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The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

By: Ryan Hawk
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As Kobe Bryant once said, "There is power in understanding the journey of others to help create your own." That's why the Learning Leader Show exists—to understand the journeys of other leaders so that we can better understand our own. This show is full of learnings taught by world-class leaders—personal stories of successes, failures, and lessons learned along the way. Our guests come from diverse backgrounds—CEOs of multi-billion dollar companies, best-selling authors, Navy SEALs, and professional athletes. My role in this endeavor is to talk to the most thoughtful, accomplished, and intentional leaders in the world so that we can learn from them as we each create our own journeys.Learning Leader LLC 062554 Career Success Economics Management Management & Leadership
Episodes
  • 712: Matt Abrahams - How to Become a Better Communicator: Speaking With Confidence, Structuring Your Message, and Thinking Fast on Your Feet

    712: Matt Abrahams - How to Become a Better Communicator: Speaking With Confidence, Structuring Your Message, and Thinking Fast on Your Feet
    Oct 25 2026
    The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com New Book - The Price of Becoming Connect on social: Twitter - @RyanHawk12 Instagram - @RyanHawk12 My Guest - Matt Abrahams is one of the world's foremost experts on communication. He's a lecturer in strategic communication at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and bestselling author of Think Faster, Talk Smarter. His focus is the hardest kind of communication: not the rehearsed speech, but knowing what to say when you're put on the spot: in the interview, the Q&A, the hallway, the toast. This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. What you'll learn in this episode: Matt's father was quiet but not shy. A lawyer, skipped a couple of grades so he was always younger than his colleagues, a man of few words and very detailed ones. Matt says what he most wants to live up to isn't the intelligence, it's that his father believed in being truthful and trustworthy.His parents asked two different questions about communication, and he's still answering both. His mother taught elementary school and wanted to know how you make it engaging and how you hold attention. His father wanted to know how you organize it and make it structured and understandable. They debated it constantly at home. Attention and structure are still the two halves of everything Matt teaches. When You're Interviewing Someone The best interview question he was ever asked: "If you were an onion and I peeled back the first several layers, what would I find?" It was the CEO's opening line, before anything else. Matt's answer: "Onions make me cry." He got the job. When he asked about the question months later, the CEO said he uses it to knock people slightly off center, and what he remembered was that Matt committed to an answer and connected it to something bigger.That's the whole move when you're put on the spot. Commit, then connect what you said to the larger picture. The content matters less than refusing to hedge.Warm call, don't cold call. Matt doesn't cold call at Stanford and won't do it in an interview either. He tells candidates up front: I'm going to ask you things that are difficult, the goal isn't a right answer; the goal is seeing how you process and how we'd collaborate. Then he asks the hard question. Blindsiding someone tells you how they handle being blindsided, which is not the job.Watch how they treat everyone who isn't you. Matt always asked whoever greeted the candidate how the interaction went, because plenty of people are rude to the front desk and flawless with the hiring manager.Teach candidates how to answer. Matt tells people at the top: answer the question, give me an example so I understand what it means, then connect it to what that would look like if you worked here. Otherwise people ramble, and you're left wondering why they told you any of it. He says it changed his interviews completely. When You're Giving a Talk Intention, attention, then relevance. How are you showing up, what energy and emotion are you bringing, and what will grab the room? Then, fast, why this is worth their time. "Attention is a gift people give you. If they don't see a return on that, they're gonna check out."Start like an action movie. How does an action movie start? With action. Not "hi, my name is, and today I'm going to talk about," which is also just reading your first slide out loud. Tell a story, ask a question, take a poll, give a startling statistic, and introduce yourself afterward if at all.The first thing Matt's students hear him say each term: "Communication is critical to your success in business and in your personal life."If you're a nervous speaker, NEVER pre-apologize. Saying you're a nervous speaker feels like buying empathy. What it actually does is prime the room to notice every piece of evidence that confirms it, and it pulls attention off what you're saying. Just start.How you end matters almost more than how you start. We remember what we hear last, and it recolors everything before it. A wonderful vacation gets remembered a little less wonderfully if the flight home is delayed and the luggage is lost.But the second you signal you're ending, people leave. Say "in conclusion" on a video call and, like Pavlov's dogs, they're opening their calendar. You don't have much runway, so know exactly what the last thing is.Know, feel, do. Every communication should have a goal in three parts: what you want people to know, how you want them to feel, what you want them to do. Build everything on it, then close by restating it in your own words. It summarizes and gives a sense of completion at the same time.Don't memorize. It's connection, not perfection. A memorized script means part of your brain is permanently comparing what you're saying to what you ...
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    55 mins
  • 711: Seth Godin - Creating Tension, Solving Problems, the Savannah Bananas, Leading Without Authority, Using AI, Hidden Entanglements, and Getting Unstuck (The Knot)

    711: Seth Godin - Creating Tension, Solving Problems, the Savannah Bananas, Leading Without Authority, Using AI, Hidden Entanglements, and Getting Unstuck (The Knot)
    Oct 18 2026
    The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com Connect on socials: Twitter/X - https://x.com/RyanHawk12 Instagram - @RyanHawk12 LinkedIn - @RyanHawk My new book, The Price of Becoming, is a USA Today, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Publishers Weekly Best-Seller! I think you'll find it useful. This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My Guest: Seth Godin is the author of more than 20 bestselling books, including Purple Cow, The Dip, and This Is Marketing. He has written a blog post every day for more than two decades, and it remains one of the most widely read blogs in the world. Before the books, Seth founded Yoyodyne, one of the first internet marketing companies, and sold it to Yahoo in 1998. He later created the altMBA. His new book is The Knot: Problems Can Be Solved. Key Learnings Being early is a courtesy, not a personality trait. "I don't understand why someone would willfully waste somebody else's time." The knot is the point. You can't have a pretzel without the knot, and if you try to undo it you end up with crumbs. Real life isn't like that. Our knots can actually be untied. Teach so that people teach themselves. Seth builds everything around a metaphor that gives people scaffolding, because "the only kind of learning that really happens is autodidact self-learning." Give someone the structure to figure it out and they'll never forget it. Name the baggage, drop the baggage, ship the work. The easiest thing to do with our freedom is pretend it doesn't exist. A man with nine million dollars in the bank told Seth he has to keep doing the work he's known for, because he needs to make a living. No, you don't. Same with the student three years into a four-year degree he hates who says he has to finish. You can choose to finish. Nobody is making you. We stay stuck because it's comfortable. It keeps us safe, guarantees an excuse, takes us off the hook. No agency means no responsibility. It isn't friction, it's hidden entanglements. Friction sounds like a law of nature you can't argue with. Entanglements are long-told stories about how the world is, who we are, what we fear, where our status sits. They form an invisible web, and unlike physics, they're ours to cut. The tell is when a problem gets treated like a situation. In Canadian Inuit territory, people are 500 times more likely to contract tuberculosis than someone in Toronto. We know how to cure it, for a tiny fraction of the healthcare budget. Calling it a situation is what lets everyone off the hook. The blue sweater. As a high school sophomore, Jacqueline Novogratz wore her favorite sweater, a gift from her uncle, blue and white wool with the Alps on it. Cheerleaders teased her for it. She went home and dropped it in a Goodwill box. Fifteen years later, running through the streets of Rwanda at 7:00 in the morning, she saw a seven-year-old boy wearing it. She chased him down, looked in the collar, and found her own name on the tag. That was the moment she let go of being the Stanford grad on the fast track at a New York bank. She has spent the decades since building Acumen and its patient capital model, and by Seth's last count, 600 million of the poorest people on earth live better because of it. What makes someone a leader: they decide to. It has nothing to do with your title. You can lead from anywhere in an organization. Seth gets stuck every single day, and most of the time he stays stuck. That's fine. What matters first is clarity: who is this for, and what is it for? Getting unstuck always means leaving something else behind. The woman with more figure skating gold medals than anyone in history didn't get them by having a life. She got them by having no life for fifteen years. Completely unstuck on gold medals. Deeply stuck on everything else. It's the word "but" that traps you. We only feel stuck when we want one thing and another, and won't be happy without both. Swap the but for an and, or admit which one you're trading away. Six to nine ideas a day, one gets published. Most never get past three words. If you need the perfect idea before you begin, you will never begin. Find the room inside the system, then leave when the system is the obstacle. Jesse Cole inherited minor league baseball's constraints and worked inside them: ridiculous name, puns, a cheering section of seventy-year-old women called the Nana Bananas, players recruited for charisma over hitting. Years of sellouts, home and away. Then the league itself became the thing in the way, so he left it. Multiple things fail at every Bananas show, every single night. That's the price. The question worth sitting with is what it actually costs you to not be perfect. If Seth's book The Practice were one page long, it would say give up your commitment ...
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    47 mins
  • 710: Ravi Gupta - The Anti-Dabbler's Guide to Mastering One New Skill Every Year, Why Presence Isn't Enough, Bourdain's Masterclass in Humility, and Pairing Reasonable Goals With Delusional Ones

    710: Ravi Gupta - The Anti-Dabbler's Guide to Mastering One New Skill Every Year, Why Presence Isn't Enough, Bourdain's Masterclass in Humility, and Pairing Reasonable Goals With Delusional Ones
    Oct 11 2026
    The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com New Book - The Price of Becoming www.LearningLeader.com/Becoming Connect with me on socials Twitter/X - @RyanHawk12 Instagram - @RyanHawk12 Join 10's of thousands of leaders, subscribe to Mindful Monday My guest: Ravi Gupta is the founder of RePublic Schools, whose flagship Nashville schools became the first in Tennessee to rank in the top 5% statewide for both growth and achievement. He co-founded Arena, which trained more than 7,000 political staffers, worked on the first Obama campaign, and wrote speeches for UN Ambassador Susan Rice. Today he runs The Branch, a media company fighting polarization. His new book is The Invisible List: One Passion a Year, Every Year. Key Learnings One new passion a year, every year. When Ravi left his job running schools, he decided to treat every year like a school year with himself as the only student. He's done it for seven years. Surfing, tennis, screenwriting, a novel, Italian cooking. Be an anti-dabbler. The seductive version is a little boxing, a little salsa dancing, a little cooking. You get fifteen years of sampling and none of the skill. Pick the thing, commit to the year, see it through even if you come to regret the pick. The rule that makes it work: no new thing midyear. You can maintain old passions. You cannot start a new one. He broke his own rule and learned why it exists. Bored one day and avoiding his cooking, Ravi walked into a Muay Thai gym on his corner. He loved the class, walked out, and told himself it was off the table until January 1. The pull wasn't interest. It was the rush of early wins, and that rush is the most convincing form of procrastination there is. Trying something and quitting can be worse than never trying. Once you've tasted it, you start seeing it everywhere, and you replay the version of your life where you stuck with it. Pair a reasonable goal with a delusional one. Ravi almost always hits the reasonable one. He almost never hits the unreasonable one right away, but he often gets there eventually. The pairing is the point. Tim Ferriss's observation on why that works: there's less competition for big crazy goals, because so few people think that way anymore. December is the meta-learning month. Thanksgiving to New Year's, Ravi wraps up the current year and pulls together the next one: the books, the experts, the sequence, what it actually means to be great at the thing. Don't start researching it in August. He has next year's candidates in his head by late summer, but he refuses to buy books or line up coaches until December. Planning next year's passion is an elaborate way to avoid this year's. Output goals need a skill set attached. Example: hiking an outrageous number of national parks. Ravi's counter: keep the output goal, but build the skills underneath it. Pitching a tent, starting a fire, navigation, survival prep. Then the year leaves you with something beyond a number. Each year becomes a chapter. 2020: surfing. 2021: tennis. Childhood is memorable because it's divided into grades with names attached. Adult years blur into one undifferentiated stretch, and Ravi thinks that blur is part of why people get depressed looking backward and forward. The reframe on aging: turning 50 in seven years is only grim if those are seven blank years. Seven more passions is a different sentence entirely. Join an accountability group. The Invisible Posse is a group of readers all pursuing their own skills at the same time, at readinvisiblelist.com. New challenge every two weeks, a leaderboard, points for doing the work. The list is a solo project. The accountability isn't. Do the thing publicly in the first two weeks. The group's first challenge was to do your new skill in front of people immediately. The winner was a man learning to sing who sat his cousins down on vacation and performed a whole song. Once you're past being judged, you're doing it instead of planning it. The second challenge is the one most people skip: get feedback from someone who actually knows how to do it, then do it again. Protecting your time is on you. From Neil Strauss, in a writing group Ravi joined during his writing year: "It's nobody's responsibility but your own to protect your time." The complaint that nobody respects your boundaries is a complaint about your own boundaries. Which means the conversation has to be explicit. You take Saturday, I take Sunday. One of us has mornings. I've carved out 45 minutes and you know about it. Writing is especially hard to defend because it doesn't look like work. Treat your session time like a flight. Strauss again, this time on writer's block. Nobody waits to feel motivated before going to the airport. You wake up early, sit in the security line, get wedged next to someone taking up too much room, and you never treat any of it as optional. Put the sessions on your calendar and defend them the same way, whatever your thing is. The question that ended ...
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    1 hr and 3 mins
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