Transcript of How One Simple Word Is Destroying Your Company | Natalyn Lewis

Employers are afraid of their own employees. They're afraid of them walking in and saying, This is disrupting my mental health. Because I don't understand what mental health really is or how that might actually disrupt someone's mental health, I'm afraid that it might be. It's like stepping on the cancer word. I have cancer. I have mental cancer, and I'm like, I don't know what that is, and I don't know how to fix it. Is this deadly? Is it problematic? I work with employers every day who are literally afraid of their employees. They're afraid to stand and say, Yes, it's hard to take nos on the phone, and you're going to be okay. I'll give you a fun tool if you want to work with these guys. I love a fun tool. So if you solidify a strategy and the answer is yes, but, then what's happening is your guys will not stay consistent with their action plan.

Yes.

They're going to do something, and then they're going to not do it at all. You're going to watch them not change behavior. If you come in and you can get them into a yes and category, they will start to change behavior. So when you come in and you say, Okay, great, we're going to go after this one product, and they go, Yeah, but, and say, Okay, fantastic. With every but, I actually want you to define the concern. But what? Define the concern. What is your concern about going after this one product? Write them all down. What's the The other guy? Oh, yeah, what's your concern about going after one product? Write them all down. And if you actually will put them in front of their face in writing so that they can give voice to it and then see it on the board, and then you acknowledge that in your move forward plan, and they literally see that this action compensates for that concern, they'll move to a yes and, and they'll start to form that behavior, and they'll stick with it.

What a great exercise.

Yeah. There's a little piece of neuro pathway, and they're like, where when we have, as a human being, we have a picture. And this picture is a future. And that future has a lot of unknowns and a lot of uncertainties, right? And if I look into the future and all I see is unknown and uncertain, Then I got to go grab onto everything in my past because the past is the only known and certain I've got. And what that creates is your buts. Oh, I know we're doing that, but. Well, I was looking forward, but. I'm trying to run in this direction, but. And when we will actually just capture the buts, capture all the concerns that are showing up, and then we actually show that the action plan moving forward addresses the concerns, the mind stops barking at them, it can calm it right down, and they can actually focus on an action-oriented item that they have control over, and it starts to make them feel like they control the destination of their future.

Absolutely love that. So were you lying when you said in your LinkedIn post the other day, you're not a therapist, you're a coach, because what you just gave me sounded more like therapy.

It's actually performance coaching, right? So if you think about it, I'm not going to go in and understand why each of these individual humans looks to the past. There is neuroscience that tells us this happens. A therapist in that same situation would say, What happened, Ryan, to you in your childhood that made it so that you really like to think about the past? What makes you scared of pursuing your dreams in the future? And I'm going to be like, Oh, heck no. Here's That's what we know. We got neuroscience that tells us that innately as human beings, we need to feel safe. And do you know what safety looks like? It looks like the known. And do you know the only thing that's known in our life is the past? So why are people so blasted, fixated at staring at their past? Trying to recreate a success they previously had because it feels safe, because it feels known. But the only thing that as humans gets us exhilarated, gets us excited, gets us like, pumped and live in life is actually progressing into the unknown future. So how do we do that with safety? We actually honor the concerns that pop up.

We focus action on what we have control over, and we go to create the heck out of the future. And then you get people to actively engage in that, and you're not whipping them into shape anymore. They're running, and you're just keeping up.

I saw this documentary the other day. It was a mini-documentary. It was like 20 minutes. It was on YouTube, and it was talking about... It was like the big mistake in psychology. It was the title of this video. And I love this stuff similar to you because I find... One of the reasons that I love leadership, talking about leadership in this role in a company is because of all the psychological and behavioral things that it takes to be good at it, right? But what this video outlined was how essentially, and I'm going to forget the exact dates, but there was Freud and there was Adler. Freud was exactly what you explained on the yes, but. Everything is about your your past, the way your parents looked at you, treated you, all your... Okay, and you have to dive into your past and ruminate in your past and all this stuff. Okay. And then there's Adler who was like, Okay, your past happened. It's real. But the only way for it is what you said with yes, and which was you have to address the future and what you can do to make your life better in the future.

Essentially, what this documentary positioned was that Freud was a better marketer. And this entire therapeutic industry of digging into our past and psychoanalyzing everything from our past is because Freud was a better marketer than Adler. And if Adler was a better marketer, we would not have to deal with all this shit from our past all the time. And I was like, That's crazy. I'm sure there's more nuance to it than that, but just the idea that one guy's ability to market over another literally created an entire generations of therapy that... I don't know if you saw, I think her name is Abigail Schreier. She came out with a book that I listened to the audio version of called Bad Therapy, which is essentially what you just described. All of this rumination on the bad shit that happens in our past, our body doesn't know the difference. So when we're thinking about this bad experience we have, our body is literally having all the same feelings. We're reliving it. Yeah, we're reliving the idea. So essentially, all you're doing is forcing your body to re-experience this stress and pain and hardship which doesn't actually take you anywhere.

So I thought that was really interesting.

Well, and people ask me all the time, why is it worse now? Why now? Why is this where you are needed now? And it's because, historically speaking, this thing was not all that common. Why? Because people were progressively just moving forward, right? There became a time where, interestingly enough, which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did it come first? Or we started to put more emphasis, so much emphasis on mental health that we went too too far the opposite direction? I mean, humanity has a tendency to do this. We tend to set our sides on something and then we overcompensate. I am a big proponent of mental health. I think that people have pushed so hard into mental health that they forgot that There's actually mental resilience is important. So we've moved to a place now where if I feel any form of emotional or mental unsafety or emotional mental discomfort, it's like, I need to stop. And it's like, well, no, actually, your Your brain operates in such a way to give you clues that, hey, this is, hey, by the way, you've never done this before, so proceed with caution. I'm going to make you a little uncomfortable so that you become more aware.

I'm going to make you a little uncomfortable so your senses are more heightened because this might not be safe. I don't know. We've never done it before. But people just stop in those moments. So we get people like, We're going to go focus on one product. We're going to go focus on one strategy, and we're going to go all in on this thing. And I've been doing four. I'm like, Oh, that doesn't feel safe. Because if I combine all my revenue from four sources, I feel like, well, can I compensate with that with one? I don't know. I've never done it before. And all of a sudden, I feel a little unsafe and a little uncomfortable. And that doesn't mean it's the wrong idea. And people have a tendency to stop and say, right there, that doesn't feel right. Therefore, it must be wrong. And that's what gets people into problems.

Yeah, you talked. And for the audience, I met Nat at an event, and you Utah. You were speaking phenomenal. I was blown away by your presentation. I love the way that you talked about leadership, and I want to dig into some of that. But I get a lot of questions, and I do very minimal. So your leadership coaching, I do this much. At any given time, I have one to three clients that I work with because I like to be operational, too. But I also find it to be both very rewarding and also helpful for me when I'm teaching my philosophies to them as well. Okay, so take this into account. But the questions that I get a lot recently are about, and you talked a little bit about this, and I think actually you got a couple of questions in the Q&A section around... I'm just going to throw a very combative generalization and say the softness of team members, employees, et cetera. I want to give you just a brief context on where I'm coming from from this, and then I'll let you run. I coach baseball. Both my sons play baseball. They're 11 and 9.

A big problem, and I see it as a problem, I don't see this as healthy, is the crying, pouting, woe is me, self-orientation, the rounding of the shoulders, all this inwardness that people go when they don't have success, particularly in a sport like baseball, because it's not like basketball or a soccer or a hockey Haki, where if you mess up, you can bust your butt down the court and get right back in it. If you boot a ground ball, you might not get another ground ball the rest of the game. Now you're sitting there marinating on the fact that you messed up this skill you're supposed to do. Okay, so My kids don't cry. They'll get upset, don't get me wrong, but they're not criers. And I had a parent come up to me one time, and she was like, I can't get my kid to stop frigging crying every time something doesn't go the way he wants. And they said, What do you say to your kids? And excuse my language, but I said, I tell them to suck it the fuck up. And I didn't mean that to be so harsh. I don't necessarily always say like that, but In context of that phrase, what I'm saying to them is like, Dude, you booted the ball.

Go do the next thing. What is sucking in inward and crying? Who are you doing that for? You're not doing it for me. I don't feel sorry for you. I played baseball, too. I booted ground balls. I don't feel sorry for you. So who are you putting on that performance for? And my kids really learned very early that they would not be rewarded in any way. I'm not going to yell at them for doing it if they do. And I'm certainly not going to go over and go, Oh, hey, do you want to drink? And it's no big deal. But that's probably a little far on the spectrum in terms of harshness. I get that? Now we can take this out of You've played sports, but I know you coach as well and played sports. So wherever you want to take this, how do we start to find the sweet spot from maybe my being just a little more harsh and rough to that everything's going to be okay. The mother coming in the dugout. I had a mother force her way in the dugout because her kid struck out. You know what I mean?

And now that kid's being babied by his mother in the middle of a game because he struck out for the 13th time that season. You know what I mean? So how do we find that sweet spot?

Yeah. Well, I am a huge proponent that that sweet spot comes with leadership and understanding. If you are a leader of an organization and you do not have EQ, if you could not rank yourself at a 10 in EQ, you better get there. Because what causes this so much is fear. Employers are afraid of their own employees. They're afraid of them walking in and saying, This is disrupting my mental health. And because I don't understand what mental health really is or how that might actually disrupt someone's mental health, I'm afraid that it might be. And it's like stepping on the cancer word. I have cancer. I have mental cancer. And I'm like, I don't know what that is, and I don't know how to fix it, Is this deadly? Is it problematic? Is it? And I work with employers every day who are literally afraid of their employees. They're afraid to stand and say, yes, it's hard to take nos on the phone, and you're going to be okay. This is what we're going to do. We don't need to take a day off. We can push through it. The problem is, if we don't understand what's happening ourselves, can we really stand with confidence with our employees and walk them through it, coach them through it, teach them through it?

Or do we just think we're going to step on that landmine, that mental health landmine that's going to blow us up? That's what's happening out there. We have a world that has mental health is being weaponized. In my opinion, I see it every day. They walk in, it's like, Oh, I can't do that anymore. It's so hard for me. I'm getting anxiety getting on that phone call. Okay, well, then you don't need to get on a phone call. That is not the right answer. If your job is to take phone calls, the right answer is, don't take that phone. The right answer is not, don't take phone calls. If that makes you anxious, we'll find another job for you. No. If that makes you anxious, let's give you training that teaches you how to deal with anxiety in in a phone call situation, or you can find another job. But we get super, super cuddly because there is a complete lack of understanding, and so it's fear-based.

What are they afraid? What is the actual outcome that you're finding these leaders are afraid of? When they're picturing it in their mind, this bad thing that could happen, what are they actually picturing could happen if they don't handle this mental health concern properly?

Oh, I've I've seen it across the board. I've seen leaders who are afraid they'll have an employee commit suicide, and it's going to be on their head. I've seen that they're afraid they're going to have employees that turn them in, and they're going to have problems on their hands with the state or with agencies. And it's funny because I'll say, who are they turning you into? And they don't know. They just know they've heard the stories that you have to treat these people fairness. There's fear that this person will sue them. They'll come back and sue them, that they didn't handle their health circumstance as well. And because mental health is such a hot topic, they're going to lose. And they're often afraid of these people because they aren't them. People who are leading and running companies tend to have a little bit more resilience and a little higher natural level of EQ and grit. And because they don't understand how this person could even walk in their office and have a conversation, like my job is to get on the phone every day, and it's giving me anxiety. So do you think that maybe I don't have to get on the phone today?

It would never cross this leader's mind to ever have that conversation. So now they don't understand the person, they don't understand the ramifications, they don't understand the ramifications. They don't understand the consequences. And they don't know what happens if they just say no.

How much of those fears is real? Of those things you just listed, what is the actual potential of one of those things happening? Is it a real concern, or is it mostly just a manifestation in their minds?

Miniscule concern. Minuscule. The reality is, if they don't handle it well, if you didn't handle it well, could you get sued? Sure. If you didn't handle it well, could something happen? Sure. And again, it comes back to, well, that is why I feel like so much of it is a lack of confidence on the side of the leaders in understanding these emotions and understanding the difference. Because right now, they just deal in fear and frustration. It's super frustrating to have employees that have zero emotional resilience. I see in every company I've worked with, Ryan, in every insurance agency I have worked with, this is 100 % true, in every agency I I have worked with personally, if you go look at their retention numbers, they start to change if you actually time out the calls with timing in the day after 2: 30 in the afternoon. Because these people have taken calls all morning. They don't There's not an understanding of how to actually handle this or how to deal with the emotions coming up. So by 2: 30 in the afternoon, they've reached hyper states of emotion or hypo states of emotion, and they're no longer servicing the customer base well at all.

People are staying on hold longer because the person doesn't even want to answer the... People are getting transferred when they don't have any reason to be transferred because that person does not want to deal with that customer and answer the questions on the call. And so you watch retention go down in late afternoon. It's a fascinating destination, and it correlates. And so why does that happen? How come the leader can't look at that and say, I'm going to help my people increase their emotional resilience, as opposed to just being frustrated by it? They don't know how to do that because they don't understand it because they never went through it themselves because most of them have a very natural level. You don't get to leadership and ownership in a company, and especially in insurance, where you're in sales constantly. You don't get to that place without a little natural resilience and grit. So since my leaders all have that, they look at the person next to them and like, what the hell is wrong with them?

It's like how Hall of Fame athletes make terrible coaches oftentimes.

That's right, because they don't even know how they got there half the time, so they can't teach the basic technical skill necessary. So the same in leadership in these positions where sales are dominant and service is dominant, the person who has become exceptionally good at it often has some natural capacity, and so they don't actually know how it is that they're more resilient. They don't know why it doesn't hurt their feelings to get a no. They don't know why it is that they walk in every day and say four nos equals one yes. Like, let's go, baby, bring it. They don't know why the person sitting next to them can't do that. They don't know why the person who had somebody They yell at them on the call about their insurance policy. Why it is that that person stood up and went to the bathroom and cried for 10 minutes because they were like, It's about an insurance policy. It's not about you, man. What's your problem? They don't understand it. The minute there's understanding, There is power to coach, train, support, and push. And without the understanding, how do you push them? Because if you just take somebody who's crying about that and you're like, Look, suck it up.

How do you do that? How do you actionably suck it up? What are they supposed to actionably do to improve that? They don't know, you don't know. And eventually, they either shove emotions so far that they erupt on somebody or they quit.

Yeah. The part of my response to the mom about my children, and that I didn't tell her, mostly because she asked me in passing, was that after I tell them to suck it up in the car or when we get home, I explain to them that the reason I tell you to do that is because there's no value in having that reaction. So what I tell them is, when you feel that emotion, you get one moment to release it. That could be an MF into your bag when you get back into the dugout. It could be a quick slam of your helmet on the bench, and then you put it in your bag. It can be whatever. You get a moment to release that pent-up energy that you're feeling, and then you get back out there. Because if crying Being at your position after you struck out helped you be a better fielder, then I would be all for it. But it doesn't help you be a better fielder. That's why I tell you to suck it out. It doesn't make you better, right?

See, I have the advantage of coaching soccer players, and I coach them very similarly in the sense that I say, look, guys, having an emotion on a field is not a bad thing. That just shows you're passionate. The difference is one player is One player is going to experience the passion, and it's so uncomfortable that they quit. The other player is going to experience the passion, and they're going to sprint their butt off and hit somebody on that field and feel great and perform well. Like the release of physical emotion is super important. Yes. And there's a way to do that in a super healthy way. With athletes, it's a really fun thing to teach them because it completely shifts the dynamic of their performance. So when you're working in an office setting and they're like, okay, well, I'm sitting at a desk feeling trapped in my little Cuby here with my headset on and my screen, and this person's yelling at me, and I'm feeling all the emotion. At first, I felt rage, and then I just got pissed off, and then this person got personal, and now I'm just flustered, and my mind went blank, and I can't figure out what I'm doing?

What are they supposed to do? There's tools for this. But a lot of people just don't know the tools or they don't understand it. And so they come back and they're like, Well, you just got to suck it up and take the next call. But they don't know what that looks like or what they're supposed to physically, actionably do. And so since the leader doesn't know and they don't train their staff that, when their staff keeps coming to them, they get more and more uncomfortable with the question because they don't know the answer. And that's a very uncomfortable position for leaders because they don't like it. They like having the answer.

So I'm interested in your take on this. So how I solve this problem in my own business, I had a National Digital Commercial Insurance Agency, was I gave them... We created a private Slack channel We were never politically correct, but we called it the Bitch channel. So essentially it was when someone had a really shitty sales call or service call, I was like, This is free reign. You were not talking about each other. We're not spending all day in here. But go in, and if you just got a blast off on this, son of a, said this, and why did it... And you just got a hitting... And what I found was, they used it for a while, and then eventually it almost started to I've self-healed the wound because I basically gave them permission to vent all the crap they had in. I mean, the best part was some of the shit that they would say is hilarious. Like, this guy said this house... They're just like... But then they would be done, and they would get on to the next call. Again, I don't know how healthy that is or how appropriate it is.

I'm super interested in your take on that, but that was how we solved it. It actually did help because it was almost like they felt they It kept all this emotion in, and then it would spill over because they felt like it was inappropriate or they didn't have a mechanism to release it. And once I gave them this vent, whether it's the right thing to do or not, and thank God it's deleted and hope it still doesn't exist on the Internet. But a lot of that gave them what they needed was the ability to just blast off on someone without any repercussions, and then they could come back. I was like, This is not for each other. That shit, you need to take home and tell your partner, your therapist or whatever, ChatGPT. But this is for clients to get it out of your system. And it seemingly worked well. I don't know.

Yeah. Well, there's some science to why that would work. And it's the idea of if you think about emotions like a still bottle of water and everything that happens in the day adds a little carbonation. And then the big moments shake it up a little bit. Where do you want to open that thing? You want to open it on your nice carpet? You want to open it over the sink with rubber gloves and goggles on, right? So when you Give somebody a sink and some rubber gloves and some goggles. You're welcome to open this. Then the opening is no longer this trepidation or this crushing it down or hoping it doesn't come out on somebody. It's actually quite enjoyable to release it. And that's the idea behind it. And so something like that will work. I have a client where they have a pad of paper, and the pad at the top of the paper literally says, lit it out. And when they're on the call with their client, if the client says something and they want desperately Probably to say something back, but that's not the time, right? Like a client call and say, You told me this, and the person sitting on the other line is like, I know for a fact I didn't say that, but you can't say that to the customer.

It's not going to help anything. So they would just write down, be like, One second, and they would write down their note, but it would be like, I never said that. But they gave themselves the voice that they weren't allowed to have vocally over here. Call would end and they would rip it up and throw it away and start the next thing. We called it the right rip pad. You're just letting it out, letting it go. Let it out, let it go. In the service situation, specifically, there's so many times they never get a voice. And so you'll notice your service people will get a lot of their rapid heart rate really tense necks and really tension here and here because they're never giving themselves a voice first, and they can't really stand up for themselves in those moments. They just get crapped on. So giving them space and giving them freedom to release. I have another client that does breaks on the 50s, so they rotate. They have different groups. So half the group does a break on the odd 50s, and one does a break on the even 50s, and they just take 10 minutes at the 50 to get off the phone, get up, get ice water, go in, crank the music if they need to, go outside and get a walk, just move and release whatever tension built up over being on the phones.

So just giving them that sink, the rubber gloves, the goggles, give them a space to get it out.

What else is going on in leadership right now? When you're getting phone calls, what's the stuff that's coming in that's got got people all tuned up. You see any other consistent patterns?

Interpersonal communications. I would say if there was... The number one thing I deal with right now is teaching teams to communicate. Because everybody's in a slightly heightened state of emotions, everything gets It's like our team can't discuss something without somebody getting frustrated or irritated, and then it's drama. And I say this as a woman, so we'll be clear about that. I'm saying it as a woman to my ladies. But when men and women work together, the men get very frustrated because when two men are having a conversation, they can just throw down on each other. And as soon as the meeting is over, they're like, Dude, you want to grab some lunch? Yeah, let's go. You got to hit around? Let's go hit around. But the women don't talk to each other for a day and a half. And it creates all this dynamic in the office. Just teaching people to be able to disagree without the deep emotions. It's like we have a tendency. It's like, nobody can disagree with us, or it's offensive, or personal, or emotional, or heightened. And it's like, how in the world are we all supposed to make good decisions in our business if we're all just agreeable?

Because the point is to bring all these beautiful minds to the table and find all the perspectives. Those perspectives shouldn't all agree or we're doing something wrong. And so to interpersonal communications is maybe one of the biggest ones I work on a lot these days.

Yeah. I want to stay down this path. All I was going to say is I used to call our team like the Island of misfit toys. And I did that on purpose. I wanted people to realize that we are all so incredibly different, that that's our superpower, and that the differences that we have, that's what makes us strong. It's okay that she disagrees with her and he disagrees with this one over here because you're all freaking different. You all live in different parts of the country. You all come from different situations. It's literally It's statistically impossible for you all to agree all the time. So that's okay. We need to be able to do that. Sometimes that worked well, sometimes it didn't. But it was funny. They seemed to grab onto it and like it. But I was trying to get to that point where I was trying to set a culture of like... Because I agree with you. The tagline for this show is Unreasonable People Seeking Unreasonable Success. Part of being unreasonable is being a disagreeable human. It doesn't mean being an asshole, but being disagreeable. So you're trying to cultivate a team of people, leaders, a group, whatever, who can communicate in this way, who don't take every disagreement personally, who are actively searching.

I had someone on the show the other day that frame this really well. A genuine curiosity for discovering the truth. That was her North Star with her company was this genuine curiosity for discovering the truth. I thought it was a really nice way of framing it. So how the hell do you actually... How do you do this? This is a major issue.

Yeah. So I go in with organizations. I teach them two forms of communications tools, because if you think about it, your Boys play baseball. Did you just stick your boys out there on baseball and be like, I'm not going to teach you how to hold a bat, and I'm not going to teach you how to look at a pitch. I'm not going to teach you how to put your feet in the right spots or how to stand or how to get over the ball. I'm I'm not going to teach you how to swing. I'm just going to put you there. I'm going to let you take fastballs, and eventually, hopefully, you figure it out. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. Maybe they'll take a lot of blows in the meantime, and probably they're not ever going to be a great batter because what they are going to start doing is really poor technique that maybe they got a hit one time, and now they lock into that. And it might be they might have the ugliest swing in the history of time. And you're like, Okay, well, that'll work for a little league, but you're never getting any further.

The same thing happens with communications. We put dynamically different people in a room, and they've been through college education most of the time, or high school education, or the school of experienced education. And how many times did somebody sit them down and say, This is how you This is how you hold a conversation. This is the tool that you're going to use when you walk in the door and you start asking someone questions. These are the words and the framework you need to use to have a conversation that ends in a positive result. When did anybody sit down and actually teach them the technique? When I walk in the door of these corporations, there's not a single person in there that understands technique. They understand concept, some understand principle, and some have natural capacity. The vast majority have never learned how to have organizational communication that works well. I teach them two tools that we use in collaboration. And by the time we're done, it's a remarkable change in the organization's capacity to communicate. And it's just because we teach them technique, actual skills that they've never learned before. Why are we expecting everybody to be good at this when no one has ever learned it?

I want to ask you a different question now. I want to dive into handling ego as a leader. When I look and I dissect my own career in leadership positions, my successes are where I was able to settle into a position of, we'll call it authoritative humility, understanding my role as it was, but humble in that position. And when ego has played a role is when I've made my biggest mistakes. Yet I think because of social media and Instagram and this perception of what a leader is and how they hold themselves and what they do. You have all these different things. You get so much as me, I'm in this role. I need to make all decisions, or I'm supposed to know everything, which is one of the ones that seemingly is very difficult for people to get past. This idea that just because I hold a certain title, I'm supposed to know every decision, every answer to every question. When you're approaching a leader who's dealing with ego-related issues, how do you start to break that down and get them to a more productive and healthy place as a leader?

Yeah. The first thing that we do is engage in identity work. So identity is an interesting thing because we gain identity both intentionally and unintentionally. And with leadership in our world, unintentional identity is ruling the roost 90 % of the time. And that's because Where did that come from? Where did even the idea that leaders are supposed to have an answer come from? Did you decide that intentionally when you took a leadership role? Did somebody tell you that? Is that what you witnessed in another leader? How did you even come up with that idea that you should have the answer? Because if you did not intentionally decide that's who you are, then that is unintentional identity. So why do people act the way they do when they come into these positions? Is it because they sat down and really decided, Here's who I am, and here's how I want to lead, and this is what I want an organization to look like, and this is how I want my organization to feel, because this is where my organization is going, and this is what it looks like for me to lead them there. If they will sit down and get intentional first, then we start to find the gaps.

We start to find what... This is a behavior that's happening right now. Is it in alignment with where you're going and who you really want to be? And we see this happen all the time. We get people who... For example, I had a gentleman who's like... I started working with him and his agency, and his life was falling apart at the seams. His agency was rocking, but his marriage was a disaster. His relationship with his kids was nonexistent. His health was going down the toilet. I said, So Is your definition of a leader, what does it look like all the way around? If you gave the full, complete picture of yourself, who are you? Who is this man that leads this multimillion dollar corporation? Is he sick with kids that hate him and a wife who won't talk to him anymore? Is that the real picture? He was like, Well, no. And he goes, But I have to be here first, and I have to stay longer than everybody else. I said, Why? He said, Because that's what somebody who leads a successful organization does. I said, How do you know that? Was that your idea?

Did somebody tell you that? And his dad barked that at him his whole life. You're going to be successful in life. You have to work harder than everybody else around you, which means you show up first and you leave last. So what's this guy? He's in there. This is his definition of leadership, is the grind. But his whole life is falling apart, and he's losing the respect of his organization. And yet he's latched on to this one aspect of leadership. But it was unintentional identity. He never sat down and defined that for himself. He was just taking it on. And so what leaders, the first thing we do, and I would challenge anybody listening to this, to stop it for a minute and say, What is my picture, my perfect picture of the leader, man, woman, I want to be that leads this organization? Where do I want it to go? And how do I want to lead it? And at the end of the day, if somebody were talking back saying, This was what Ryan was really like. What do I want that person saying? How do I want to represent myself? And if my children heard that, would they be proud?

If my spouse heard that, would they be proud? Do I have my physical health and well-being? Do I have a spiritual connection to some higher power than me? And do I live my life with purpose? If you can't answer those questions yet, do some soul searching and figure that out, because if you haven't defined how you're showing up as a leader, I promise you, you are operating on somebody else's definition, which means right now you are operating unintentionally.

I love the word intention. I think so much of what we do in our life, not just in a leadership or business capacity happens unintentionally. And we blame it on luck or God or the universe or whatever, some other person in our life or force that we make up. And And when you really get down to the symptoms, it's you weren't doing anything with intention. You were floating through life, allowing things to happen to you, hoping you were going to pluck a lottery ticket out of thin air and have this life that you dreamed of that you didn't make. And I find... So the episode that will come out right before this one is with the founder of Dugout Mugs. We refer to Dugout Mugs, the baseball bats that he turned into mugs and stuff? Yeah. Okay. Part of that was he had a bunch of wins, a bunch of losses in his life all up and down, and he has carved this path out where now he took the entire summer. He's like, I just got back from three months. I didn't touch my business once. Ceo owns 92% of the company. They're doing 10 plus million a year in revenue.

For three months, he didn't touch his business. And who's the better leader? The guy who's doing 10 million, but his wife hates him, his kids don't know who he is, he's out of shape, unhappy, but he's in the office every day because he's grinding and has to be there? Or the guy who's had the humility, or guy, who's had the humility to outsource, systematize, automate, delegate to the point where essentially for three months He doesn't even have to touch his business. Why is one... Why do we... I feel like so much today, we hold up the grinding guy, the hard working, I'm here all the time until the lights go out. We hold that person up on Instagram is like, Look, this is a grind or work hard, hustle. And this guy who's basically built a business that allows him to live the life that he's always dreamed of, that guy, because he's not trying to go from 10 million to 100 million, And there's something wrong with him. He's not as good a leader, et cetera. That narrative, it's just not told enough. And I think- Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

It's because it is a narrative that's not told enough. And that's because we're not trying at this onset of our businesses to create our own narrative. If you were to say to this guy, my client who was grinding, which I did say to him, I said, so let's paint me a picture of what you want your life ultimately to look like. And I said, now, are the decisions you're making today in the way you're running your business getting you there? There's a complete disconnect. But because he's not starting the day every day with a reminder of vision, and because he's not understanding intentionally who he is as a man that is leading to that vision, there is a complete disconnect. And then we get into reactive and comparison mode. And this, I believe, is where the pride comes. I believe the ego comes not because I'm afraid of what I want and who I really want to be, but because I don't know if what I want is good enough because I just compared myself to somebody else, and now I got to go do better than them. It's not okay for me to want this nice life with my family because that guy's got twice what I've got.

So I got to go get that now. So comparison, and especially because if I don't really know what I want, then I'm just looking around. If I go to the store and I go shopping, and I go there because I'm intentionally shopping for one thing, I'm showing up at Foot Locker, I'm buying some J's, and I'm going home. That's it. That's my objective. I walk into the door closest to Foot Locker. I walk into the Foot Locker. I ask for that specific shoe in my size. I try it on, put it on, buy it, and walk out. I I'm super content and very happy, and I got exactly what I wanted. But if I just know I want a shoe, and I start looking around at everybody else's shoes, and I start walking through the mall, do you know what is going to happen? I'm going to find 14 other things that I think I might want that I never thought of before that are going to lead me to a place to spend too much money, be very unproductive, incredibly inefficient, and ultimately leave me with credit card debt, a stuff I don't actually want or wear, and now I'm stuck in a hole.

And that is how people are running their businesses. They're running it reactive to something because they're not taking the time to know exactly what they want and who they are. And that unintentional vision or unintentional comparison creates unintentional pride, and they're functioning in a place of everybody else defining how they have to show up to go get some unknown outcome that they think they're supposed to want.

Does this go back to where we were at in the beginning with uncertainty? If you're not certain, right?

Then you're not safe.

Then you're not safe. Because if I have five things, one of these things, there's a better chance one of these things makes me look cool. But if I just pick one shoe, right? And there's a better chance that people might not think I'm cool for buying this shoe, and now all of a sudden, the whole reason I came in here is blown up.

And If it's unknown, it's uncertain. And unknown and uncertain equal unsafe. And then I will hesitate. I will function from concern. I will function like life is happening to me, and I will react instead of act. And then I'm not building anything. I'm just surviving.

So there are people, and I put myself in this category, who feel very comfortable in uncertainty. It's literally never bothered me. It's what's made me into the leader and entrepreneur that I've become is that I'm willing to wade into that gray space and go, I feel confident I can figure this out. And not always perfect, for sure, but that's always been... But I can't tell you that I was trained on that. It didn't come from my parents. It certainly didn't come from my parents. My dad was a laborer on the railroad. My mom was a receptionist. Their advice to me was, Go work for the biggest company you can, get a pension, and I'm retired. I tried that. It did not work. It was a hard It's a verb fail for me in that environment. So okay, so obviously there are some people who are, we'll just say, built to handle uncertainty. Can this also be trained? Can you be trained into this?

That is emotional intelligence. The tagline I start everybody with is we're going to get real comfortable being uncomfortable. And that is the tagline of emotional intelligence for us, because that is the point. And so much like somebody can have natural athleticism, you can have natural emotional intelligence. The The difference is, do you understand how to create it in somebody else? That's where the impact to leadership comes in, is that I might have it, but if I can't create it in somewhere else or understand it enough to operate with other people, that is where That's where it starts to fall off a little bit. I actually believe a lot of leaders of organizations, especially in any organization that requires sales, they have a tendency to lean into that unknown, uncertain. They have a tendency to not be afraid of the unsafe. They have a tendency to have a little bit of grind in them that just pushes them into that space. And then over time, they get stronger naturally, because as you have experiences with the unknown and uncertain that turn out well, your brain starts to say, Hey, well, we don't mind the unknown and the uncertain.

This is not a bad place for us. There could be safety in the unknown. And now you become very, very resilient to that. But if we don't know how to then go train that next person to take that first step into the unknown, take that first step in the uncomfortable, get comfortable being uncomfortable, and then start to create success patterns with that so that their brain finds safety in the uncomfortable as well. If we're missing that step, then that's where we can't necessarily bring our entire organization with us. And a lot of times that leads to a lot of leadership frustration, where half the leaders I work with are just like, I don't know what to do with these guys. I don't know why I have a team of wusses. I had one of my clients the other day said, I have a team of wusses, and I don't know what to do with them. And that's fair because he was naturally athletic. He was naturally gifted with emotional intelligence, naturally unafraid of the uncomfortable. Always had been.

How much of this is hiring?

There's an opportunity to hire differently for sure. And I have met very few people that when given the understanding and tools cannot shift and become. So I I think part of it's definitely hiring for sure. And hiring people with high levels of emotional intelligence is becoming one of the most dominant things. I mean, Harvard Business School just did an entire article on how important... They said, Emotional intelligence hiring right now is more important than any formal training, education, or background in the area. Because they said, If they have a higher level of emotional intelligence, they can be trained faster with less frustration. They're not afraid to learn it. They're not afraid to engage. They're not afraid to make mistakes, and they're not afraid to win. And so there is some degree of hiring involved for sure. And when you have a decent higher, like a mid to higher, right? That higher can be taught with some basic skills. Like, the... Yep, you got a baseball team. You got a baseball team, you got one natural athlete, and maybe you got nine that you need to teach them how to bat. And then you got your 10th one that you're like, bless your heart, son, but no matter how many times we swing that bat, you should bowl.

That's what you should switch from baseball bowling. That's where we should go with you, right? I have some soccer players like that, too, where I'm like, well, her natural ability is uncanny. I have somewhere once I teach them a skill, they perform incredibly well. And I have a couple that I'm like, cross country is a sport that's better for you because nothing will be at your feet but the ground. And that is a better place for you to be, right? It's not unlike that with emotional intelligence. You're going to have some natural athletes. You're going to have some that can be taught, and you're going to have some that you're like, this is... Sales and service is not a great space for these people. They need to be in empathetic jobs.

See, I like the way you talk about EQ, because I've heard in different groups, and I've been in different leadership meetings or masterminds or whatever. And oftentimes, I think from people who don't understand EQ the way you're speaking about it, they use it synonymous with the negative connotation to DEI stuff or mental health. I got to give everyone a day. So they're like, oh, well, if you're high in EQ, that means that all you do is care about emotions. And you have driven people tend to not care as much about emotions. It's more about getting the outcome. So I find that that type of individual struggles with this idea of EQ. And what I'm picking up on is because of the way you define it, the way you talk about it, to me, feels like exactly what they want, right? Someone who can emotionally respond to the demands of the job that I'm supposed to do, where It can get like, there's a negative version of it, which seems maybe misclassified, having heard you talk about it, which is it's about being soft and just caving to their every mental whim and all this stuff.

Yeah. Well, and I totally agree with you that that is the direction and shift it's gone. That's why I said it over swung the mark, right? But if I were to describe good EQ, I would put it on a spectrum like this. Just like everything else, EQ has a spectrum. And all the way over here is everybody Everybody should receive a therapy session. Everyone should lay on the couch, and everyone should talk about their problems at all times. That's the far left side here. And then if we were to come all the way over here, the highest end of emotional intelligence is if you understand emotions, engage with them intelligently and intentionally, you can experience the highest level of resilience, grit, passion, and accomplishment. Over here, I believe people who hit a 10 in emotional intelligence here can have it all, and they should. I believe that you can have it all. And I don't believe you can have it all without emotional intelligence because you lack understanding to work with people. And people are everywhere. And without them, we're never going to have it all. It impacts relationships, it impacts health, it impacts longevity, It impacts efficiency and productivity.

And so I look at it and say, if you're on this end of the spectrum over here, go see a therapist. That's not me. But if you're the person who says, I'm a high achiever and I need to take the next step. I need to be better at driving my people, better at motivating my teams, better at leading. I need my teams to know that they can do this. I want a team that wants and likes to do hard things and get the victory afterwards. That is emotional performance coaching. That is EQ, driven in the right direction. That's the spectrum, if that makes sense.

Adelen Lewis, my friends. As good as I was hoping for having seen your presentation, I've been so excited to talk to you. I can talk to you for another hour about this stuff. For people who have heard this, and I know there will be, either event organizers to have you come in and speak, which I would highly recommend for all of you listening who have events, seen her do her thing live. It's phenomenal. You will get questions. You'll get people leaning in. Even Cromogeny old dudes who think they know everything about leadership will lean in and ask questions. I promise you, I saw it happen in real-time, or consulting in the different work you do. Where can they get deeper into your world?

Yeah, they can find me on LinkedIn. I'm there with Natalie Lewis. I have a website, ascendeq. Com. It's the name of my company. They can reach out there or in any of my other social media handles that are connected in LinkedIn. Just DM me, and I'm happy to talk to anyone about what's going on in the organization and how what we do can help.

I appreciate you. Thank you so much for your time.