Ahmet Bozer on Soulgery and Unlocking Your True Potential

0:00Hey, I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you'd like to apply to be a guest at the show, just head on over to missionmatters.com and click on be our guest to apply. All right, so today I have Amette Bozar on the line, and he's the author of Soldiery, a life-long guide to unlocking your potential. Amette, welcome to the show. Thank you, Adam. Great to be on your show. Thank you for having me. All right, so we got to talk about today. So I do want to get into this book, so Soldiery, a life-long guide to unlocking your potential. And I guess just to get us kicked off here, Soldiery, what does that term mean? What does that mean, Soldiery? Well, it's a name I sort of made up from the concept of or from the idea of doing self-surgery on your soul. I come from a business background, and pretty often we say what we do is like doing self-surgery when we do organizational changes and stuff like that. So I just took that term self-surgery and doing that on your soul.

1:01But I also have to clarify one thing that I personally don't believe that we can operate on our souls because that sort of, we can only connect with it. We cannot operate on it. But to be able to connect with our souls, we have to do, manage our own psychological world, our thoughts, our emotions, our thinking patterns. And as we work on that, we can open up ways of connecting with our souls. So that's in the context in which I've given the name to the book, and that's what its content does. It's how do we manage our whole selves, our thoughts, our emotions, our connections with our spirituality, so that we grow, and we can get into more details of that as to what I mean by grow and how it becomes relevant, but let me just sort of hold it there for now. But where did you get the idea for this book, where did that come from? So I've had a little more than a quarter of a century career with a Coca-Cola company. My last role there was head of Coke International, where I had the responsibility of the entire

2:06world except North America. And for most of my career at Coke, I was in leadership roles, and my leadership approach was mostly about how can I create the right conditions for my teams and for myself to thrive. So it was a very people-focused, I tried to be very people-focused in my leadership. And having seen the whole world and worked across pretty much cultures of all parts, any culture, I have become really passionate in this topic of how people grow. And so when my career at Coke came to an end, I thought I will focus on that, and what I have focused in practice for more than a quarter of a century, I thought I should now sort of document this. That's a good model for people to use themselves, to grow themselves. And that excited me a lot, and I to give you an idea of how passionate I was on it. I have given eight years, about four years, to develop this model. And so it's not, I don't claim it to be scientific, I don't claim it to be religious, or I don't

3:11claim it to be spiritual. But it's all from the experience I've had over my time and from the curiosity I had for the human being, becoming human and all of that. So distilling all of that into a model that people can use to grow themselves. Did you always know you were going to write a book? Was that kind of something that was always in you, even going throughout your career? Like, I'm going to get around to writing this book, I'm just curious. This is very strange. I'm pretty disciplined about my own routines, and I always have like a year-end routine, where I sort of look back at the year, like most of us do, and then sort of plan. But I found when I was looking at my hand writings on my, to be precise, 2008 year-end plan, I didn't have something to this effect. And I always thought, I loved working for Coke, it was wonderful, but I wanted to do something more after that. And that something more was in the area of helping people grow. Now, and then I thought the best way to do that would be to start with a book, because

4:14the work still continues, and we can get to that later on if you'd like. But, so I knew the first step of, I knew it was going to be growth, and I knew the first that was going to be a book from 2008 onwards. So, yeah, I've had this for a long time. Yeah. Wow. What was it like? Because you went through, obviously, you went through a deep dive into it. This isn't something that, not taking away, by the way, for everybody listening just for a little bit of context here, I'm a fan of anybody that gets through writing a book, because writing a book is challenging, it's hard. So, to start it, to finish it, to publish it, all that good stuff, it's not an easy task. Well, even though I think everybody should at least do one, I feel like everybody has at least one book in them. But for your process on that, like, you mentioned you're pretty disciplined, talk about your process and how you got to the finish line. So, I say to myself, I wasn't even a novice writer when I started, so, we talked from Coke at age 56, it sort of became clear to me over the years that just because you can write good emails doesn't mean that you can be an author.

5:16So, I decided to work with a colleague of mine, who also left Coke, who was an expert in communications, but I said to him, this has got to come from within me, I just wanted him to, and his name was Sebastian, Vanderweck, I said, Sebastian, I just want you to sort of give me back to me. What does this sound like? How do you read it? So, that's how it started, and it was just years and years, I had this model in my mind, but the model never settled in until I got into the structure of my writing. So, you know, writing is something that's very interesting. As you write, you clarify things for yourself, and you realize that if it wasn't really clear to you, you can't write it very well. So, that process took like three, four years, it was only after the fourth year, which I have to say, I didn't spend, I spent probably about 10 hours a week on it in the initial years. But after like four years, I finally nailed down the model and the structure of the book. And after that, it was more sort of making sure that each chapter delivered on its intended

6:19goal. So, but it was, yeah, then we came to almost the eighth year, and Sebastian tells me, I think we're in good shape now, but we now need to involve the professional editor. I thought that was going to be a very short deal. Well, it wasn't that took another six months, because the editor's comments made me realize I had the model right, I had the concept right, but there were places where I wasn't conveying them in the right way, because one final thing I'd say is, you know, I sent set standards for Sebastian and for myself. I said, six words, you know, like the book has to deliver on these six words. You know, one was, you know, it's got to be useful. So, when somebody reads it, it might be pretty, she should be clear that, oh, yeah, I could use this. And then it's got to be inspirational and motivational, and I want to do it. So, all of these things, when we gave those standards to the editor as well, to a new person coming into a review, we realized, so that took another six months, then it was the lounge. So, which I decided to self publishing and that involves a lot of marketing at yourself.

7:26And that involves social media, as you know, websites and newsletters and all of that. And trying to build that was actually a lot more effort than writing the book. And now, what I'm saying is, how can I make this available to more people? And how can I, more importantly, how can I make sure that people who sort of like it actually can apply it? And for that, I'm now developing an app for it. So, that'll be an AI-based app that facilitates the application of these concepts in people's everyday lives. So, at that time, I probably feel more comfortable that, oh, yeah, what I wrote is sort of reach some people and some people are using it. So, that's the journey. That's the journey. It starts with a book, but once you finish the book, it's just the beginning. Oh, yeah. That is true. And then the promo begins. Now, you said one of the central themes of this book is unlocking potential, really growth in people. Like, how do you feel this book delivers? Like, talk a little bit about the model. So, the model sits on three pillars.

8:28First of all, because I wanted this to be very practical and applicable in real life, there's a very clear definition of growth. That's pillar number one, and that is becoming increasingly capable, impactful, and resilient. So, that's sort of the anchor. Then, the other two pillars is, I thought, you know, I had to define what a human being is because we grow by using the resources within us. So, there's the self-map. That's the second pillar, which sort of describes what each and every one of us have. And then the third pillar is, how do you grow that self-map? And there, I have the four acts of growth, which is broken down to more things, and that's what the book is. You know, the book introduced to the self-map, but then the majority of the book is the four acts of growth. Those are things that each of us can do on our own. Obviously, yes, always some coaching helps and always talking to others help, but eventually it's our own responsibility, and it's only us we can do this work.

9:29So, and we take these four acts of growth within the context of our everyday lives. We don't do something separate for it. In other words, these four acts sort of introduce a way of thinking about yourself and about life that you apply to everything you go through in life, and as you do, you accelerate your growth. The book assumes that we all grow. We all grow. The question is, how fast and how much and these four acts accelerate your growth is my thesis. Now, obviously, it's a full book, and there's many things that you hope the readers get from it. But if there was one central theme that, you know, you hope all your readers walk way with, whoa, that'd be. Oh, that's great. And as I was listening to one of your podcasts, Adam, you know, it was so funny. I just randomly picked one, and then I sort of randomly picked a point, and I said my goodness. And the gentleman there was talking about smashing your ego. You might remember that, but that's in the center of this model, which sort of affects

10:35your growth at a most foundational way, and which is, I call your sense of self. So then this other show it was being talked about as your ego, I'm not using the word ego for the reason that whenever people hear this, they think of high ego people. But I argue in my book that we share a common human tendency of sort of serving our sense of self. Meaning we try to elevate it or we try to protect it. That's a human tendency. So now what we call high ego people, they do this a lot more and a lot more visibly. But that doesn't mean that we don't have the same problem at a lesser level. And the issue is if we don't become aware of it, it sort of quietly holds us back. And so that's at the center of this model is how well do we understand whether we're serving our sense of self, to what extent, and how does our sense of self get in the

11:38way of our growth. And so the book talks about a lot of, you know, example, reflection, some examples from my own life, like probably five or six of them in the book, where most of them is where how I have discovered that my sense of self was getting in the way of my growth. And it treats this not like a one time thing because I think this, when you think of the serving the sense of self concept in this way, it just never ends. You know, we're going to be serving your sense of self when we're 90, 95, I think. But as you do less of it, as you become more aware of it, you start unlocking paths for growth for yourself. And you know, you don't feel an expectation that you're perfect in doing this and none of us will ever be. But every step of progress we take will grow us in a big way. So that's the main, but there's a lot more in the book, but that's at the foundation of everything. Hmm. Amazing. There's been a lot of fun having you on the show today and getting to know more about your work. So soldiery, a lifelong guy to unlocking your potential for those that want to pick up

12:42a copy, connect into your, to your ecosystem you're creating, got an app coming out and some other things. How do people follow? How do they connect? How do they grab a copy? Yeah. It's in Amazon on all US retailers online retailers. They can get it's also on Kindle and it's also available in audio format in a number of platforms with audible with storytell or Spotify and all those. So it's in all three formats. They can sort of check me out on a number of social channels. I'm on Instagram with the name book off soldier be OK, O S soldier, S O U L G E R Y or I'm on LinkedIn with my name, Ahmed Bozer. And I'm also on YouTube, but it's a more active on Instagram and LinkedIn. So and then there's the website soldiery.com where they can find a lot of the articles I wrote. They can find more information about the book, download a free chapter, whatever. So my recommendation would be if you, if after listening to this, if you got interested,

13:43just download the free chapter, take a look at it, browse the website and if it really catches you, then read the book. That's what I say. Fantastic. For everybody watching and listening just so you know, we'll definitely put some links in the show notes so you can go grab a copy for yourself and speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven't done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show. Yes, you heard me right. Each and every day we're bringing you new content, new ideas and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. Also hit that subscribe or follow button and I met it's really been a pleasure. Thanks for coming on and congrats on the new book. Thank you, Adam. It was great talking to you. Have a great week. The Toyota Tundra and Tacoma are built to keep going, blending rugged muscle with precision engineering all supported by Toyota's time tested legacy of dependability. Step into a Tundra and feel the unyielding capability with the available I force max engine. Tundra puts out impressive power, torque and towing performance and the roomy high-tech

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