Leap Academy with Ilana Golan - Chuck Garcia: "The Moment That Defines You"

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

From leadership roles in big investment firms to a coach, author and speaker.An incredible personal story with clear takeaways for anyone looking to leap to become the best version of themselves. In this inspiring conversation, Ilana and Chuck Garcia discuss how to lean into life's difficult moments as opportunities for growth and transformation.  More about Chuck Garcia:Chuck is a motivational speaker, Amazon bestselling author of A Climb to the Top, and teaches at Columbia University. He is a passionate and accomplished mountaineer who has scaled peaks all over the world and formerly spent twenty-five years in leadership positions at Bloomberg, BlackRock, and Citadel Investment Management. His new book, The Moment That Defines Your Life will be released on February 6th and distributed by Simon & Schuster. LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuck-garcia-015128/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/aclimbtothetop/ Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/TheChuckGarcia --------Watch this episode on YouTube - https://youtu.be/Rutk0FeHqCg About Ilana Golan & Leap Academy:Website - https://www.leapacademy.com/Follow Ilana on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilanagolan/YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/@ilanagolan-leap-academy

So on 9-11, on that morning, three of my Bloomberg colleagues were already in the building setting up prior to my speaking engagement that afternoon, this thing called the Bloomberg Terminal. I had indicated on the Bloomberg calendar that I was at the World Trade Center. I had not indicated that morning that I was somewhere else en route to the World Trade Center. When the planes struck, I was in another hotel at a speaking engagement, and somebody interrupted my speech at about 9.25 that morning to say an event occurred at the World Trade Center. I stopped speaking. We watched the television monitor, and we couldn't believe what we were seeing. For four hours, because the phones died, by the time I got back to the office at Bloomberg, there was a list, and the list was unaccounted for and presumed dead. I was the fourth person on that list. The other three died in the building. The first

revelation that when the buildings hit, my wife and my company thinks I'm dead. But it began an incredible sense of self-reflection, of transformation, and wondering why the heck am I even on this planet because of a simple twist of fate. Welcome to The Leap Show. In The Leap Show, we're here to bring experts from around the globe who share inspiring stories, concrete tips, and insight on what helped them become the best version of themselves and who they are today and create the incredible life that they wanted. Subscribe and follow us. Share this with friends who are also driven and aiming for more because you'll hear stories and tips that you'll hear nowhere else. Hi, I'm Ilana Golan, CEO of Leap

Academy, which helps driven professionals reinvent, leap their careers to the next level. Now let's get started. Oh my God. So I am so, so, so excited about the show today. Today we are going to meet Chuck here, Chuck Garcia, who has an incredible, fascinating career journey that I believe will resonate with a lot of you. So I want you to listen carefully because he started from Chuck, right? Financial, investment sector. We'll introduce you in a second. But with 25 years in companies like Bloomberg and BlackRock and Citadel Investment Management, like, you know,

super solid leadership roles. And you took all this experience to coach executive on public speaking, emotional intelligence, executive presence. You're an Amazon bestselling author, climbs to the top and teaches in Columbia University. And you have an upcoming book, The Moment That Defines Your Life, which I do want to talk also a lot about. So you're leaping again and again and again. Welcome to this show. Oh, thank you. I appreciate the wonderful words, the kind introduction, and it is a pleasure to leap

with you. Amazing. I love it. So tell me, first of all, I think everybody will be intrigued to hear what makes somebody with a few decades of leadership experience in probably some of the most solid, great companies in the world to decide to leap to entrepreneurship. Can you talk to me a little bit about that? Yeah. So many people like me, you, to take whoever goes into the regular American educational model, when people ask you what you want to do. In my generation, you didn't say I

wanted to be the next entrepreneur. It's not that that didn't exist. We didn't think of things that way. You go to college and you major in something. I was a finance major. And as a finance major, something that I didn't know exactly what it was. And I didn't know what I was going to do with it. But when I thought about all the things that I could read about, every time I started reading something about the investment world, it struck a chord. There was an appeal to it. What is this? It fueled my curiosity. So I said, if I'm going to go do what is described here, how do I do it? Go to college, be a finance major and work for Wall Street companies. I never considered that there was another path. That's all I ever thought about.

So when I went to college as a finance major, I only wanted to do three things. One, I'm a first-generation American, so number one was make my parents proud. Just, if nothing else, they came to the United States for the opportunity for their children, having left a military dictatorship in a world now where I could be anything I wanted to be. Second was financial independence. And the third, I wanted to see the world. And I knew that I'd gone into finance. I read about the London exchange, Tokyo, Hong Kong. There were things that were appealing to me outside the subject matter that was the kind of life that I wanted to be drawn to. So through a series of

twists and turns after college, I found my way to this little company that no one ever heard of, working under the tutelage of a guy that no one ever heard of, who became one of the world's richest people. And his name is Mike Bloomberg. So I say that, Alana, for context, because what I do, I never counted on it. It was never part of my design. But I will say, events happen in our lives that are often unexpected. And it was through one particular unexpected event that caused me to rethink why I even wake up in the morning and go to work. So I'll pause there to give you the opportunity whether we want to go with that, but it is pertinent to what happens to many adults at a certain age or as a result of the circumstance of an event that causes them to provoke different ways we think about ourselves and the way we think

about the world. I love that, Chuck, and you are absolutely right. And I think that ties beautifully also to your book, right? The moment that defines your life, right? So I definitely want to go there a little bit. What is, what are some of these moments or maybe the one that you're alluding to that really catapult, you know, for you to rethink and redesign your life? Yeah, no, no doubt. And thank you for the opportunity to voice this. When I was at Bloomberg for my first seven years, I'm bilingual, so I was head of Latin American sales, and I had a wonderful time traveling south of the United States, opening up for Bloomberg business in a bunch of countries.

But for the next seven years, I was the company's public spokesman, which meant I stood on a stage wherever there was a speaking engagement request for Mike Bloomberg. I was the guy who did it. Whether it was Tokyo, Hong Kong, New York, Singapore, it didn't matter. I was on stage all over the world. On September 11, 2001, I was scheduled to speak at an industry event for 300 industry professionals that were coming together for a conference on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. It was an event space that many people may not know because it was 20 years ago called Windows of the World. And it was this beautiful, incredible panoramic view with eating food. It was beyond belief how wonderful this place was. And it was also an event space.

Two months before September 11th, I was on a draft of the program that was being constructed by the program directors, where I was speaking at 9.20 a.m. on September 11th. Someone I worked with at an investment bank was scheduled to speak at 3.20 that afternoon. Two months before we locked the program, my friend Scott called me with a conference producer on the phone and said, we have a conflict. Chuck, if you don't mind, I cannot speak at 3.20 in the afternoon. You have 9.20. I have 3.20. Can you switch? So I was then scheduled to speak on 9.11 at 9.20 and the day after at 11 o'clock. So on 9-11, on that morning, three of my Bloomberg colleagues were already in the building setting up prior to my speaking engagement that afternoon,

this thing called the Bloomberg Terminal. And my friend Scott was the keynote speaker, and at 9-20, he was scheduled to speak. I had indicated on the Bloomberg calendar that I was at the World Trade Center. I had not indicated that morning that I was somewhere else en route to the World Trade Center. I had said to my wife, and I have four children at home the night before, I will be coming home from the World Trade Center. I expect to be home at this time so we can all have dinner together. When the planes struck, I was in another hotel at a speaking engagement, and somebody interrupted my speech at about 9.25 that morning to say an event occurred at the world trade center i stopped speaking we watched the television monitor and we couldn't believe what we were seeing for four hours because

the phones died by the time i got back to the office at bloomberg there was a list and the list was unaccounted for and presumed dead. I was the fourth person on that list. The other three died in the building. And I say that, Alana, because the first revelation that when the buildings hit, my wife and my company thinks I'm dead. Okay, I can eventually remedy that simply by showing up and letting her know I'm not. But it began an incredible sense of self-reflection, of transformation, and wondering why the heck am I even on this planet? Because I'm speaking to you because of a simple twist of fate. Let me stop there.

Is that clear so far? Oh, my God. What a story. And I can't believe, and obviously some of these moments will get you to reconsider everything that you know. And that's an incredible journey and you tell it so beautifully. So I know that's how you teach it. And if I may also continue that little paradigm, because what you hear a lot is also around climbing mountains, right? That's also a theme that you kind of share again and again, and you share beautiful with

a climb to the top and you have, you know, your, you know, your own company, Climb Leadership International. So there's definitely a theme there. So how did that also shape your life and why? Yeah, this is where I'll connect the dots. In that moment, when I arrived back into the office and I made it home to my family and everyone was relieved and everybody was calling, everybody, Chuck's alive.

Oh my God, people, everyone thought I was dead. Everybody knew I was there. It was a big, well-known event. And as far as they were concerned, Chuck is speaking, cool. When I showed up to the building, the first person I saw said, oh my God, everyone in that building thinks you're dead. Go walk around. So I did. And I walked around and I high fives and hugs. Oh my God. Anyway, here's where I'll get to it. In the week following 9-11, New York was a place I didn't recognize. Everyone was quiet. You get into the elevators, it felt very different. People said hello that otherwise never gave you the time of day. We were in massive introspection mode because

funerals were all being planned. So over the course of the next month, I attended 16 funerals and memorial services. And three of my Bloomberg colleagues, two of them were 24 years old. One of them was 20. And I had to call the mothers and fathers to tell them your kid was in the World Trade Center. Those phone calls were the hardest thing I ever did. And in that week, Alana, I began to reflect. There's nothing I can do that's going to bring that moment back. I'm not going to bring their lives back. I don't even know what it is I'm going to do with this. But the only thing I'm certain about that I can change in this entire equation is myself. And I thought about, well, what do I want to change? I didn't know what it was, but I had read a couple months before a wonderful book by an author named John Krakauer, who'd written a book called Into Thin Air. Right. And so I saw myself, and for those who may not know the book, it recounted the tragedy of what happened in May of 1996 on Mount Everest, where it was the confluence of a series of events that led

many people, unfortunately, to perish toward the top of the mountain. As he described, Ilana, the process of mountain climbing, and I'd always been a distance runner. I'd been a marathon runner in my 20s. So I just had the sensibility about pace and progress and good days and bad days, but working through the pain. As I thought about, hmm, maybe I can change myself. I'd always enjoyed winter sports. I'd always skied and skated as a kid. And when I saw myself in that book, I began to see myself differently. So to cut to the heart of this, on 9-11-02, on the one year anniversary of 9-11, of that tragic event, I stood on the summit of Mount Rainier in the Cascade Mountains in Washington, which is to the viewers,

if you're to the listeners, if you don't know it, it's 14,400 feet of elevation and a wonderful alpine climb. Now it's like, okay, so what have I done? Well, I said, what else do I need to do? Am I trying to find myself? Am I trying to lose myself? I was just trying to make sense of the events and I didn't know how else to do it besides getting out of the New York rat race, getting away from everything and trying to find out why the hell am I even put on the planet? And why was that not my day to die? But more important, what lessons do I take from that? And how am I going to change myself? So a year later, I stood on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro.

I then climbed the Matterhorn. And now every couple of years, I'm climbing another mountain. But Alana, here's where the dots get connected. The most wonderful thing about climbing mountains is you are climbing them based on the service and the capacity of incredibly generous mountain guides who are there in the service of guides like me to experience this incredible, wonderful thing we do. And on a mountain about 10 years ago, coming down from a mountain in Alaska, as I was descending the mountain, and this was, I think, my seventh or eighth expedition,

it was that light bulb moment when these guides had led us up this treacherous mountain, 12 days to get to the top of this massive, beautiful mountain in Alaska. Then I said, Alana, I got it. These guides are sacrificing their time in these dangerous conditions to help us in our achievement-oriented world. Well, now, when I came down from the mountain, I said, from this day forward, from here on in, I am going to go to work in the service of someone else's success. I don't need to prove anything else to myself, but I am wholly dedicated to become the proverbial mountain guide for people who want to and may not either be equipped or prepared to know how to climb a career. Hence, at the end of this event, I started thinking about how I left Citadel.

I formed Climb Leadership. I started thinking about how am I going to brand myself? And I'll stop talking in just a second. That's when I said, I think I have a brand here. Given my many years of communicating, people knew me as a metaphor for how to climb careers. But instead of an ice axe and crampons, it's all the communication skills that I acquired and learned to develop over the years, because now I'm wholly dedicated to help other people climb their proverbial mountain, but I have a toolkit that can help them. And that was the origin of all of it. And I love this so, so, so much. And we share a lot of that, which we discussed before, because again, the typical education system just doesn't teach you a lot of the skills that are actually needed in the future of work. So to actually climb the mountain or to actually

climb the career, right? To actually become a best version of yourself. What is that best version? Right now, but tell me you mentioned something about mountains and you mentioned those hard moments, right. That you just need to kind of persevere and continue going on. Again, when you just decide to leave Citadel and, you know, and work, you know, you needed to just continue going on because it's, it, it is hard. It is, it is a hard journey. Well, it's a wonderful lead in to what is the second phase that led to writing the second book

called the moment that defines your life for context to our listeners, I am what's called an executive coach. I teach people to do something, and I teach people to not do something. Where I spend most of my time is helping people in communication skills, public speaking, TED Talks, helping people to step on stage and to use a powerful and compelling framework for how they're going to tell their story. But what I learned, Alana, throughout the course of my teaching, there was something that was missing in the way that I was teaching for a couple people that I felt it's not really connecting. What's not happening here? Now, what I found is so many people that I was working with were just so fearful of doing something out of their

comfort zone. And mountaineering is the ultimate stepping out of your comfort zone. It gives new meaning to what it feels like to be uncomfortable. But when it's all said and done, it's exhilarating. So what did I do? I confronted the fear that I had that what would happen if I left these big machines and started my company? What's the worst thing that's going to happen? I can always go back to the big companies. But the reason I'm saying that, Alana, is many people that I work with, what I did not realize is how much they were afraid of the unknown. What I really came to find out, they were afraid of themselves. They were afraid of deciding something that was going to take them out of the world that for years they worked so hard to be in.

But sadly, many people are miserable in that world, but they're miserably comfortable. Okay, so how then to become not miserable and uncomfortable? And what I learned, and this is where the moment comes in, as part of my teaching narrative, I came to find out when I started to test the idea that so many of the things we do in our life that are beyond our own expectations are often born in a moment of adversity. And when I began to test the idea with many people in my life, and I began to think, I'm thinking about a certain angle for how I'm going to write about this social science called emotional intelligence, which helps people to define what self-awareness is. It helps them to face and confront their fears. And once you do that, you can develop an action plan to how to move

past those fears. But you can't do it unless there is evidence, relevance, and the consequence of not changing. So what I found, Alana, is I became the mountain guide where when people looked for guidance on how to climb the mountain, forget the technical skills, forget the communication skills. What we're really talking about is the confrontation and the provocation of one's fears. So for me to take the entrepreneurial leap, I had something that I valued and I didn't have something that I valued. What I had was capital. I had that. I worked in a lucrative career

and it doesn't take any money to launch your own business in this day and age. What I didn't have, Alana, was time and mobility. I worked in the service of these big companies that demanded my time and paid me for it. But there comes a certain time where you begin to flip what you value. Because now I'm glad I could make the money that allowed me to be an entrepreneur. But sadly, I didn't have any time and mobility to reflect or to do what I really wanted to do. And that's where I decided to start my entrepreneurial journey and hopefully to inspire, to persuade, and perhaps to provoke in the minds of the people I work with, they're capable of the change,

but they're ill-equipped and unprepared to make it, and they're too afraid of the unknown outcome. So if you don't know what's going to happen and you fear it, nothing changes. So all of that led to me writing the second book where I put people's moments in perspective because it's often the action plan born around the moment that helps them to develop the very thing that they said they were afraid to do. But there has to be a toolkit, just like when I wrote a climb to the top. And this toolkit now is the integration of the social science of emotional intelligence combined with the philosophy of stoicism, which was propagated by the great Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who taught us all in his book Meditations. How? And this is the important part,

you can tell someone to calm down. That doesn't work. You teach them how to stay calm under the weight of enormous pressure and expectations, how to breathe, how to work through the adversity and develop the mindset that this isn't happening to me. It's happening for me. That very good things come out of the adversity if we just change the way that we view those events. And that's where all of that was born. Oh my God, I love this. And it's so connected with what we're seeing again, again, because the challenges are inevitable, but the suffering is a choice. So you decide what you want to do with it. And you decide how you steer, you know, the boat and how you, you know, or the sail, right, in order to take the wind and go with it. So I love what you just said. Thank you. And you describing Alana, just that very statement, you're describing the philosophy of stoicism. Suffering is a choice, notwithstanding things you can't control, cancer, medical things. I appreciate that. But your point is we all, let's assume we are sound mind and sound body. How do you view those things that just occurred and you hit the nail on the head, but it took me 60 years to learn this? Why didn't anybody teach us this?

I'm still baffled, so I've made it a point. The cram exam model that you and I grew up with, you regurgitate and you get rewarded for a good grade and you get punished for a bad one. The world doesn't care about our grades and we can show up and regurgitate as much as we want. Nobody anymore in my world will call that smart. What we will call smart, adaptability, collaboration, getting the power of what you do because you did it with others in the service of their success, and they gave it right back to you. Bam, there's the power. And it took me a long time to figure that out, and I shouldn't have to have worked that hard to find that conclusion. I love that. And I think we're agreeing. That's,

you know, why we're trying to disrupt education, because I think it doesn't, the professional education doesn't exist today. And in fact, I think the pass and fail that we learn in school, it's exactly what prevents us from experimenting because we're waiting for that perfection that is never going to happen. And then we never really tip the toe and to check. Do I want to teach people about public speaking? Do I want to do public speaking myself? Do I want all these beautiful things that you were experimented with and look where it got you? So, right. Well, I love what you're doing that leap. I think the sentiment is the same. We are provoking a change in helping people because they have to believe that. But until we can help them come

to that moment, they're just going to stay in the status quo, look around and do what everyone else does. So if everyone else walks off the cliff, you're going to walk off the cliff? No. Leap Academy is saying there is an alternative. No offense to the other side. It's all good, but we have an alternative worth consideration. That's what I do, helping people to recognize there's other ways to go about your career, your marriages, your life. But I don't want to say the alternatives are suppressed. I just think it takes people like you and me as evangelists for a cause we're very passionate about because we've seen both sides and we recognize from our sides, from the Leap Academy or the CLIMB leadership, there is another model. It doesn't mean we're more right or they're more wrong. We're an alternative rooted in the practicality that

life is a series of continual adjustments, that success is not based on your capacity to continue to do well on exams or to write a dissertation that only three people read. That doesn't make sense to me, but that's the model. And if people want to stay in that model, all due respect, cool. I just think we have an alternative that changes the mindset because you can't change the skill set until the mind tells you and the heart, to do and who you are and what do you even care about. Right. Which is which I love. And then you teach them all these skills. They're really not taught anywhere, which is so fundamental. But tell me, Chuck, what what are some of the things maybe that you wish somebody would tell you when you were younger that you think would have changed a lot of things for you? Yeah. And I love that question because I do think of it often. And when people

ask me for advice, the first thing in my mind I think about is what would the advice I give myself when I was that age. When I went into college and I came from a very educated family, my father was a college professor of linguistics and my mother was a pianist. So I grew up in a very cultured home, a love of language, a love of music. The education was the currency. And also we were new to America. So my parents didn't, we didn't come from means. We had love and education. And in my mind, I had a certain definition of what success was. And I was led by a father who taught us the importance of career, of marriage, of balance. And he was very good about that. But he was very much rooted as I walked into the educational model where success was a

GPA. And the person that has the higher one is smarter than the other one, and some even go out of the way to make those who have a lower GPA feel stupid. Well, I'm not very bright. I was a good student. I wasn't a great student, though I was a very studious one. I just don't have a keen intellect the way my engineering students do. But I say that, Alana, because I was too concerned. And I, believe it or not, as crazy as it sounds, I almost worked too hard at college to compensate for the fact that I'm no genius, but I thought it mattered. What nobody told me, not one of my business professors ever said to me how important it was to adapt to changing circumstances,

how important it was to communicate who you are and what you do, how important it was to collaborate with other people. That never showed up on an exam score. Just the paradigm was so misguided to me. But I had one professor, Alana, in college that had more impact on me than the other 39 combined. And he was one course in debate. I learned to debate because he articulated the skills that I learned, I learned from him. His name is Eric Skopek. And I dedicated the moment to Eric. And Eric, if you are out there listening to this, I love you and I'm grateful for everything you taught me. But the reason I say that, Alana, nobody else was telling me this. Handed me a textbook, read two chapters, outline it, take an exam. Congratulations. I wish I knew the importance

of network building, the importance of communicating who I am and what I want in the world, all of these intangible things that people seem to dismiss as irrelevant until you get into a job interview and you screw it all up. But nobody prepares you that either. Just tell them all the A's you got in school. No. So I would tell, and what I tell my undergraduate students, everybody lighten up on whether you get an A or an A minus. Believe it or not, the sun will come up if you don't get a 93 on this exam the next morning. But if you want to be valuable to other people in your world, that's not the way to do it. You become helpful. You align your actions in your words. You develop credibility, trust, and respect. That is your career currency,

not your brilliance, not your capacity to calculate the square root of a number or to do a Rubik's Cube in six seconds, as commendable as they are. To our listeners, your job in your career is first to build your credibility. How do you do that? You communicate clearly, you treat people with respects, and you deliver on your promises. If that's all you do, you have a bright future ahead of you, which means you can make mistakes, just fix them. What you cannot do is anything that diminishes the capacity for you to be seen as a credible individual that can be trusted. That is what I wish somebody had told me and how important that mindset and the execution of credibility, trust, and respect would be to my career. And So tell me, you talked about our listeners and I actually want to, you know, open this up to our audience. Why should they read? Because I'm a big fan of combining like your examples of mountaineering and mountains and challenges with

career. Like to me, they're all so combined so beautifully. And it's interesting because I give them sometimes in my keynote. So it's so combined beautifully. So why should our listeners go read The Climb to the Top, which is, again, it's all about this mindset and perseverance and taking calculated risk to overcome obstacles. Like, I love everything you say. And why should they preorder the moment that defines your life that is coming? I think you said February 6th, right?

February 6th. Thank you. I appreciate that. By Simon and Schuster. I mean, it's huge. So why should they read this? Why do you think it's important for leapers? You're articulating two different things.

And I want to lend some credence. And I'm glad you are because what I'm really talking about is the integration of the two. What I know in a climb to the top, it felt to me when I was climbing mountains, it felt like a career. There were a lot of things in common. It was a metaphor for my, in my case, taking a step at a time. So think about, let me frame this appropriately. When you climb a mountain or you climb a career, you think about what you're trying to do. You set a goal. Now your goal could be, I want to make a million dollars. I want to be the CEO, or I want to work for two years and then buy a sailboat and whatever

that is. It's all different, but you got to have a goal. It's good to have a goal. It is subject to change, but it's best to know what it is you're trying to get out of this. Second, you can only take one step at a time. There are no shortcuts to the top of a mountain, and there are no shortcuts to the top of a career. And most important, this was the mountain, and this was my career that I did not know until I started to ascend.

You cannot do it alone. I don't know why people think that they can go into their careers and just stay in their own box and expect to ascend without the help of others. I think the biggest thing that I learned, I think about who had an impact on me. In many cases, people I didn't even know, Nelson Mandela, Winston Churchill, I looked to them to inspire me in the craft that I do. So that's part of my team. I consider Mandela and Churchill, two people that have passed away long before I even considered how to do this. I could not have done it without them. I could not have done it without Mike Bloomberg's tutelage, the lessons he learned, the lessons I learned from him.

But here's the mountain to why they should read it. Your career, whether you know it or not, is a mountain and it's hard. If you expect a lot from it. If you have no expectation and you just want to get by, no worries. I respect that. But that's not me. And that's not anybody in my world. So first, start with mindset. What are you trying to do? You're trying to feed your family, make money, live a prosperous life.

And I hope you do. Before you set out for skill acquisition, give thought to what you want out of this world and who you are. And if you think about the mountain metaphor, try get on that uncomfortable career path, even if, oh my God, that seems so hard to me, all the more reason to lean into it and take a step and then take another step and find out who your friends are and keep climbing. And once you have a coalition of people that care about you, your goal is to give it all back to them. And this is where the magic happens a lot. When you build that team, all of us is better than any one of us. That's how we climb mountains, that's how we climb careers. But a climb to the top is focused on communication skills, which means I don't care about your SAT score, your GPA, whether you went to Harvard or Columbia, whatever. You either live up to your promises or you don't. And helping to be a clear, concise communicator brings people into your world

and promotes your own brand and the kind of person that people want to work with. This is where you build your community. That's a climb to the top. The moment is the internal and emotional companion to a climb to the top. What happens, I'm using mountain and career as the same thing, when the unexpected occurs. You, Alana, are in Silicon Valley, and a year ago, there were massive layoffs. Sadly, how do people react to the very circumstance of which they have zero control? Who taught them? The moment is meant. Whatever adversity you face, and if you live, there is conflict.

And where there's conflict, there is adversity. School did not teach me a lot of the methods of adaptability and how to be a clear, concise, calm communicator when I'm facing adversity. And if we juxtapose clear, concise communication, learning about yourself, learning how, the methods for emotional intelligence and stoicism, which is behavioral. So we go from skill acquisition to modifying the behaviors under enormous pressure. You put them both together. And that's the contribution I try to make to the world is how to use them both at different times, like a good toolkit. Sometimes you call upon the skills that you've acquired. Sometimes you call upon the behavior modifications required to stay calm under the weight of pressure. But this is where leadership is born, Alana, because you become the kind of leader that people choose to follow. That's leadership, not, hey, he's your boss and oh, my God, he's horrible. that's what I want people to be the kind of person that others choose to follow because I

chose the mountain guides that helped me in these extraordinary achievements and that's my life's mission to help others do the same in the proverbial mountain ah that's incredible incredible incredible and if I need to tie this even a notch further, which I love it on so many levels, because even when you stand on the top, there's a lot of peaks out there and some are higher and some are to do, but you can also look back and say how far you've come and really enjoy and embrace that journey. And that combination is what creates an incredible leader that can always look at what else is possible, but also really feel the achievement and the impact of what they're creating.

And I just love that on so many levels. Yeah, there's something else at play here. And sometimes people ask me, Chuck, what's the one thing you've learned throughout all of this? And I'd like to think I've learned more than one, but there is one thing that I think I would like to recount, and it relates to the theme of what you're describing. I have trained thousands of people. So when I think about the universe of both college students and at the executive level, 99% of the world does not need to be told what to do. They don't. They know right from wrong. You teach them this, they do that, that's okay. 100% of the world needs to be inspired to do it. And it was something I learned

from Nelson Mandela because when he formed the new South Africa, he kept talking about what we need in this new country, in our new nation is inspiration. And Mandela provoked his own questions. How do I help the citizens of our country to exceed their own expectations? Mandela did not talk about skill acquisition. What he talked about is inspiring people to be the better version of themselves in however they decided to define it. And when I watched the movie called Invictus by Clint Eastwood, which is the story of the formation of Nelson Mandela coming out of prison and forming the new South Africa, it was all about inspiring. And I think all of the people in my world, I'd like to think that

there's people who could probably teach them better than me in whatever subject matter. But I know when I go to teach them, I am not going to do them service until I figure out a way to inspire them to exceed their own expectation. That's what good leaders do. The people that I admire bring that inspiration and it's behavioral. It's not genius. It's not IQ. It's every day climbing them a little bit higher, a little bit higher, and then looking back and say, how do I give this inspiration to others? And if we do that, we will be in a much better place if we keep it only to ourselves. I just think we're doing the world a disservice. I love that. I love that.

And I agree so much. And I think that's why it's so aligned. Last famous words, Chuck, you know, and again, we're going to have the links to your books because I think they're brilliant. And, you know, I'm really intrigued by the new one that is upcoming because I think it's absolutely true, you know, how moments will, you know, reshape your life. And the question is, how do you take those moments, especially when they're hard to realize that this is now catapulting, you know, yourself to a new level? So we'll have this, but last famous words for our audience.

There are two questions that a lot of people have trouble. And I ask our audience to consider two things. Who are you and what do you want? Not what your name is. I got that. That's not who you are. That's the name that your parents assigned to you. And then what do you want? I'm not talking about, I want a red Corvette or I want to live in this kind of house. what do you want? I'm not talking about I want a red Corvette or I want to live in this kind of house. What do you want in the world? As hard as it may seem and as abstract as it is, who are you and what do you want? And I just think that we as a society are capable of so much more. Don't wait around for permission to do this thing you've thought about. Just do it. Everything you do is a lesson. And if you decide to dismiss those lessons, nothing changes. If you decide to take those lessons and to find other people who can help you make sense of them, this is where our lives begin to prosper.

So I would say last thing, don't try to do it alone. It doesn't work. There's too much anxiety. There's too much angst and pressure. Don't wait for those tragic moments to redefine your life. Think about now when the adversity comes, how to turn tragedy into triumph. The moment that defines your life is meant as the book to help you define who you are and what you want. And if you can answer those two questions, you can climb any mountain in front of you. Oh, this was so inspiring, Chuck. Thank you so, so, so much.

I know why you're teaching public speaking. Like that was incredible. I'm sure our listeners, hey, subscribe, download, share it with friends. This will move the needle. This will change people's lives. So the more you share it,

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