the POWER of YOU: UNCORKED with TIM WINDSOR

the UNCOMMODiFiED Podcast

In this cross-release episode, Tim Windsor and Brady Wilson redefine accountability, moving it away from a concept of blame and shame toward

Key takeaways

Accountability should be viewed as a tool for empowerment rather than a mechanism for finger-pointing or shame.
The 'Three R's' framework—Reality, Responsibility, and Response—provides a practical model for enacting change.

Main topics

Redefining Accountability
Human Agency and Ownership

Notable quotes

Accountability isn's something someone else holds us to. It's something we choose to own, and when we do, we don't surrender power, we reclaim it.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a powerful call to action for individuals to sto

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) There are conversations you have, and then there are conversations that have you get inside of you, unsettle something in you, and change the way you see yourself in the world. And this was one of those kind of conversations for me. My friend Brady Wilson invited me onto his What Juices You podcast to collide around some of my ideas in my new book, The Power of You. Particularly the provocative idea that accountability isn't something someone else holds us to. It's something we choose to own, and when we do, we don't surrender power, we reclaim it. Brady has spent years exploring human energy, what ignites it, what drains it, and what allows people and organizations to truly come alive. So in his world, collided with my musings around accountability, agency, ownership, and generosity, sparks flew. This isn't simply a conversation about becoming more accountable. It's an invitation to stop being deceived by your own insignificance, to recognize the contribution that is uniquely yours to make, and to ask yourself a much more disturbing question, what might change in my life, my work, and in my world if I stopped waiting for someone else to own it and decided to go first? Welcome to this special cross-release episode of What Juices You and Uncommodified. Don't just listen. Let this conversation collide with you. Let it challenge what you've accepted, expose what you've avoided, and provoke you to own what only you can own. Speaker 2 (1:32) Tim Windsor, welcome. You have written the book Uncommodified. You have now written a book called The Power of You. We want to dive into that today, have some dialogue. You have a podcast that is insanely successful called Uncommodified. You've been around the block in terms of training and coaching, working with organizations and bringing this new message of accountability to the world. Welcome, Tim. Speaker 1 (2:01) I appreciate that, Brady. It's great to chat again. I always love connecting. I love the collision that we have over the years, both personally and professionally. And, you know, when you collide with somebody, the great thing that often happens, like when iron sharpens iron, you get a little bit of spark and friction, and friction is good. And so I'm looking for some sparks to fly and for us to have a really awesome conversation that will be provocative. inspiring and hopefully as well, and not just hopefully, I believe it will be very practical. And I think that's the key. Speaker 2 (2:34) Yeah. Yeah. Oh man. Well, let's dive in. Accountability is right up there with feedback and some other engagement in terms of a word that has been stigmatized to no end. And so for instance, when somebody comes up and says, Hey, I need to give you some feedback. I mean, we get triggered instantly because it is laden with finger pointing and judgment and I'm going to have to receive something from a person who has dubious ability. So I think accountability is in that boat as well where we need to talk about accountability. It comes laden with the possibility of a sense of blame and shame and finger pointing. And so you're taking a word, it's been around forever. And I think it's been a little jaundiced in some cultures and some organization. And I think you're bringing it to life in a way that it actually has a real chance of surviving and flourishing. Why is this word accountability? And why is the concept so important to Tim Windsor? Speaker 1 (3:44) Well, first of all, I totally agree with what you just said. I mean, the challenge with this conversation is as soon as the A word is used, it locks people down, particularly in fear and these things. And I see that we can move beyond fear and understand that this is a force that we can fuel our life with and fuel our communities, our businesses, our society, our world with because it is a word that is so important. It's an idea that's so important, intrinsic to living. well, being a great human, being a great contributor, but yet it's got all this baggage around it, as you've said. And accountability has been something that has been important to me from the time I was quite young. I didn't come by it naturally in a lot of ways, like a lot of people. My first inclination was to not be accountable for my behavior when I was younger. I remember a time when I decided I would steal a pair of work boots from a garbage can of a shoe manufacturer in my community. I thought, they're just garbage. No one's going to miss them. Who cares? I threw them out and I stole them. It was a clever, ingenious way to get into the garbage container and out. And I was about 14 years old. And I went home with these boots. And then my mom caught on to the fact that, hey, we don't have money for boots, Tim. What's going on here? And of course, my mom, who was a practitioner of accountability, not just of us, but of herself, she actually made me co-pack and take the boots back and apologize to the manager of the facility. Speaker 2 (5:20) Oh, jolly fun that would be. Speaker 1 (5:22) Yeah, that was just, that was pleasurable, but instructive. And so from an early age, I had somebody who was encouraging me to be accountable. To take responsibility for my actions, my choices, and understand that my choices have consequences, both positive and negative. And that, in fact, when I take accountability, the other thing it does is it empowers me. So I like, frankly, I like to have some power and I like to have some control, if I'm going to be really honest. And I think what happens that when we're accountable, we actually, our power comes back to us. Because if there's a problem in my life, my personal life, there's a problem in my business and I can't find any accountability for it or in it, I actually disable and de-energize my ability and my power to do something about it. If I'm complicit in it at some level, if I can find my complicity and my contribution to the problem potentially, I can then actually own the solution. And so accountability is something that we often, we have this really strange relationship with it because the more we reject it, the more we become disempowered to actually enact and enable. the things that we want to see different in our world, our society, our communities, our businesses. And so that's why I think it's fundamental. Now, the other thing I think that's fundamental, Brady, is whether people see, hear this story in a context of religious context or not, we'll just look at the Judeo-Christian scriptures suggest that this problem existed from the moment of time. It suggests that... when humans sort of got a little bit wonky. And again, we could see this as a religious truth, or we could see it as a fable. We can see it as an ancient story that's sort of metaphoric in nature. We can see it any way we want. But as a metaphor or even an allegory, it's quite interesting because when something goes wrong, the first essence in something going wrong in an idyllic land, there's a calling of account for action. And the humans in the story struggle, really struggle. to find their accountability. And so because they see it wrapped up in that shame and that blame and all of that, and I want to remove those things. I don't think blame in and of itself is useless. Blame of self, blame of others, that's not what this game is about. It's not the blame game. It is about understanding core responsibility and finding my place in the solution by understanding I might have a place in the problem. The way I look at it, very simply. Speaker 2 (8:00) You said something around as soon as I can see my part, where I am complicit, then I can own the repair, etc. And so you're creating some sort of a relationship between accountability and ownership. I had a neighbor, Jim, and... You know how there's a part of your yard that's not really yours, it belongs to the city, right? Yeah. And so the sidewalk and the boulevard. So Jim always took immaculate care of the sidewalk and the boulevard, etc. I came to discover... that he saw it as his own, even though technically it belonged to him. And because he owned it, he was completely accountable for it. Now, I just want to ask you, which comes first? Or is it just a circular thing? If I own it, then I'm accountable. Or if I'm accountable, then I begin to own it. Could you parse that out for me? Speaker 1 (9:07) Yeah, so it's Speaker 2 (9:07) a Speaker 1 (9:07) great question. Maybe it's a chicken-egg thing in some ways. And I think you're onto something when you say it might be a loop. Speaker 2 (9:13) Okay. I Speaker 1 (9:14) think one enables and energizes the other. Speaker 2 (9:18) So Speaker 1 (9:19) my ability to own it, own my, let's say, my response in a situation, my ability to own it, by the way, and that is only the good, the bad, the ugly, the amazing, the messy. I'm owning it all. My ability to own it proportionally, I do think, increases my ability to feel accountability in it. Or for it. Right. I think it also works in reverse, that when I... and more accountable, I by nature find myself in a place of ownership. Because now I'm owning my contribution. I'm coming to the table. And I think the challenge, even in business, when we look at this, when we think of the word ownership, which is a word we use a lot, the problem is people get locked into, well, I'm not a shareholder. I'm not a loaner. Well, no. We got to own our actions, behaviors, and attitudes. We have to be accountable for that because they make a contribution either to a positive culture or a negative culture. So I do think that they're interconnected and I think one feeds the other. Yeah. And I really believe that, you know, hyper ownership is really, really a critical skill and, and posture that people have to look at. You know, in the book, I, I tell the story in third person, but there's a story in the book that comes from my experience with my wife. Just before Pam and I got married in 1986, In the fall of 85, Pam was going to mail a letter back when you mailed letters. And she parked her car on the side of a road. And it was on a sort of a back pedestrian street, not a lot of traffic. She opened up her door to cross the road to go to the mailbox, didn't even look, and watched dead in front of a car who was coming. Speaker 2 (11:10) When I read that story, I did not know that was you too. Speaker 1 (11:14) Yeah, that is something. Speaker 2 (11:16) Keep going, keep going. Yeah, Speaker 1 (11:18) and so she walked out and she got hit and windshield over the back, the whole thing. I was actually on a business trip in Montreal. I got a call saying you have to come home right away. Pam's right back there. No other information. We didn't have cell phones back then, of course. But the reality is, so she went through major surgeries, two surgeries, a lot of... unintended problems for her, obviously, but the poor man was mortified. He wasn't doing anything wrong. He was driving his car. He wasn't even speeding. It was an older gentleman. His name was Tom. And he came to the hospital two days later, and I can remember the look on his face. He was just mortally crushed. And I remember Pam saying to him, you know, Tom, this isn't your fault. You're not responsible. I am. I walked out in front of you. But then we were faced with the moral dilemma, which our society puts forward to us, which One of the challenges I see in this conversation, Brady, is that what happens is not only do we live in a society that struggles with understanding and embracing accountability, we live in a society that actually can reward you monetarily for pushing your accountability away, blaming others, assigning responsibility and accountability to others when it wasn't their fault. And so soon after the accident, our insurance agent visited Pam. And counseled us to sue Tom and his insurance company for Pam's pain and suffering and the potential of ongoing medical problems in the future. We weren't married yet. And now we were engaged to be married that summer. But now we were in a dilemma. What are we going to do? And it really wasn't a dilemma for us because Pam and I had a certain way of looking at the world. And both of us said it is actually inappropriate for us to benefit and to sue. Tom and his insurance company for something that was 100 % Pam's responsibility. Wow. And I remember people around us thinking we were nuts, like just like crazy. But to me, this is part of the problem. So for example, this is where accountability and ownership equals complicity. So if I want to make this argument and say this, look, we in Ontario, Canada, we all bitch and complain about the cost of insurance. Sure. But is it possible that the cost of insurance might be a little bit less if it's a shared responsibility cost if people didn't choose to defraud the system and they were accountable for their own actions? Is it possible that actually I'm part of the problem? I'm accountable maybe at some level in a micro and macro way for the kind of pricing I get because if I choose to shirk my accountability, my responsibility, push it on to a third party that's not responsible. And make somebody else pay. Maybe that's part of the problem. And so I think this is where I just go back to, hey, we don't always have to make somebody pay. Right. And that goes back to the blame part. It's not about blame. It is about responsibility and accountability. And that is ownership. Pam needed to own her actions. She didn't do it on purpose, but she had to own the fact that she walked out in front of the gentleman. He could not avoid her. Yeah. That story really was a... a framework for our relationship in the very beginning. Speaker 2 (14:33) It almost feels like... Speaker 2 (14:37) you have a very high view of the sovereignty of a human being. What I mean by that is that when I decide not to be accountable and push the blame out, I am moving the locus of control from here, where it needs to be, out to somebody else and saying, no, no, no, they were accountable. And there's some sort of cost. That begins maybe small and ends up being really big in terms of pushing the locus of control out. Can you talk a little bit about that, Tim? Speaker 1 (15:10) Yeah, this to me is, again, it's such a germane thing is, is that with agency. Speaker 1 (15:18) comes opportunity and responsibility. Yeah. So it is a wonderful gift and privilege to live with a sense of human agency, of understanding that we are the cause, we have choices. Now, in some parts of the world, Brady, you've traveled extensively and so have I. In some parts of the world, people have fundamentally less choices, less agency. Yeah. In some societies. We happen to live in a part of the world where, yes, there's rules and regulations and there's things I can't do and can do. But most days, I never really bump up much to those boundaries. I live with a sense of freedom and choice. And with choice comes responsibility because now I made a choice and something happens. I want the choice, I want the agency, but I have to then own the impact. Because sometimes when I express my agency, it doesn't always return butterflies and rainbows. Speaker 2 (16:20) Yeah. Speaker 1 (16:21) So I do think that human agency is a big part of this. And I actually think that from my research is that human agency and when it fires in the brain, that empowers agency actually is fueled by accountability. The more we own something. the more that agency muscle and energy grows in us. So I think there's a direct correlation. Speaker 2 (16:43) Which brings up something I really want to get into. Roger Martin wrote The Responsibility Virus. And so basically just saying if, let's say you and Pam, if you become over-responsible with the finances, what will Pam become? Like, unresponsible. If you become... under responsible in terms of raising the kids? What will Pam become over responsible? And so he basically says there's a fixed amount of responsibility that can be assumed in any relationship.