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Foreign. Welcome to Leading Organizations that Matter, a podcast about leadership and how we find impact, meaning and joy in our work. I'm Ray Spadoni and today's topic is what are you chasing? We all chase something. It's part of life and we learn early on that it's important. In school, we chase acceptance and community, good grades and achievement progress to the next level and eventually a chance at making a living, hopefully a good one. Over time, we make choices based on our experiences, values, hurts and desires. This can result in the pursuit of wealth, recognition, love, comfort, power, control, and so on. Chasing is important and often good, but of course we can get wrapped up in chasing things that aren't good for us or for those in our lives. If we value meaning and purpose, then we might chase salvation, enlightenment, peace, wisdom and beauty. As I said, chasing can be good, but chasing can be bad too. It's especially bad if we don't stop to ponder what it is that we are working so hard to gain and as a result accumulate a lot of something that ultimately doesn't do us much good at all. We live in times when it's easy to chase connection with each other via online platforms. The platforms know this and so they reward us with likes, impressions and thumbs up. We get a chemical rush whenever these arrive and so we chase them. Marketers hit us hard with a steady stream of messages designed to entice and captivate and upsell the heck out of us with discount codes, price reductions if we let them text us constantly, subscriptions and membership programs that reward us for our loyalty with exclusive offers. So we chase those. News outlets remain relevant by making us mad. Mad at something and more likely at somebody. This drives us further and further apart. Outrage sells, engages, and ultimately manipulates. When we're not mad or frightened, we tune out. We go and live our lives, but when we're ticked off and afraid, we watch and read and listen. And then they got us. If you alternate between left leaning media and right leaning media in split screen style, it's quite clear that we live in two wildly different realities. So we chase what helps us feel comfortable and belonging. AI used to be supercharged search engine only, and then it became a cool way to research and write stuff, create images and videos and interact with less effort. But now it's pretending to be us and actually getting quite good at it. I was interviewed recently by an AI bot and it did a good job. I'm getting emails from AI bots and they are identifying themselves by human names. They are pretending this is dishonest and I don't love it. But we are being told that the future will be shaped by AI and by the way there's gold in them our hills. And so we fear being left behind. So we chase relevance and modernity. We chase what are you chasing? I've been thinking about this a lot, mostly because a friend heard me talking about all this recently and said quite simply, and this is a direct quote, you seem to value authenticity. Authenticity in a world where it's very easy to be inauthentic. This got me to thinking, what exactly is it that I've been chasing? And it turns out I've been chasing a lot. And so it's time to reevaluate, to make sure I'm accumulating something that matters to me and the people I care about, not to those who benefit from my chasing whatever it is that they're selling. When I work with healthcare clients on their strategic plans, I ask them to prioritize their goals. When I work with executive coaching clients, I ask them to prioritize their objectives to be clear about what it is they're chasing. It's high time I did the same. Thanks for listening. Leaving a positive review and letting others know about this podcast will help a great deal. My mission is to help empower organizations that matter by supporting those who lead them. I offer coaching, mentoring and consulting services. You can learn more about me and my work@racepadoni.com. Sa.