For our second deep dive interview of Stay at the Top we are joined by someone who has lived in a high performance lifestyle of General Manager or above for over 2 decades.
If that’s not personifying ‘Stay at the Top’ I don’t know what is.
Wayne Reuben has extensive senior leadership career in Pharma, Med-device (Optometry and Audiology) and FMCG and was the previous APAC Region President
On top of that he is the previous founder/program delivery lead for HiWay Advanced Training and a certified Coach, AMC Mentor, DiSC Accredited, Podcast Host of “Hard Yards in Leadership” and Author.
In this episode Wayne shares:
- His early stages in his career and how working in the factory helped him in the later stage office jobs that he worked
- His two decades working in the GM level and above
- How he learnt how to work at such a high sustained level without breakdown
- What made him incorporate fitness into his strategy for maintaining his high performance lifestyle
- How the physical fitness routine helped his mental fitness
- Why he always made time for a run without fail
- How his physical exercise also helped ensure he had good nutrition
- His advice for others on how to put progress over perfection
- The tips and strategies he attributes to helping him stay at the top
Key Quotes
“It’s a gift that we don’t rise too fast because it does harden us and toughens us up and provides chunks of learning.”
“You do actually have the power to say no to people when they say this is the program and to force your needs into the space.”
“I came to realise that if I was going go for a run for an hour…I would always start with what are some of the things that are waying on my mind? And I’d bring them with me and then let them go.”
Episode Resources
More about Wayne
You can hear more of the wisdom and stories Wayne gathers on his podcast Hard Yards In Leadership: https://podfollow.com/hard-yards-in-leadership
You can connect with him on linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wayne-reuben-engage4performance/
Jessica Spendlove Website – www.jessicaspendlove.com
Jessica Spendlove Keynotes – JessicaspendloveKeynotes – Jessica Spendlove
The High-Performance Profile Quiz https://jessicaspendlove.com/quiz/
Jess Spendlove Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jess_spendlove_dietitian/?hl=en
Jess Spendlove LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-spendlove-64173bb8/
About Your Host
Jessica Spendlove | Wellbeing Speaker & High Performance Strategist
Jess Spendlove is an international wellbeing and high performance speaker, coach, and advisor. With over 15 years of experience across corporate leadership, elite sport and the military she is known for helping ambitious leaders and teams optimise energy, build resilience, and sustain peak performance.
As one of Australia’s leading performance dietitians and a trusted voice in executive wellbeing, Jess delivers science-backed strategies that empower individuals, teams and organisations to thrive under pressure and achieve long-term success.
Episode Transcript
The following transcript has been automatically generated and not checked for accuracy
Jess (01:00.776)
Wayne Rubin, thank you for joining me today at Stay at the Top. I’m really looking forward to diving into you as a person, your career, the lessons, the behaviors, the non-negotiables, the practices that you have in place that have helped you stay at the top for decades. And I know the listeners will take so much away from it as well.
Wayne Reuben (01:23.878)
Awesome! Looking forward to the conversation, Jess.
Jess (01:26.98)
Now, before we dive into the fun stuff and talk about the journey and the lessons and all the fun things, I would love to kick it off by just knowing what’s one thing that’s excited you this week.
Wayne Reuben (01:40.086)
Well, that’s actually quite an easy question, because my son…
got married a couple of weeks ago and he and his fiance are currently on, I guess, vacation stroke honeymoon in Mexico. So we’ve been getting these kind of like daily updates of, you know, some of the exciting places that they’ve been visiting and fun things they’ve been doing and all that sort of stuff. So it’s been really exciting watching them kind of, you know, begin their, you know, their journey as a married couple together in Mexico with thanks to the…
wonders of WhatsApp. So that’s what’s been really exciting me this week.
Jess (02:20.284)
I love that bit of living vicariously through them as well. I’ve been to Mexico a few times and it’s a great place. The food, the culture, the environment, the beach, the jungle, there’s a lot. Even Mexico City itself is amazing. I don’t know where they are, but it’s such a wonderful place.
Wayne Reuben (02:37.638)
Yeah, yeah, and living vicariously is very helpful sometimes when you’re slogging away at your desk and you go, ah, how cool is that? You know, like you say, it’s beach, jungle, it’s city, it’s food, it’s lots of fun times, so very happy for them. Yeah.
Jess (02:54.813)
all the good things. Now Wayne, your experience in the corporate world is…
immense, it’s deep, you were at an incredibly high level in multinational companies, you know, GM level and above for two decades, which doesn’t just happen. You know, it’s something that you’ve cultivated and no doubt had plenty of good behaviours and non-negotiables and things in place that have allowed you to do that and also transition into the work that you do now with your own business. But take me back to the start or the catalyst
Jess (03:32.118)
to know you and learn what you’re about, the work you do, and also most importantly, who you are as a person.
Wayne Reuben (03:38.83)
Sure, so I guess for me the start was…
working with my dad. So when I grew up, you know, my dad was one of those kind of hardworking people who had his own business, import and distribution company, French perfume and makeup and kind of fun things. And he was, I guess, a role model for me in many ways. And, you know, I used to, as a teenager, kind of go and earn my pocket money by going packing boxes in the warehouse and doing all those sorts of things. And the first phase of my career, I mean, I did the university thing
and studied marketing and whatever else. But my plan A was to actually kind of take over the family business. And so for the first few years, after I finished uni, I worked in literally every role in that business from sales rep to packing in the warehouse to in finance to being the marketing person. I did the lot. And I think despite the fact that I stepped out of that much earlier than I thought I was going to
and then spent essentially the rest of my corporate career the next 40 odd years in big multinationals. The things that I learnt by actually doing the task work in all of those different roles gave me a sense of kind of how all of the things in business actually are interconnected and how real it is. And you know from there I joined a small company, most of the
probably have heard of called Coca-Cola and I was in sales management and then in a marketing role and did quite a number of fun jobs at Coca-Cola. And that was my first experience of working with people who’d never actually done stuff other than sit in the office of a business.
Wayne Reuben (05:39.99)
And I was to come across many of those people in my time going through big pharmaceutical companies where I was kind of the next phase of my career and then Med Device, which was the next phase of my career. And always, I always felt very lucky that I had this deeper understanding of, you know, between actually talking to the customer in a sales role and then packing boxes in the
Wayne Reuben (06:10.164)
and delivering it well and delivering it on time is important and then sometimes having to deal with people who hadn’t paid their bill and getting on the phone and saying you know what’s going on and just understanding what they’re dealing with like all of those sorts of groundwork things I think helped me be
be a lot more successful in understanding a lot more elements of how all of that works when I was in general manager roles and regional president roles and all of those sorts of things. Yeah, so that’s kind of my story.
Jess (06:47.228)
Yeah, fantastic. And I think that is incredible. Like the experience that you had early on with, you know, working with your, you know, not the family business, but that, that business that you’re, you know, your dad was in and doing all of those tasks and roles and, and probably not understanding at the time how well that would actually serve you. And I think that’s a really important piece of the puzzle to, to be successful.
It’s not just you’re the best candidate for the role. It is to really drive, and I know you’re really big on culture and empowering people and driving engagement and no doubt your ability to stay in touch with.
the end, you know, the customer or even the people doing certain tasks and roles, which as you elevated, you got further and further away from. But that ability to stay connected because you literally walk to those shoes, you know, it’s kind of like what’s the what’s the story or the saying where the CEO starts in the mailroom. Like it really was a bit of a maybe not quite in the mailroom, but, you know, you really wore a lot of hats to experience and navigate.
Wayne Reuben (07:56.374)
Yeah, literally.
Jess (07:58.92)
business and then corporations and large corporations at that.
Wayne Reuben (08:05.278)
I think, yeah, I mean, I do see it as a gift and it’s funny because I mean, I look back now and I can kind of remember my.
my father saying like, you can come into the business, but you’re gonna do all of the hard yards, you’re gonna work in every segment first. And I just thought he was just making it tough for me. And it was only literally kind of years later that I started to realize what an extraordinary grounding it was. And certainly when you’re in senior roles, to be able to…
demonstrate empathy to customers in the first instance, because every business is powered by customers and recognising just a lot more of the things that they go through. And secondly, being able to have empathy to the roles of different people in different departments. You know, I fundamentally don’t believe that people are more or less important than each other or better or worse than each other. I fundamentally believe that in the course
Wayne Reuben (09:05.316)
different tasks and the organisation needs all of those tasks to work for the organisation to be a successful, sort of dynamic organism. And I think for me, having that natural kind of empathy for folks all throughout the organisation and this, you know, this ongoing belief that we’re all equals as humans, we just do different things. I think that was to help me come across as an empathetic.
leader, where it wasn’t sticky taped on, it was just there from how I grew up.
Jess (09:43.577)
And that’s, yeah, it wasn’t this skill that you needed to learn, it was just who you were, that soft skill which…
Wayne Reuben (09:49.516)
Literally.
Jess (09:52.592)
No doubt, you know, and we’ve done an interview, you know, roles reversed. And I know in our conversation, that was a lot of what I discussed around the clinical skills and the learned, you know, the degrees. I don’t believe that separated me from others. I do think it was the soft skills and the ability to connect with people. Let’s focus on the two decades that you spent, you know, GM level above, because that is a lot of pressure,
Wayne Reuben (10:12.659)
Mmm.
Jess (10:23.146)
and that wasn’t a short stint. So talk to us about that and talk to us about how you were able to sustain yourself in those roles for such an extended period of time.
Wayne Reuben (10:36.126)
Yeah, sure. And, you know, again, it’s interesting to reflect because, you know, as you know, like I’m sure many of your listeners who are in the corporate kind of space, you know, I
it, it’s seeing getting to GM level was something that I really aspired to. And you know, you don’t go from working in a warehouse to GM in one jump. You work your way up. And you know, a number of the roles that I had, you know, sort of, I had ran some business units in some large pharmaceutical companies, you know, J and J and Sanofi and so on, head of sales, whatever. So I had big teams and a lot of responsibility. I never really realized how much more accountability and responsibility
when you transition from all of those sorts of roles to general manager. And frankly then when you go to running a region where you’ve got a dozen or more countries and you’re responsible for a massive part of a global corporation’s overall revenue and profit and hundreds if not thousands of people, just how much more responsibility kind of lands on your shoulders.
So I think in the first instance, it’s a gift that we don’t rise too fast. You know, we have to do our time at the different runs along the way, because it does harden us, it toughens us up, and it also provides just, it provides chunks of learning that help us be able to cope at the higher level.
But then getting directly to your question, which is, again, if I kind of reflect back and say, well, it was almost bang on 20 years, a little bit more, between when I first was a general manager to when I stepped out of my corporate career and say, okay, well, if that was sort of like the pinnacle of responsibility,
Wayne Reuben (12:39.422)
And with that comes stress and pressure and demands and whatever else. How can I kind of encapsulate learning to cope with that and to exist at a sustained level so that there isn’t burnout, so that there isn’t breakdown, you know, all of those sorts of things. And I think the other thing for me that, you know, if I kind of say,
something that was really important to me in doing that journey was that every year I had new challenges that were self-imposed, I had new goals in terms of my own levels of performance, my performance as a leader. Every year I wanted to be a better leader, I wanted to do the job that I was doing better than I had the year before and I think that drive of self-improvement, I never needed someone to challenge me for that. Like that was always just… And I never, and still to this day, don’t think
I’m particularly fantastic at anything. I recognise I got quite good at things, but I was never anywhere near the point where I’d go, nothing to learn here. Like, you know, don’t suggest sending me to some sort of leadership training, because you know, I’ve got this. Like, I never fell into that space, and I always had a deep lack of respect for people who…
people who transitioned into that space. So that constant desire to improve, I think, was actually a big part of what made it interesting, fun, fulfilling, you know. I…
This word fulfillment I think is incredibly important. I think we talk about having fun at work and we talk about people being motivated. And both of those are nice things. But I kind of see them a little bit as sugar pills. You know, it’s nice to motivate people. It’s nice to do things sometimes that are fun. But what sustains you over months that turn into years, that turn into decades, it’s never all gonna be fun and you’re not gonna be motivated all the time.
Wayne Reuben (14:45.86)
a fine fulfilment in what you’re doing and that sense of kind of self-improvement and recognising that you’re creating better cultures that help others have a great work and work experience and all of those sorts of things. They become things that you can kind of get energy from and kind of say this is important work I’ve got to kind of stay on top of my game. So I think that’s a piece of the puzzle.
I guess the other thing, and you tell me where you want me to go with this, but the other thing that I learnt very early on was incorporating mind and body wellness and challenge and awareness in my overall existence.
became a really critical piece of being able to cope with what very quickly became extremely high pressure, demand, hours, jet lag, you know, all of those sorts of things that I did manage to learn to sustain for quite a long period of time.
Jess (16:00.048)
And with your focus on the mind-body connection that you mentioned, was that something which you feel you always had in some way? Were you always an active person and you then…
dove deeper into that or valued that more as the pressure and as the stress and the accountability and the responsibility rose. And you found that was something, a strategy or a behavior that helped balance that out and manage everything. And was this grounding non-negotiable piece or was it something that someone educated you on or you started to value later? Talk to us about how that came to be for you. And also some examples, I know we were talking before we jumped
about some of the goals and the goals that you had in this specific space.
Wayne Reuben (16:55.242)
Yeah.
It’s such an interesting thing to reflect on, Jess, because I guess for me, I struggle at this point to say which was the chicken and which was the egg, which kind of came first. Was I always an active person? To an extent, I certainly became a lot more active. I stepped up my exercise routine quite significantly around about the time that I took my first general manager’s role. And that actually coincided with also
when my dad died and so I’m an only child so it was quite a big deal to see, you know, my two parents eventually pass and
probably part of coping with that emotional trauma and some of the additional responsibilities I was having made me kind of reach for a higher level of commitment to movement. And…
oddly that transitioned quite quickly from being just a casual exerciser, you know, try and do half an hour of exercise a bunch of days in a week, to signing up for my first marathon. And I probably broke the mould versus most people because most people run a half marathon as an ambition and then they think, you know, maybe I’ll build up to a marathon. I jumped straight from nothing to a marathon. And…
Wayne Reuben (18:27.186)
and it was sort of all around the same time. And I think I quickly learnt that the discipline of literally daily exercise and…
which gave me a certain degree of body fitness but also gave me a chunk of time that I found extraordinarily beneficial in terms of mind fitness. So I came to realize very quickly that if I was going to go for a run for an hour or swim for an hour because you train for a marathon you don’t just run but you do a lot of things sustained. Whatever I was going to do for
Wayne Reuben (19:15.208)
I would always start with what are some of the things that are kind of like weighing on my mind and I’d bring them with me and then I’d let them go and it was a little routine that I had that kind of I’d allow my mind to sit on them for the first part sometimes that would be five minutes it might have been 15 it didn’t matter but at some point it’s like okay I’ve gone around that as much as I can ever go around it I’m gonna let it go and that wasn’t a taught technique that
Wayne Reuben (19:44.29)
But doing that became something that I came to realise was exceptionally powerful in terms of being able to make sure that I was mentally fresh most of the time. And I guess the other thing that…
Jess (19:58.886)
And, and, sorry. Sorry you keep going.
Wayne Reuben (20:02.862)
Okay, I’ll just add that one extra thing. The other piece of that puzzle, of course, is when you sign up for a marathon, you…
you have to do the training. Like you, like, it’s not like you can go, I’m going to be a desk jockey and I’m going to rock up on, you know, Sunday, the, the 5th of November or whatever it is and run 42 kilometres because I just can. I couldn’t, I had, I had to do the training. So the, um, the, the act of signing up for marathons became something that, um, I, I realised helped me
Wayne Reuben (20:46.576)
going to train. And in terms of just being a daily routine, that’s a big deal, especially because through all of that period, I travelled a huge amount. For many years, I was away for literally two-thirds of the days in a year. And I trained on virtually every one of those days. I could run down the street at 6am in the morning in Tokyo just as easily
Wayne Reuben (21:17.416)
So I think that discipline bill is really important in terms of allowing me to be able to sustain performance at that level.
Jess (21:26.804)
Yeah, I really love that and it’s definitely something I talk to a lot of the corporates I work with and whether it’s movement or whether it’s the nutrition piece, but it’s finding ways that they can have these non-negotiables that they need, which for everyone is a little bit different, but how when they have these jobs which require them to domestically or internationally travel, how do we put things into place? Because that…
helps support them through these periods of stress, but it also allows for the momentum and the compounding benefits of these behaviours to continue to grow and thrive, which to me it sounds like you not stumbled across that, but to an element of you embarked on this stepping up your training as such at a time which was really challenging to yourself and
Jess (22:23.57)
process, you know, stressful situations from the day or frustrating and compartmentalize that nearly and then clear it became this really helpful purposeful practice, as you said, for that mind and body connection and then served you very well for periods of high stress, not just stressful situations, but additional stress on the body when you are traveling internationally and longer days and all of that.
I do know that’s something in the coaching that you do now with your own business. I do know that’s something that you speak to the leaders that you coach and emerging leaders and you check in with them on what practices that they’ve got because that is such a something that’s been that was so fundamental to yourself which whether as you said maybe wasn’t
Entirely intentional maybe was that chicken or that egg process but it was definitely something which you’ve been able to reflect and see how Well, it did serve you
Wayne Reuben (23:25.13)
Yeah, that’s absolutely true, Jess. I think, you know, one of the joys of coaching senior execs and mentoring, and I do both in this phase of my life, one of the joys of being able to work with people who are on their journey of self-improvement is to be able to share things that I didn’t read in a book. It’s like, let me tell you about some of the experiences that I had, and I think people receive,
advice so much better when someone can speak from a space of experience rather than just theory and can show, you know, for me relating to a senior exec saying, yeah but I’ve got, you know, I’ve got to be in this city there and I’ve got a budget presentation and everything and it’s like I did all of that and guess what? Like I was fitting in marathon training. I didn’t mention before, I mean I’m…
I’m not sure if it’s a credit or a sign of madness, but I actually did 10 marathons over that period. And I stopped counting how many half marathons, because I do half marathons just to kind of keep going when I wasn’t really training for marathons. So I was pretty much for 20 years in quite a continuous state of relatively steady training, highs and lows in that as you have to do, you know more about that than most.
discipline allowed me to cope with all of those things, you know, jumping on a plane, getting off, going straight to the office, doing all those sorts of things. And people would say, okay, we’re going straight to dinner. And I’d say, no, we’re not. Like, you’re going to drop me at the hotel at five and you’re going to pick me up at seven. Like, I need that hour. Or people would say, I’m going to pick you up at seven in the morning. I would say, no, you’re not. You’re going to pick me up at eight. Because I had a two-hour run planned for that morning and that two-hour run had to happen. That was part of my preparation.
sustaining and staying on my game. And I think one of the great things that you learn is that you do actually have the power to say no to people when they say this is the program and to force your needs into the space. And very often when I’m coaching people at even the very highest levels and mentoring, folks that are coming up through their careers,
Wayne Reuben (25:54.376)
it’s a great reminder that you can say no and you can say we’ll just push and pull it around like it doesn’t have to be the way someone else first crafts it but if we don’t
I know that if I didn’t have my time looking after body and creating that space for mind, if I didn’t have that, I could not be as sharp as consistently over such a period. And I don’t throw jet lag in as just another coin in the pond, you know, for all of us that have done significant amounts of international travel as we work.
I actually believe that jet lag is the hardest thing. It’s the most, it’s the biggest whack you ever do on your body. And it’s the most unnatural thing to be on a plane for 13 hours and suddenly your time has completely flipped the other way around and you’re expected to perform at work.
in waking hours that your body thinks are your sleeping hours. If you don’t have things that help you manage that, you’re just physically present, but you’re just essentially an empty shell. And getting out in the morning, you know, I’d love to say I got enough sleep every night, but I didn’t.
But if I get up in the morning and go out and put myself in the sunshine and the bright light and, you know, do some exercise, it’s such a powerful way of getting into the right rhythm and being ready for the day that’s ahead. And I think the other piece, and obviously, you know, you’re a dietitian as part of your multidisciplinary trade. But…
Wayne Reuben (27:41.822)
I think execs commonly drop the ball on that front because we’re going out for dinner and we’re doing all these things and we’re missing meals and whatever. But if you’re doing two hour runs, you know, three mornings a week, you…
you don’t drop the ball because you know that your body can’t do a two hour run without some of the right nutrition in it. So it forces you to get some of those things right and I’m really thankful that I kind of stumbled into that space that I think became really a powerful self-sustaining.
Jess (28:22.56)
and exactly what you’ve touched on there, they are the sunlight on the eyes, the movement on the body, they are two of the most powerful ways to reset that body clock. So when you are traveling international, and as you mentioned, someone like yourself, and there are many…
high-level corporates out there who are on the road a lot. It is just a by-product of the role that they are in. So we need to put things into place that are going to serve them, which is what you found. And the reality is you’re going to be tired probably either way for at least you know a day or two depending on where you’ve gone and how frequently. So if you’ve got at least a strategy that can support you, elevate, help you reset that body clock as quickly as possible, as well as timing those meals and using nutrition to elevate your energy and
how you feel across the day, well then that’s a win-win and you are going to move through that a lot a lot better and you know for me what I see is like how do we have strategies that we adapt no matter where we are and what we’re doing and what we don’t want are robots but what we do want to guard rails and we do want to know what our few non-negotiables are and you know for someone listening to this if you’re not a runner well don’t choose marathons but
Wayne Reuben (29:14.539)
Yeah.
Jess (29:37.602)
or if you enjoy doing weights or whatever that might be, you know, having a diversified approach to your new, having a diversified approach to your training is a fundamental part of being a high performing human. And, you know, the research around exercise being our best form of medicine has always been there, but it is becoming stronger and stronger, whether we think about physical health, whether we think about cognitive health.
you know, kicking the can down the road and thinking about later in life, short term, every single day you will feel and function better, which is exactly what you were experiencing and you were able to embed throughout that those two decades. If we fast forward to now, you know, you’re a man or sorry, I don’t know if this is, did you wanna, I’ll leave you to comment.
Wayne Reuben (30:26.434)
Let’s go.
Wayne Reuben (30:30.178)
So, okay, I’ll add one extra thing. Sammy can do some work here. I’ll add one extra thing to that, Jess, because I’ll add one extra point to that because talking about your body and defense mechanisms, the other thing that I don’t know if it was good luck, but I doubt her.
Jess (30:37.222)
Thanks Sam.
Wayne Reuben (30:54.266)
I rarely got ill during that time, and I mean very rarely. And if I think of the demands that I put my body through, predominantly from that being on the road and the travelling and the jet lag and all of those sorts of things…
People would often say you’re asking more of your body because you’re doing all of this running. And I did lots of swimming and weights and everything else. I was a great believer that the way to train for marathons was to do a lot of cross training. So I did lots of those things too. But when people would say you’re putting a lot of extra strain on your body, I’d say the exact opposite. I’d say this is actually helping my body be able to cope with what I’m asking for it to do.
and I really did see the ability to just very, very rarely kind of…
you know, find myself coming down with any sorts of illnesses or whatever else. I’m quite sure that the combination of exercise, mindset and a relatively nutritious diet along the way was a big part of making sure that my body’s defence mechanism was also able to kind of cope with what I was throwing at it.
Jess (32:19.132)
Yeah, you’re 100% right. I mean, I can talk to the technical side of that just quickly. I mean, one element is there’s good stress and bad stress, which, you know, we need elements of both or, you know.
We need elements of both slash they’re both like parts of life. We know that we are going to have, you know, the bad stress as such. So having good stress on the body in the form of exercise is helping build resilience. If we have no stress, our ability to be resilient isn’t there. The other element to that is exercise does help us manage our cortisol levels. Now, when we are training at really high intensities, we actually do increase our cortisol levels.
when we get the nutrition and the rest and the recovery and our mindset piece, right, that helps to buffer that. So exactly what you’ve mentioned there, when we do have that balance of the good stress helping buffer some of the inevitable stresses, we do find that balance. And a really strong, healthy immune system is a great indication of that. You know, what that tells me is you had a really good grasp on your personal and professional life, those non-negotiables, and you were allowing periods of rest and recovery.
because I certainly see, well I see high performing corporates of all, you know, all ends of the spectrum. I see those training for the Ironman events and the marathons that are getting sick often because they are pushing it too hard. But what you did was really periodise your training, which is exactly what you should do. Too much of one, too much of one thing is not a good thing. So by periodising that. But similarly, when we’re at the other end, which is those that are not moving and don’t have those healthy behaviours,
Wayne Reuben (33:45.334)
Mm-hmm.
Wayne Reuben (33:48.967)
Yeah.
Jess (34:01.746)
risk of getting sick because they don’t have that good stress and it’s just all bad stress building over time.
Wayne Reuben (34:05.783)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. That makes complete sense. And I think that the other piece that, you know, we’ve talked a lot about exercise and diet in terms of coping, and I think you’re just talking about stress at the moment. And I’m just pausing because there’s a siren going past.
Wayne Reuben (34:28.642)
Okay, the other part that I would want to just make sure that we include in kind of trying to create some powerful messages for listeners. I think the other thing you have to get good at if you’re going to sit in those senior roles, you’ve got to be able to separate the things I can control versus the things I can’t control. And you know, we…
We sometimes think, you know, I’m going to be successful all the time. I’m always going to deliver great business results and all of those sorts of things. And that’s just not real. You know, the reality is over time, there are always going to be some, some tough yards in terms of your business results. And there are times when corporations have to make really tough decisions, like, you know, letting people go and closing factories or changing facilities and doing all that sort of stuff. I think, you know, I’ve seen, I’ve seen a lot of my, my colleagues and peers really crumble under the pressure of some of those
things. Whereas the reality is if we look at something and say have I done everything I possibly can that’s within my realm of control and if I can say yes I have, then there’s a certain amount of just what happens in this world that we can’t control and we have to just learn to live with. And my approach was I used my exercise time to process that literally on a daily basis. Literally process what are the things that I have to say yes, it’s
It can cause me stress and it’s wanting to cause me stress, but I’ve done everything that I can so therefore I have to just accept that there are going to be some yucky things that transpire, you know, and I have to just do the best I can to walk through that but not beat myself up over it and not let my state of mind get completely kind of degraded because of that stress. And if you say, if you ask yourself the question, so have I done everything I possibly could
then get on and do that and focus on that rather than just focusing on the enormity of the stress and I think those sorts of things are both coping techniques but also success drivers and I’d love to say I got that right all of the time I absolutely didn’t but I did get better at that over the years as well
Jess (36:44.712)
Yeah, it’s learning to control the controllables and have ways to, as you said, not beat yourself up over the things that may not have gone the way that you wanted but were not necessarily something within your control. With the coaching and the mentoring that you do now, do you have some techniques or anything that you can share there for anyone? I think that’s a really universal lesson for anyone who’s corporate space or whatever industry they’re working in, how they can kind of get better at that.
over perfection piece.
Wayne Reuben (37:17.686)
Yeah, so for me, when I’m coaching or mentoring folks, it’s a space that I always wanna go to because I think it’s a space that most of us struggle with. And I guess, regardless of whether you do it during exercise or some other time, for me, the first thing I go to is, it needs to be a daily process of review and coat manage and process.
Because ultimately on a daily basis, we need to be able to put ourselves in the head space of saying what is it I’m gonna focus on? And how can I make sure that I have the least number of hand breaks that are stopping me focusing on the things that I can actually impact? And to be able to really stare down, A, have I done everything that I can control? And if not, what is there?
and b, what are the things that I have to accept that I can’t control, that therefore I have to let go of. I think, you know, for me, when I’m coaching and mentoring folks, I really work on helping people find a space in each day that thought process is associated with. So it’s not, try to think of that every day, because if you just say that, it won’t happen.
So for me it was associated with my morning exercise. For someone else it could be associated with, I don’t know, the journey to work, having the time of a breakfast. Whatever the thing is, find that thing, but make that part of your daily discipline and be very disciplined about.
those series of questions that you ask yourself, because there’s only two or three, but they each need to be asked, and rather than go around and around them, because I think that as, certainly in the business world in leadership, but probably in life generally, one of our most unproductive spaces is when we get something in our mind that we just essentially go around and around and around.
Wayne Reuben (39:24.914)
we have to find ways to get out of that essentially pain and stress driving loop and turn that into a proactive decision that then has an action that we can then hold ourselves accountable to the next day. So that’s what I work to encourage people to do.
Jess (39:46.844)
And what I… Sorry, I think there’s a lag.
And what I’ve heard there is you were encouraging people with a practice, which you found very supportive, but the way in which you did that was by habit stacking it. It was by adding it to a behaviour or a journey or something within someone’s routine, which was already existing. You know, James Clear made this habit stacking notion really, I guess, well known in his very, very well known book, Atomic Habits. But for anyone out there,
whether it’s a practice like this or any behaviour that you’re trying to embed into your life, by doing that and attaching it or doing it with an existing behaviour, it is more likely to embed faster and easier, which I think is a really good call out. And it’s definitely a tactic and a strategy that I use with a lot of my clients. Wayne, I’d love to ask you as we get closer towards the end.
Wayne Reuben (40:47.438)
Mm.
Jess (40:53.55)
But you know and it might be summarizing some of the things we’ve touched on or something else might come up But if you were to say the three tips or behaviors or strategies that you had in place that have helped you stay at the top For such an extended period of time What would you attribute those to be?
Wayne Reuben (41:12.362)
Yeah, it’s a great question, isn’t it? You’ve given me three. Okay, so the first one I’m gonna say is a state of mind thing, which I think underpins sustaining, attaining and sustaining high performance in the business world, and that’s curiosity. So I think, I can never remember, do 15 things. I can never remember that.
For me, I always try to kind of embed a handful of things that I go, just have that state of mind and then allow that to kind of make other things take care of themselves. And staying curious was definitely the top of my list. So when you’re curious, you…
When you talk to people you want to hear more about them, you want to understand that person. When you look at a business process, you’re always curious, how can I make that better? When you talk to a customer, you’re always keen to ask, what could we do to better serve your needs? You don’t have to learn the questions, you just be curious. And I think the other thing with curiosity is, I think curiosity helps you, there’s a lot of talk these days about the importance of D&I, which I’m a great believer in as well.
But a curious person never sees someone as being different and weird, or different and I don’t want to have something to do with you. When you’re curious, you are keen to learn about people’s differences and respect those and just sort of see what makes them tick. So curiosity for me is the first one. I guess second is the movement piece. You know, I think that… I think…
recognizing that we’re not just a, I think business leaders often think of themselves essentially as kind of this brain. We’re not a brain, we’re an entire body and we have to, we have to recognize that when the body works well the brain works well and it’s black and white when the body doesn’t work well the brain doesn’t work well. So look after both and both will take care of you. And the third I think is really just enjoy the journey. You know you and I have chatted about
Wayne Reuben (43:32.816)
about chasing destinations. It’s recognizing that this is just about a journey and whether you attain a title of general manager or president of something or whatever it might be, those things are hollow if you’re not finding fulfillment and satisfaction from the things that you do along the way and hopefully seeing the good in what you do and how you’re helping others kind of have better lives and so on in the way that you go about doing those things.
gives you that fulfilment that allows you to enjoy the journey and keep getting up every day and looking forward to what’s going to happen on that day, because it’s the next day of your journey.
Jess (44:11.646)
Yeah.
Oh, I love that. I think that’s a really great place to begin to end this conversation. Before I ask my very last question, I would love to know, or let the listeners know, best place to find and connect with you off the back of this amazing conversation.
Wayne Reuben (44:15.178)
So they’re my three.
Wayne Reuben (44:33.87)
Sure, and thanks for asking. Look, listeners out there, I love chatting to people about your journey and…
If there’s things that are part of my journey that can help others, then that’s awesome. I love to share. So I’m on LinkedIn, pretty active there. So Wayne Rubin, remember it’s an R-E-U. There’s lots of ways to spell Rubin. So look me up on LinkedIn and have a chat. Or my main business is a curious leaders circle. So you can find that on LinkedIn and you can see how curiosity has gone from being an obsession to, I guess,
the place that I choose to do most of my work these days. So look forward to hearing from folks.
Jess (45:21.68)
Yeah, wonderful. I know a lot of people will be checking that out for sure. My very last question, which is a nice light way to finish, but other than what we’ve spoken about today, what’s something that you like to do for fun, Wayne?
Wayne Reuben (45:39.706)
So one of my fun pursuits…
is something that I’m probably worst at, which is I periodically throw myself back into phases of trying to learn guitar, and I am terrible at it, but I have a lot of fun trying, and I doubt that this is ever going to go anywhere more than literally just fun, but it does give me a lot of fun to challenge myself and occasionally hit the right notes in the right
once in the right timing and go gosh that actually sounds like the song I was trying to play.
Jess (46:20.968)
I think sometimes it’s good to do things where we…
we’re not naturally great at or that we don’t gravitate to because I think as your third point in helping you stay at the top, it’s about the journey and it can be quite humbling and fulfilling and enjoyable. Wayne, thank you so much for your time here today. I feel like we could keep going. There’s so much more I wanna ask you about, but I’m mindful of your time and the structure of how the episodes normally roll. So we’ll wrap it up there. Team, make sure that you connect with Wayne, particularly if you’re in that corporate world, whether you’re an emerging leader, your exec or anyone throughout a business, Wayne is an abundance of experience and a really genuine amazing person who just loves connecting with good people. So we’ll leave it there team, I’ll see you all again next week and until then keep staying at the top. Wayne, thank you for your time today.
Wayne Reuben (47:15.01)
Thank you Jess, it’s been an absolute pleasure.