversation with your PC. The social interaction we have through messaging and social platforms is needy engagement. I need validation. I need someone to text me so I don't feel alone. Whereas you used to go spend time with your friends and socialize.

We're talking extremes here. Obviously, people still go out and have friends and community. But there's a trend: if we're not careful, we become tech zombies. We only want to be with our people. It's like you never grow out of school because you're still connected with the people you knew 20 years later. You're meant to grow from those people. You're meant to grow into a husband and a wife, a mother and a father. You don't need to stay connected to the person you used to get drunk with on a Friday night.

This hyperconnectivity—the philosophy was, "Hey, let's have social media. It brings everyone together. We stay connected. We share wonderful information, and everyone's more informed and makes better decisions." But what we didn't realize is it just feeds your biases and keeps you stuck and connected to people you don't need to.

People with a million followers—what's the point? You influence people? You don't. You just tell stories. It's feeding the illusion. You're running a constantly playing movie of an alternate reality.

Unfortunately, there are all these studies now about how women only want to marry 5% of the population. They want this much money, this, this, this, and there's not that many men. Men want this type of woman, and there's not enough of that type. When we talk about debriefing, one of the really important elements is because it's objective in result, you can manage expectation better. It's not always about striving. Sometimes it's about moderating expectation, and I think moderation of expectation isn't happening.

There's this great story called The Bike Shed Effect. A group of people had to make a decision: building a new nuclear power station. They had the designs for the nuclear power station, the design for the bike sheds, and then they had to agree on what brand of coffee they wanted.

When they looked at the amount of time invested in the conversation, it was on what color they were going to paint the bike sheds. The power station was so complex, it was just, "Yeah, whatever, just do it." The coffee was too simple, "Whatever." But the bike sheds, now that's important. We tend to generalize and lose the detail that's actually important to make a decision. We make bad decisions and decisions that hold us back because we're constantly caught out by how hard things are. They're just hard. They're not too hard. They're realistically hard, and you can realistically get there, but you can't say, "I want to be Michael Jordan on Monday," and then arrive on Friday. There's a process.

In my book, Inner Wisdom, Outer Impact: Leading Your Life from the Inside Out, there's a chapter about attachment, and later there's a chapter about detachment. It's about how we get stuck when we get attached to a concept or idea. You're going to paint these sheds, this is now an important thing. But is this really what you want to create? Because at the end of the day, life is a creation experience.

We're all energy. Everything we do is an energy exchange in some form or fashion. The food we eat, the exercise we engage with. It's all an exchanging experience. How are we creating that experience? We get caught up in that bias—this is so simple, so we're just going to follow on that, and this is so complex. Somewhere, somehow, somebody feels the urge that they've got to get their version out there. Are you attached or are you not attached?

I think that whole idea of energy is important. You can get into the quantum physics side and get real technical about it. At a basic level, you only have so much energy per day, and I don't think we intentionally place it anywhere. When I do keynotes and there might be a thousand people in the room, I ask a question: "Who gets home after work every day or clocks out of the home office and feels like they've got nothing left in the tank?" The vast majority raise their hand.

And then your family gets that version of you. You're putting all your energy into work, all your energy into keeping busy for the sake of busy. You're not actually achieving anything. There's nothing left. You have to moderate your energy so you come home with some in the tank. Your family is the—that's a big part of my practice. I'm not here on stage to show you how to be a great leader and get more done with less and make a massive PNL.

That's going to happen, but if you do this stuff, it's going to happen as a result of you having a great home life and being there with your family, showing up slower, more thoughtful, making better decisions every day, and being more intentional about your time and attention.

When did the family come second? Through history it's been that way—Dad works in the mines all day and earns no money and drinks it away. It's always been there. But I don't think we had the elevated sense of self-awareness we have today. We have so much more awareness of the human mind, spirituality, psychology, and neuroscience. It's like we have this wasted opportunity because back then we didn't know better, whereas now we do, and it's a choice.

It wasn't a choice when you were working in a coal mine, but it's certainly a choice when you're working in a finance company. The whole idea of intentionality gets thrown around a lot: be an intentional leader, be an intentional person. I prefer to drill it down one layer: be a destination-driven leader and live a destination-driven life. You've got to arrive at these destinations. You can't just have intentions. You've got to get there.

If you start the day with good intentions to do a lot of work, that's a very different conversation with yourself than, "These are the three destinations I must arrive at today." It gets you focused. It pushes out the distraction. You get into flow state. Just that small shift—arrive rather than do. That's all you have to think about. A slight tweak.

I'm sitting here thinking: I call it the creation process. We are creative beings. We create our life every day, whether we own it or are responsible for it or not. You talked about the autopilot. I talk about autopilot all the time. We're driven by our old patterns, what's familiar, a lot of conditioning from our past programming.

You have one point about what you're doing for your family and what they get when you get home at the end of the day. A little bit ago, you talked about how women are seeking 5% of men and men are seeking a certain type of woman. It takes me to this point: it's about relationships. We're in relationships, but we forget the basic terminology: how are we relating? We almost engage with somebody based on how they're going to show up or how a situation is going to show up, and then I will respond.

That's a reactionary mindset. If you're operating in reaction, something else is operating you—whether it's technology, a situation, your past issues, whatever. When you realize, wait a minute, this is a relationship. I have the ability to relate. How am I going to be responsible? How am I going to be accountable for what I want to create in this world? You'd be surprised at how many people would be shocked that they created their relationship rather than the relationship happening to them.

Yesterday I watched Diary of a CEO, the interview with JD Vance, and I was very impressed. I haven't invested time and effort into learning about the guy, but what was really interesting is his core thematic: everything is a relationship. When you see things in the media and someone's angry at someone, he's like, "That's just normal." We're trying to negotiate with Iran, and they have different ideas than we do. We're trying to build a relationship, and every relationship has good things and bad things.

Instead of reacting to everything that goes wrong, we need to say, look—we're on the precipice of getting divorced. The relationship comes first. Let's finally invest in the time and effort to hear each other out, to understand what your expectations are as a husband, yours are.

And suddenly it's like, "Oh, okay, is that all you want? You just want a kiss every time I come home. That's it. Wow, it's easy." But we get so caught in what I want, looking from my eyeballs out, not the other person coming in.

I think this whole idea of difficult things—everything in business, everything in humanity is geared towards comfort, right? You don't have to cook a meal. It comes to you. You don't have to exercise. Just jab yourself with a needle and the weight comes off. We bring this convenience and expectation of the world into a relationship. What do you mean I have to look after the kids? I don't want to look after the kids. It's like everything is a surprise.

Relationships need structure. They need expectation. They need the expectation to be revisited. We go through seasons in life. Who we are at 23 is very different from 43. Deep down, people are kind and want to help, but we get into our corners of the boxing ring and don't let people know what good looks like for me or what I need. We just get angry because I'm not getting it.

This is the thing about selflessness. There's no way of getting away from personal need. There's no supremely selfless human being. There's always the element of I need something and I can give something. It's almost like there's guilt associated with asking for something. In that commitment, I'm getting into something where no matter what goes wrong here, I just have to deal with it rather than say, "Well, what does richer look like? When we get poorer, what are we going to do about it?"

It's like, "No, no, I'm married. You said you'd be here no matter what and do anything for me, and you said that too, and now you're not doing it. Now I'm angry." It's a bit like the Prince Charming that everyone thinks about: I need to be Prince Charming and you need to be a princess, and that's the only way the world works. It's way messier than that.

Half of us don't even understand ourselves, let alone expecting our people in business or in relationships. Ding, ding, ding. Yes. The work that is available is our work. We want to sit here and be like, "Oh, my spouse, my girlfriend, my boyfriend, my kids"—whatever it is. We like to say, "What's the blame? What's the cause?" Something is responsible. I'm not responsible. You are. It's amazing what happens.

I heard this quote probably 25 years ago: "Amazing thing happens when you take responsibility for your life. There's nothing left to blame." Yes, I've had that philosophy my whole life. Luckily, it was trained into me as a fighter pilot, but it's very true.

What happens if you can't function in a relationship is you end up with artificial harmony. Artificial harmony is basically like a nail in the coffin because everyone's nice and friendly, but they're not.

We do this exercise when we come in with a big organization. We run a debrief with all the leaders in a room, and then we run a debrief one-on-one with each leader separately, and we debrief the same results. What we create is a harmony heat map, a trust heat map, where the same problem in private is expressed quite differently from when we're all in the room together—the causes behind it and the contributors.

We say, "Look, we want to bring these two worlds together," because a good culture is really what people say and do outside the room as much as what they say and do inside the room. If they're saying something in private that's different, that's the version of the story they're taking to their people. They're just keeping up appearances, and then the story that they believe is the story they're telling. We wonder how companies get dislocated with everyone doing different things and creating chaos and reacting everywhere. It's because we don't have that level of alignment, clarity, honesty, and integrity in the room that we do when we're by ourselves.

That's where the fellowship comes in. If you think of a fighter pilot leader, people think of leadership as a hierarchy. You're the chief of the village, you're the leader. But in the world of the fighter pilot, the leader is whoever's leading the mission, not the squadron. The leader is oriented towards the impact they're trying to make in the business or the impact they're trying to make.

That's vastly different from business where they set up project teams with a project manager, but that project manager still reports to the hierarchy. It should be the opposite. The project manager's the one getting the job done. The hierarchy needs to answer to them. That doesn't happen, though.

But we're preaching to the choir here because I'm right there with you. It's honoring leadership so you can get the results that you truly want to create. Not the titles, not the status. If you want to see a really powerful leader, they bring the people up around them to surpass them. That's a powerful leader, not bringing people up to follow.

Even in relationships, boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife—there are going to be days, times, seasons when you're the strong one and maybe you're not the strong one or whatever that is. It's how do you show up in the fellowship and be a leader on multiple levels? Because this living experience, this thing we call life, is many layers of experience that we get to learn through, grow through, and open up to.

For 17 or 18 years, I did simulation experiential training around child sex abuse. I remember speaking with forensic interviewers, police officers, caseworkers. When I would debrief with them, I'd ask, "What was your mindset coming into the experience?" They really wanted to save and protect this child. Great, noble idea, noble concept.

But I said, "Why did you make it about you?" They didn't understand. "What do you mean? I didn't know I was making it about me." And I said, "Well, you had this idea. You wanted to save this child. The assault had already taken place, so what were you saving them from other than building a case? And you asked questions based on what you wanted to know rather than what the child had to offer."

They kind of came to what I call the hero experience. The problem with heroes is we don't need heroes in this world. Heroes create villains in villainous situations so they can shine. What we need is leaders. We need empowered, impactful leaders that can actually make a difference. A lot of them were very grateful for that awareness because they didn't really know. They just had good intentions. They didn't realize they were missing a lot of information because there was a certain bias in place.

In that short conversation, you've labeled the avenger effect, the superhero leader. You've labeled intention over destination—two very different things. Looking at the world, how we're engineered—it's not a bad thing, it's just the program, how it works until you figure it out—is you're always in it for you. It's what's in it for me.

The world is full of well-intentioned people that create a lot of damage. That's the righteous: people who think they're good, do good things, and believe in good things, so therefore everything they look at, feel, or do or touch is good. If you're brought up in a particular sect or religion or community structure where you believe good is this, and if someone's not that, then they're bad. Or they're your villain.

Why I'm committed to this process and why I don't let go of my fighter pilot past when I really should, because I'm well past my use-by date, is everyone wants to be growth-minded. Everyone wants to be well-intentioned. Everyone wants to do the right thing. But no one shows them how. That's what debriefing does. The A in a debrief is the how. The O is the intention, the R is the reality, the C is the curiosity, but none of it means anything if you don't do something. That's what drives growth. The little tweaks in the actions.

I've lived in the United Kingdom, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Afghanistan, Dubai, and the United States. I'll tell you one thing: strip away religion, strip away politics, strip away everything, everyone's the same. Everyone just wants to have their family, wants their kids to be successful, doesn't want stress. We're not actually that different.

I love that you're saying that. When you strip that all away, we're all the same, and I almost wish we could go back to being like third or fourth graders with that kind of curiosity and openness to receiving. The only reason you believe something is because someone's told you it. That's it. It's a fabrication. It's a dream. Just as someone has given you information to believe something, you can also undo that belief. But the fastest way to undo a belief is to behave differently.

Even though behaviors are a byproduct of biases and beliefs, to change belief and biases, you have to act. You can't outthink a bias. You can't change a belief because someone tells you to believe something else. That's just called an argument. If I'm a Christian and you're a Muslim and I believe Muslims are bad and you believe Christians are bad, we're not going to function as two humans.

But in four years of living in that part of the world, we never had this conversation. It was never an issue. Everyone just got on with their job and helped people and built roads. That was across the board—gnarly ex-Marines, 16-year-old kids who pray five times a day. Everyone got on with it because the infinite amount of need in that part of the world meant that everyone just pulled together.

When there's an infinite amount of want in the first world and an infinite amount of need in the third world, those two paradigms create a very different culture.

My friend, we could talk shop. We could just sit down and have a pint or two and talk for a while. I just want to thank you for being on the show today. It is a real gift. Thank you for your time, thank you for your wisdom, and thank you for what you bring to this process and how we bring our energies there to bring synergy and growth to those who are listening.

It was a pleasure. I want to let the listeners know that Boo has two different websites. One is callmeboo.com—Boo is spelled B-O-O. Or www.afterburner.com. Those are the two places to resource your information, right, Boo? They are. You can also just type my name, Boucousis, B-O-U-C-O-U-S-I-S. I'm the only one out there apart from my father and my son, so you'll find me.

If you check out his websites, there are leadership resources, insights from Afterburner, his book, The Afterburner Advantage. And what else? Flawless Leadership. So Flawless Leadership is a book coming out in October this year. Get that. Other than that, I just want to thank you. If you found this conversation useful, please hit the like button, share it with your friends. Boo, really grateful that you were here today. Maybe you'll come back again later on.

You're always welcome. All right, brother. Always wishing you the best. I want to thank everyone again for listening. Remember, Powerful and Unpolished is sponsored by Insights for Choice, bringing power to purpose. Until then, have a great day, have a great week, make it a great year. Cheers. Thank you for joining us today.