The Virtue of Flapping Consciously with Chengeer Lee, Principal at Resonance

In this episode, Chengeer Lee, a recruiter turned coach, breaks down how authenticity, writing, and self-awareness fuel success in the talent world. He shares raw insights about navigating careers, the power of metacognition, and why ego destruction is essential for leadership—and how all of this ties back to building impactful organizations.

01:59 — Chengeer Lee’s unconventional path into recruitment
04:03 — From Kazakhstan to building a career in Canada
06:33 — Landing his first job with no recruitment experience
10:00 — Why job development built his recruitment foundation
12:18 — Moving into tech and agency-side talent acquisition
14:45 — How LinkedIn content created career opportunities
15:38 — Writing, discipline, and rebuilding after burnout
19:42 — Why writing is a meta skill for clearer thinking
23:15 — Metacognition: learning to observe your own thinking
27:34 — Why there are no shortcuts to self-understanding
32:04 — Removing mental noise to improve performance
34:49 — Self-transcendence as the foundation for growth
39:31 — How recruitment and coaching are more connected than they seem
42:09 — Making self-awareness practical for sceptics
46:01 — Building conscious leaders and organizations
49:04 — Playing life’s games consciously

Creators and Guests

Host

Martin Hauck

Co-Founder of The People People Group & Host of From A People Perspective

What is From A People Perspective?

A podcast about fascinating professionals, how they got to where they are and where they’re going from the lens HR, Recruitment and People Operations hosted by Martin Hauck.

Chilly Goose (01:59)
All right, chili goose and silly goose in the house.

Silly Goose (02:03)
What's up?

Chilly Goose (02:04)
This is way too informal for my podcast. Usually I'm like, hi, welcome back. Thanks for listening to another episode of from a people perspective. I'm your host Martin Hawk. And today I've got Chengger Lee with me. Welcome to the show, Chengger.

Silly Goose (02:05)
you

Thank you so much. Happy to be flying around and landing in the right place in the right moment.

Chilly Goose (02:22)
You

So this is a fun podcast. All the podcasts are fun, but this is fun because I know you, I've worked with you, you're a friend and ⁓ you are a person to be reckoned with on LinkedIn and in the recruitment world and so many stories. I think the first place we should start is why, why, why do, why are our names silly and Goose. Can you, can you share, do you want to share that story?

Silly Goose (02:58)
I think this is my story to tell. I think this is something you need to share.

Chilly Goose (03:02)
Really?

Silly Goose (03:03)
I don't even remember at the point, like I just saw something like

Chilly Goose (03:06)
I think I just accidentally

called you, you were doing something and I'd been in parent mode for so long, just in general, still adapting to the like lack of sleep and everything. And you had done something, it was silly. And that was the word that came to my mind. And I called you a silly goose, but it was on a professional level because we were working together. So it's just like, when do you work? When do you tell the people you work with that they're a silly goose? Never. And it's just stuck.

That's my understanding of the story. I'd love to get your, your take on it.

Silly Goose (03:40)
My understanding of the story is that before meeting Mr. Martin Hawk I didn't even know the word meme, what it means and what it exists and then one day I probably have done something not very intelligent but I received a video from you where this little goose playing Levampolka da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da

Chilly Goose (04:01)
That's fair.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. The, ⁓ okay. So let's, let's dive into it. You, I want to get a proper understanding for the audience, ⁓ on who you are, where you came from, what your story is. We've already done the icebreakers in terms of silly goose-ness. ⁓ but yeah.

Walk us through your background. Walk us to how you got to where you are.

Silly Goose (04:38)
The Chinggirli pitch and story has been polished like so many times, I guess, but originally I'm already started. I've started as a soup of things. I'm originally from Kazakhstan, born and raised. ⁓ I'm Korean. I guess like I'm third generation there now, first generation Canadian, because I got my passport last year. Yay. Go Canada. ⁓ but yeah, like I've been since a very little age, I guess, very drawn to just reading and

absorbing stuff. My grandmother was a brilliant chemist and she thought I'm going to become one. So she was nurturing me in that way, ⁓ carving the path of science for me. I got into academia, spent there 10 years, was a researcher in my past life, chemistry, chemical engineering, material science. Again, finally, I got fed up with that stuff. realized that ⁓ science is cool. At that time, I was doing PhD and I realized that, I love pain, why don't I start startup? And that's what I did.

Um, chewing glass for a couple of years. That was a fun journey, but then of the day, uh, yeah, wrong place, long universe. So maybe the right one, but got all the experience, but started, didn't take off. And, um, yeah, prior to that also lived in Canada for a little bit. So I promised myself to come back and in 2019, I immigrated properly, uh, and the first role with the nonprofit organization, helping people find jobs. And, uh, that's how I got immersed into, I didn't know what the job of job developer, so to speak is.

But that was a weird form of recruitment on the other side when you're pitching clients into the businesses. And yeah, and did a contract with them. I was on the streets for 111 days and Mr. Martin Hawks scooped me from them and saying, hey, why don't you join me and build this crazy, ⁓ crazy place called Caseware? ⁓ And I rejected him, but that's a whole different story. finally, finally I joined him. ⁓

Yeah, it was a wild COVID times. I still remember. I'm happy to tell that story too. That was fun one.

Chilly Goose (06:33)
Yeah.

Yeah. Help me. Let's double click on.

How you get a job as a career development person without necessarily having any experience as a recruiter or as a job developer or in that role as like that of everything you've said and you know, I'm privy to a lot of those stories. So that's the, but everything you've said, that's the most interesting part. I want to double click on very quickly.

Silly Goose (07:05)
Yeah, totally. As I said, I lived in Canada before 2009, 2011, lived in Regina, lived in Montreal, worked in McDonald's, sold coffee, was a cashier, so I washed a lot of floors. So that was fun. But came back home, finished my masters, I realized Canada changed me, I need to move on. I went to do my PhD in South Korea. That was six years. And then when I arrived to Canada,

I like, again, as I said, I promised myself to come back and I came with like 10 grand on my account, nothing but dreams and like no plan whatsoever. Like, and just like steel balls. I'm going to get, I'm going to make it happen. And ⁓ actually it was right about this time, right? October 6th, we landed. So it's been six years now in Canada and got very, very lucky. I think luck is very important, but got my job.

in first 40 days, I think, went to all the YMCA's of this world, got all the employment services. They were not super helpful. But like in one of those, there was a career fair and I showed up there again, as usual, groomed up, dressed up, resume in my hands. And ⁓ I think there were like 350 plus people, super crowded, super noisy. They were planning probably to host like about 100 folks.

And of course there are some employers that didn't accept even resumes and a lot of very angry people from all over the parts of the cities. And I was like, you know, before I leave and I see like all these people around running around organizing the events, they were speaking Russian. I'm like, I'm going to go give them a piece of mind before I leave and like, Hey people, like, you know what, you can organize this better. And the lady's like, okay, shut up. Hold on. Like, are you looking for a job? Give me a resume. I give her a resume. She's like, Hmm, interesting. Interesting.

stay here, she leaves, comes back with another lady. Another lady looks at my resume, interesting, interesting, so you're looking for a job, come for an interview. And so that was fun. And ⁓ yeah, like I showed up and like two interviews, I bought a suit for myself, which I don't never use, but yeah, like two weeks later, I had an offer that was my first job, 50 grand. I was a workforce specialist, AKA job developer.

Chilly Goose (08:54)
You

Silly Goose (09:13)
⁓ The funny thing is that probably like five months, six months later, I asked them, why me? Why did you hire me? You had like so many options there. And they said, out of 300 plus people, you were the only one who came and talked to us. So I guess that's where the luck connects with the luck that you create yourself.

Chilly Goose (09:32)
Yeah, I was gonna call that out. I'm like, you're not one person to rely on luck exclusively. So I'm glad you made that distinction. And from there, what would you say you learned in that? Like you didn't spend a ton of time there. But what would you say your biggest takeaway from that experience was as a job developer? Because effectively as a recruiter, you're on the other side, right? So curious to get your take on

Silly Goose (10:00)
I think overall it was just a very insightful time. Like I build all my recruitment muscles that I then used in talent acquisition game. first of all, I first I came here, I came to Canada, I thought I have no skills. Like I have all the soft skills, but like anyone knows how to Google, anyone knows to talk to people, anyone knows to read stuff and like communicate, but apparently not everyone. And this has been my craft like sharpening there, but it was very insightful time because ⁓ you...

We're playing very challenging game. had some candidates who were like 65 years old and have like 1.5 years of experience and you to place them. And I've called every single dental clinic in the city, I think, but finally got a job for that person. And it was like 25 placements in the year. And it wasn't great by any stretch of imagination, but only then, only after I joined recruitment, I thought I realized.

⁓ interesting. Like this is actually has been very challenging because now that I'm on the other side of the table and I have to play with like top 1 % people, that's much, much easier and it goes way smoother. And so this is our journey together.

Chilly Goose (11:07)
So job development was harder. Getting jobs for people was harder than finding jobs for people.

Silly Goose (11:14)
Job development is a different kind of beast, yes, because people obviously they need help when they have serious barriers to employment, right? And you are that coach and champion and recruiter for them and you're many jobs for them, but you're selling stuff, you're selling people.

Chilly Goose (11:37)
Do you keep in touch with any of the people that you've placed in the past?

Silly Goose (11:40)
With many, yeah. Some of them became my coaching clients. Some of them are like crushing it in Canada. Some of them we're still friends with. They'll be like, go and observe like how they develop and yeah, it's very cool.

Chilly Goose (11:52)
That's awesome. That's awesome. So we don't have an agenda today. ⁓ but that brings us to where you are now in terms of we've obviously been talking about it and you're on the podcast. So it's got to do with something with HR recruitment and recruitment. This is obviously your, one of your many skillsets. ⁓ what, what are you up to these days? Like what helped me understand, help the audience understand where you're at today.

Silly Goose (12:18)
So, yeah, it was March, right? 2021. think Martin Hawk opened graciously the doors for me to the world of tech and corporate Canada and talent acquisition. And this is where I've been ramping my skills for the past now four years. But four years is when you graduate the university and I graduated that company and joined the dark side. Now I'm on the agency side.

joined one and only amazing Zahara, which I need to connect you at some point. ⁓ kudos to her for everything she's doing. She's amazing. And yeah, it's a boutique agency called Right Hand. We're actually going through a rebrand ⁓ exercise. Probably not at the liberty to disclose the official name just yet, but lots of cool stuff happening. And the way she built the business, ⁓ she started with the Chief of Staff practice.

And crushed it. Absolutely made like six placements in the first year, 16 in the second one, businesses exploding. And she found silly goose like, Hey, silly goose, do you want to come and join and build the chief of staff practice? And that was actually fun because actually in real life, the opportunity, that opportunity found me also in a similar way as we found each other. Like I was posting stuff on LinkedIn and she noticed my content.

I noticed her content and we were like, yay, fangirling about each other's stuff and jumped on the coffee chat and was just an instant chemistry vibe click like, yes, hell yes. Like I can cook some cool shit with this person. And it was almost, I don't know, like several months, six, seven, eight months before the actual job appeared. And when the job appeared, I reached out to her like, hey, do you need some help? Maybe I can find you someone. It wasn't even for me. And she's like, shut up, we need to talk.

Chilly Goose (13:54)
Mmm.

Hahaha

Silly Goose (14:03)
And

it was like, boom, boom, boom. I got the job, but now living a dream and working with so many different shops, like from San Francisco, AI tech startups, all these crazy founders and to opt in like New York funds. I I worked like with fire safety company and I worked with a MedSpark company. So learning lots of stuff about Botox and injections and things like that. So it's breadth, it's depth, but very similar to management consulting style, but. ⁓

Yeah, my bread and butter is chief of staff operators, but on the back end, again, staying dangerous generally is doing everything, product design tech, like all the purple squirrels in the world and purple humans doing podcasts too.

Chilly Goose (14:45)
So let's talk a bit about LinkedIn. Cause that's interesting that some of this opportunity arose from it. And I think a lot of people approach LinkedIn in a very standardized way. I've got my profile. It is my digital resume and majority 99, 95 % of LinkedIn doesn't do any posts. It doesn't use it as a social tool. You are

Obviously using it in the opposite. Anyone that follows you on LinkedIn knows that you are very diverse in your content and very hot with your takes. Walk me through your approach to that and some of the impact you've seen from, taking a different approach to, LinkedIn than the traditional user.

Silly Goose (15:38)
Absolutely. Well, first of all, I think this is just my like, for like how I got into this, this whole journey, right? As I said, like I had this startup and like I sold it for scraps, probably like, like honestly, someone in China approached me and we sold it for like $1,000. But after that, it was my baby, right? We kind of buried it and it was a funeral and I was in depression. And that's a, that's the time when I felt burnout through true burnout, two weeks straight, I was just dead in my, in my bed.

Chilly Goose (15:53)
Yeah.

Silly Goose (16:08)
binge watching Netflix, waking up late, eating pizza, all that stuff. And then one of, ⁓ I don't know, I don't remember. It's just like lots of garbage, right? Was no motivation to do anything whatsoever because I've been working, grinding two jobs. tried to do the PhD thing and then startup thing. And my founder said like, hey, like you're so good with words. Why don't you start writing this stuff? yeah, cool. So I jumped into, I gave myself a challenge. In 30 days, I'm going to post 30 essays on Medium.

Chilly Goose (16:12)
What shows were you watching?

Silly Goose (16:36)
I still can find the first one from 2017, pure cringe, like was so bad. But it was just a journey, was this discipline. By the day 30, I published 43 essays and 43rd just went through the roof. Like first 42, complete silence crickets and 43rd got, I don't know, thousands and thousands of likes, lots of traction. It was a post about meditation, how meditation changed my life. People from around the world reaching out and I got my first signal, like, hey, you're onto something here.

Chilly Goose (16:40)
Yeah.

Hmm

Silly Goose (17:06)
So

I started writing on Medium. I was writing, writing, writing on Medium. And at some point I thought like, why am I blogging for free? Like I'm supposed to write a book and publish it and become all these bestselling author in New York all times. And ⁓ so that I did. And that's what Stephen King I think says, when he says the book that's gonna change you the most is the one that you're gonna write yourself. That's exactly the process that's gonna happen to me. ⁓ I was writing it for two years, we wrote it four times. It was complete crap in the end.

But that discipline of showing up every day at the same time and deep working for four or five hours during two years. ⁓ Yes, I've probably expanded my vocabulary. I learned how to use words. Probably I really improved my thinking skills, communication skills. Obviously the better writer you become, the better speaker you become. A lot of public speaking is a lot of private thinking and that's what you do. So I...

advise it to absolutely everyone. Obviously, it's a huge blast of my coaching practice that we actually learned how to like writing is the foundation of everything. And so when I came here to Canada, I already had that muscle and the first attempts were very, very slow and humble. Right. But I started posting and then slowly, slowly, slowly just snowballed. And then at some point you just become a person who cannot not write. And that's why I'm today, I guess.

Chilly Goose (18:09)
Hmm.

The

What did writing...

I feel like there's so many different directions to go here.

you still write today, obviously. And it's interesting, like I have this fascination with words and language and the idea that, you know, it's effectively magic because you write something down and it, you know, yes, you say something but you Yeah, I love that Alan Moore quote, but the for for you. Like you you've attributed, like that 43rd

Silly Goose (19:01)
That's why it's called spelling.

Chilly Goose (19:15)
medium article, there's an act of I think like it takes a lot of time to write 43. It takes a lot of time to write one essay, one article, one blog post, put your thinking down. But you touched on so many different things about writing, guess, like zooming out on writing as a whole. Obviously, you recommend it. But what would you say its biggest impact on you has been?

Silly Goose (19:42)
Writing is ⁓ physical manifestation of your thoughts, right? And the more you do it, the more disciplined and organized thinker you become. And that's ultimately the meta skill that you get hired for and you get everything done, especially in the world of business. Everything hinges on communication, right? How masterful of communication you are. of course there's, ⁓ communication is just a thin slice of this meta skill, but metacognition as a large meta skill is like the ability not to only

have mental processes and thoughts, but actually to observe them and then reorganize them, improve them, upgrade them, all your thinking systems. That's ultimately the large bulk of it. Writing enables that. And then by extension, writing enables everything else. It enables speaking, it enables reading people, it enables orchestrating human systems and all that stuff, which actively translates into games like talent acquisition, for example.

Chilly Goose (20:41)
Now what the advent of AI and writing has become this thing that you technically don't really need to do as much anymore because you can just come up with a prompt and say, ⁓ write this email, make it sound friendly and professional, but ultimately say no, say no to this opportunity. Say no to this person inquiring about my time or energy or whatever. And it's obviously taking

If people already didn't write enough, which I imagine you would say was true is true. Now there's less people writing and thinking about their thoughts and diving into these things. What's, what's your take on what I've said.

Silly Goose (21:31)
AI is a tool, right? Just like a knife. You can cut an apple, you can stab a person in the same thing, like AI in masterful hands. ⁓ AI in masterful hands, like it can be a katana. can sharp very, it can be a very cool tool. All right. Like the problem begins is like, how do you utilize the tool? Because some people use AI to substitute the thinking. And that's exactly what happens. Right. Like for, like we are actually a bit, we are very lucky to be like in generation of millennials where we grew up.

Chilly Goose (21:37)
Jesus Christ.

Silly Goose (22:01)
And so we didn't have technology around. So we learned all these probably critical thinking skills. whereas younger generations, they immerse themselves right into this. And that also enables that ability to work with AI. So are you using AI as a knife or you're using it or your mind is a knife and you're using AI as a rock to sharpen the knife. So that's the thing, the difference, right? And when it comes to prompting too, yes, you prompting, prompting is actually extremely hard. That's why their whole jobs as elite prompt engineer.

Chilly Goose (22:20)
Hmm.

Silly Goose (22:30)
because ⁓ in order to like the quality of the output is the quality of the input. The quality of the answer is the quality of the question. That's why I coaching, for example, coaching is this art in science of questioning, right? But ⁓ you like you most folks, they never realize and fully actualize the potential of AI because of how underdeveloped the prompting skill, which is again, a cognition slash metacognition skill on the back end.

Chilly Goose (22:59)
You expand on the metacognition thing. I've you've used it as, as a concept with me and I understand it to a degree, but even just for the folks that like walk us through, even just through an analogy or metaphor almost.

Silly Goose (23:15)
Yeah, absolutely. There's going to be a short form and a long form. The short form is very simple, right? It's not just thinking stuff. Everyone knows how to think stuff. It's thinking about your thinking. Right? And the long form is ⁓ you undergo a transformation. And if you just go into your direct experience and observe your life, you will start noticing that. That your body has been transforming. You were in the body of a little boy or a girl, right? And then the body has been transforming. You became a teenager. Teenager became a student. Student became...

single young person professional, that person married etc etc. Throughout the transformation of the body you had the transformation of identity. You were you associated yourself like okay I'm a little boy or girl, I'm a little child, I'm a teenager, I'm a student, I'm a single person, divorced, widowed etc etc. So your identity is transforming and changing. But what is identity? Identity is nothing but a story. It's just an entanglement of different thoughts and beliefs. I am blah blah blah.

I am an engineer, am a technician, I am a woman, I am a man, I am old, I am young, I am fat, I stupid, am smart, etc. All of this is just associations. So that's ultimately what identity is. So metacognition is your ability to observe that story and ultimately rewrite it. And it is a skill, it's developed skill. You can actually learn how to do it and...

What I do a lot in my practice is not only coaching in order to find yourself at that point of observation and awareness and raise your awareness skill, but actually utilize all these beautiful tools like AI in order to augment your awareness. Because AI can serve as that sharp metacognitive partner, observe you without the noise. Or you can dump all your noise from your mind into the system and the system will organize it for you.

but it doesn't have the hindrance and inhibition of fears, anxieties, limiting beliefs, blind spots and all that stuff. And you can use usually, you can use AI as a metacognitive partner.

Chilly Goose (25:14)
oftentimes people are talking about watching content and then speeding it up, trying to consume more information faster at like 1.5 X or two. Like what you watch, like even just for me, like if you watch or listen to my podcast traditionally, especially if it's just me, I'm like, you need to listen to this at two X because I am slow and I take time for my thoughts to come together. And I've noticed just during this podcast and it's just always apparent when, talking to you, you're the speed and wit.

And accuracy of the things that you're saying is so fast. Like it's funny because I'm thinking like people need to listen to this at 0.75 or 0.5 just to like slow down and, and consume what you're saying, ⁓ in a way that is like meaningful. I think that kind of just speaks to the power of writing. It shows that you've spent so much time with words that it just comes so easy to you. Whereas like if somebody is not

using that in their day to day practice of writing, then yeah, it's just going to show up in how you talk, it's going to show up in how you speak, it's going to show up in how you write, obviously. There's more of an observation than anything like in terms of a statement or anything like that. But you have talked about coaching a bit in the last couple of sort of rabbit holes that we've jumped down. And you know, myself, like,

reaching out to you and saying like, I know that you do this and you know, talk to me about neuro linguistic programming because that was on your LinkedIn profile. And I thought I was curious. And then it opened up this rabbit hole of your coaching practice. As I think about it, and I want to hear more about it just in general, but what did you have a mentor? Did you have a coach before you became a coach? Like how did you get to where you are in terms of? Okay, I have these

thoughts and frameworks and I have very strong points of view on how a person or a human can operate at such a high level. Like that was never you from the beginning. There's some foundational aspects, but like help me understand or help the audience understand how you got there.

Silly Goose (27:34)
many directions to take here. But that's my favorite, not favorite questions. First of all, the reason or how, right? Whenever people ask for how they're seeking for prescriptions and prescriptions is the recipe for and serious, right? And you're not, you're never going to get anywhere. And I always say like, if Steve Jobs wrote a book with like two minutes saying and explaining everything that he's done and you read the book and you follow the blueprints and you do the same thing, would you become Steve Jobs? Well, absolutely not. Right. And

That's common sense. Yet somehow people are still, this is a disease of our age and disease of our minds when people go seeking prescriptions. When you do that, you're actively outsourcing your agency, your ownership of your own life and your agency of your own minds and your mental architecture, so to speak. ⁓ So there is no how.

What made me who I am, I have no idea. Is it like partially nature? Maybe. Is it partially nurture? Maybe. Like there's definitely DNA in play and there's definitely DNA in the sense of like a specific composition of spirit and mind. I've always been a truth seeker. You see that scar on my nose? I'm like when I was five years old, I hit a corner of a steel tennis table and it was a third nostril bleeding like a fountain of blood. And I already was questioning like, hi God, why you punished me? So there was some kind of esoteric metaphysical kind of questioning there.

I've always been that. And the first phase of my life, I was actively destroying myself and got myself to a point when like, okay, I was a drug addict, a substance addict and a smoker and an alcoholic. Suicidal depression was a friend. And I got myself to the state when I wasn't even like, I don't think it was like a tipping point. more like animalistic primal instincts. If I don't start doing something, someone will find my dirty body, my dead body in a dirty motel. And

I started crawling and I fell and then before I walked, I crawled and then I walked and then I ran and then that's what I always say. You transform, you change yourself. There are two ultimately fuels, either from desperation or inspiration. And my journey was from desperation to inspiration before I learned how to inspire myself. I had to eat bucket loads of despair. I had to understand like what's the, probably like the death in the face.

Chilly Goose (29:37)
Mm.

Silly Goose (29:51)
and use this as an advisor, right? And I know that whoever's listening to me like, yeah, right now, can think like, he's like a machine gun, like 11 out of 10 is always his speed. That's not a default. That's my recruitment speeds. Apparently, like, I'm so excited to be with you. So always. Like, so it is my default speed right now, but my coaching speed is on another spectrum, right? It's going to be like one out of 10. It depends on the person who is sitting in front of me. So to answer your question, I have an answer. And it doesn't matter how Changir got where Changir is.

Chilly Goose (30:06)
You

Silly Goose (30:21)
The question is like where you are right now, where do you want to be and what's the obstacle on the way. And the obstacle is always there. It's always inside your head. And like once you unfold all this stuff, like once you take these stories of identity, which is like the massive stuff, the stories of the past, the stories of the future, hopes, expectations, dreams, you take it all, dissect it completely, demolish the construction and build from the solid foundation of truly understanding who the hell you are.

by understanding who the hell you are not, that's when the noise will subside and you will operate from stillness which will translate into this productivity and top world class performance that everybody's seeking.

Chilly Goose (31:02)
The prescription side of things is very tempting because, I saw this myself, right? I, when, when we started working together, it was an interesting thing of like, I'm just taking in my mind from my perspective. was like, I'm taking this a shot on hiring this person. My goal at that time was to hire someone quickly for the team before I even started in the role. Because in my mind, that's what the role required. And that's

the mandate and the urgency that was being put behind the position. So I wanted to a show up really well for my new employer, my new boss, who I have a ton of respect for, we both do. And in doing so there, I suppose, you know, you could call it like a bit of an intuition, but there was also a little bit of risk. Like, what I'm trying to say is, on paper, it didn't necessarily make sense to be like, oh,

I'm hiring this person and they're going to be a transformational recruiter for our team. And within three months, four months, you were already showing signs that like, this is like the strongest recruiter I'd ever worked with. And it, it, and that's my tagline. And when, when talking about, about you is the fact that for somebody that didn't understand recruitment formally, and nobody usually does because they don't teach it in school, but

You just deconstructed the roles. You deconstructed the priorities. You deconstructed all the work and then rebuilt it yourself in the sense that you were just when, when everybody who had tried previously at the organization to place people within the company, you know, whether it's one placement a month or two placements a month, that was sort of the ceiling. And then you blew the roof off with six, 12.

I think there was a time we made like 16 placements. I don't know what was your record as you recall.

Silly Goose (33:05)
And this was like 14, but my desk was like 25. Yeah.

Chilly Goose (33:08)
Yeah. Yeah.

So the insane levels of placements, not like if, across the board, if anybody is, ⁓ talking about hiring like 14 placements in a month, isn't a normal thing. Right. And so you having this not fresh, like your seasoned recruiter now, but going back to that.

And for the folks listening that are recruiters that maybe feel like they're stuck, that do care about their profession, that do want to improve. What's the single greatest thing that's in their way from your perspective? Like people are just doing it wrong. And if people wanted to, so like, that's where I'm talking about, like the prescription in the sense of like doing it, change gears way is probably not going to do it, but what's your advice to those folks to get to that place of making 14, 16 placements.

Silly Goose (34:03)
I don't do advice. I'm a coach. But ⁓ like, again, as a meta principle, it's going to be all individualistic, right? But again, going into this abstraction layer on the metal layer, all my work and everything that I do as a coach is elimination of the hindrance of the noise, right? You know, like how people say like,

Chilly Goose (34:05)
Hahaha!

Silly Goose (34:27)
the manager's job is to hire the best people and then get out of the way. Like in a way, like that's that's what you do. Right. Like you have to remove that stuff that's inside your mind that's on the way. And what's inside? What's the stuff that's inside our mind that's on the way? Our worries, our past memories, all that stuff. Someone wronged me. All this. This is something that's called childhood trauma. And I understand like life is tough. when like we all get damaged through through it. Right. But what do do with it? It's like cleaning a house.

Sometimes when you've never done this work, before dusting something, you need a shovel and then you need a broom and then you wash floor and then you dust stuff. It's a lot of foundational work. When people come to me and say, like, I've never done this before, it's the same expectation setting. You've never done this before. You've been living as yourself for 40 years. You want me to clean up in two weeks. This doesn't work like that. Insight itself takes no time. That's why we have in animation this light bulb of an insight, but the integration takes work.

So what I'm doing as a coach, basically giving this so-called shortcut, there is no shortcuts, but what I can deliver in 60 minutes, 45 minutes is 15 years of integration or absorbing all these mental frameworks and most importantly, destroying all that noise. So that that's what I do. Do this work, right? And like, and again, it's not a prescription, right? If it truly matters to you, if you truly want to understand who you really are.

Chilly Goose (35:40)
Mm.

Silly Goose (35:51)
Not like for your translation in the corporate world and career and work and stuff like that, but truly who you are as a human. What is the, what is consciousness? What is this black box of the mind? How does it really work? What is this mechanism? You, if the desire is truly serious and sincere, you will get it without, without my help. And if you get it, it's like everything else will fall in place. You know, like one of these tools with which we used in coaching practice called wheel of life, very simple.

People look into the health aspect first and then they go, okay, health is good, I'm gonna fix my relationships. Relationships are good, I'm gonna fix my environment. Environment is good, I need to take care of my career and career is fixed, I'm gonna get money. Money I can invest into enjoyment of life and life experience and then personal development. And in the end, there is this last little piece of pie called spiritual growth. Well, my proposition is that this is the foundation. You take care of that stuff, everything else will fall in place. ⁓

Everyone knows about pyramid of Maslow, right? And you know that you have all these needs to feel right? You need your food, you need a shelter, you need relational ⁓ elements there. And then you start thinking about self-esteem and reputation, etc. No one knows, like very few people know about Maslow's pyramid 2.0, which he released like very, like almost close to his death. And at the very pinnacle of it was self-transcendence. And I always use this pyramid, but I inverted.

Self-transcendence is this little pinnacle, that's the foundation. If you transcend the self, the self is the inhibition. The person you believe yourself to be is the person that creates the problem. It's the person that stops you from achieving. It's the achiever himself. It's the attaener, it's the craver, that ego. I like this expression by Carl Jung too, like the first half of life, the person builds a healthy ego. In the second ⁓ half of life, the person is destroying it.

But destroying the ego that's been built is a prerogative of very rare humans. Most people, they build the ego, they live with it until the end of their life. As the ego, as the person, and they never realize who they are. And from my perspective, that's just a life wasted.

Chilly Goose (37:52)
Mm-hmm.

It's always funny because there's these areas that you excel in as a person. So many of them. And the few that we're talking about one is obviously recruitment and two is coaching and awareness of the self. And they seem so far like recruitment is, is such a tactical corporate in the

day to day realities of life, air quote realities. And then on the other hand, there's like, you need to destroy the ego Martin. And they just seem so far and separate from each other. And it seems weird. It almost like good guy, bad guy. And you're in the same, you're embodied in the same person. Like one, one aspect is

you know, people falling into sort of like the rat race in the corporate life and not not being self aware enough to know what they really want. So they just go with the flow and end up doing a job for 10, 20, 15, five years and not really questioning why they do it. And on the other hand, so it's just an interesting like you you hold space for both you're very good at both of those things. How? Yeah, how do you hold space for that?

Silly Goose (39:31)
It is the non-duality. You have to separate yourself from that self that's supposedly holding the space from the organization of the mind and the mental architecture and actually the awareness in which everything unfolds. Right? You live as awareness, but within your mind you can construct and that's what allows you to compartmentalize. You know, like Sherlock Holmes, he's using this memory palace, right? Like where you create sort of like different rooms and you can create, hide your memories so that you can recall them quickly. You don't need this anymore. Now we have AI.

Right. But ⁓ you can do the same thing with the different aspects of your life. take it right. Once you truly realize and understand that you are not the self, you are not the identity, you can take the identity, deconstruct it completely, break it down to first principles and reassemble it in the way that you need. And you can do this with absolutely every single life, single aspects of being. You can do this specifically within the corporate life vertical. can again, because most people, right, like how do they show up?

also. And how you live your life is actually a function of how you show up. But how do you show up at work? You have a mask, have a persona, it's very theatrical, it's very performative at work. And then my work life and my personal life, this work-life balance, all like different stuff theoretically. But it's all the same. And people ask me the same question, like how talent acquisition and coaching are related.

Talent Inquisition is coaching. I coach hiring managers how to hire better. Because surprisingly enough, a lot of people who are extremely accomplished, extremely brilliant at what they do, not necessarily so savvy in all the human sciences and how to acquire talents and talent architecture and the nature of human mind and just human nature in general. And on the other side, you're coaching a candidate because they're going through the most important transition in their life. It's a lot of fear. It's a lot of change.

How do you address that fear? How do you coach them through that fear? And at the end of the day, these are the people who are co-creating a new reality. For me, this is a reality engineering. And in order for them to co-create, they need to start seeing it from the same perspective. Like this organization and the people and the founders within this organization, they need to see the world how this human sees. And this human needs to start seeing and thinking as the founders. That's, metacognitive ability where it kicks in. And I'm here, the middle guy.

as a facilitator helping them to start seeing the same thing so that they could envision it and then go and create online alignment and manifest that stuff that they want to manifest together.

Chilly Goose (42:09)
There's an aspect of people listening where they're just going to continue to listen for the whole podcast. And then there's probably people that have dropped off way earlier on because of the direction of our conversation. I'm sure you're no stranger to it. And there's people that are like about to check out because they're just like, he's using words like metacognition and he's using words like manifest and

yada yada yada and I don't buy into this or that's a little too woo woo for me. And it's for let's assume that there's a handful of people listening right now that are thinking that and are waiting to hear what you have to say about bringing them back and saying, no, you should listen further. You should, or you should, this is what you should investigate. What would you say to those folks?

Silly Goose (43:04)
No, you shouldn't. Please don't. Don't listen to me. I don't want you to listen to me and I don't want you to do anything in the prescriptive manner. If that truly clicks to you. Again, the way I explain it to people, water boils at 100 degrees, at 99 it merely simmers. Everyone who is at 99, they just need a little tip, a little nudge from my hand and boom, they're boiling. Everyone who is at 98 and below, they are not my people.

Chilly Goose (43:07)
Yeah.

Silly Goose (43:34)
Right? They need to go through whatever the journey they need to go through in order to ripen and receive the message. Until then, my words will not penetrate them. But for those little few rare humans who like, know, like Neo, Neo wake up and like, you know what? Probably they are still hitting the snooze button, but they already know like, okay, something is going on, something like the matrix is not real. need to do something about it. That's who the message is for. The message is for those people.

And the message is for those people who are ready to be conscious capitalists, conscious, conscious builders. And also this is the job for me. This is my job. My job is to be the bridge between two. So I have a lot of different mental models around that to bridge that gap. So for example, when I talk to techies, which is again, obviously my larger audience, I explained to them very simple. Brain is a hardware. You were born with the brain. You have this computer. If you're lucky, you have a high functioning brain.

Your mind is an operating system. literally utilize your mind to operate in the world. Your beliefs are like applications. You can install them and install them, or you can upgrade them. You are a software developer. You have access to source code and you can recreate, reprogram the whole minds. But of course, a lot of within your mind is not your programming. It comes from schooling. It comes from parents. It comes from God knows where when you became a teenager, you started brainwashing yourself, following blind leaders, reading books and listening to podcasts like this. Who knows? Right. And my job.

in this analogy is to be a QA or a debugger. My number one job is to bring all these programs to the level of your awareness. Number two job is to pressure test them. And number three, when the code breaks after I pressure test the program and it falls apart and you see the fallacy in your logic is to be the co-pilot so that you can write the new code. And once the new code is written, new states are created, new behaviors created, new realities created, new experience, and that's a loop. New experience creates new thoughts.

So I have a lot of stuff like that, but this is how I connect it, right? And everything you do, like everything you can do can be spiritual or non-spiritual. You don't need to use the word spiritual, right? It's all up to you. Whatever the stories you're telling yourself, that's your reality. If it's possible for you, it's possible. If it's impossible for you, it's impossible. ⁓ Magic is right there.

Chilly Goose (45:50)
Yeah, magic's real when it comes to that. Interesting. What's next for you?

Silly Goose (46:01)
What is next for me?

Chilly Goose (46:03)
Yeah. What are you working on? Silly goose.

Silly Goose (46:10)
Nothing to work on. Like you get to the point when there is no you who is working on something. There's nowhere to go, nothing to become and nowhere to be. It's just... ⁓

Chilly Goose (46:20)
Classic ANC or

classic classic. Yeah.

Silly Goose (46:24)
You do not control how the thoughts are pop up. If you don't control, then there is no controller. If there's no thinker of thoughts, then who is doing all this stuff? Like you're here as just awareness observing shits happening by itself called life. And I'm just here to observe what this Chinguier guy is doing all the time. He's sealing and he's goosing and he's creating shits and building companies and hiring people. yeah, like, I don't know. Hopefully.

Living a good life, meaningful life, purposeful life and becoming a force of change. I have some time on this planet to play the game that I want to play, to play the games that mind finds entertaining and let the mind play the games that it needs to play. But as awareness, I'm just here to watch.

Chilly Goose (47:11)
So what games does your mind want to play in the future? What is your mind working to?

Silly Goose (47:18)
Naturally, these are the only games that make sense to play. Number one is to build a knowledge base and to be that portal where everyone who is interested in this path of development, I'm not saying to be the Bible and all answers in one place, but to give them a starting point. So like, I want to understand how my mind works and I want to master my mind and by extension, I want to master my life. Where do I start?

This is where you can potentially start and I want to be the guide on that plane. And on the coaching side, again, progressively working with higher players, right? People who, again, I no longer have an ambition to change the world, but I'm here to enable and serve people who have the intelligence and ambition to change the world. So enable the change makers, people like yourself, people who want to build cool shit with cool people, right? And then... ⁓

create something good in the world, create something that needs to exist. And at the end of the day, again, this is where we come down to concepts of conscious capitalism and conscious development, conscious organizations, self-learning, self-developing organizations. want to see businesses and entrepreneurship, I think, is the single most powerful vehicle of changing the world. And I'm here to enable people who are doing just that and help them not just to build companies to...

get profit and improve the bottom line. I'm here to build conscious organizations that, yeah, do something good. Like this is a collective reality. Everything that we do, we are just flapping wings in the world as butterflies and it can create tsunami and tornado if we need to. We just need to flap consciously.

Chilly Goose (49:04)
Slap consciously. I feel like that's where we should end this episode. Yeah.

Silly Goose (49:09)
Yeah,

the silly goose goes north, chilly goose flies west, east and both flap consciously until the end of times.

Chilly Goose (49:19)
Sounds good. Thanks, Jhengir. Where should people connect with you and your persona?

Silly Goose (49:21)
Thank you, Martin.

I'm on LinkedIn, but more of the stuff that you've heard about more today, you'll find on Substack. And this is my portal. And yeah, ask Martin, he'll find me.

Chilly Goose (49:39)
There you go. Yeah, I'll happily introduce you. Thanks so much, man. I appreciate the time. Appreciate you.

Silly Goose (49:45)
All right. Thanks, Tim.

Take care.