In this episode of The SAFE Leader Podcast, Mark McBride-Wright sits down with executive coach and leadership strategist Yosi Kossowsky to explore a remarkable journey of growth and transformation. From starting out with no clear plan, to discovering a passion for computers and technology, Yosi shares the twists and turns that shaped his early career. He reflects on the challenges of moving from technical expertise into leadership, and the powerful lessons he learned when feedback revealed that emotional intelligence, not just technical skill, was the missing piece.
The conversation dives into vulnerability, self-awareness, and the hard but rewarding work of uncovering limiting beliefs. Yosi opens up about his experiences with emotional wellness practices, the importance of embracing the full range of human emotions, and the wisdom of learning to enjoy the journey rather than rushing toward goals. Honest, insightful, and inspiring, this episode offers leaders a fresh perspective on growth, resilience, and leading with both head and heart.
Read the Transcript
Mark McBride-Wright 0:01
Mark, Hi everyone. Welcome to the next episode of the safe leader podcast. I’m your host, Mark McBride-Wright, and today I’m joined by Yossi kosowski, who is an executive development coach, leadership strategist and co owner of ktor Consulting Services with over 30 years of experience spanning IT leadership, executive coaching and organizational transformation. Yossi helps technical and data driven professionals elevate their leadership effectiveness through neuroscience based emotionally intelligent methods. His career includes senior roles at Cisco where he led global leadership development and culture transformation programs and as Chief Technology and Strategy Officer at AI IR consulting, where he spearheaded product innovation and coaching technologies today, Yosi coaches leaders and teams around the world, helping them transition from individual contributors to inspiring high trust leaders who unlock team potential and deliver results from CTO to coach, you’ll see bridges deep technical insight with human centered leadership, empowering clients to lead smarter, not harder. Welcome. How are you doing?
Yosi Kossowsly 1:14
I’m doing really well. Mark, thank you so much for having me on the show today.
Mark McBride-Wright 1:18
It’s absolute pleasure that is, that is quite an introduction. That is quite a very concise career. How, yeah, it feels like you’ve had a very funneled, we haven’t met before. This is the first time we’re, yeah, we’re chatting properly. But I feel like you’ve had a very focused, um, route to where you’re at, is that right?
Yosi Kossowsly 1:41
So it didn’t feel focused, honestly, it really did not have a plan. So I started university, and I was having to pay my own way. I quickly realized at the end of my freshman year that I couldn’t afford it, really, and so I got a summer job working in a mail room at a real estate development company. And towards the end of the summer, I just asked them if I could stay on because I didn’t have a plan, like I really didn’t have a plan. And when I first my first major was psychology, and I did that because that’s what kind of like the family business was, in a funny sense. My father was a minister, my grandfather was a minister. My great uncle was a psychiatrist. So there was a lot of, like, mediation, things going on in the family, I’m like, okay, so this is, like, the thing to go into. But I really didn’t have a plan, and so I, I’ve, I stayed at that summer job, which an amazing angel came in the form of the CFO of the company, offered me a job in in the accounting department, took me under his wing, and I let me tell you, Mark, I suck at math like big, big, big, big time.
Mark McBride-Wright 3:12
Did you with the accounting or
Yosi Kossowsly 3:16
payable, much to their chagrin. And luckily, it was about about a year into the job that they were putting in a computer system, like the first networking system of in the company. It was really early days, like 91 or 92 and they were, you know, trying to get this shared accounting system, and I got assigned to, like, work with these consultants to put in the system. And I just fell in love with computers and IP, just unlike accounting, which didn’t make any sense to me, computers, and I just had a instant relationship.
Mark McBride-Wright 4:02
It was a good time to get to grow an affinity to computers, because, yeah, early 90s, they were starting to revolutionize how we did business, like they continue to do so now,
Yosi Kossowsly 4:13
yep, and so I, you know, I got married, actually, not too far from this whole experience, and then my wife said, I don’t want to live in New York, so we moved to Maryland, and I took a job in a help desk, you know, and and then I just grew my career over the next 10 years. And then, you know, a few years later was this.com boom thing and and it just allowed me to grow and grow and grow in the IT industry. And because it was so new, it wasn’t like there was real certifications. I mean, Microsoft had some certifications, and a company called node. Val had some certifications, but it wasn’t like hard study, you know. And once you were using the things, it was easy to
Mark McBride-Wright 5:07
go this, learn, learn through doing, learn through application. There what? There weren’t any sort of software engineering degrees or apprenticeships that you’d go off and study. It was very much on the job, learning your craft, learning your specialism?
Yosi Kossowsly 5:21
Yeah, absolutely. And which, by the way, I just have discovered, is the best way that I learned. So that was a perfect match. That’s perfect, yeah. So I did that, and then I got bored a little bit, and so in 2000 I took on a job in something called a pre Technical Sales Engineer, and so the sales team would qualify people, and then I would go in and help architect the solution. So more technical work, just on the pre sales side,
Mark McBride-Wright 5:50
pre sales so you haven’t yet made a sale,
Yosi Kossowsly 5:53
but so it was to close the sale. It was like to help the sales team close the sale. So I was working for a company you said you lived in New York, so called Comcast, which is a cable company, right? Yeah, yeah, they’re very big that time. They were just a cable company and and they were starting to sell to businesses. And so I would go in and help architect the fiber solution for the customers.
Mark McBride-Wright 6:19
So to meet so for the cost, yeah, to make sure that what was being diagnosed, let’s say, by the sales team, as the need for the client was actually correct, and you were there to make sure that that then there was no hidden surprises when it then came to paying for what they were purchasing And then actually rolling out?
Yosi Kossowsly 6:41
Yeah, you know, I don’t know if you’ve ever worked in any businesses with sales people. Sales people tend to have high estimation about what a company can actually deliver, okay, and so, so this was kind of helping ensure that we didn’t sell something we couldn’t deliver.
Mark McBride-Wright 7:02
Yeah, because that can have risk issues further down line. Can’t you know, you said you could do this, and now you can. And so you’re having to deal with disgruntled customers. And, yeah, cancelations, no renewals, and bad reputation,
Yosi Kossowsly 7:20
all of that. So, so it was a great job. It ended abruptly when the market crashed in 2001 or so, right? Actually, 2002 I got laid off in the summer of 2002 and landed a job a few months later in another technology company at this time as an engineer, something called the system engineer.
Mark McBride-Wright 7:49
Okay, so first time engineer was in your title, it was
Yosi Kossowsly 7:53
the first time engineer was in my title. And the company built and delivered technologies for satellite and cable broadcasters. So funny enough, it wasn’t. It was It wasn’t connected to Comcast in any way. And the work I was doing in Comcast wasn’t related to the TV side of their business, just the fiber side. And so what happens is that if you have, if you’re in UK, if you have B, Sky, B or something, right? So then you have a set top box in the house, and you’ve got a smart card in there that kind of gives you the permission about what you can watch and all of that, yeah. And so we created the smart card technology. We created the, you know, a lot of the chips inside the box, as well as we did what’s called the head end, which is all of the things that allow the broadcaster to do the metadata, the on screen TV Guide, yeah, and all of that information. And so my job was again, to architect the solution, but this time it was a post sales role, and then go to on site where the broadcasters were, and set up the systems and configure them, get them running, then troubleshoot and do upgrades and stuff of that
Mark McBride-Wright 9:11
you were, you were really working in areas of broadcasting and telecom that were, Were quite cutting edge or quite leading
Yosi Kossowsly 9:22
at the Yeah, absolutely. And so really learned a lot about encryption and algorithms and other and other things like that. The broadcasters that I was mostly supporting were in Asia. So a lot of time in India, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Malaysia. And then one of our customers at the time was B sky, and so I was in the UK, and I was in France, Germany.
Mark McBride-Wright 9:47
Oh, you lived everywhere, yeah.
Yosi Kossowsly 9:49
So, so it, it was interesting, because it played, it played a big role later in in the time of the engineering, it was just fun and exciting to. Learn about other cultures, taste different foods, you know, those types of things. Yeah.
Mark McBride-Wright 10:05
So what do you mean by it? So is this bringing us up to your transition from technical work, then into leadership and coaching. The fact that you’d worked in so many different geographies, nationalities, interfaced so many different nationalities and people from different backgrounds. You developed a high EQ in relation to people and how to lead teams of different backgrounds?
Yosi Kossowsly 10:34
AROUND, AROUND 2005 or so I applied to take on like a team lead. And very quickly, so I, you know, I got the opportunity, and very quickly started getting feedback that I wasn’t so great on the people side, that I didn’t have the EQ, the intuition, the understanding. And remember I told you before that hands on learner type of thing, yes, and so this was a real discovery for me, just how difficult it was for me to translate ideas into practice, like active listening, like patience, like listening to understand somebody else, like not being too bossy or too directive, or things of that nature. And that was a real struggle, like I I did not understand that. I didn’t understand until I got the feedback, and then I’m was clear that I had a gap, but then I didn’t know how to solve for it so not related to work on my personal life, I was I’ve always dealt with something called autoimmune issues, and Western medicine doesn’t really have great solutions for autoimmune and so my wife, a few years like in 2002 had really pushed me to start seeking what we would call alternative medicine, and so one of my connections there recommended I take a workshop on something called emotional wellness therapy, and it was a three day intensive event, and it really blew me away. Like it blew me away. I realized, you know, day one, I was like, everyone’s talking, like, everyone’s like, really emotional here, what’s what’s going on, and it made me super duper uncomfortable. And I never realized that. And so then the, you know, the people that I was working with, they’re like, Okay, so let’s, let’s explore this on this discomfort with emotion, yeah, and, and ultimately, it really cracked the egg open for me and helped me understand that I really was pretty disconnected from myself and my emotions best. And it was enough that I realized I wanted to know more. I was scared and I wanted to know more
Mark McBride-Wright 13:09
curious. Yeah, scared, but curious, which is a nice combination to have to carry you through. You weren’t you weren’t petrified that you then wanted to put your head in the sand and keep that closed and not open that, but you decided to investigate and go deeper. So talk us through that to the extent that you’re comfortable doing so like exploration. So it started
Yosi Kossowsly 13:33
off with recognizing emotions, and what I started to really understand was that I couldn’t recognize my emotions, meaning I knew anger, frustration, yes and hate, but I didn’t really recognize pretty much anything else, whether it would be love, joy, happiness, Passion. I was really familiar with those three and you know one of one of the parts of it is like they’re trying to help you touch like your soul or your inner self. And I’m It must have taken me about six or seven months before I ever had what I could relate to as the experience that they were talking about
Mark McBride-Wright 14:25
and Okay, and what was the experience touching your soul? So to speak, was the experience and what was the work that you had to do to get to that point?
Yosi Kossowsly 14:35
So ultimately, it was a lot of letting go of ideas, identifying limiting beliefs, rules, ideas, ideals that I had picked up throughout my whole life, unknowingly, unaware, wasn’t even aware that such a thing was happening could happen. You know, I really believed that the way I saw the world. Was the way that the world was. I didn’t understand that we live in a very subjectively perceptible world, meaning the way you see the world and the way I see the world is not the same, that there isn’t the idea of one truth. And even though, essentially my grandfather, my mother’s father raised me with an idea that truth is an area and not a point, that many truths can coexist. Yes, I had the idea again, but I didn’t understand how that was possible.
Mark McBride-Wright 15:36
Yeah, it was quite binary. Maybe your mindset, that’s the engineering side coming through the very logical, methodical, systematic process, thinking
Yosi Kossowsly 15:46
very much so. And you know, I was happy to be associated with Spock, if that is a reference point for you on Star Trek. And honestly, there was a lot of like, crisis of faith, crisis of self throughout this process, and I ended up really spending many years going through workshops and retreats where in the retreats would be like, you know, 1012, days, where we would just be separated from the, you know, like day to day life, And you just spend a lot of time digging deeper, having these very open sessions. And, you know, one of the things mark that’s really weird or cool about it was, this was the only place I’d ever been that everybody loved your shit, like, the more, the more that you were willing to open up and share like the more accepted you were, and that made it super safe to be crazy vulnerable.
Mark McBride-Wright 17:10
Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard of people in terms of the men’s movement and these retreats and that have become a bit more popular, although they’re nowhere near at the scale that they should be, with the amount of introspection that men need to do to be that emotionally vulnerable. I’ve heard that there it can go too far in one direction, sometimes as well, in that there then become this competition of who can be the most emotionally vulnerable, or, you know, if you’re not having a breakdown and in tears, and then it’s not working, or, I guess it’s different for each person. And you shouldn’t come to these retreats or these sessions with that expectation, and you should just go with the process and see what happens. Absolutely.
Yosi Kossowsly 17:58
So for the firstly, the in I had like as I was going through, so I did do some men only retreats, okay? The majority of the retreats, though, were mixed, mixed, okay, and it’s funny about the competition. I don’t think I ever thought about that until you said this. I never felt in competition with anybody, and I never, I don’t, I don’t think anybody ever like mentioned this
Mark McBride-Wright 18:32
idea didn’t have that
Yosi Kossowsly 18:36
meaning, what, what, what did, what there was interesting was, like, from a from an outside perspective, from a family perspective, and friends, some people thought I’d gone off the deep end and into a cult like event. And, you know, my wife and I, so I kind of pulled my wife into it, and we kept on checking, like, is this a cult? Is this a cult, you know? And no one was asking us for our money. No one was asking us to separate from others, like we kept on looking up on Google, like, what are cult like? You know, behaviors, yeah, and there, meaning it was more along the lines of a religion, though it was not a religion at all. And the person that the main teacher we had, really went to great lengths to talk about the agnostic level of it, meaning you believe in what you experience, but not in what anybody else tells you,
Mark McBride-Wright 19:37
yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s sort of like a boundary to the that then can blend into spirituality, or whatever that may be. But it’s not a higher order purpose, and you’re a vessel for for this. And what have you, it’s, it’s the extent to which you experience the world, and the fact that that can vary from person to person, and therefore, what is the interrelationship? Between that and the tension points and the and the opportunity points that come up, yeah,
Yosi Kossowsly 20:06
and so what, what they’re ultimately trying to do is
Yosi Kossowsly 20:16
to get you to a place where you feel you are a choice in how you respond and react to life in each moment,
Mark McBride-Wright 20:24
yes, yes, yes,
Yosi Kossowsly 20:26
that I would say, not their stated goal, but their unstated goal, because it came up a lot that that’s kind of like what the
Yosi Kossowsly 20:47
you know, like water test was, is, how much are you being driven by the unknowns inside of you, your fears, your concerns, your limiting ideas, your your limiting beliefs. And it’s really hard to uncover your limiting beliefs and your derailer ideas and the personality traits or habits that you’ve picked up throughout your life, and find them, see them, examine them, and then choose whether or not this is serving you in that moment or at all anymore. And then what are you left with without some of those? Because some sometimes, the identification of me with that idea or or ideal was very, very strong.
Mark McBride-Wright 21:40
Yeah, it’s decoupling a whole lifetime’s worth of programming. And that’s an element, you know, you can do that when you’re journaling or self reflecting or discussion, when you’re not being triggered in that moment. And then the next higher order capability is where you are in real time a dynamic situation, and you can feel yourself going to your de facto response. And you’re able to now have the self regulation to think you’re going down that route. We want to be going down this route. Now this is our new challenge, our new goal for ourself. Let’s be aware of how our mind is now starting to behave. Our physicality starting to behave. It’s a bit like, I mean, parenting is one of the biggest areas in which I can relate to it, and it’s almost like trying to break the generational cycle of the way in which you were brought up, and then the way in which you’re now bringing your kids up, and that whole attitude of, well, it was fine for me, and it will be fine for you, but actually, maybe it wasn’t fine for you. Maybe it’s had a legacy effect on you, and that’s a root cause of one of these cycles that you’re trying to break. So it’s it’s hard, it’s hard. It’s a constant, constant, Mark constant,
Yosi Kossowsly 22:54
and it’s funny you bring up parenting. I was doing this work while my kids were just about getting to their teenage years. And honestly, I think, I think we freaked them out a little bit because we were, we were going through changes and and I don’t think that they understood I understood it. And even though I, you know, with hindsight, we all recognize that this was a better way for us to be parents at the time, I think it was just freaking them out. Like, yeah, I went from being overly bearing bit of a jerk dad to less like you’re saying, like I really did throw on them, all of the burdens, especially religious idea value, burdens that I had been raised with, Even though they weren’t serving me?
Mark McBride-Wright 24:01
Yeah, it was an expectation. And you had maybe a pressure from above to be raising the next generation in a certain way, and you had that inner conflict with with that. And then when you start showing up differently to what they’ve already always been used to, it’s like, hang on, who is this person who is this dad that’s just came back from this, this experience that they’ve you mentioned that the trigger point was your wife suggesting alternative therapies because Western medicine wasn’t really helping. Did you find then going on this, you know, doing what you did then helped in the physical sense.
Yosi Kossowsly 24:43
So the reason that I actually stayed with the whole alternative idea was one of the diagnoses that I had gotten a few years before was I. Uh, psoriatic arthritis, and I don’t know if you know anything about it, but not a great diagnosis and no cure, and it can be pretty disabling as
Mark McBride-Wright 25:17
time goes on, triggered by stress, right? You know it can be exacerbated.
Yosi Kossowsly 25:21
So it’s all exacerbated by stress, for sure. They don’t Western medicine doesn’t really understand the roots or the source of the autoimmune issues at all, yeah. And so the medication that they wanted to put me on to slow down the progress of the essentially, the rumination of your joints also had some crazy side effects. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I’m 30 years old, and I’m thinking, how, what is my life going to be like in 1020 years? And at that time, my kids were very little, and I’m thinking, this has no positive future if I start going down this. And so one of my early experiences with a naturopath was a whole lifestyle food change and a really kind of like clearing of my liver and my kidneys and stuff of that nature. And what was amazing was it cleared up the arthritis
Mark McBride-Wright 26:48
interest, and so you changed your diet and all that as well. You changed everything mindset.
Yosi Kossowsly 26:54
And that was before this, like that was before the whole emotional wellness program. Yes, it was one of the things that really got me to stick with, believe, trust, that there
Mark McBride-Wright 27:05
was alternative to Western ways of thinking and approaches and pharmaceuticals and medicine and so forth.
Yosi Kossowsly 27:14
So while it did do that, the two other autoimmune issues, psoriasis and thyroid disease. I still, I’m dealing with those, though less so on the psoriasis, actually now just mostly on the thyroid and what, what? So while, the while, many people who went through this emotional wellness therapy work did experience physical healings as well, mostly for me, what it did was it helped me reframe my experience of myself and life and of these factors In my life so that I did not relate to them with stress or anger or kind of like a dysfunction like so I was that’s where it really helped me. Was really to see my life in a different frame, a different light to learn how to process my emotions. The goal is not to get rid of emotions. Yeah, right, in a sense, Mark, how do you know what hot feels like?
Mark McBride-Wright 28:31
Because you’ve experienced it and you feel it.
Yosi Kossowsly 28:35
So if you only experienced one temperature your whole life, what would happen?
Mark McBride-Wright 28:43
Well, yeah, yeah, you’d have no skill. Would you? You’d have no reference point.
Yosi Kossowsly 28:47
So our emotions are like that as well, in the sense that the reason we know happiness is because we know sadness. We know joy because we know the opposite of what that is. And so when we want to start to mute some, some of the emotions, it inherently starts to mute the other side as well. And that’s what I had been living my life, like muting them. And as I was learning to open up, I also was starting to feel a lot more and a lot of the work is teaching us how to relate to our feelings in a more open way, in a more accepting way, and helping us understand that our emotions don’t necessarily need to be connected to a thought or an idea or anything, that our emotions are a system of their own, okay? And they sure there is often a triggering effect, like a balance off between our beliefs, our ideas. However, sometimes we just wake up and we’re in a grumpy mood. Yeah, right, and it doesn’t necessarily always mean something. Right, and things of that. So in really learning how to be open to feeling everything, how to be how to learn how to sit with one’s emotions and not spiral, how to recognize that just because I have thoughts I don’t need to follow them. I don’t need to, and I learned this a little bit later on, is that in a sense, we think in narratives, and once we recognize that we’re always telling ourselves a story, we can also maybe realize that not every story we tell ourselves is accurate or true or has a basis, and that sometimes our brains are just making up stuff, but if we follow the stuff our brains make up, then We often do get into a emotional triggering mode and and so there, there is this constant, like, play out. And so learning how to be and relate with to my emotions differently, learning how to recognize thought patterns and also learn how to, kind of like switch the channels so that I don’t have to follow every thought that I have.
Mark McBride-Wright 31:24
Fascinating when you bring in the like neurodiversity to this as well. Oh yeah, how different people, how everyone’s brain is different, and then how, how people may have different ways in which the or different mechanisms that they’ll need to follow to help process certain emotions, certain feelings, the intensity with which they experience things as well, varies from person to person,
Yosi Kossowsly 31:51
absolutely and so all of this started getting me very interested, by the way, in the brain and in Understanding, okay, so now I was understanding the emotional play out and the belief play out. And I was very curious about, what is the different what is the impact of these different chemicals? I kept on hearing about dopamine, serotonin, cortisol, and also I was very curious in this idea of neuroplasticity, and what does that mean, and ultimately, in a most simplest form, I was really curious about, why is it that if I can really get to a place of making a decision for a life change, like, let’s say, no more chocolate, no more junk, that that didn’t stop me from wanting it, yearning it, and often buying it still. And I’m like, What is wrong with this system that my decisions are not like that part of me is not following through on that. Like, what? Yeah, yeah. And so again, you know, life pointed me to a good direction, and I started studying, as well a neuroscience therapy course that taught me a lot about our holistic selves and what we need to do to have a thriving body and a thriving brain To build what’s called growth factors, and that supports elasticity and all of that. And then taught me a lot about the different chemicals, and now they’re triggered. How often you know, how do they stay in the body? What they do to the body, how to help flush them out or build them, and together, the knowledge kind of like really synchronized in helping me understand that there’s this whole way to handle our emotions, and then there’s this whole way to handle Our thoughts, there’s this whole play out of subjective perception, and how deeply that impacts the way we see the world, understand, make sense of the world, react, respond to it, and that even more so in A play out of people interacting with each other, that the systems we have been taught overall about how to communicate with another are ineffective, yes, based on how the brain is working and processing.
Mark McBride-Wright 34:35
So with all that in hand, you shifted to a career where you help people with this.
Yosi Kossowsly 34:44
So what happened was I finished the certifications around 2010 and then it was suggested to me by people in the company that if I want to continue to like, bring this knowledge in and help other leaders, maybe go get a coaching cert. So I went in and I found a place, and I got my first coaching certification that I completed in 2012 and I really had no intention to leave engineering. A year and a half later, the company got acquired by Cisco, and that was a real shake up the company I was in about 5000 people. Now Cisco’s 77,000 people. Senior execs became middle managers and everything kind of like shifted, but really none of us had the understanding, the skills. How does that happen? And and while Cisco was amazing about, like onboarding us from a practical perspective, getting your computers and your badges from a cultural perspective, we were kind of left on our own. And so about two months in, my wife says to me, she goes, and I was kind of like moping around with everybody else, and she says, you know, you have tools for this.
Mark McBride-Wright 36:02
You could be a conduit to and
Yosi Kossowsly 36:04
I’m like, I do well, I think first she was saying for me to get out of my funk. So I took it though, like you just said it, like, yeah, I got tools for this. And so I went and I offered the executives at my site coaching. And I had never really done like, I mean, I had been certified, but I never like,
Mark McBride-Wright 36:24
did it? Never practiced it with with actual people when, well, only what
Yosi Kossowsly 36:29
you have to do to get certified,
Mark McBride-Wright 36:33
practicing it yourself with people as a like, once you’ve got the start, you hadn’t applied it in that
Yosi Kossowsly 36:39
respect. No, not really, not like, not as a, not as a program like I had been coaching one, you know, ad hoc people, but using the skills. But I never made a program and a plan, you know, let’s meet for a number of sessions, and here have a, you know, so, so I made something up. I pitched it. And of the 15 leaders I pitched to 12 said, Yes,
Mark McBride-Wright 37:08
amazing. Then
Yosi Kossowsly 37:10
about two months in, about eight of those leaders went to HR, and they said, Okay, this is this has shifted everything for us. We gotta, we gotta get him doing more of this. And I had also started random, you know, kind of like rogue, a program for the employees at the site to also help them go through this emotional transition using the same tools. And between the both of them, HR started noticing a big change of of employee engagement at our site. And so at some point they came and they asked me if I would do it full time at all of the acquisition sites. And that really was the shift of goodbye, computer engineering, hello. And I joked at the time, you know, human engineering and and then again, I started traveling. And so here was the point where all of that cultural experience all of a sudden kicked in in a different way. And so again, I was spending a lot of time beyond just the US both west and east coast, which are different kind of culturally offer time in Mexico and Canada, England, France, Germany, Amsterdam, Israel, again, a couple of different places in India, again, Hong Kong and China, Malaysia. And then a lot of time, I didn’t fly ever to Sydney, but a lot of time also with the Australian teams. And really started understanding how impactful culture, gender and generation are on all of these things, on how do we interact, how do we communicate, how do we process thought, how do we process emotion, and what does that play a role in teaming? And how do we effectively work with one another? How do we go through change? How do we accept change? How do we work with resistance to that? And over the next six years, that’s all I did was work with different leaders and teams across the company. Spend time in engineering and then sales and customer success and operations and also did a lot of adjunct work with with HR teams on different parts of refreshing performance management, but also the an employee onboarding program, working with a lot of the M and A teams on helping them integrate some of these things into their M and a work that they, you know, because Cisco just acquires a lot of companies overall as a way of growth, their growth strategy, yeah, and, and I had the opportunity to get also more certifications and more understanding on human systems dynamics. And you. More and more neuroscience and more ideas of such things like strength based coaching and positive psychology, and they were all just tools, right? They were all just a continuing bundle of tools to work with leaders and teams. I wasn’t my role wasn’t a coach, it was more of a change management leader, yes, and and then there was coaching like So Cisco did have a coaching practice, and I joined that. And so I did do straight coaching, but even my day job was mostly coaching of and I learned how to create workshops and programs. And it was amazing. Honestly, it was, I never thought beyond it. It wasn’t a plan. Yeah, it was so fulfilling. It was just amazing.
Mark McBride-Wright 40:56
We I work with a lot of, you know, large infrastructure projects that are performing in a certain way. Different sites have different engagement scores, different quality of leadership. You know, mostly male still, because that’s engineering the way it is now, fortunately, still haven’t shifted massively on improving gender representation. And so what that means practically then, with the composition of who’s working in the sector, is that you get certain, certain dominant cultures that are created then with individuals who haven’t done all the type of confronting, their feelings, self exploration, like you’ve described that you did through your emotional wellness coaching sessions. And so I’m wondering if there’s an opportunity to curate something with all these tools that are available. It’s almost like a pick and mix, or you’re looking on the shelf and you’re thinking, right what, what tools do I need, and what combination for that site and for that site and for that site, or for that organization, or for that entire project, and all those supply chain suppliers, you know the art of being able to come in as a consultant and help advise and diagnose on that, but then also have a solution and then create a project to then follow through on. Quite frankly, that’s where I’m at right now. Actually, with the safe leader, I know that more men need to share their stories, for more points of reference for everyone to learn from. But people are not doing that. And there’s work. Even what I’m discovering through doing these podcasts and doing more, there’s a whole ton of work that needs to get be done before people are even ready to do that. And they might never be ready to do that, but at least if they’ve done it within themselves. Yeah, then the So, there’s so the safe leaders became a kind of circular journey of share, act, feel, empower, where the sharing is is, well, it’s essentially, maybe some emotional wellness type introspection and stuff that we’re pulling out. So it’s, I think it would be transformation, transformational for the entire engineering sector, construction, you know, sectors to really lean into this type of programming because, you know, engineers are so familiar with physical safety, and it’s part of our culture. So it’s not too much of an extrapolation to extrapolate that to psychological safety and thinking about the brain being treated with the same respect as the physical body. You know that that was actually why I started this podcast and wrote my book, and it’s the work I’m trying to do in the world now. You know? So, yeah, maybe there’s some more, more discussions we could have offline.
Yosi Kossowsly 44:06
Absolutely, I would love to. So I’ll tell you this mark, I am so not proprietary. In the end, I have not found one source of material that informs the way I coach or do workshops. I’m really still pulling from a lot of different materials, as well as my practical experience in working with people.
Mark McBride-Wright 44:43
That’s what people relate to the most. It’s where there’s someone in front of them who’s done the work and experienced themselves, and it’s a personal story, a personal success that’s been realized for the individual. And then people think, well, could that be me? Could that be me? Could I make. Imagine you can have all the tools and frameworks and policies and procedures and methodologies under the sun, you know, but ultimately it comes down to creating a learning experience where the individuals are like, I see myself in you, and I believe in what you’ve said, and so therefore I’m curious. Come back to that curiosity. It’s where you were however many years ago. It’s that curiosity to then do that discomfort, and I think fundamentally, that’s where we’re at as a society in relation to our relationship with diversity, equity and inclusion. Sure, it’s all got muddled through this superficial diversity approach, and actually, it’s all about understanding the experiences of others and recognizing that we see the world differently to the way others see the world, and we experience it differently. And it’s this beautiful layering of what you’ve just so eloquently described, but applied to others. But we need to do the work ourselves first.
Yosi Kossowsly 46:03
To understand, we need to do the work ourselves first. It’s, you know, there. We do have a strong Sixth Sense, and so if somebody is standing in front of us, this just happened the other day, thankfully, not to me, but to one of my clients, where a senior leader was talking about the need to be kind, they need to be respectful, and all of that. And then then, you know, a day later or so, they they lost it on on a group of people, and this senior leader just couldn’t, um,
Yosi Kossowsly 46:54
let go Initially, of the loss of trust of this executive because of the perception of hypocrisy. And there’s a lot of work in in, you know, being able to learn how to process, and there’s a few funny enough, there’s like four or five parables or stories that or sayings that I kind of have attached myself to, that really kind of influence, yeah, influence, my, my, my, my, my value systems, or, you know, so one of them is this saying attributed to Buddha that holding on to resentment, anger, frustration, whatever for another is like drinking poison and hoping the other person will dry. Right? So you one, when one is feeling anger or blame or judgment towards another, it like eats you up inside, and you’re constantly that’s the poison. The other person rarely feels it, or you have no idea if they feel it at all, but they certainly don’t feel it from you, and they might not even know or think about it, you know, and and you’re sitting there and you’re, you know, burning up inside and so, again, easy to say, not so easy to implement.
Mark McBride-Wright 48:29
Yeah, that’s the work, totally. So nowadays, then that’s how you, you’re, you’re working through your own company, helping organizations with coaching and programming and yeah, and we and is it still mainly engineering, or do you work across other other sectors?
Yosi Kossowsly 48:49
So yeah, I work across I do really well with logic minded people. And it ends up that I do get work in front of a lot of logic minded people, but not, not solely, and it was one of those hard things for me to accept in the beginning, when I went out on my own, that you need to have a niche and specialize, yes, so that people can understand what You do, but that ultimately doesn’t necessarily limit you, yes, as time goes on, yeah.
Mark McBride-Wright 49:24
It’s the marketing funnel. It’s the hook. It’s what gets people into your website and then booking a 15 minute discovery call with you to, you know, understand their pain points, and then hopefully commission some work or do some further work. Yeah, okay, quick fire questions, okay, right, yeah. What’s the one skill every technical leader should develop?
Yosi Kossowsly 49:51
I’m going to say this word, but I do want to define it, and we’ve used it already in the conversation, which is curiosity. So. The the mindset of, what if I don’t know? What if I don’t understand the other person? What if I don’t really know the things I think I know, that ability to then create a space for questions is amazing, and it’s unavailable if I think
Mark McBride-Wright 50:22
I know. What’s the best leadership advice you’ve ever received?
Yosi Kossowsly 50:26
This one? Be curious. Be curious. I didn’t understand it when I first got it, but be curious. Don’t be so sure. Don’t be so sure of everything you think you know. So yeah, they kind of come together,
Mark McBride-Wright 50:42
coffee, tea or something stronger,
Yosi Kossowsly 50:45
coffee, coffee, coffee. I have t shirts. My kids all laugh. Yeah, coffee, lot of I am I’m crazy about coffee. So coffee,
Mark McBride-Wright 50:56
coffee, coffee, love that, who’s one seeker, who’s one thinker, coach or mentor, who inspires you?
Yosi Kossowsly 51:05
You know, it’s funny. I had to think about that question. I think that one of the people I talk to others a lot about is Brene Brown, yeah, and this relationship between courage and vulnerability, it it really kind of like blows leaders away when they get that. There’s a connection there. Yeah, between them,
Mark McBride-Wright 51:30
what’s a book you regularly recommend to your clients?
Yosi Kossowsly 51:34
I have a series of books that really have influenced me in funny ways. So one of them is predictably irrational by Dan Ariely, and it’s about macro, microeconomics or emotional economics. And it’s just so funny when one realizes the nature of sometimes, how our brain makes choices that we think is, ah, you know, we think, Oh yeah, it doesn’t make any sense, but it’s very consistent. So that’s a big one for me.
Mark McBride-Wright 52:07
What’s your favorite coaching tool or model that you always come back to?
Yosi Kossowsly 52:13
So I created a model for teaching people about how human perception works, and it is my start off model on 99% of my coaching engagements and workshop engagements for people to understand that the illusion of communication happening is really an illusion. The illusion of understanding is and if we don’t understand that, we just because I’m talking and you’re nodding your head doesn’t mean that you hear me the way I’m saying things.
Mark McBride-Wright 52:43
Yeah, what’s your go to way to recharge? The gym? What something leaders often get wrong about delegation
Yosi Kossowsly 52:56
that they don’t know how to do it. So it’s a word that doesn’t actually have a defined meaning for everybody. If you ask everybody what delegation means, they’ll all say something different. Yeah. So delegation requires the building of trust first, and we think of delegation as an assignment, and so delegation without trust is just a storm brewing.
Mark McBride-Wright 53:33
You’re being held to a bar that can’t be fulfilled. Or Yeah,
Yosi Kossowsly 53:36
well, yeah. And that goes into this whole ambiguity, which is 99% of the words we use are ambiguous. They they imply a definition or term, something like I need it as soon as possible. Get to me by the end of the week. I need that to be better. I need you to be more strategic. Make that shorter, clean that up a little bit. They all imply something, but no one defines it, and no one thinks to ask for a definition, and then you deliver it and like, no, that’s not what I wanted.
Mark McBride-Wright 54:09
Interesting. Yeah. And finally, then what advice would you give your younger self stepping into your first leadership role?
Yosi Kossowsly 54:18
So I’m gonna say it, and then I’ll define it, enjoy the journey. And so I lived a lot of my life very goal based, and that meant that every day that I woke up and didn’t achieve the goal, then it was just like, this is a waste of time, Dave. Like, this is just something to get through, to get me closer to my goal. And not really, like people would say, smell the roses or whatever, really learning how to value every moment as much as I can, how to value this conversation for the conversation, and meeting a new person and, and it doesn’t have to lead to something, yes, if it does, great, but it’s just the opportunity to connect and, and I wish. Which I had spent more of my life valuing each moment
Mark McBride-Wright 55:06
as beautiful. That is a really nice strong point to round off on. And you’re right setting expecting that every minute you invest in your life to then be a compound minute for another thing makes your life so mechanical and less less less enriching, because you’re not just enjoying the journey, as you say. So if people want to find out more about your work or get in touch with you. How do you how do they do that? The best
Yosi Kossowsly 55:44
way, really, is LinkedIn. And I do have the website, but the website is more of a placeholder and it it’s a place for the company, which has my partners are all very focused in different areas, and so LinkedIn is the place. There’s also a button, as you say, for anyone to book a 30 minute discovery call with me. No charge, and so, yeah, that’s the place fabulous.
Mark McBride-Wright 56:08
All right. Well, we’ll put a link to your profile in the transcript the show notes as well. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for for joining us today.
Yosi Kossowsly 56:17
You’re very welcome. And again, thank you, Mark for having me on your show. Thanks. You.
E037: Learning to Feel and Enjoy the Journey
Podcast Description
Read the Transcript
Mark McBride-Wright 0:01
Mark, Hi everyone. Welcome to the next episode of the safe leader podcast. I’m your host, Mark McBride-Wright, and today I’m joined by Yossi kosowski, who is an executive development coach, leadership strategist and co owner of ktor Consulting Services with over 30 years of experience spanning IT leadership, executive coaching and organizational transformation. Yossi helps technical and data driven professionals elevate their leadership effectiveness through neuroscience based emotionally intelligent methods. His career includes senior roles at Cisco where he led global leadership development and culture transformation programs and as Chief Technology and Strategy Officer at AI IR consulting, where he spearheaded product innovation and coaching technologies today, Yosi coaches leaders and teams around the world, helping them transition from individual contributors to inspiring high trust leaders who unlock team potential and deliver results from CTO to coach, you’ll see bridges deep technical insight with human centered leadership, empowering clients to lead smarter, not harder. Welcome. How are you doing?
Yosi Kossowsly 1:14
I’m doing really well. Mark, thank you so much for having me on the show today.
Mark McBride-Wright 1:18
It’s absolute pleasure that is, that is quite an introduction. That is quite a very concise career. How, yeah, it feels like you’ve had a very funneled, we haven’t met before. This is the first time we’re, yeah, we’re chatting properly. But I feel like you’ve had a very focused, um, route to where you’re at, is that right?
Yosi Kossowsly 1:41
So it didn’t feel focused, honestly, it really did not have a plan. So I started university, and I was having to pay my own way. I quickly realized at the end of my freshman year that I couldn’t afford it, really, and so I got a summer job working in a mail room at a real estate development company. And towards the end of the summer, I just asked them if I could stay on because I didn’t have a plan, like I really didn’t have a plan. And when I first my first major was psychology, and I did that because that’s what kind of like the family business was, in a funny sense. My father was a minister, my grandfather was a minister. My great uncle was a psychiatrist. So there was a lot of, like, mediation, things going on in the family, I’m like, okay, so this is, like, the thing to go into. But I really didn’t have a plan, and so I, I’ve, I stayed at that summer job, which an amazing angel came in the form of the CFO of the company, offered me a job in in the accounting department, took me under his wing, and I let me tell you, Mark, I suck at math like big, big, big, big time.
Mark McBride-Wright 3:12
Did you with the accounting or
Yosi Kossowsly 3:16
payable, much to their chagrin. And luckily, it was about about a year into the job that they were putting in a computer system, like the first networking system of in the company. It was really early days, like 91 or 92 and they were, you know, trying to get this shared accounting system, and I got assigned to, like, work with these consultants to put in the system. And I just fell in love with computers and IP, just unlike accounting, which didn’t make any sense to me, computers, and I just had a instant relationship.
Mark McBride-Wright 4:02
It was a good time to get to grow an affinity to computers, because, yeah, early 90s, they were starting to revolutionize how we did business, like they continue to do so now,
Yosi Kossowsly 4:13
yep, and so I, you know, I got married, actually, not too far from this whole experience, and then my wife said, I don’t want to live in New York, so we moved to Maryland, and I took a job in a help desk, you know, and and then I just grew my career over the next 10 years. And then, you know, a few years later was this.com boom thing and and it just allowed me to grow and grow and grow in the IT industry. And because it was so new, it wasn’t like there was real certifications. I mean, Microsoft had some certifications, and a company called node. Val had some certifications, but it wasn’t like hard study, you know. And once you were using the things, it was easy to
Mark McBride-Wright 5:07
go this, learn, learn through doing, learn through application. There what? There weren’t any sort of software engineering degrees or apprenticeships that you’d go off and study. It was very much on the job, learning your craft, learning your specialism?
Yosi Kossowsly 5:21
Yeah, absolutely. And which, by the way, I just have discovered, is the best way that I learned. So that was a perfect match. That’s perfect, yeah. So I did that, and then I got bored a little bit, and so in 2000 I took on a job in something called a pre Technical Sales Engineer, and so the sales team would qualify people, and then I would go in and help architect the solution. So more technical work, just on the pre sales side,
Mark McBride-Wright 5:50
pre sales so you haven’t yet made a sale,
Yosi Kossowsly 5:53
but so it was to close the sale. It was like to help the sales team close the sale. So I was working for a company you said you lived in New York, so called Comcast, which is a cable company, right? Yeah, yeah, they’re very big that time. They were just a cable company and and they were starting to sell to businesses. And so I would go in and help architect the fiber solution for the customers.
Mark McBride-Wright 6:19
So to meet so for the cost, yeah, to make sure that what was being diagnosed, let’s say, by the sales team, as the need for the client was actually correct, and you were there to make sure that that then there was no hidden surprises when it then came to paying for what they were purchasing And then actually rolling out?
Yosi Kossowsly 6:41
Yeah, you know, I don’t know if you’ve ever worked in any businesses with sales people. Sales people tend to have high estimation about what a company can actually deliver, okay, and so, so this was kind of helping ensure that we didn’t sell something we couldn’t deliver.
Mark McBride-Wright 7:02
Yeah, because that can have risk issues further down line. Can’t you know, you said you could do this, and now you can. And so you’re having to deal with disgruntled customers. And, yeah, cancelations, no renewals, and bad reputation,
Yosi Kossowsly 7:20
all of that. So, so it was a great job. It ended abruptly when the market crashed in 2001 or so, right? Actually, 2002 I got laid off in the summer of 2002 and landed a job a few months later in another technology company at this time as an engineer, something called the system engineer.
Mark McBride-Wright 7:49
Okay, so first time engineer was in your title, it was
Yosi Kossowsly 7:53
the first time engineer was in my title. And the company built and delivered technologies for satellite and cable broadcasters. So funny enough, it wasn’t. It was It wasn’t connected to Comcast in any way. And the work I was doing in Comcast wasn’t related to the TV side of their business, just the fiber side. And so what happens is that if you have, if you’re in UK, if you have B, Sky, B or something, right? So then you have a set top box in the house, and you’ve got a smart card in there that kind of gives you the permission about what you can watch and all of that, yeah. And so we created the smart card technology. We created the, you know, a lot of the chips inside the box, as well as we did what’s called the head end, which is all of the things that allow the broadcaster to do the metadata, the on screen TV Guide, yeah, and all of that information. And so my job was again, to architect the solution, but this time it was a post sales role, and then go to on site where the broadcasters were, and set up the systems and configure them, get them running, then troubleshoot and do upgrades and stuff of that
Mark McBride-Wright 9:11
you were, you were really working in areas of broadcasting and telecom that were, Were quite cutting edge or quite leading
Yosi Kossowsly 9:22
at the Yeah, absolutely. And so really learned a lot about encryption and algorithms and other and other things like that. The broadcasters that I was mostly supporting were in Asia. So a lot of time in India, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Malaysia. And then one of our customers at the time was B sky, and so I was in the UK, and I was in France, Germany.
Mark McBride-Wright 9:47
Oh, you lived everywhere, yeah.
Yosi Kossowsly 9:49
So, so it, it was interesting, because it played, it played a big role later in in the time of the engineering, it was just fun and exciting to. Learn about other cultures, taste different foods, you know, those types of things. Yeah.
Mark McBride-Wright 10:05
So what do you mean by it? So is this bringing us up to your transition from technical work, then into leadership and coaching. The fact that you’d worked in so many different geographies, nationalities, interfaced so many different nationalities and people from different backgrounds. You developed a high EQ in relation to people and how to lead teams of different backgrounds?
Yosi Kossowsly 10:28
Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Right? No.
Mark McBride-Wright 10:33
So, hey, let’s
Yosi Kossowsly 10:34
AROUND, AROUND 2005 or so I applied to take on like a team lead. And very quickly, so I, you know, I got the opportunity, and very quickly started getting feedback that I wasn’t so great on the people side, that I didn’t have the EQ, the intuition, the understanding. And remember I told you before that hands on learner type of thing, yes, and so this was a real discovery for me, just how difficult it was for me to translate ideas into practice, like active listening, like patience, like listening to understand somebody else, like not being too bossy or too directive, or things of that nature. And that was a real struggle, like I I did not understand that. I didn’t understand until I got the feedback, and then I’m was clear that I had a gap, but then I didn’t know how to solve for it so not related to work on my personal life, I was I’ve always dealt with something called autoimmune issues, and Western medicine doesn’t really have great solutions for autoimmune and so my wife, a few years like in 2002 had really pushed me to start seeking what we would call alternative medicine, and so one of my connections there recommended I take a workshop on something called emotional wellness therapy, and it was a three day intensive event, and it really blew me away. Like it blew me away. I realized, you know, day one, I was like, everyone’s talking, like, everyone’s like, really emotional here, what’s what’s going on, and it made me super duper uncomfortable. And I never realized that. And so then the, you know, the people that I was working with, they’re like, Okay, so let’s, let’s explore this on this discomfort with emotion, yeah, and, and ultimately, it really cracked the egg open for me and helped me understand that I really was pretty disconnected from myself and my emotions best. And it was enough that I realized I wanted to know more. I was scared and I wanted to know more
Mark McBride-Wright 13:09
curious. Yeah, scared, but curious, which is a nice combination to have to carry you through. You weren’t you weren’t petrified that you then wanted to put your head in the sand and keep that closed and not open that, but you decided to investigate and go deeper. So talk us through that to the extent that you’re comfortable doing so like exploration. So it started
Yosi Kossowsly 13:33
off with recognizing emotions, and what I started to really understand was that I couldn’t recognize my emotions, meaning I knew anger, frustration, yes and hate, but I didn’t really recognize pretty much anything else, whether it would be love, joy, happiness, Passion. I was really familiar with those three and you know one of one of the parts of it is like they’re trying to help you touch like your soul or your inner self. And I’m It must have taken me about six or seven months before I ever had what I could relate to as the experience that they were talking about
Mark McBride-Wright 14:25
and Okay, and what was the experience touching your soul? So to speak, was the experience and what was the work that you had to do to get to that point?
Yosi Kossowsly 14:35
So ultimately, it was a lot of letting go of ideas, identifying limiting beliefs, rules, ideas, ideals that I had picked up throughout my whole life, unknowingly, unaware, wasn’t even aware that such a thing was happening could happen. You know, I really believed that the way I saw the world. Was the way that the world was. I didn’t understand that we live in a very subjectively perceptible world, meaning the way you see the world and the way I see the world is not the same, that there isn’t the idea of one truth. And even though, essentially my grandfather, my mother’s father raised me with an idea that truth is an area and not a point, that many truths can coexist. Yes, I had the idea again, but I didn’t understand how that was possible.
Mark McBride-Wright 15:36
Yeah, it was quite binary. Maybe your mindset, that’s the engineering side coming through the very logical, methodical, systematic process, thinking
Yosi Kossowsly 15:46
very much so. And you know, I was happy to be associated with Spock, if that is a reference point for you on Star Trek. And honestly, there was a lot of like, crisis of faith, crisis of self throughout this process, and I ended up really spending many years going through workshops and retreats where in the retreats would be like, you know, 1012, days, where we would just be separated from the, you know, like day to day life, And you just spend a lot of time digging deeper, having these very open sessions. And, you know, one of the things mark that’s really weird or cool about it was, this was the only place I’d ever been that everybody loved your shit, like, the more, the more that you were willing to open up and share like the more accepted you were, and that made it super safe to be crazy vulnerable.
Mark McBride-Wright 17:10
Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard of people in terms of the men’s movement and these retreats and that have become a bit more popular, although they’re nowhere near at the scale that they should be, with the amount of introspection that men need to do to be that emotionally vulnerable. I’ve heard that there it can go too far in one direction, sometimes as well, in that there then become this competition of who can be the most emotionally vulnerable, or, you know, if you’re not having a breakdown and in tears, and then it’s not working, or, I guess it’s different for each person. And you shouldn’t come to these retreats or these sessions with that expectation, and you should just go with the process and see what happens. Absolutely.
Yosi Kossowsly 17:58
So for the firstly, the in I had like as I was going through, so I did do some men only retreats, okay? The majority of the retreats, though, were mixed, mixed, okay, and it’s funny about the competition. I don’t think I ever thought about that until you said this. I never felt in competition with anybody, and I never, I don’t, I don’t think anybody ever like mentioned this
Mark McBride-Wright 18:32
idea didn’t have that
Yosi Kossowsly 18:36
meaning, what, what, what did, what there was interesting was, like, from a from an outside perspective, from a family perspective, and friends, some people thought I’d gone off the deep end and into a cult like event. And, you know, my wife and I, so I kind of pulled my wife into it, and we kept on checking, like, is this a cult? Is this a cult, you know? And no one was asking us for our money. No one was asking us to separate from others, like we kept on looking up on Google, like, what are cult like? You know, behaviors, yeah, and there, meaning it was more along the lines of a religion, though it was not a religion at all. And the person that the main teacher we had, really went to great lengths to talk about the agnostic level of it, meaning you believe in what you experience, but not in what anybody else tells you,
Mark McBride-Wright 19:37
yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s sort of like a boundary to the that then can blend into spirituality, or whatever that may be. But it’s not a higher order purpose, and you’re a vessel for for this. And what have you, it’s, it’s the extent to which you experience the world, and the fact that that can vary from person to person, and therefore, what is the interrelationship? Between that and the tension points and the and the opportunity points that come up, yeah,
Yosi Kossowsly 20:06
and so what, what they’re ultimately trying to do is
Yosi Kossowsly 20:16
to get you to a place where you feel you are a choice in how you respond and react to life in each moment,
Mark McBride-Wright 20:24
yes, yes, yes,
Yosi Kossowsly 20:26
that I would say, not their stated goal, but their unstated goal, because it came up a lot that that’s kind of like what the
Yosi Kossowsly 20:47
you know, like water test was, is, how much are you being driven by the unknowns inside of you, your fears, your concerns, your limiting ideas, your your limiting beliefs. And it’s really hard to uncover your limiting beliefs and your derailer ideas and the personality traits or habits that you’ve picked up throughout your life, and find them, see them, examine them, and then choose whether or not this is serving you in that moment or at all anymore. And then what are you left with without some of those? Because some sometimes, the identification of me with that idea or or ideal was very, very strong.
Mark McBride-Wright 21:40
Yeah, it’s decoupling a whole lifetime’s worth of programming. And that’s an element, you know, you can do that when you’re journaling or self reflecting or discussion, when you’re not being triggered in that moment. And then the next higher order capability is where you are in real time a dynamic situation, and you can feel yourself going to your de facto response. And you’re able to now have the self regulation to think you’re going down that route. We want to be going down this route. Now this is our new challenge, our new goal for ourself. Let’s be aware of how our mind is now starting to behave. Our physicality starting to behave. It’s a bit like, I mean, parenting is one of the biggest areas in which I can relate to it, and it’s almost like trying to break the generational cycle of the way in which you were brought up, and then the way in which you’re now bringing your kids up, and that whole attitude of, well, it was fine for me, and it will be fine for you, but actually, maybe it wasn’t fine for you. Maybe it’s had a legacy effect on you, and that’s a root cause of one of these cycles that you’re trying to break. So it’s it’s hard, it’s hard. It’s a constant, constant, Mark constant,
Yosi Kossowsly 22:54
and it’s funny you bring up parenting. I was doing this work while my kids were just about getting to their teenage years. And honestly, I think, I think we freaked them out a little bit because we were, we were going through changes and and I don’t think that they understood I understood it. And even though I, you know, with hindsight, we all recognize that this was a better way for us to be parents at the time, I think it was just freaking them out. Like, yeah, I went from being overly bearing bit of a jerk dad to less like you’re saying, like I really did throw on them, all of the burdens, especially religious idea value, burdens that I had been raised with, Even though they weren’t serving me?
Mark McBride-Wright 24:01
Yeah, it was an expectation. And you had maybe a pressure from above to be raising the next generation in a certain way, and you had that inner conflict with with that. And then when you start showing up differently to what they’ve already always been used to, it’s like, hang on, who is this person who is this dad that’s just came back from this, this experience that they’ve you mentioned that the trigger point was your wife suggesting alternative therapies because Western medicine wasn’t really helping. Did you find then going on this, you know, doing what you did then helped in the physical sense.
Yosi Kossowsly 24:43
So the reason that I actually stayed with the whole alternative idea was one of the diagnoses that I had gotten a few years before was I. Uh, psoriatic arthritis, and I don’t know if you know anything about it, but not a great diagnosis and no cure, and it can be pretty disabling as
Mark McBride-Wright 25:17
time goes on, triggered by stress, right? You know it can be exacerbated.
Yosi Kossowsly 25:21
So it’s all exacerbated by stress, for sure. They don’t Western medicine doesn’t really understand the roots or the source of the autoimmune issues at all, yeah. And so the medication that they wanted to put me on to slow down the progress of the essentially, the rumination of your joints also had some crazy side effects. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I’m 30 years old, and I’m thinking, how, what is my life going to be like in 1020 years? And at that time, my kids were very little, and I’m thinking, this has no positive future if I start going down this. And so one of my early experiences with a naturopath was a whole lifestyle food change and a really kind of like clearing of my liver and my kidneys and stuff of that nature. And what was amazing was it cleared up the arthritis
Mark McBride-Wright 26:48
interest, and so you changed your diet and all that as well. You changed everything mindset.
Yosi Kossowsly 26:54
And that was before this, like that was before the whole emotional wellness program. Yes, it was one of the things that really got me to stick with, believe, trust, that there
Mark McBride-Wright 27:05
was alternative to Western ways of thinking and approaches and pharmaceuticals and medicine and so forth.
Yosi Kossowsly 27:14
So while it did do that, the two other autoimmune issues, psoriasis and thyroid disease. I still, I’m dealing with those, though less so on the psoriasis, actually now just mostly on the thyroid and what, what? So while, the while, many people who went through this emotional wellness therapy work did experience physical healings as well, mostly for me, what it did was it helped me reframe my experience of myself and life and of these factors In my life so that I did not relate to them with stress or anger or kind of like a dysfunction like so I was that’s where it really helped me. Was really to see my life in a different frame, a different light to learn how to process my emotions. The goal is not to get rid of emotions. Yeah, right, in a sense, Mark, how do you know what hot feels like?
Mark McBride-Wright 28:31
Because you’ve experienced it and you feel it.
Yosi Kossowsly 28:35
So if you only experienced one temperature your whole life, what would happen?
Mark McBride-Wright 28:43
Well, yeah, yeah, you’d have no skill. Would you? You’d have no reference point.
Yosi Kossowsly 28:47
So our emotions are like that as well, in the sense that the reason we know happiness is because we know sadness. We know joy because we know the opposite of what that is. And so when we want to start to mute some, some of the emotions, it inherently starts to mute the other side as well. And that’s what I had been living my life, like muting them. And as I was learning to open up, I also was starting to feel a lot more and a lot of the work is teaching us how to relate to our feelings in a more open way, in a more accepting way, and helping us understand that our emotions don’t necessarily need to be connected to a thought or an idea or anything, that our emotions are a system of their own, okay? And they sure there is often a triggering effect, like a balance off between our beliefs, our ideas. However, sometimes we just wake up and we’re in a grumpy mood. Yeah, right, and it doesn’t necessarily always mean something. Right, and things of that. So in really learning how to be open to feeling everything, how to be how to learn how to sit with one’s emotions and not spiral, how to recognize that just because I have thoughts I don’t need to follow them. I don’t need to, and I learned this a little bit later on, is that in a sense, we think in narratives, and once we recognize that we’re always telling ourselves a story, we can also maybe realize that not every story we tell ourselves is accurate or true or has a basis, and that sometimes our brains are just making up stuff, but if we follow the stuff our brains make up, then We often do get into a emotional triggering mode and and so there, there is this constant, like, play out. And so learning how to be and relate with to my emotions differently, learning how to recognize thought patterns and also learn how to, kind of like switch the channels so that I don’t have to follow every thought that I have.
Mark McBride-Wright 31:24
Fascinating when you bring in the like neurodiversity to this as well. Oh yeah, how different people, how everyone’s brain is different, and then how, how people may have different ways in which the or different mechanisms that they’ll need to follow to help process certain emotions, certain feelings, the intensity with which they experience things as well, varies from person to person,
Yosi Kossowsly 31:51
absolutely and so all of this started getting me very interested, by the way, in the brain and in Understanding, okay, so now I was understanding the emotional play out and the belief play out. And I was very curious about, what is the different what is the impact of these different chemicals? I kept on hearing about dopamine, serotonin, cortisol, and also I was very curious in this idea of neuroplasticity, and what does that mean, and ultimately, in a most simplest form, I was really curious about, why is it that if I can really get to a place of making a decision for a life change, like, let’s say, no more chocolate, no more junk, that that didn’t stop me from wanting it, yearning it, and often buying it still. And I’m like, What is wrong with this system that my decisions are not like that part of me is not following through on that. Like, what? Yeah, yeah. And so again, you know, life pointed me to a good direction, and I started studying, as well a neuroscience therapy course that taught me a lot about our holistic selves and what we need to do to have a thriving body and a thriving brain To build what’s called growth factors, and that supports elasticity and all of that. And then taught me a lot about the different chemicals, and now they’re triggered. How often you know, how do they stay in the body? What they do to the body, how to help flush them out or build them, and together, the knowledge kind of like really synchronized in helping me understand that there’s this whole way to handle our emotions, and then there’s this whole way to handle Our thoughts, there’s this whole play out of subjective perception, and how deeply that impacts the way we see the world, understand, make sense of the world, react, respond to it, and that even more so in A play out of people interacting with each other, that the systems we have been taught overall about how to communicate with another are ineffective, yes, based on how the brain is working and processing.
Mark McBride-Wright 34:35
So with all that in hand, you shifted to a career where you help people with this.
Yosi Kossowsly 34:44
So what happened was I finished the certifications around 2010 and then it was suggested to me by people in the company that if I want to continue to like, bring this knowledge in and help other leaders, maybe go get a coaching cert. So I went in and I found a place, and I got my first coaching certification that I completed in 2012 and I really had no intention to leave engineering. A year and a half later, the company got acquired by Cisco, and that was a real shake up the company I was in about 5000 people. Now Cisco’s 77,000 people. Senior execs became middle managers and everything kind of like shifted, but really none of us had the understanding, the skills. How does that happen? And and while Cisco was amazing about, like onboarding us from a practical perspective, getting your computers and your badges from a cultural perspective, we were kind of left on our own. And so about two months in, my wife says to me, she goes, and I was kind of like moping around with everybody else, and she says, you know, you have tools for this.
Mark McBride-Wright 36:02
You could be a conduit to and
Yosi Kossowsly 36:04
I’m like, I do well, I think first she was saying for me to get out of my funk. So I took it though, like you just said it, like, yeah, I got tools for this. And so I went and I offered the executives at my site coaching. And I had never really done like, I mean, I had been certified, but I never like,
Mark McBride-Wright 36:24
did it? Never practiced it with with actual people when, well, only what
Yosi Kossowsly 36:29
you have to do to get certified,
Mark McBride-Wright 36:33
practicing it yourself with people as a like, once you’ve got the start, you hadn’t applied it in that
Yosi Kossowsly 36:39
respect. No, not really, not like, not as a, not as a program like I had been coaching one, you know, ad hoc people, but using the skills. But I never made a program and a plan, you know, let’s meet for a number of sessions, and here have a, you know, so, so I made something up. I pitched it. And of the 15 leaders I pitched to 12 said, Yes,
Mark McBride-Wright 37:08
amazing. Then
Yosi Kossowsly 37:10
about two months in, about eight of those leaders went to HR, and they said, Okay, this is this has shifted everything for us. We gotta, we gotta get him doing more of this. And I had also started random, you know, kind of like rogue, a program for the employees at the site to also help them go through this emotional transition using the same tools. And between the both of them, HR started noticing a big change of of employee engagement at our site. And so at some point they came and they asked me if I would do it full time at all of the acquisition sites. And that really was the shift of goodbye, computer engineering, hello. And I joked at the time, you know, human engineering and and then again, I started traveling. And so here was the point where all of that cultural experience all of a sudden kicked in in a different way. And so again, I was spending a lot of time beyond just the US both west and east coast, which are different kind of culturally offer time in Mexico and Canada, England, France, Germany, Amsterdam, Israel, again, a couple of different places in India, again, Hong Kong and China, Malaysia. And then a lot of time, I didn’t fly ever to Sydney, but a lot of time also with the Australian teams. And really started understanding how impactful culture, gender and generation are on all of these things, on how do we interact, how do we communicate, how do we process thought, how do we process emotion, and what does that play a role in teaming? And how do we effectively work with one another? How do we go through change? How do we accept change? How do we work with resistance to that? And over the next six years, that’s all I did was work with different leaders and teams across the company. Spend time in engineering and then sales and customer success and operations and also did a lot of adjunct work with with HR teams on different parts of refreshing performance management, but also the an employee onboarding program, working with a lot of the M and A teams on helping them integrate some of these things into their M and a work that they, you know, because Cisco just acquires a lot of companies overall as a way of growth, their growth strategy, yeah, and, and I had the opportunity to get also more certifications and more understanding on human systems dynamics. And you. More and more neuroscience and more ideas of such things like strength based coaching and positive psychology, and they were all just tools, right? They were all just a continuing bundle of tools to work with leaders and teams. I wasn’t my role wasn’t a coach, it was more of a change management leader, yes, and and then there was coaching like So Cisco did have a coaching practice, and I joined that. And so I did do straight coaching, but even my day job was mostly coaching of and I learned how to create workshops and programs. And it was amazing. Honestly, it was, I never thought beyond it. It wasn’t a plan. Yeah, it was so fulfilling. It was just amazing.
Mark McBride-Wright 40:56
We I work with a lot of, you know, large infrastructure projects that are performing in a certain way. Different sites have different engagement scores, different quality of leadership. You know, mostly male still, because that’s engineering the way it is now, fortunately, still haven’t shifted massively on improving gender representation. And so what that means practically then, with the composition of who’s working in the sector, is that you get certain, certain dominant cultures that are created then with individuals who haven’t done all the type of confronting, their feelings, self exploration, like you’ve described that you did through your emotional wellness coaching sessions. And so I’m wondering if there’s an opportunity to curate something with all these tools that are available. It’s almost like a pick and mix, or you’re looking on the shelf and you’re thinking, right what, what tools do I need, and what combination for that site and for that site and for that site, or for that organization, or for that entire project, and all those supply chain suppliers, you know the art of being able to come in as a consultant and help advise and diagnose on that, but then also have a solution and then create a project to then follow through on. Quite frankly, that’s where I’m at right now. Actually, with the safe leader, I know that more men need to share their stories, for more points of reference for everyone to learn from. But people are not doing that. And there’s work. Even what I’m discovering through doing these podcasts and doing more, there’s a whole ton of work that needs to get be done before people are even ready to do that. And they might never be ready to do that, but at least if they’ve done it within themselves. Yeah, then the So, there’s so the safe leaders became a kind of circular journey of share, act, feel, empower, where the sharing is is, well, it’s essentially, maybe some emotional wellness type introspection and stuff that we’re pulling out. So it’s, I think it would be transformation, transformational for the entire engineering sector, construction, you know, sectors to really lean into this type of programming because, you know, engineers are so familiar with physical safety, and it’s part of our culture. So it’s not too much of an extrapolation to extrapolate that to psychological safety and thinking about the brain being treated with the same respect as the physical body. You know that that was actually why I started this podcast and wrote my book, and it’s the work I’m trying to do in the world now. You know? So, yeah, maybe there’s some more, more discussions we could have offline.
Yosi Kossowsly 44:06
Absolutely, I would love to. So I’ll tell you this mark, I am so not proprietary. In the end, I have not found one source of material that informs the way I coach or do workshops. I’m really still pulling from a lot of different materials, as well as my practical experience in working with people.
Mark McBride-Wright 44:43
That’s what people relate to the most. It’s where there’s someone in front of them who’s done the work and experienced themselves, and it’s a personal story, a personal success that’s been realized for the individual. And then people think, well, could that be me? Could that be me? Could I make. Imagine you can have all the tools and frameworks and policies and procedures and methodologies under the sun, you know, but ultimately it comes down to creating a learning experience where the individuals are like, I see myself in you, and I believe in what you’ve said, and so therefore I’m curious. Come back to that curiosity. It’s where you were however many years ago. It’s that curiosity to then do that discomfort, and I think fundamentally, that’s where we’re at as a society in relation to our relationship with diversity, equity and inclusion. Sure, it’s all got muddled through this superficial diversity approach, and actually, it’s all about understanding the experiences of others and recognizing that we see the world differently to the way others see the world, and we experience it differently. And it’s this beautiful layering of what you’ve just so eloquently described, but applied to others. But we need to do the work ourselves first.
Yosi Kossowsly 46:03
To understand, we need to do the work ourselves first. It’s, you know, there. We do have a strong Sixth Sense, and so if somebody is standing in front of us, this just happened the other day, thankfully, not to me, but to one of my clients, where a senior leader was talking about the need to be kind, they need to be respectful, and all of that. And then then, you know, a day later or so, they they lost it on on a group of people, and this senior leader just couldn’t, um,
Yosi Kossowsly 46:54
let go Initially, of the loss of trust of this executive because of the perception of hypocrisy. And there’s a lot of work in in, you know, being able to learn how to process, and there’s a few funny enough, there’s like four or five parables or stories that or sayings that I kind of have attached myself to, that really kind of influence, yeah, influence, my, my, my, my, my value systems, or, you know, so one of them is this saying attributed to Buddha that holding on to resentment, anger, frustration, whatever for another is like drinking poison and hoping the other person will dry. Right? So you one, when one is feeling anger or blame or judgment towards another, it like eats you up inside, and you’re constantly that’s the poison. The other person rarely feels it, or you have no idea if they feel it at all, but they certainly don’t feel it from you, and they might not even know or think about it, you know, and and you’re sitting there and you’re, you know, burning up inside and so, again, easy to say, not so easy to implement.
Mark McBride-Wright 48:29
Yeah, that’s the work, totally. So nowadays, then that’s how you, you’re, you’re working through your own company, helping organizations with coaching and programming and yeah, and we and is it still mainly engineering, or do you work across other other sectors?
Yosi Kossowsly 48:49
So yeah, I work across I do really well with logic minded people. And it ends up that I do get work in front of a lot of logic minded people, but not, not solely, and it was one of those hard things for me to accept in the beginning, when I went out on my own, that you need to have a niche and specialize, yes, so that people can understand what You do, but that ultimately doesn’t necessarily limit you, yes, as time goes on, yeah.
Mark McBride-Wright 49:24
It’s the marketing funnel. It’s the hook. It’s what gets people into your website and then booking a 15 minute discovery call with you to, you know, understand their pain points, and then hopefully commission some work or do some further work. Yeah, okay, quick fire questions, okay, right, yeah. What’s the one skill every technical leader should develop?
Yosi Kossowsly 49:51
I’m going to say this word, but I do want to define it, and we’ve used it already in the conversation, which is curiosity. So. The the mindset of, what if I don’t know? What if I don’t understand the other person? What if I don’t really know the things I think I know, that ability to then create a space for questions is amazing, and it’s unavailable if I think
Mark McBride-Wright 50:22
I know. What’s the best leadership advice you’ve ever received?
Yosi Kossowsly 50:26
This one? Be curious. Be curious. I didn’t understand it when I first got it, but be curious. Don’t be so sure. Don’t be so sure of everything you think you know. So yeah, they kind of come together,
Mark McBride-Wright 50:42
coffee, tea or something stronger,
Yosi Kossowsly 50:45
coffee, coffee, coffee. I have t shirts. My kids all laugh. Yeah, coffee, lot of I am I’m crazy about coffee. So coffee,
Mark McBride-Wright 50:56
coffee, coffee, love that, who’s one seeker, who’s one thinker, coach or mentor, who inspires you?
Yosi Kossowsly 51:05
You know, it’s funny. I had to think about that question. I think that one of the people I talk to others a lot about is Brene Brown, yeah, and this relationship between courage and vulnerability, it it really kind of like blows leaders away when they get that. There’s a connection there. Yeah, between them,
Mark McBride-Wright 51:30
what’s a book you regularly recommend to your clients?
Yosi Kossowsly 51:34
I have a series of books that really have influenced me in funny ways. So one of them is predictably irrational by Dan Ariely, and it’s about macro, microeconomics or emotional economics. And it’s just so funny when one realizes the nature of sometimes, how our brain makes choices that we think is, ah, you know, we think, Oh yeah, it doesn’t make any sense, but it’s very consistent. So that’s a big one for me.
Mark McBride-Wright 52:07
What’s your favorite coaching tool or model that you always come back to?
Yosi Kossowsly 52:13
So I created a model for teaching people about how human perception works, and it is my start off model on 99% of my coaching engagements and workshop engagements for people to understand that the illusion of communication happening is really an illusion. The illusion of understanding is and if we don’t understand that, we just because I’m talking and you’re nodding your head doesn’t mean that you hear me the way I’m saying things.
Mark McBride-Wright 52:43
Yeah, what’s your go to way to recharge? The gym? What something leaders often get wrong about delegation
Yosi Kossowsly 52:56
that they don’t know how to do it. So it’s a word that doesn’t actually have a defined meaning for everybody. If you ask everybody what delegation means, they’ll all say something different. Yeah. So delegation requires the building of trust first, and we think of delegation as an assignment, and so delegation without trust is just a storm brewing.
Mark McBride-Wright 53:33
You’re being held to a bar that can’t be fulfilled. Or Yeah,
Yosi Kossowsly 53:36
well, yeah. And that goes into this whole ambiguity, which is 99% of the words we use are ambiguous. They they imply a definition or term, something like I need it as soon as possible. Get to me by the end of the week. I need that to be better. I need you to be more strategic. Make that shorter, clean that up a little bit. They all imply something, but no one defines it, and no one thinks to ask for a definition, and then you deliver it and like, no, that’s not what I wanted.
Mark McBride-Wright 54:09
Interesting. Yeah. And finally, then what advice would you give your younger self stepping into your first leadership role?
Yosi Kossowsly 54:18
So I’m gonna say it, and then I’ll define it, enjoy the journey. And so I lived a lot of my life very goal based, and that meant that every day that I woke up and didn’t achieve the goal, then it was just like, this is a waste of time, Dave. Like, this is just something to get through, to get me closer to my goal. And not really, like people would say, smell the roses or whatever, really learning how to value every moment as much as I can, how to value this conversation for the conversation, and meeting a new person and, and it doesn’t have to lead to something, yes, if it does, great, but it’s just the opportunity to connect and, and I wish. Which I had spent more of my life valuing each moment
Mark McBride-Wright 55:06
as beautiful. That is a really nice strong point to round off on. And you’re right setting expecting that every minute you invest in your life to then be a compound minute for another thing makes your life so mechanical and less less less enriching, because you’re not just enjoying the journey, as you say. So if people want to find out more about your work or get in touch with you. How do you how do they do that? The best
Yosi Kossowsly 55:44
way, really, is LinkedIn. And I do have the website, but the website is more of a placeholder and it it’s a place for the company, which has my partners are all very focused in different areas, and so LinkedIn is the place. There’s also a button, as you say, for anyone to book a 30 minute discovery call with me. No charge, and so, yeah, that’s the place fabulous.
Mark McBride-Wright 56:08
All right. Well, we’ll put a link to your profile in the transcript the show notes as well. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for for joining us today.
Yosi Kossowsly 56:17
You’re very welcome. And again, thank you, Mark for having me on your show. Thanks. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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