That was a really pivotal moment where I just made a decision not to hold myself back anymore
on this subconscious level and develop this level of belief in myself.
One of the great lessons I've learnt is there are no mistakes and that's really hard when
you have been knocked down to say, well, that's not a mistake, this is how things are and
Hi, I'm Sally Patton, editor of BOSS from the Australian Financial Review and welcome
to 15 minutes with the BOSS, a podcast about success and failure and everything in between
and along the way we're hoping to get some really great advice from our leaders.
My guest today is Lisa Wade, chief executive of Digital X.
Hi Lisa, how are you?
Hi, good thanks Sally, how are you?
Very well thank you and thank you so much for coming into our Sydney studio and for
allowing us to spend 15 minutes with you.
Now Lisa, you are the CEO of Digital X, which is a technology and investment company focused
on blockchain consulting, digital asset management and RegTech and I think you've been CEO for
And do you love it?
It's probably the most fun and the biggest challenge I've ever had in my career but broadly
speaking yes, we managed to have a lot of fun and it's been a great 18 months taking
Great, I'm looking forward to hearing lots more about that.
Let's get started.
We've got 15 minutes.
The clock starts now.
Okay Lisa, my first question is all about your morning routine.
What time do you get up?
What happens before you get to work?
My usual morning is 5am.
Lately because I'm over 50, I learnt about high intensity exercise and it's very important
so I unfortunately go for a little bit of a run or something that gets my heart rate
above the high intensity level and that's not my happy place, however it gets the job
And then for the last 10 years I've actually been a yoga teacher so I follow that up with
some yoga and meditation and then I have been known on lazy days to read emails first but
generally whichever order I put it into I wake up at 5am.
Do you still teach yoga on the side?
During COVID I did teach meditation at National Australia Bank every morning and that was
amazing the different types of people I met across the whole bank because that was a bank-wide
initiative and there's like 34,000 people so we had people dialling in from all around
the country and that's something that really got me through COVID and is a habit that I've
picked up that without fail even if I'm feeling lazy or having a rest day on the exercise
I still meditate at least once or twice a day.
And how long do you meditate for?
Up to 30 minutes.
There's some really great apps.
If I'm feeling really distracted I use the Calm app and the amazing thing about meditation
is I know that it will help me and lots of people I know who don't like meditation and
don't like yoga and don't like yoga people those apps really get them over the line and
break that barrier between hippie trippy and actually a powerful tool.
Okay great I'll go find that app.
Highly recommend it.
Tell me about a pivotal moment in your career that shaped you as a leader or somehow changed
the trajectory of your career.
I think in the last five years maybe six years ago when I joined National Australia Bank
I always struggled with being out and my sexuality and was always something that held me back
and not something that I wanted to talk about and I said to Steve Lambert who hired me International
Australia Bank I'll come but I just can't explain myself to everybody I'm so tired of
it so I would like to whatever pride group you have I would like to run it.
Just put me on the board or the panel or whatever it looks like so that I don't have to explain
myself and I can just be a stand for others and actually role model not explain myself.
And his EA sent me this article from the CEO of Lloyds London Inge Biel and her whole journey
of coming out and a woman in such a powerful position I'd never had a role model and she
talked about her career and her career path and it literally on this level that I can't
even explain to you shifted my whole mentality about myself and from that day onwards like
even just the comment about what to wear like I don't really worry what anybody thinks about
me anymore and that really changed my whole way of showing up and that was a really pivotal
moment where I just made a decision not to hold myself back anymore on this subconscious
level and develop this level of belief in myself and I texted Inge and I thanked her
and she replied and said she was really overjoyed that I'd shared that story with her and you
know I think that you know we all need role models and we need more and especially more
for women because it really makes a difference.
Yes we definitely need more role models like Inge.
OK so my next question is what is the best piece of advice you've ever been given.
Oh the best piece of career advice I've ever been given was a desktop calendar on my very
first day of working at Stedler pens and pencils and it said the key to success is
persistence and determination and perception is greater than reality and I've never forgotten
those two quotes because they have served me in every difficult situation throughout
my entire career.
So would you say you are particularly persistent.
Absolutely and just breaking into finance from manufacturing accounting and DIY I always
wanted to work in finance so I wrote letters in those days and I only got the interview
at County NetWest I was one of 500 people that applied for the job and the guy who hired
me who's still to this day now one of my best friends when he interviewed me he told me
that he couldn't give me the job because the job was going to go internal and throughout
that interview I won him over and I got down to the second round and he told me that the
second round was a technical interview and it was all about index Arben options trading
and so I studied so hard for that because I wanted that job and I got 10 out of 10 in
the interview and he was like I have to offer you the job because you got 10 out of 10 but
the other guy did too and didn't take no for an answer and he gave me the job.
Yeah that's how I ended up where I am today.
OK that's a great story I love that.
On that note we're going to take a short break stay right where you are when we come
back we're going to open the chatterbox.
Welcome back to 15 minutes with the boss.
I'm here with Lisa Wade the chief executive of digital X.
Now it's time to open the chatterbox.
Now Lisa in front of you you'll see this very glamorous brown box inside which are 20
questions all folded up on little bits of paper.
I'm going to ask you to pick out three questions one by one which of course I will then ask
Would you like to start fishing in the chatterbox.
Oh my goodness I'm a bit nervous here.
It won't be that bad.
It's exciting though.
Who is a person outside of the business world whom you admire and want to be?
Michelle Heyman who is a former Matilda.
Yeah just the resilience of being a sportswoman in Australia and those girls are the top
They don't get the recognition they're starting to get the recognition they deserve now.
But Michelle did a lot of events for us when I ran NAB Pride and just the sort of journey
that those athletes were on at that time I really admire.
And then any Paralympian at all watching the Paralympics and athletes just succeed in
under those circumstances I think is something that I find truly inspiring and because you
know in those moments when you know you get knocked down all of the time.
I always expected this moment in life when you would stop getting knocked down.
I've just realised it's not that you get knocked down all the time you just got to get
back up again and sometimes it takes a hot minute and it's hard to admit that you've
been knocked down.
But if you can dust yourself off and get back up again then that's the only way to play.
Do you have a secret for getting yourself up again when you've been knocked down.
I absolutely reset even if it's just on a weekend I take the time I meditate I'm always
doing some kind of course on you know at the moment I'm doing Eckhart Tolle is becoming
a teacher of presence not because I see myself teaching presence but the only way to
teach presence is to embody it.
And one of the great lessons I've learned is there are no mistakes and that's really
hard when you have been knocked down to say well that's not a mistake this is how things
are and they should be and it's neither good nor bad I have to deal with what's in front
of me and that's exactly how you have to get back up again.
That's good advice.
There are no mistakes.
There are no mistakes.
OK next question.
I almost forgot about this.
The pain will be over soon.
Just so everybody knows I don't know what these questions are.
Just to reiterate that.
What do you think of chat GPT and what does it mean for your business.
I love it and I hate it at the same time.
I think it's a powerful tool but I also believe that we are about to enter this age
where we can automate a lot of processes and being investment managers.
I've built the second half of my career by building macros in spreadsheets to simplify
investment processes and road test them and chat GPT actually legitimizes a lot of the
algorithmic trading and machine learning that we've been using for a long time.
So do you think that across the economy as a whole chat GPT could cause the loss of lots
of white collar jobs.
I think it enhances the job.
I don't think there'll be job losses.
I think it saves time and I think the jobs will never go away.
So it's not reducing jobs it's just reshaping that role and making it more sophisticated.
But you know it really helps especially young people coming through because if I'm
talking about a complex finance term they don't understand they can go off and do the
research and finances much faster.
And I think it's a great tool.
So with chat GPT do you think there's a danger that we will just outsource too much of
our brains to technology.
So yes and no. So what I worry about with the young grads that we have coming through
is we in finance I said we call it the grunt work and really that grunt work is really
important work. It's learning how to gather data to analyse data learning how to see
what's important and what's behind the data.
So as an investor I may have people help me gather all of that data but because it's so
ingrained into me traders are basically data scientists because we build all these
financial models but I understand what goes behind those models on a level because I've
done all of that work.
So yeah in a way I do get a little bit worried that younger people won't get to learn
those skills that we all got to learn.
It's almost like a rite of passage.
And do I worry that we just become lazy.
And I think that even that bleeds into working from home too because how do we know
that people when they're working at home aren't just loading something up into chat GPT
and counting that as a whole day's work.
But at the end of the day it has to be on each of us as individuals to want to further
ourselves and to do the work.
So that's going to be the challenge to get the new people coming in to actually do the
grunt work so they build the basic blocks.
For their own benefit absolutely because to really really really do well at work and to
enjoy it you have to care otherwise you just get bored on this level where you can't
Chucking something into chat GPT that is not your own original thought that's a really
fast way to get bored and to pump out the answers it's asking the questions that's the
important thing but asking them in a way that you are curious to answer them yourselves
and that is what I don't think we want our young people to lose.
And I think as leaders we need to adapt to new ways of encouraging the passion and the
drive and the why behind what they're doing and not just shortcuts because the shortcuts
you know I don't think will lead to any form of career satisfaction or happiness at work
and at the end of the day what's the point if you can't be happy at work.
OK Lisa one more question.
Oh fishing again here we go.
Do you have a coping mechanism for high stress situations.
There's what I would like to do and what I actually do.
It's really breathing in those moments.
I take a few breaths.
You've really got to create that time out for yourself even if it's in the absolute
moment but it's really around high stress more breath and that's been a tool that I've
been using at least for the last 10 years because before I learnt that stress used to
really get to me and when we were trading on the trading floor we just used to yell
and scream a lot and that's not really very productive as you move through in those high
pressure situations.
So my coach teaches me you have to have a grounding mechanism and believe it or not
in the habit work that we do for different types of stressful situations I have different
touch points for different situations and different responses if you like.
Some of them are grounding my feet and pressing my feet into the earth if somebody sort of
Another one like I look at my watch and tap the front of my watch.
There's all different habits that I've developed with a breath to just ground myself
and deal with that stressful situation because that time out can be an eternity between
reacting and responding and the difference between reacting and responding is everything.
As I've gone through my career journey you start to learn well I've started to learn
that I always have my power it's whether I want to give it away to people and reacting
you're just handing your power in a situation to somebody on a platter and responding is
really about keeping your power and being grounded in that moment.
So I would recommend anybody who really doesn't think they cope very well with stress to
read books like Atomic Habits.
My coach uses a methodology by a guy called Brendan Bashard.
That's where I picked up all of those habits he does wonderful ones like walking through
doorways so every time you walk through into a meeting that's you know going to be high
stress you reset yourself as you walk through the door so you don't feel that stress as
much and I highly recommend anybody do the training that I have because I've been very
So when you're taking that time out to breathe or put your feet into the ground how long
would you do that for is it just a couple is it just a minute.
It's not even a minute because in the high pressure situations you know I don't have a
minute I have that breath to respond or react and in a judgmental world that's how you get
judged in a board meeting.
I love my board they're really great but people don't always see eye to eye and if I
don't like what a board member said in that moment I have to respond not react.
You don't have a minute in my world it has to be that breath I've had to train myself
and I'm not saying I do it well all the time.
I think there's a great danger in I guess podcasts and all of us telling our stories
where we tell all the good bits because you know I live in a very high pressure situation.
I said to somebody last week I said oh you know we navigated through a market crash and
the guy looked at me and said you know the market crashed twice last year Lisa and I
was like oh yeah it did too.
So you know we're in the world that we're in in 2023 sometimes you don't have a minute
it's got to be in that second and in that moment.
OK a breath or two even I should be able to manage to fit that in.
Yes it's a very special kind of breath it's a mindful breath in through the nose with
your mouth closed and out through the nose which reheats resets and that fire of presence
burns the situation very quickly if you believe in all of that.
OK Lisa that's the end of the chatterbox.
I am going to finish the podcast with one last question and that is if you had a month
off totally unencumbered you could do anything you wanted to do.
What would it be.
I would travel to a very remote island and swim and write and jump on my paddle board
every day and just completely chill out and read lots and lots and lots and lots of books.
So any idea where this remote island would be.
Everywhere I go now for more than about three days has to be a bucket list.
And so the Maldives are on my bucket list just because I can't wait to see that crystal
clear blue water and hopefully we can wind back the clock on climate change so that all
these beautiful islands still exist.
Now I have to ask what else is on the bucket list.
So definitely the Northern Lights.
I think everybody has to probably go to Everest at one point in their life.
So that's on mine.
Machu Picchu and the number one place on my bucket list is the Galapagos Islands just
because I do love scuba diving and that's the best scuba diving in the world.
And so maybe it would be the Galapagos Islands actually.
Thanks for reminding me.
If you'll have me I'm there.
On that note Lisa our 15 minutes is up.
I've loved listening to you talk about the power of habit which is so important in the
morning but indeed throughout the day and the power of meditation even if it is just
for a breath or two before you have to make a response in a stressful situation.
So thank you so much for allowing us to spend 15 minutes with the boss.
Thanks for having me.
And thank you to everyone for listening.
If you like the podcast and would like to hear more consider sharing the podcast or
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At The Financial Review we investigate the big stories about markets business and power.
You can subscribe to The Financial Review the daily habit of successful people at
AFR.com forward slash subscribe.
This podcast was hosted by me Sally Patton produced and edited by Lapfan our theme is
by Alex Gow and our executive producer is Fiona Buffini.
The Australian Financial Review.