#306 Mastering the Art of Tech Leadership: Navigating Stress, Values, and Growth With Noah Cantor

0:00:02 - Mehmet
Hello, I'm welcome back to a new episode of the CTO show with Mehmet Today. I'm very pleased joining me Noah Cantor. Noah, the way I love to introduce my guests is I keep it to them to tell us more about what they do, a little bit of your background, and then we can take it from there. Okay, that sounds good. 

0:00:21 - Noah
So first I want to thank you for having me on the show. I appreciate the invitation and look forward to sharing what I know with your audience. So, hi everybody, I'm Noah. 

I currently live in New Zealand and I'm a tech leadership coach. I help tech leaders who are struggling with demotivated staff, teams that struggle to deliver or teams that have significant technical debt. Often the leaders I work with are feeling overwhelmed, stressed and frustrated and by working with me and following my program, they engage team members, enable operational flow and improve quality and performance so that they can reduce staff turnover and absences and create adequate time for strategy and business management and show up with clarity, authenticity and purpose. And now, when I talk about tech leaders, I'm not just referring to, say, ctos. I'm referring to both formal and informal leaders. I work with anyone from the C-suite down to senior developers and kind of, if you're in the technology space and are responsible for people, then you might be a good fit. And most of my clients tend to be curious, interested in self-development and willing to self-reflect and they tend to understand that the ways that they see themselves, and therefore the ways that they behave, have an impact on both the team and the organization and performance. 

0:01:53 - Mehmet
That's great, noah, and thank you for the introduction, and thank you again for you to be with me here today. The area that you're specialized in is, in my opinion, a little bit underrated, because you mentioned the word self-development, and usually in tech, we don't hear these words much. So you must have thought something that made you choose to say hey, I think there's a gap, I think there's something missing, so I need to take the lead and become a tech leadership coach. So what was the reason behind this decision? 

0:02:43 - Noah
So it stems back all the way to the beginning of my leadership career and my experience, so I can start there and then go forward. So when I took my first real tech leadership role, it was in a truly agile software company and I genuinely I struggled. I remember coming home and talking with my wife and talking about how difficult it was to actually be there and be successful and do the work that needed to be done, and I told her that if I survived the transition that I was currently going through, I'd be much better off for it. So one of the biggest challenges is that everything that I thought I knew about technology and working in technology companies was wrong. So I'd been taught that developers couldn't be trusted, and that's why we had testers and test environments. That's why we didn't let developers support their own systems. I'd been taught that everybody has to have a bug tracking system because otherwise it would be impossible to keep track of all the rework that needed to be done. And also, again, developers can't be trusted. I'd been taught that everybody. I'd been taught that people outside the development team knew what customers wanted and understood their customers in a way that the team never could, because developers wanted to sit in the dark and code and be alone, and the best way to give customers what they wanted was to be predictable and orderly and deliver everything at once, and so I took this new job. And there were no agents that acted on behalf of the customer. Developers spoke directly with them any time they needed excuse me, developers spoke directly with customers any time they needed clarity. There was no bug tracking system, because bugs were triaged as soon as they were identified and they were either fixed this immediately or never fixed. But more than that, almost no bugs were ever written, and that was completely new to me. Our developers deployed directly to production on a daily basis. They incrementally released code that was useful and helpful to customers, and I really had none of the tools necessary to thrive in an environment like that. 

It was so different from what I'd experienced up to that point that I was lost. Every single day I had to face another idea that was in conflict with my assumptions, and every day I found that the ways that I kind of intuitively managed simply didn't work in these circumstances, and I also felt scared to admit it to my boss. I thought it would indicate that I was incompetent or bad hire, or at least that he would see it that way, and I needed badly somebody to talk to and I didn't have anybody, and so I repeatedly used approaches that had worked for me in the past, which were now creating inexplicable results. So, while under significant amounts of stress, I tried to learn what to change. I read books, I read articles, and almost all of them talked about what to do and not why it would be valuable to do those things. They didn't talk about the underlying reasons to follow a particular process or how they came to the conclusion that those were the right things to be doing, and none of them were really talking about the assumptions they made about how technology teams had to work or what different assumptions about how teams would work would lead to different behaviors in managers and different behaviors in teams, and there were obviously very different schools of thought because I'd gone from one environment to another one. Now that gap, that lack of clarity, made it really difficult to take any of the approaches and make them work for me and make them consistent. So I ended up leading based on how I had been managed in the past. 

So I combined a bunch of styles and a bunch of approaches that led to behavior that was inconsistent and inauthentic. It made the teams I was working with and responsible for feel left safe and secure and, in addition, I felt overwhelmed and stressed all the time, and that impacted my team. Honestly, I think, like a lot of us, I was not a good first-time manager, and a few of the senior managers in the team noticed because it would have been impossible to hide and they tried to help. They gave me advice and processes that I could follow, but since they didn't understand what mattered to me, their help actually contributed to my inconsistency and my growing sense of frustration and the pain my team felt. So their attempt at helping actually made things worse and it took a long time, but what I learned over time was the things that I valued. The things that really mattered to me were actually really well aligned with the environment that I was in. 

What I'd been missing wasn't process. It was a clear understanding of the things that I valued and how those values could be used to create an approach that worked in the environment I was in, and the truth was that once I understood what mattered to me, I could create approaches that would work in almost any environment and I could identify environments that wouldn't be a good places for me to work, and so it became much easier to look at new practices and new processes and new habits and figure out do I need those and how would I use them in a way that actually fits with what I want to be doing? And the only reason that I actually was able to go on this journey was down to luck. So I had the good fortune to have two conversations that exposed me to things that were completely new to me. So in one I was introduced to elements of psychology and motivation that I had never really thought about or been exposed to, and in the other I was introduced to the impact that environment and circumstances and systems have on our choices and our behaviors. 

Those came in the form of two books. The first one was Drive and the second one was the Goal. They're very familiar to a lot of people, but I loved the ideas in there so much that I devoured dozens of books on the topics, and during those studies some of my core values actually became clear to me, and they were helping other people and being open. And what I find really interesting now looking back on my life, is that At 16 years old I knew how much I enjoyed helping other people and how important it was to me. And at 18 years old I had forgotten, and that led me to actually seek isolation and back-end technical systems. 

I was under the mistaken impression that I didn't like people, or maybe I really didn't and I just needed to go through a period of growth. 

But it wasn't until I was 30 that I re-learned how much I enjoyed helping people, and once I understood that those were the things that I valued, change became much easier. 

I was able to expand my studies in line with the things that mattered to me and shift my focus from kind of managing people to creating environments in which people can do their best work. 

And so I did it, at first as a tech manager and as a consultant and as a tech leader and kind of a variety of those sorts of roles over the course of the next kind of 10 or 15 years, and every new experience helped me understand how my own values could be used to create systems and policies that matched what was important to me and what the organization needed. And so over the years I coached a lot of tech leaders through that journey, right as a consultant coaching was just kind of part of that work and I helped them discover ways to lead and manage work that worked really well for them. And mostly it was part of something else I was doing. Right, I was doing it as a consultant, I was doing it as someone helping leaders, someone looking after senior executives, but it turned out that that combination of technical background that I had and systems awareness and really caring about people combined to make me well suited to be a coach, and that was actually a surprise to me. 

0:11:07 - Mehmet
Well, yeah, so it's a very interesting story and you know a lot of things you mentioned resonated with me also as well, because multiple things like and maybe in the next question I will ask you about some examples but one thing that caught my attention is, like, usually, as people coming from technical background, we think that we want to hide, which is not true, and you know there's this stereotype about, you know, technical people being people who sits in the dark and you know, behind their screens and they don't interact with people, which is not true. 

And the second one, when you mentioned about you know the value, and this is something really I think, again, we don't talk about much because when we do something, we do it for a reason and, of course, like these two books, I advise people also to have a look at them. But no, you know, we like always, you know, both of us coming from technology background, so we like to relate things to real business outcomes, as we call it in the business world. So, but here we will discuss it not from a business perspective, we'll discuss it from a personal perspective. So maybe you can share with us a story of someone you know you've coached and you know what were the changes that happened after this coaching? 

0:12:41 - Noah
So I once I once helped a woman named Anne. She had recently been promoted into the position of CTO in her organization and she had gotten there through a route that she considered unlikely. She wasn't particularly technical. Instead, she'd come up through working with products and providing a product focus in her organization, and she'd been exposed to technology for years but wasn't altogether comfortable being responsible for it. She was recommended for the role by two of her technical leadership peers who thought she'd be great for it, so she decided to take it and give it a shot. But she wanted help and so she came to me and she really started with the idea that there was a gap in her capabilities. She was working with executives, but her lack of tech technical experience or hands on technical experience and lack of experience with the executive made her question whether she was the right person for the job. And through our work together, anne realized that, regardless of her own assumptions, her ability to bring people together, which was built on her own value of being open, was a skill that was sorely lacking amongst her peers and was highly valued to the valuable, to the people that she was responsible for. So recognizing that first helped settle her mind and allowed her a focus on the work that he needed to do. 

But later in our relationship she came back to me with a dilemma, and this dilemma kind of played out over the course of two sessions that we did together. But she was feeling really, really stressed because of the financial situation of the company and redundancies were a real possibility if certain contracts weren't one. So cash flow had been an issue in the past and people knew that. They knew that that was a problem in kind of the abstract, but Anne was keeping the magnitude of the problem away from them, kind of in order to avoid a panic, as she said. And when she brought it to my attention it was almost as a side note. In a different conversation we were talking about something and she was filling in some detail and she said, oh, and I'm feeling some stress due to the severity of our cash flow problems. Of course I haven't told the team about it because I don't want to cause a panic. 

You see, in Anne's mind there was no alternative to secrecy. When things were really bad, executives kept them to themselves so others didn't have to worry about them. That's what her predecessor had done and that was the only time she had been in that situation before, so that was what she did by default. And as we explored the problem more, I helped Anne discover that the stress that she was feeling was way out of proportion to the problem. And over the course of our sessions, she recognized that by keeping everything inside in order to quote unquote protect the team, she was actually acting in violation of her values. 

It was that conflict the hiding things from the team while having a preference or a need to be open that, more than anything else, was the source of her stress. 

So, once we got it out in the open, we worked together to identify ways that Anne could share enough information with her team so that they could make informed decisions without her having to share anything that was confidential. So, recognizing that conflict between her values and her actions, she was able to come up with something that was more aligned with who she wanted to be and put that into place, which ended up reducing her stress to the point where she was able to focus on the work that she wanted to get done. And this isn't to say that layoffs are not stressful Not all of the stress went away when she did it and it's not to say that they're not painful, because there was a significant amount of pain in going through this process, but the difference between the conflict that she was feeling and going through really ramped that up far, far more than she had anticipated, and so resolving it really brought things back down and really helped her and her team focus on the things that needed to be done. 

0:16:55 - Mehmet
That's a great example, noah. I want to, out of curiosity, ask this question, right? So what do you think causes having staff getting demotivated? So you mentioned, for example, in this one that maybe there was a risk of layoffs and something like this, but usually in majority of the time, because when you interact with people you work with, with the leaders you work with, you must have, you know, get some common, I would say, challenges. That causes this. 

0:17:31 - Noah
So if you can share that with us, so it's a good question and it's interesting because a lot of our thoughts about motivation depend or are built on the idea that people don't want to work. It's kind of implicit in the way that we talk about motivating people as if it's a thing that we have to do to others because they wouldn't do it on their own. And it turns out for a lot of people, particularly people in technology and people in knowledge work, that that's not actually the case. People work. People do things because they want to do them. They're intrinsically motivated to do them, and the mistake that I made, and one that I see a lot of leaders make, is the idea that it was my responsibility to make them do things or get them to do things. And actually I almost managed somebody out of the company in my first job, in my first leadership job, because I didn't understand this, and thankfully the company actually ended up having him report to someone else and he did a great job working with them. 

But the shift when we move into management, from individual contributor, where we're doing something, to management, where we're enabling others to do things, is actually really hard, I think, psychologically, because we're going from being in charge of something and telling it what to do. 

As we write code or we build infrastructure or we build networks or we do security, we make things happen, but as we step into leadership, our job is to enable others to make things happen and create environments where people who are motivated can do great work. And that shift is really hard to do because we almost most, most of us in technology do not have the support necessary to develop those skills as we move into management and they are a completely different skill set, like being good as an individual contributor doesn't translate particularly well most of the time to being a good, a good manager. And so we end up trying to get people to do things, which actually works against their motivation, and they end up being unhappy and they end up demotivated and then we try harder because their work is suffering and if their work is suffering, the team is suffering, the organization is suffering, so we motivate them even harder, which makes things worse and it creates a spiral that we, without kind of external influence, we struggle to get out of. 

0:20:04 - Mehmet
Another one because I know when I was preparing for the episode and you know, from the information you shared with me before, this is close to my heart, not because it's something I face, but because majority of the time, I talk to CTOs, I talk to VPs of engineering, I talk to a lot of people in this. You know, especially, you know companies who have startups into the scale up mode and we hear the term technical depth, right so, and I know like this is something also you work with them on solving it, which causes stress, I believe. Right so, and the reason I'm asking you know, because how you know when, when you advise them first is it easy to get rid of this technical depth and then you know how, actually they know that they are already in a technical depth, so most. 

0:21:02 - Noah
So the second part of that question, I think, is easier to answer, because I think most organizations know when they're not doing things the way that they would like them to. People do, often the leaders do, and that information about debt often is something that the leaders are aware of, even if they can't necessarily do anything about it. The first part of your question around you know, how do we, how do we deal with the debt and can, can we like, how easy is it to solve? I think requires a shift in perspective, because the term technical debt implies that we will, that the technology team created it and owns it and is responsible for fixing it. And the truth is somewhat different. Right, the truth is that the organization creates the systems and the processes that the tech team works in. So when the organization says we have to get that out the door by a certain date and the tech team or teams cut corners to do it or make compromises to do it, we call that technical debt. But that didn't originate with them. That debt belongs to the organization and we talk about. 

You know what, if the, the technical team, aren't good enough, isn't that technical debt? Don't they own it then? Well, the question you want to ask is what are the processes that the organization set up in order to make sure it was hiring the right people? Is it giving them the time and the space for progress? Is it making sure that they have the ability to learn? Do they have the time to do things right? 

And more often than not, we find that the organization shapes a lot of the way that people behave, and so I think a large part of the challenge with technical debt is that it isn't technical, it lives in technology, but it belongs to the organization. 

And if, as CTOs and kind of shift that conversation so that the organization recognizes the role that it's playing, that makes tackling the debt much easier. Because if they recognize once, once the organization recognizes that pushing for feature feature feature really ramps up debt over time because it doesn't give time for maintenance or they, you know, want to ship a product that maybe doesn't have a solid case for customers using it and it's a sales team that's really pushed for it and it gets rolled out and it doesn't work as well as we need to and the team never gets a chance to go back and remove it and turn it off and therefore reduce the footprint and the debt in the system Like. Once the organization realizes how much of a role they play, it becomes a much easier conversation to have to start resolving it and start addressing it. 

0:24:00 - Mehmet
I love this. Now also, there's one thing which I didn't ask immediately because I wanted to bring these two points first, about culture, right so? And culture, I think it's something that might cause someone to get depressed if we say, or like, demotivated at the same time. You know, maybe, because this is you gave, from your own example, noah, from your own experience about you know your core values and the company core values. Now, have you ever had this you know session, maybe with one of your clients where you had to go and tell them either you go, try to change the culture in your company or you just leave. Have you ever had something like this? 

0:25:01 - Noah
So it's a really it's a really interesting question because it often depends on the seniority of the person that I'm working with. When I'm working with people who are kind of senior technical leads or first time managers kind of operating at that level, their ability to influence and change the system is relatively small, and so a lot of the conversations when when this particular conversation comes up, becomes a matter of okay, how do you succeed within this system? What are the things that you can change, what are the things that you can't change? How can you influence it? But kind of recognizing the boundaries of where the control is that they exercise, and that often leads to a much, a much greater sense of internal peace, as they recognize where they can have influence and they stop trying to solve all the problems and they just kind of optimizing the space they have. 

When I'm working with senior executives, cio, ctos, cpo, sometimes they are the people in the organization who are actually responsible for how the system works. So if it doesn't work the way they want it to, they have the ability to change it. And that makes for a very interesting conversation, because a lot of people struggle with the notion that the things that they don't want to see in their organization are in many ways a reflection of their own beliefs and their own behavior. And that's one of the reasons that I look for people who are willing to recognize and be self-reflective, but willing to recognize that the way they see themselves influences the way that they treat others and the way that their organization responds. Because in order to solve those kind of cultural problems, the senior leadership needs to recognize their role in those problems and as soon as they do, they recognize that they have the ability to change them. And that is really powerful. But it's really hard to do unless people start in a place where they're willing to see that from the start. 

0:27:19 - Mehmet
Great, noah. And again, you know I usually ask the questions because I want to reach a certain point. We're living in a very complicated world today and things are changing very, very fast and what I have noticed and I really appreciate anyone that does something, like yourself, noah, who tried to bring this idea that hey, you need a coach, you need someone to come and help you out. So how do you think we can encourage more tech leaders to understand that you know you need some coaching, it is necessary for you, and do we need to highlight to them you know, the general problems? Or what can we do more to foster, let's say, this leadership thing? Because, for example, when you come to a client and you work with them, like with any executive, I'm sure like things goes for the better and you gave the example already but how we can encourage more people to go out and seek for mentorship so they understand that really it's needed for me? 

0:28:42 - Noah
So it's really interesting because it's when I first thought about going into coaching. I did it with, I think, a similar view that a lot of the people that I work with have, which is I'm going to be a coach and I'm going to help other people, but I don't need coaching. I know what I'm doing, I'm in good shape, and it wasn't until I started working with a coach who really asked probing, deep questions that I was able to kind of be as self-reflective as I should be, or as I'd like to be, and recognize that there are things that I can't see about myself. There are always things that we can't see about ourselves, and those and people on the outside can ask us questions that we would never think to ask ourselves, and so that's one aspect of it is you know, there's a huge amount of value in people just asking you things that you didn't think of for yourself. There's the other side of it is, or there are. 

Another side of it is that there are significant challenges in being a tech leader, and it's a really lonely place to be because you can very rarely can you tell the people that you're responsible for all the things that you know. The example that I gave earlier is a good example. There are limits to the information that you can share. In addition, a lot of environments don't feel safe for CTOs to share with their peers. I've worked with a lot of CTOs who are in reasonably political environments where, if they admit that they need help, they'll be treated the way I was afraid that I would be treated in my first role, which is people will treat them as incompetent and try to take advantage of it or otherwise position themselves to gain a benefit from it. So that's another struggle. And the last one is that technology leadership is lonely because it's the only part of the organization that has to understand all the management requirements and the strategy of the organization and where it's going and what it's trying to achieve, as well as all the technology aspects and how your existing technology and architecture and infrastructure and systems make it harder or easier to achieve those things. And that's a balancing point that nobody else has to worry about the people, the individual contributors in the team, the managers in the team they're mostly focused on their aspects of the work. 

The other senior leaders don't have to think about technology, so the CTO role and the CIO role are often the only ones having to think about all of this at one time and there's nobody else for them to work with and there's no one else they can talk to in the company that can help them really reflect and think and challenge them in ways that they need, because nobody understands them or their role. 

And so having someone outside, having a coach who has been there, who has done a lot of those things or some of those things or most of them, depending on the coach that you're working with really can help just provide a safe place to talk to somebody. And when you need to talk and most of us need to talk a lot of the time and when we end up unable to do that, we end up struggling significantly more than we would. And my own experience again comes before my wife is not in technology. My wife is in medicine, as evidenced by the skeleton behind me, and so there are limits to the conversations that I could have with her as a tech leader, Like she would always listen, she'd always care, she'd always be empathetic, but she wasn't really and isn't really in a position where she can then help me take the next step forward, because she doesn't have the context, and that's the last missing piece is we need to make it okay for leaders to share where they are with other people. 

0:33:15 - Mehmet
Now you know, like this is good, noah, but people usually like tangible outcomes, right. So, like, some people might be able to go and choose this path by themselves, but I am more fan that the organization would invest in these coaching programs. Like, personally, right. But again, the conversation will come. If we go the business route again and tell the organization that you have to invest in your stuff I'm a big fan of this they would say, okay, but you know what are like the benefits that we can immediately start to see, right, so? But do you really think that this is should only be measured in business terms, or we should think about it as Because, look, you talked about being stressed, you talk about being depressed, you talk about being not liking your job. 

You talked about even doubting that you should be in this. Don't you think no other? This is something and because you just mentioned medicine, it came to my mind Don't you think that this is related even to the mental health of your people who are working with you, whether you are a startup, because I know in startup scale ups like the tension, the stress is much high and even in corporate but don't you think that this is should be Something that we don't need only to measure, okay, how much Money, business, whatever we're gonna do because of the coaching, because our staff will be happy, but also this is important for the culture and for the mental health. What, what you can tell us about this? 

0:35:02 - Noah
so a hundred percent, completely agree, and what I've, what I've actually found working with working with CTOs and tech leaders, is that Sometimes they'll fund it themselves and that that does happen, but it's not Like it's not outsized, like it's not a significant outlier. 

The the majority of the coaches that I work with, actually take their funding requests to their CTOs or, sorry, to their CEOs and Get it approved as as kind of ongoing personal development, professional development, training like it. 

Just it just gets fit into the budget in the same way other professional development would, and there have been so far Very few questions asked. Actually, when I've been working with people who have gone to the, who've gone down this road and said I would like to get a coach to help me out and help me be a better CTO and do a better job, I Don't think I've worked with any CTOs where the business refused to actually go down that road, and so I think there's there's significant fear that we won't be able to get the help that we need, but in my experience, companies have tend to be fairly supportive of the people that they're that are actually looking for help and are asking for it, and so I would encourage anybody who would like to work with a coach to actually talk to their leadership and See what kind of provisions can be made to actually help with the funding. 

0:36:45 - Mehmet
That's great, noah, and thank you for, for you know I this is exactly the message I wanted to hear from you. Now, let's say, you know and this is a maybe traditional question, but I love to ask it from especially experienced people like yourself so if, today, someone is listening or maybe watching us and they are on the verge to become a tech leader, or maybe someone who is See or he is already in the tech leadership space for quite some time, what kind of advice, what kind of message you want to leave them with today? 

0:37:29 - Noah
So I think in both cases there are Kind of two things that they can do to help get them on their journey. So they're Whether they're they're new in the role or whether they're not, or whether they're kind of anticipating getting into that role and aspiring to be a tech leader there are still things that are fairly Consistent about what's needed in a technology leader, and so I just want to talk about two things quickly. The first one is make time. As leaders, most of our time should be spent Thinking. It's much less about doing and much more about thinking and understanding and using that that understanding, to help others achieve things. 

The organization has goals, your team members have goals, and your role is to help clarify the organization's goals for the teams and help make the make it possible for the teams and the team members to achieve their goals. And if your calendar is full of meetings, your ability to stop and reflect is almost always non-existent. I've worked with a number of CTOs who were just back to back in meetings all the time and felt like they never had a chance to think, and they were largely right, and so I'd encourage you to Take that time, find a way to to you share those responsibilities with other people, because otherwise you end up in a reactive position, unable to get ahead of things and create that environment where your teams love working. So the first step is make time to reflect. The second one is about feedback. This didn't used to be one of the things that I talked about, but one of the core struggles that keeps showing up every time I work with tech leaders is that they don't know how to get great quality feedback on how they're doing, and they often struggle to understand how to give quality feedback that allows other people to grow and improve. 

And it comes up so frequently that I developed a dedicated course that teaches people the science around effective feedback and gives them that opportunity to practice, and I normally charge a couple thousand dollars for the class, but after enough requests came in, I distilled most. I distilled a lot of the content and I put together an ebook that's on my website and it makes the content of the class simple and easy to digest, and I'm currently offering it for free. So if, like many of the tech leaders that I've worked with, you're struggling with getting that feedback, that you need to grow, or you aren't sure how to frame the feedback that you want to share with others. You can find the ebook on my website at knowacantocom and download it, read it, learn as much as you can from it. Feel free to then get in touch with me and ask any questions that you've got. 

0:40:34 - Mehmet
Thank you, noah. Actually, this was usually my last question to you and you answered that where people can go find more about you. So I will make sure to put the website in the show notes so people can easily find it, get in touch with you, and I really encourage you, you know, this year, trying to get experts like yourself, noah, in this space, because I think we need more coaching, more mentoring, we need more, you know, people who guide us in this labyrinth, I would say, because things are changing very fast in the world of tech. People are asking what will happen. For example, are leaders still would be needed in the future with this AI? I'm telling them yes, of course they would be needed, but they need to be ready and they need to be always coachable and ready to get the information. So thank you very much, noah, for sharing all these insights today. Anything you know, like you wished. I had asked like this is as a final again, maybe final word anything you another message that I didn't ask you about, probably. 

0:41:47 - Noah
So, yeah, there is one thing which is it took me years to connect with my values and to start using them to lead, and sometimes it feels that I, like it, fell into every single hole and every single problem that I could along the way, and I couldn't see it at the time. But learning to climb out of those holes put me in a really good position to recognize when they're happening and help others avoid them, and so I want the 10 or so years that I spent learning through failure to be of service to others. Like my goal is to help others shave years off their journeys of self-discovery, making them better, happier leaders. But honestly, regardless of whether it's with me or with somebody else, if you're in the situation that I was in, the journey doesn't have to take years. You find somebody, you find a coach that resonates with you and go on the journey with them, and if you want to start it with me, that'd be great. 

I'm open to consultation. You can always go to my website and book a call with me. I will, without a doubt, let you know during our conversation. If we're a good fit for each other, then I will invite you onto the program. I've only got a few spaces available at the moment, so it might not work out. So I'd encourage everyone who's interested to actually move quickly. But if during our call, we find we aren't a good fit, I will 100% do my best to point you at resources that can help, because just because you can't work with me doesn't mean I don't think this is a great journey for you to go on and for everyone to go on. And so listeners can book a call by going to my website again, knowacantercom, and following the book a call link. And please book a call and let me help you help yourself. 

0:43:44 - Mehmet
Thank you very much, noah, and, to your point, we are living in a good time, a lucky time, where we have people like yourself who seem at all as we say, so they can come, seek help, seek the coaching from you, and this is again for the audience Visit Noah's website, you know, and try to book a session. As he said, he has limited seats available and, yeah, I believe doing this is for a great reason, which I want to thank you, noah, for all the information, all the efforts you have put together and, by the way, I've seen some of the articles you share also, sometimes so great insight from you. So, for any technology leader, actually any leader, anyone who's going to a leadership position, but because here is the city or show mainly, so highly advised you to check Noah's website. Noah, thank you very much, and this is how usually I add my episodes. So this is for the audience. So, if you discovered this podcast by luck, thank you for passing by. 

I hope you enjoyed, I hope you liked this content. Please subscribe and share it with your friends and your colleagues and if you are one of the loyal followers that keep you know, sending me their feedback, their comments, keep them coming. I really appreciate that and if you are someone who has an interesting story, you're doing something special for the technology startup entrepreneurship community. I would love to hear from you. Reach out to me and we can discuss this. And again, you can find me also on all social media platforms. So reach out to me for any discussion, any topic you want, and I will be ready to answer you. Thank you very much and we'll meet again in a new episode very soon. Thank you, thank you.