A Bit of Optimism - Second Chances with Bruce Deel

Episode Date: August 24, 2020

It’s often easier to learn lessons when we look at extreme cases. I turned to the military to understand trust. To learn about compassion, I turned to Bruce Deel. He’s an extraordinary man and the second chances his organization, City of Refuge, gives people can teach the rest of us how we can do the same. This is… A Bit of OptimismYouTube: http://youtube.com/simonsinekFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/simonsinekLinkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/simonsinek/Instagram: https://instagram.com/simonsinek/Twitter: https://twitter.com/simonsinekPinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/officialsimonsinek/ 

I like to go to the extremes to understand some of the lessons we need to learn. For example, I turn to the military so that I can better understand trust. And I look to Bruce Deal so I can better understand compassion. The work that he is doing at his organization, City of Refuge, is nothing short of remarkable. In fact, I was so inspired by him, I had the opportunity to publish his book, Trust First, which I highly recommend. The experiences that Bruce has had can teach us how to be better versions of ourselves. This is a bit of optimism. Bruce, so good to see you. Thanks so much for sitting down to do this with me. It's, so good to see you.

Thanks so much for sitting down to do this with me. It's always a pleasure to see you. Great to see you. Thanks for the opportunity to spend some time together. I wanted to talk to you about this idea of giving people a second chance. You work with prostitutes and drug addicts and people who've often been marginalized and forgotten in society. What I think is so profound about you and your organization is how sometimes the idea of giving

people a second chance can actually be a daily occurrence. That sometimes you believe in someone and they let you down and you have to give them a second chance again and again and again. Right. So for many of the people that we deal with, they were born into poverty, lack of quality education. They didn't have safe and affordable housing. They were born without forward momentum. And so even though they've made a lot of bad decisions in life or a lot of bad things have happened to the outsider, we're giving them a second chance.

And a lot of times I feel like we're giving them their first real chance. And of course, if you've only been given one first chance and you've got all this history with bad things in your past, you're probably going to fail at the first chance. And so we enter into that relationship with an expectation, frankly, that they're probably not going to quite get it right the first time. So we need to already be prepared on the front end for what the second and third chance looks like. It's very much like a parent, isn't it? Which is when a child is young, which is ostensibly their first chance at doing most things that they're going to do.

Everything. Not most things, everything. They're not going to ride a bicycle for the first time properly. They're not going to use their knife and fork properly. It's all going to be a mess. It's not so much that we put a date on, it takes this amount of time to ride a bicycle. If you don't ride a bicycle by this date, we're going to put you up for adoption. But rather, it's a process. You hold the seat, you put the training wheels on, you take one

wheel off, and you fumble through it, and they fall, and they get back on, and you believe in the process, and eventually, every kid can ride a bicycle. Is that more of what it's like? Yeah, I think so. I'm being on both. Trust the process and trust the people. So you have to have the process first. If you just start extending second chances without a process as to how that should look, that's going to fail always.

So trust the process, trust the people. I'm a father of five daughters. I'm now the grandfather of five grandkids, two more being born in the next couple months. And what I found in my process, I'm much more tolerant of the second generation's failures than I was the first generation's failures. So it's also a process for us. For some of us, it's really hard to give second or third or 15th chances. But the longer we do that, the more adept we become at that. And then we start to understand that it is a longer journey than we want it to be intuitively. We want them to hurry

up and grab it and get it. But it is a long, slow process. And unless we're willing to walk with people that have had difficulty in life, they're probably going to crash and burn at some point because nobody was there to prop them up for that next chance. Tell me a story of someone who has gone through your process. Sure. So quickly, Ryan was born in Cleveland, Ohio, abusive stepfather, ran away at 13, was recruited into a gang, was in a gang for 14 years, robbery crew all over the United States, in and out of jail, drug addiction, all kinds of issues. Moved to Atlanta because there was a contract on his life in Cleveland. Ran into us the day after we met him.

We moved him into our facility, gave him keys to a room. And at least seven times in the next five years, he bailed on us. Went back to the streets, went back to the same life. And all seven times we went looking for him. We didn't just wait for him to come back to us. We often predicate our second chances on whether or not that individual is willing to return to us and apologize for their

failure, when sometimes they're willing to take the chance and embrace what we give, but we got to go tell them that we're willing to do that. So at least seven times we went after him. We're now 14 years into that journey. His record has been expunged, seven felonies erased from his record, got certified as a licensed security guard in Atlanta, owns his own security company now, has 35 employees, serving multiple organizations in the city. And all of those that he's employing are those that we're giving second and third and fourth chances to as well. How many years have you been doing this? 23 years.

So 23 years. If you look back at yourself in your own relationships with your wife or your children or your friends, how has your process in working at City of Refuge changed you? So I grew up in a conservative, real tight kind of environment. My father was a minister and it was great. It was a great environment, but I found myself with a lot of preconceived notions and judgments about others based on their behavior, not based on who they are. And 23 years later, I just have almost zero judgment on the front end. So I meet somebody and I hear their story and where I used to judge whether or not they're a good person or make good decisions. Now I just see them as an opportunity for us to walk with and see what

the future can be rather than judging them on what the past has been. I think that's the biggest thing that's happened to me is I've just chosen to lay down this attitude and mentality. I'm going to judge people based on their vocabulary or their lifestyle or color of their skin. I've just decided those things are inappropriate. And I have to believe in them, even if I can't see yet what I believe is there. We should all carry that advice with us. I had a conversation with Dia Khan recently. And Dia is a documentarian. She's a Muslim woman who spent time with white supremacists and engaged in what I labeled extreme listening. She took these people who hate her and gave them a safe space to say what they think. She gave them a space to feel heard

and she didn't fight with them. And I asked her, how do you listen without judgment? She says, oh no, no, I judge. I do listen with judgment, but I sit in that discomfort. What you're talking about is something entirely different. And I think it's so interesting that in both cases, the objective is to allow the other person to feel heard, to feel like they matter in the world. Exactly. And when I say I don't judge, wrong is wrong and right is right. So there's some behavior that obviously judges itself. What I'm talking

about is I don't judge the individual for the behavior. The behavior is wrong. We deal with that here. Now let's deal with who you are as an individual. What led you to this place? What experiences in your life have happened that I'm unaware of that causes your behavior to be something that I don't agree with. This is such a great sophisticated thought for us to be able to disconnect the behavior from the person. One of the things I know when we lob insults at people very often, we mean to attack the behavior, but we end up doing is attacking the person. You're a liar versus you lied. When you say you lied, you can have a breakthrough there. But if I say to you, you're a liar, I'm now attacking say you lied, you can have a breakthrough there. But if I say to you, you're a liar, I'm now attacking who you are, and you're going to dig in and maybe even attack me back.

Yep. This is something very similar, to be able to separate the behavior from the person, to criticize the behavior perhaps, but to allow the person to be that clean slate, that tabula rasa. Yeah. It's my opinion that so many people live in a false identity because of exactly what you're talking about. They have been labeled by others. You're a liar. You're a thief. You're an addict. You're this. You're that. We actually try not to term the folks that we serve by the labels everybody else gives them. So we don't necessarily talk about the homeless. We talk about those who are in transition right now. It's amazing what the difference makes to that individual when you don't say, hey, I

know you're homeless. I want to help you. If you say, hey, I understand you're in transition right now. Here are a couple of resources that we have for you. And so sometimes it's literally just a choice of vocabulary that helps individuals feel like you're not judging them. You're actually giving them a chance to be what you believe they can be. I love this.

It's not that you're a thief. It's that you have stolen things. It's not that you're a prostitute, but you have prostituted yourself. It's a very finite and infinite concept. I'm just realizing as you're talking about it, because to label someone is very complete. And worse is if they start to believe that label, they see no hope for their future. They become their label.

Yeah. It goes to your point, the infinite game. With the folks that we serve at City of Refuge, it's never about today. This is always about a future that we may never see the end of. And so we've served 23,000 people in the last 23 years. I say we serve about 1,000 unique individuals a year. I have no idea what the ROI is there, Simon. But I do know that 10, 15 years later, I still get messages from folks that go, hey, what you guys shared with me 10, 12 years ago is working now. So it's not just about the results I can see today or tomorrow. It's about an investment in somebody's future. It is the infinite game. I may never see the end of that, but it's not just about the results I can see today or tomorrow. It's about an investment in somebody's future. It is the infinite game. I may never see the end of that, but it's still the right work. People are so uncomfortable with that, that to invest so much time and energy and not necessarily know if that is going to be a result anytime soon.

Well, especially in the nonprofit space where I spend most of my time. We like to call it the four impact space. Four impact space. That's correct. In the four impact space, so much is based on outcome-based measurements. Funding is often dependent upon outcome-based measurements. Getting the next contract for the government to support you on your next program is dependent on your graduation rates and your success rates. So the world of which we live is programmed in such a way that you have to have success scenarios. We've actually flipped that, and my team,

I just tell them all the time, this is not about success, this is about obedience. This is what we feel like we're called to do. We feel like this is our assignment. We feel like this is our life's work. So as long as we do that with passion, excellence, dignity, and integrity, then we are successful. But if we're driven just by the numbers, I think we get lost

in production versus productivity, which to me are two different things. I love this. And it really is two things. Vision, cause. You have to have cause. That's the calling and the process. Again, I go back to that original analogy. If you're teaching a kid how to ride a bicycle, there is a process to learn how to ride a bicycle. It starts with training wheels. And if you follow the process, it 100% works, but you just have to believe in the process. So I guess that if you have a process that has some positive outcomes and you see that over the course of time, this does work, you tweak and tweak and tweak. It becomes the process that you're obsessed with. In other words, you allow for the process to evolve. You have to. The fundamentals of learning how to ride a bike

haven't changed, but what you're doing is constantly, constantly, constantly tweaking the process to make it work better, and in this case, prepare people for the fall. Right. Here's the real truth. We've had far more failures than successes. When you deal with people that are coming out of incarceration, they're coming out of addiction, they're veterans of PTSD, they've been sexually abused and traumatized, they've had zero support system in their life,

the percentages of success are always going to be less than the percentages of failure. So again, it goes back to not measuring this by some position that we place that they have to be in life. It is, this is the right thing to do. We've discovered the right way to do it. Now you do the right thing the right way over and over and over. Yeah. And what we do is we celebrate all of the victories and we try to learn from the failures. So we don't get dismayed by the failures, although at times that's a challenge. We try to learn from the failures and celebrate all the victories.

How do we apply what you've learned to our own lives? Like, how do I become a better version of me by learning the lessons that you've learned? Because most of us aren't doing the kind of work you're doing, but we can apply what you're learning. Yeah. Well, I think in every environment, this attitude of trying to see the best in everybody every day. So in the business place, in corporations, in our family, in our friendships, we all have failures. We all have faults. Everybody that I work with is going to disappoint me at some point in time. Can I look beyond that and see the good that they are bringing to me and to our organization and to the people we serve? So seeing the best in people, I think, is really critical, Simon.

And that's a learned skill, by the way. The second thing is to speak that truth to them and about them out loud. So saying to people what you believe about them that they may not even believe about themselves. We say it to them, but we also say it about them in front of others. It's an incredible, incredible dignity giver. And it's also this belief system process that they begin to develop in themselves. When I talk positively about somebody in front of their peers or in front of those that are on the journey with them to help them get better. And how do we learn that skill? Is it just practice? There's not a whole lot I pride myself on. I think I'm a good student of observation.

So what I try to do is just see what's something this person's doing, saying, or I can see in them that is not visible without studying them. So just observing is really critical. And the more I've practiced that over the years, the more I begin to recognize these good places in people's lives that are covered up by all the external things. It's sort of a mindset, isn't it? Absolutely. Complete mindset. It's kind of a choice how to approach the day in the morning. Well, yeah. I mean, it's an embracing the day and focusing all the positives that might be there with an understanding that the other stuff's

always going to be there. So it's not negating the negative. It's just saying, I know that's there. We'll deal with it. But here's what we have to celebrate. Yeah. Do you have a favorite story of someone who's come through City of Refuge?

Yeah. I met Jake when he was 57 years old. Jake was an African-American that grew up on a plantation in South Georgia as part of a sharecropper family. So he experienced racism at the highest level. His father was an alcoholic and abusive. He tells the story of hiding in the closet at 11 years old while his father fired a gun trying to kill he and his mother. He ran away from home at 11 and started crashing in a little utility shed at a nearby golf course. Met a couple of the guys. They started teaching him some things. He started

caddying, turned out to be a great golfer, was one of the first African-American teaching pros in golf, but fell subject to crack cocaine and alcohol addiction. We met him in the streets, living under a bridge. And Jake and I just became great friends. And for the next 13 years, Jake lived with us on and off times. He would sit at our table. He loved my wife. He loved my daughters. I loved him. I would employ Jake, and Jake would fall back into his addiction.

He would go back to jail. So it was a 13-year journey. We lost Jake for about eight months, about four years ago. And he came back, and he had been in jail again. He got arrested for some crazy stuff and Jake always said either you'll do the time or the time will do you and this time the time had done Jake and so his mental health was a little off and he was just struggling I said Jake you want to move back in he goes I can't I just can't be confined can I just sleep in the back seat of your truck so I had this F-254 pickup crew cab. And I said, well, sure. It was parked

on the parking lot. So Jake would get some meals and shower and clothes and he would sleep in my truck. We were there together and I would see him and we would talk and I'd give him some work. But he just struggled to overcome life. And so one Monday morning, one of the guys that works for me, Steve walks in and he says, hey, somebody's asleep in the backseat of your truck, but it's not Jake. That's a great big guy. And so I walk out and I look in the window and I go, you know, it's Jake and he's dead. And Jake had died in the backseat of my truck a couple nights before and his body had bloated. We had to call the coroner. They break the window. The smell of death rolls out. They drag him out in a parking lot. It's just so unceremonial. I really got hacked

off, Simon, right? We'd invested 13 years of believing and identity and all these kind of things. And at the end of the day, Jake died, still not overcoming all of his demons. But it took me a couple months to really process. And I still come to tears about it. I have Jake's golf clubs and shoes sitting outside my office door as a reminder of who we are and what we do. But the thought struck me a couple months after Jake's death. Jake came home to die. Jake could have died under a bridge. He could have dived in the graveyard he used to sleep. He could have died in prison. We would have never known. We wouldn't have been able to have a funeral for Jake, to recognize Jake, to talk about his legacy with us.

This was a place he felt loved and cared for, a place where he had been given chance after chance after chance. And there was something inside of him, I believe, that knew life was coming to an end. And he wanted to be home when he died. And for us, that's success. It didn't end like I wanted it, but he knew he was cared for and loved at the end and he knew that the back seat of my truck was his and so that's why we do what we do it still plays that infinite game you know that success isn't we got you off drugs and you're now gainfully employed and can take care of yourself and your family it's progress towards an ideal

and as long as there's movement forwards and jake went on a lot of twists and turns and a lot of speed bumps but at the end of the day he was further down the path when he died than he was when he started on the path and jake would have died 10 years earlier if he hadn't met us yeah if he'd have stayed in his full crack addiction the whole time, full alcoholism, the full sleeping out in the cold weather, Jake would have been dead 10 years before. And so for us, it's not about whether he ever got to this place that we dreamed he would get to. It's that at least he had the opportunity to get to that place. And he was closer to it at the end than he was at the beginning. You know so much about human behavior.

You've seen people at their best and their worst. And you interact with people, obviously, outside of City of Refuge. And I assume some people are telling you how to do your job sometimes. There have to be little voices that go on in your head instead of rolling your eyes. That you see so much opportunity in society to learn some of the lessons that you've learned? You look out the window and be like, my God, this country, this world would be a better place if. What's if? If we did what? If we learned what? Well, such a big question. Number one, if we would stop being so selfish. It's always about us.

That's what probably frustrates me more than anything else. I travel and speak in churches and businesses and four impact summits, all kinds of things. And it always feels like everybody's there for them. Even if they're doing good work, they're there for them to be better, to be more well thought of, to gain some level of popularity or prestige. better, to be more well thought of, to gain some level of popularity or prestige. And so if we could just be more about others and less about us, I think that's one of the biggest things that I would love to see us as a people try to do. The second thing is to your position in life, to be optimistic, to see the glass half full.

With all of the crazy stuff going on in our world today, I mean, frankly, I don't watch the news because I can't listen to those who are talking about how much bad there is and how much struggle we're having. I want to see the best in people and the best in our society. And so being less about ourselves, more about others, and being more positive about what the future can be and less negative about what the present might be are two key things for me. So how do we learn that? How do we learn to be less selfish?

I mean, you can't just go up to somebody and say, hey, be less selfish. Well, again, it's a process. It's a journey. Sometimes I ask people to ask themselves two or three questions. When they see somebody in crisis, what are your first two or three thoughts? And then why are those your first two or three thoughts? And what are two or three thoughts you could replace those two or three with? So just practical questions. And can I now flip a switch and make myself think something else the next time I see somebody in that same situation? Yeah. How have you taught these lessons

to your daughters? Well, practical expression's the biggest way. They've just seen me live it out. People want me all the time to come in and teach them how to do what we do. And I say, well, better ways for you to come hang out with us for a week because I can do a seminar, but this is really something you have to see and feel. And so my girls grew up with homeless folks sitting at our dinner table, with girls I'd picked up from jail that morning that had got arrested for prostitution that night. They're telling us their story, and I have to dismiss the girls from the breakfast table because the graphic nature of the conversation.

They've seen me out in the middle of the street in the night rescuing somebody who's ODing. So I think it's critical that leaders of corporations and businesses expose their people to the world outside the walls of that corporation intentionally, not just because they're going to run into it, but what's our intentional effort. So just practical expression of it and the living out of those things daily. My girls, they just naturally gravitate to it after they have seen the expression of it and seen the positive things that can come out of it. When you think back about your life before City of Refuge, who was your mentor? It is my dad primarily. I mean, he was a pastor. He was a missionary.

He would go and speak places and come home and mom would say, what was your honorarium? Because she managed the bills. And he goes, I don don't know there was somebody there that needed it more than us so I gave it to them we always had people living in our homes growing up so we got a call one night about bedtime we get a call from this lady and she says hey her husband's name is Roger he's drunk and he's beating me and the kids again can you come get us he's in the basement right now dad immediately gets in the car goes and picks them up brings them over they're in the house It's 11 or 12 o'clock at night. We're all in the bed. Roger calls and says, Cecil, I'm coming to get my wife and kids.

And he says, well, you can't have them. And he goes, well, I'll kill you and take them. And so they literally woke us up in the middle of the night and told us, my two brothers, some cousins were with us. We're all under the bed in the back bedroom, scared to death at 10, 11, 12 years old. The guy shows up on the front porch. He and dad are in a heated, and all of a sudden he just starts, he fired a gun 21 times through our house.

And dad's wrestling with the guy and he's threatening to kill us all. And at the end of the day, the wife and children stayed with us and Roger went to jail. And so sort of what I was exposed to early on in life. And we've had our own experiences of that here in 23 years. And someone is looking down and looking after your family because, I mean... Oh, well, yeah. I mean, we're not shy about the fact we're a faith-based organization. I believe providential care was all over that and still over me today. Absolutely.

What makes you scared? My answer is probably strange. What makes me scared is not doing what I'm supposed to do. We've been here 23 years. We're broken into 34 times. We've had vehicles stolen. I've been in superior court with guys that wanted to kill me. Probably to my detriment, I'm not much afraid in the streets.

I am afraid of not fulfilling what I believe is my God-given purpose. And I'm afraid of not inspiring others to do that as well. So I always want to make sure when I share that I present this in such a way that is invitational and not condemnational. I'm not saying to people, you're bad because you're not doing what we do or what other people in the world do. I'm inviting people to see if they can step out of their comfort zone and see if life can have a little more color and flavor to it.

Well, you are living your purpose today, my friend. I am so inspired. Unfortunately, you're one of a kind. I wish there were many of you. The lessons that you have learned from the work that you do, I think, have application to all of us in our lives. And I know just from the time I get to talk to you, even just now, I'm going through my head of things I can do better. Well, thank you. Thank you for all the good you do to make people feel better about getting up

every day and going to work and coming home happy and fulfilled. You are magic, my friend. Thank you so much. Thank you, Simon. If you enjoyed this podcast and if you'd like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other.