The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 531: Dr. Angus Fletcher - Building Confidence, Responding To Adversity, Telling Your Story, Exhibiting Vulnerability, & The New Science of Narrative Intelligence

Episode Date: June 18, 2023

Text Hawk to 66866 to become part of "Mindful Monday." Join 10's of thousands of your fellow learning leaders and receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right... Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12   https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 Dr. Angus Fletcher has dual degrees in neuroscience (BS, University of Michigan) and literature (Ph.D., Yale). His research employs a mix of laboratory experiment, literary history, and rhetorical theory to explore the psychological effects—cognitive, behavioral, therapeutic—of different narrative technologies. He's the best-selling author of multiple books including Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, and Storythinking: The New Science of Narrative Intelligence. "The story you tell yourself needs to be the true story of yourself." How Angus tells his story: Build trust Listen Demonstrate courage - Angus told a group of special forces operators one of the most embarrassing stories of his life. After that, he said, "I'm not scared of anything." You must be genuinely humble to learn from your mistakes. "Real leaders activate the leader within you." Being a leader is all about contemplating fear. Stepping up when adversity strikes is why we exist as leaders. It's easy to lead when everything is going well. We want to be known as the leader who is there when it's hard. Dr. Fletcher's ultimate goal of using the power of story to bring us closer to self-actualization. Seems like that's a good first step to being a great leader. Confidence is earned by creating evidence for yourself that you can do hard things. Angus did this when he shared his story of not making it through Marine Corps boot camp. Angus's vulnerability earned trust with the military leaders. "For the longer we suspend our judgments, the more accurate our subsequent verdicts become. This valuable fact has been uncovered by researchers who've spent decades probing the mechanics of better decision-making, only to discover that the key is simply more time and more information. Which is to say: reserving our judgment until the last possible moment." Unlike a computer, the brain wasn't particularly data-driven. Or particularly logical. Instead, it was emotional. And creative. And powered by story. "There are a number of judgments that we can suspend permanently, including most of our judgments about other people. Our brain is constantly making such judgments. It looks at strangers on the street—and judges them. It looks at celebrities in magazines—and judges them. It looks at family members and colleagues and friends in homes and offices and restaurants—and judges them. These judgments feel instantly good to our neurons; they deliver pleasant microdoses of emotional superiority. But in the long run, they make us anxious, incurious, and less happy, so we can improve our long-term mental well-being if we suspend them." Apply to be part of my Leadership Circle 02:12 - Highlights of Leadership Training04:24 - How to Prevent Failure09:14 - What is a Story Scientist? 12:57 - Is Story Science Therapy? 14:22 - Tell Your Story 18:56 - Vulnerability is the Most Powerful Thing You Can Do 22:00 - Can You Go Too Far With Being Vulnerable? 25:19 - How to Be Vulnerable 32:42 - Real Leaders Activate the Leader In You 36:10 - Where Does Your Sense of Confidence Come From? 40:50 - Punch Through Your Own Fear 43:00 - Be Open About What Could Go Wrong 44:47 - Questions to Ask During the Interview Process 48:33 - Responding to Adversity IS Leadership 51:45 - How to Be Excellent at Speaking 56:27 - Advice For Younger Leaders

And your job as a leader is to maximize the potential of the people under you. That's your job. It's not to win. If you maximize the potential of the people under you, you're going to win 99% of a time. Welcome to The Learning Leaders Show, presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text, Hawk to 666866 to become part of Mindful Monday, you, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world.

will receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about how my book, The Pursuit of Excellence, will help you become a more effective leader. Text, Hawk to 66866. Now, on to tonight's featured leader. This is a great one. Dr. Angus Fletcher has dual degrees in neuroscience and literature. He earned his Ph.D. at Yale. This research employs a mix of laboratory experiment, literary history, and rhetorical theory to explore the psychological effects, cognitive, behavioral, and therapeutic of different narrative technologies.

This dude is so smart. He's also the best-selling author of multiple books, including Wonderworks, the 25 most powerful inventions in the history of literature and story thinking, the new science of narrative intelligence. During this conversation we discussed why learning to tell your authentic story is so important as a leader and it's therapeutic. And then how to build trust with a new team quickly. And then Angus shares how we can confront our biggest fears and work through them to be better leaders. Ladies and gentlemen, this one is so good. It's Dr. Angus Fletcher. Dr. Angus Fletcher.

Great to have you here in the Learning Leaders Show. Welcome. Thanks, Ryan, and feel free to call me Angus. Angus, gotcha. Okay. So Angus, I saw you were recently awarded the United States Army Medal for leadership training. It's a big deal. And I just had to dig in here. I'm not a veteran. I have not served. However, I hold them in highest esteem. People know from listening to show. I have had a lot of them on. But you receiving this for training, what happened? Tell me more about that. Yeah, well, this is kind of a shocking story. And so far as I myself not a veteran, and want to make clear that I'm the last person you would want to call to defend you in a

firefight. That's definitely not in my DNA or my training. But essentially what happened is, is I was working with a lot of business schools. I was working with the University of Chicago Booth. I was working with Wharton. My home institution is Ohio State, but I work on parts of the brain that are often neglected in other parts of business training. And so I was working with these other areas. And a faculty member of Booth called me up. And he said, said, Angus, how did you feel about talking to the U.S. Army? And I said, I don't actually know. Why does the Army want to talk to me? And he's like, don't worry. The Army's just interested in some of the training that you develop to train leaders. And they're interested in helping

some of their younger officers make the step up into these leadership positions. Do you think you could kind of work with them to develop some training? And so I did. I work with them. We developed a new field guide. I then got a call from the U.S. Army Special Operations. I went in and trained a lot of teams there. And one thing led to another and the army gave me a medal. Wow. So I'm particularly interested in this area. It sounds like the helping a newer leader become good at it, right? For lack of a better phrase, my first book actually is called Welcome to Management in the corporate world when you make that lead from individual contributor to first time manager, something I've done. And usually like most of us, we just fail miserably because we haven't

been properly trained. And it's just a completely different job. So I'm curious, you don't to dig into the entire training, but what were some of maybe a fun story or the key highlights of the training that you were doing for those leaders? Well, the first thing I should say is that the Army brought me in because not only do most people fail at that transition, they fail permanently. Oh, yeah. And this shocked me. It turns out that most people, when they fail to make the transition, it's not just that

they lose the confidence to the people around them. They lose the confidence in themselves. And they then become unable. And it's particularly challenging for people because almost everything you've learned in the prior phases of your career, you have to turn inside out. So all the things that have helped you run the system, all the things that have made you a responsible troubleshooter who have made you responsible at enforcing the rules the way they are, get in your way if you're trying to innovate this system, if you're trying to see the future, if you're trying to make and innovate new protocols. And so you completely have to turn your brain inside out. And when you make the jump, you have no one helping you. Because the whole thing about being a leader is you have to learn to self-assess.

And that is incredibly challenging. And a lot of times the people who most effectively make that jump in the beginning are sociopaths, as I've been told by some of the Army training who just don't have any interest in what other people think about them at all and just kind of run forward into machine gunfire. And then eventually they're exposed. But people who are thoughtful people, people who are open and engaged, they really struggle with that transition because they figure out how do I get myself to assess and evaluate myself and have confidence in myself in this completely uncertain and changing domain. What are some of the things you taught them that help them or help prevent them from being not only a temporary failure, but a potentially permanent failure? failure, which scary to even say. Yeah, no, it is terrifying. So there's two levels of the training, and maybe I'll touch on the most basic one first.

Okay. The most basic is simply developing that emotional resilience in yourself. So it turns out that when leaders fail, their failure typically falls into one of three kinds. They get scared. and when they get scared, they start losing a sense of their own direction, looking around to other people for help. They start calling in consultants. They start asking for advice randomly implementing things, peace meal, and all the rest of it.

The second failure is they get overly aggressive. This is a kind of anger response, and they just stick to what their original plan was, and they feel that it's weakness to back away from it, and they just keep driving this harder and harder and harder. And that failure and that anger are two faces of a fight or flight response. So what your brain is having happen is a kind of primordial instinctive sense of I'm under fire here. And the third way that leaders fail is they just get scattered and disorganized. So they try and do two or three things at the same time. They're inconsistent and they lose a sense of overall purpose.

All of these are what happened to soldiers when they first experienced combat. And that's one of the reasons why we kind of focus on this emotional piece first. Got you. What were you so good at that made the government, the military, want to give you a medal? Well, first of all, it wasn't that I was particularly good. It was that the soldiers under me improved, perhaps in spite of me. And as you will know. Come on, dude.

You know that's not true. As you will know, I mean, as a teacher and an educator, it's nice to take credit for your students' work, but it is largely on them. The main thing that we did is we just went in there and we ripped up a lot of the traditional training. Yeah. And we focused, first of all, on helping them find the leaders in themselves. So a lot of leadership training is very banal and generic. And it consists of these platitudes and general principles and rules that all leaders follow and so on and so forth. Anyone who's ever met a leader knows that every leader is unique.

That's what makes them a leader. And every leader has their own individual leadership style. And they have to develop that as they go along. They have to find confidence in that in their own unique method. And so the first thing that we would do with every single one of these individuals is we would walk them backwards through their life and say, there's already a time you've been a leader. There's already a time when you've been a leader. And in that moment, you learned to lead in your own way.

And that revealed a lot of your own core leadership method, what was unique to you. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to go backwards to go forwards. we're going to walk backwards to a time in your life when you walked out in front. And we're going to identify not what was universally true about you as a leader, not what you did that every leader does, but what was unique, what was distinct? What was something about you that other people weren't doing? Because the more we can identify that, the more we can give you confidence that when you're out on your own in the future, that's okay.

Because as a leader, you don't want to be looking around and being like, I'm doing what everyone else is doing, you want to be able to have confident in what's unique and distinct about yourself. So we walk them backwards through their past. We identified these single moments of original leadership, and then we help them walk those forward into leadership styles for the future. So is this a kind of Socratic method where you're asking lots of questions one-on-one as a group or you're in front and you're asking these questions and then they're taking notes? What's the process like? So we do it in small teams. It's not Socratic. for a couple reasons. I mean, first of all, it's not Socratic in the sense that a traditional

Socratic method implies that I, the teacher, Socrates, actually know the answer, when in reality, I'm the idiot in the room because I don't know anything about your personal past. And all I can do is facilitate you kind of coming up with the answers that are original to you. But in these teams, it's important to have big trust. And it's important to have people who have gone through similar experience, like you've gone through yourself. And what we do is we work in small teams to have each of them go back and try and find these leadership stories and share them with each of other. And so it's a process of review. And then once they found their leadership stories, we then work on them getting up in front of the entire group and sharing them and owning the

rooms. So it kind of transitions from a small group process into a larger group process. And that's really how leadership works. You have to kind of start with a kind of small team. Usually that's your leadership team. And then you have to figure out how to broaden it out to the whole organization. So we got to the magic word that I actually was going to launch with, but I was fascinated by this award. So forgive me. But that word is story. And you're a story scientist.

What is a story scientist? Well, I think it's important to admit that I'm the only story scientist in the world because I basically made up the term. I was allowed to make up that term because I have a lot of credentials behind me. You know, I have my PhD. I've done a lot of work in neurophysiology and narrative theory, which are the two things that make up story science. But basically, my big insight is that we think of story as a way to

communicate. So if you go to business school, you get a book off the shelf, people tell you, oh, story is a way to communicate. Actually, the most important story is not the story you tell other people. It's a story you tell yourself. And unlike in our modern world, where we're encouraged to massage a story to make it better, to make it nicer, to make it appeal more to others, the most powerful story you can tell yourself is your true story, the true story of yourself. And what we know is that in the brain, because so much of your brain's thought is powered by story. I mean, when you wake up in the morning, you tell yourself a story of the day. Before you go to bed at night, you review the story of that day.

When you meet with people, when you meet with teams, you meet with your organization, you share stories about things you've done. Your company on some level is a story. Your strategy is a story. It's a narrative about what you want to accomplish. Because story is so powerful, it's really important as a leader and just as any individual to know what your own true story is. And to be able to sit with yourself in your own mind and review the story of your past and take the confidence from that, from the good parts, and take the growth from the negative parts. And what we know is that most people in our world are not comfortable or confident in their own stories. So yeah, yeah, yeah. So most people, if you ask them to share their story, they'll get awkward, they'll get nervous or they won't tell you the whole story.

and we also know that most people have a hard time reviewing their history. So if I sit people down and say, I want you to take an hour and just think through your past. Most people will experience shame, they'll experience regret, they'll often experience panic and anxiety about things. And this is one of the reason that people are always turning to their cell phones or technology as a way of distracting themselves from just being in their own story. And you get this a lot. So when I work with special operators, they have a particularly intense time with their own story because they've obviously been, in situations where they've seen horrific things happen. And a lot of them will blame themselves for things that have happened in front of them.

And it's very hard for them often to be sit still, to sit still and just process and work through their own stories, their own narratives. And I can't tell you the number of special operators I've talked to who really feel almost valueless or worthless when you sit them down and start to talk to them. And when you actually shift this process around and get them to work through their stories and get them to see all the things that they've done that are powerful. That's when they start to make the transition back into confidence and back into being into being leaders. And so that whole process of being a piece with your own story, that's the most powerful thing you can do. And that's what

I as a story scientist generally do to go back to your question is I help people go into their stories, find the most powerful parts of those stories, and access them to increase their own performance. It sounds like therapy. Is it therapy? Well, it's therapeutic, but it's definitely not therapy. So, What we're focused on is not, so when you think about what traditional therapy is, traditional therapy is I have a problem and I want to go and I want to be fixed. And what we're really talking about here is saying, actually, you have a lot more potential in you that's in your head.

And we haven't as a world figured out how to access that because we think of the human brain and the way that our educational systems are built aren't designed to help you access that part of your brain. So most of what we study in school is things like logic or math or numbers or statistics or data or things like that. But as a human being, that's not really how your brain functions most of the time. Your brain functions like I was saying through these stories, stories it tells about itself. And so what we do with this work is we identify the stories that give you power. We help you identify those stories in others and in your organization. And then we figure out how to combine those like we do in these military contexts into teams

that are able to be innovative and dynamic in rapidly changing situations where there isn't a lot of data, where there isn't the opportunity for math, but in which your story is the determining factor. Wow, this is super interesting, man. Okay, let's say, I don't love hypotheticals, but I think we can get to the answer I want to get to by doing it this way. You're interviewing to be the CEO of a great company. Okay. And the board sets you down, Angus, all right, man. And this has happened to me in an interview process to be a VP of sales once. And they say, all right, man, tell us your story. What are you all about?

What's your story, man? Right. Like, how would you answer that question? So I can tell you the closest I've ever had to that experience. Okay. And I'm going to have to redact a couple of details here. But I was brought in to train one of the most elite units in the U.S. military. And I went in their room realizing that there was no.

reason for them to listen to me whatsoever because they were already better than anyone else on earth and they didn't need anything that I had to teach them and I had never done anything that they had ever done. I had literally never done a single thing that they had done. So why would they want to listen to me? Well, what I knew, even though they had no reason to listen to me, what I knew in that moment was that there was a way for me to access them and build trust. I just wanted them, even if they weren't going to do anything I told them to do, I wanted them to listen to me. And so I thought to myself, the way to do that is to demonstrate courage. I'm going to come in here and tell them something true about myself that requires courage for me

to tell them. And when I do that, I'm going to bet that they're going to recognize that courage and they're going to see something in me, which makes them trust me. And so what I did is I got in that room and I told them the story of my most embarrassing failure. And it's a failure I hadn't really shared with anyone, even my wife up to that point. And I told them the whole story completely honestly. And when I finished telling it, there was just total silence. And then they started laughing. And then it was just like we've been friends for 20 years. And that's when I say the power of your true story. At the end of the day, people want to know who you are. Because if you're going to be their leader, they just want to know what kind of a leader are you? It doesn't, it's not they have to

agree with you or disagree with you. It's just they want to be able to see as quickly as they can into your core. And the way you do that is you look into yourself and you say, what am I scared to share with them right now? What am I scared to tell this group of people? What do I think will make this group of people reject me? And that's actually the thing you have to have the courage to tell them. Because what you're doing in that moment is you're saying to them, I'm not scared of anything. I can do anything. When I'm your leader, I'm going to do the things that are hardest for me to do. I'm not going to shirk or flinch from things. And by having the courage to tell the parts of your story that are difficult to share, you single to everyone in the

room, because everyone in the room has these same story processors, you single to them, okay, even if I don't always agree with this guy, even if I don't always like this guy, I know who this guy is. And as long as I know someone, I will follow them. Do you think, though, part of what helped you in that room was I have to imagine the guy or girl who introduced you read your background and when you read your bio which I will have done at the beginning of this it is super impressive with all of your educational background degrees awards books you've published the blurbs you have are some of the best in this book writing industry from the the best of the best, does it make it easier to tell the embarrassing story with all of that a part of the overall

story? Well, you would think so, right? But the truth is, is that the more successful people are, the harder a time it is they have telling the truth about themselves, because they feel like they have to live up to this image. And I've seen this happen time and time again with leaders. The more successful someone is, the more of a squirm when you try and get them to admit that there's something imperfect about them. So I would actually say, no. I don't think that. I don't think any amount of accolades or public attention determines your level of self-confidence. I would also say that if you knew the unit that I was talking to, you would understand that there was literally nothing that I could come into that room with that would impress them.

There was literally zero, unless I had single-handedly done a Chuck Norris and rescued the president of the United States while like, you know, there's just about nothing that that would have impressed them about me. Yeah. Let's take it out of you and me. if somebody is going to interview for a big promotion, maybe one that they're, they're barely squeaked in the door because they don't have enough experience, which is very common for someone who listened to this show, which is they're ambitious and they're kind of ahead of their

class, meaning they've skipped some levels and they're going for big jobs and maybe they're less experienced and younger than other candidates. They're learning leaders, right? So they're ahead of the game. That person, you think would it be wise for them when the, when the, the board says, all right, hey man, tell me your story. What are you all about? Why are you here? You know, that type of broad opening, which happens from time to time. You think that is a good moment to go into telling an embarrassing story about yourself.

Or being vulnerable, I guess, is another way to put it. I think vulnerability is the most powerful thing you can do. Because vulnerability is completely honest. And it also is what demonstrates total strength. I'll just tell you this. I now have had the opportunity to work with a lot of people in a special operations community who are incredibly tough and incredibly strong. The hardest thing that they face is being vulnerable.

But that is the thing that they all tell me is what allows them to transition into being leaders of their own communities. And when you're a young person, you think that the path to leadership is by being perfect, is by being excellent, as being all of these things. You're already all of those things to be in that position. what people want to see when they want to follow you is, can you learn from your mistakes? Can you be open? Can you be humble? Humility is just the most important thing in a leader.

And it's the rarest thing because most leaders, instead of being humble or insecure. And because they're insecure, they overcompensate. But if you can be genuinely humble, if you can get up in front of people and be like, yeah, you know, I know I've done all these amazing things, but I also know that in the grand scheme of things, that's nothing. I know that there are a thousand people walking this earth right now who have done more impressive things than I. And I know that there are a million people who have walked this earth and passed from it whose shadow I walk in. If you can have that genuine humility, people will say, okay, well, here's someone who can grow. Because that's really what they want as a leader. They don't

want you just as you are now. They want someone who can walk into challenges and evolve through those challenges and help the company evolve through those challenges. And so much of our current culture is based on making ourselves seem more perfect than we are through the internet and through marketing and through social media. And that's just very brittle. That's very fragile. You see people buckle under that almost immediately. But if you can be up in front of people and be like, here's something genuinely humiliating. Here's something dumb. Here's something like really dumb that I did. And here's how I kept being dumb. I didn't do something dumb and then fix it. I just kept being dumb again and again and again until finally I got my.

myself to this point and then someone had to lift me out of it. And I got lifted out of it. I understood it. I unscrewed myself. And here I am in front of you to tell you. I learned from that experience and I've grown from it. The learning part, I think, is key. Can you overdo it though?

Because I'm big into Bernay Brown. I know she's blurbed your stuff. You've been on her podcast. I love her. I think she's amazing. But I think because her work is so popular, it maybe push the scales potentially for people who are into her work that you could overdo it?

How do you measure that to make sure you're not going too far? Well, so the thing is, if it's hard for you to share something, you're probably not going too far. And what I mean by that is there's a kind of performative vulnerability. Right. That's what I'm talking about here. And there's certain things that are now safe to admit in public, where it's not actually really vulnerability.

It's just like a whole bunch of things that other people have endured to. And it's in a weird way, it's like the opposite of actual vulnerability. It can have the opposite effect if it's fake humility, fake vulnerability. In a way, it's just like in the sporting world when you sense a coach is not genuine or real, you're done. It just doesn't work. And that's kind of what I'm getting at is I have seen that creep up. It even happens on the podcast every once in a while. It doesn't feel genuine.

It feels like fake self-deprecating humor. And I know we can probably sense it when it happens, but it can give you the ick when it does. Yeah, I totally agree because the person is trying to manipulate you. This is, again, as a leader, your guide has to come from within. And you know whether or not you're doing something because you think it's going to work or whether you're doing something because you're actually genuinely scared. And the reason that it's important to step up in front of the board and have the courage to say things you're scared to say is because being a leader is almost always a confrontation

with fear. You're always having your limits exposed. having the limits of your organization exposed. You're always realizing how fragile things are. And if you can't be calm in those situations, then you're not going to succeed. So if you get up in front of a group of people and you do a performative vulnerability thing where you're pretending to cry or pretending to get upset or these kinds of things. But if you're someone who gets up in front of a group of people, so I mean, there's a specific example. I work with a retired command sergeant major of Delta Force, whose name is Tom Satterley. And one of the most arresting things he told me

was the moment that he almost killed himself. And he had been out of Delta Force for a couple of years. And he had kind of lost his sense of what he was doing because he'd spent his entire time being part of this best organization in the world. And he no longer felt that on a day-to-day basis. and he had all this time to reflect on his past. And through a series of lucky events, he did not end up following through on his attempt. But when he tells you that, he doesn't tell it, he doesn't cry, he doesn't kind of make it mockish.

But he just tells you honestly, like, that's how low I was. And it was a shocking moment for me to hear that from him. It's not something private. He shared it with other people. He shared it publicly with other people. But when I heard that, I knew okay. This is someone being honest with me. and that's what built an immediate sense of trust.

And you'll just feel that with people when they're being honest with you. It just builds that immediate sense of trust in you. And you can see through their consistent performance after that, whether that trust is earned. Do you want to try something that is potentially risky and we may have to edit it out? Sure.

Okay. Will you coach me and how to get to this place? Is it possible to do it in this time frame where we start at least getting it started with the questions you ask to help somebody get there. If not, we'll cut this and go on to the next one, but I'm curious, is this even possible?

Yeah, absolutely. And we don't have to go too deep, too fast. And as I say, it's often better to do it in a larger group. So I think we'll just do it gently now. We'll just kind of get started now. And then you can try it. I know what I'd try you up for this. I'm sorry for not sending you a note ahead of time.

Maybe I should have. Okay, cool. This is totally awesome. This is what I love to do. This is actually why I like to train special ops. Because every time I go in there, they're like, no, screw what you were going to do. I'm like, all right.

I don't know how to do that, but let's see what happens, man. Okay. So the first thing you want to do is you want to just take a moment and start to think through your past and think through a couple major changes that you've gone through. So a couple of moments in your past that you've made major changes, major positive changes. And as you're thinking through those moments of positive change in your life, you want to start to break them down into, the external thing that impacted you? What was the external trigger in your life that made you change?

And what was the internal response that you met it with? So as you think through your life now, what were a couple of moments where you think to yourself, okay, I made a big positive change. And I can think to myself, here's what outside my life impacted me. And here's inside how I met that moment and started to start to grow. Hmm. Mine almost all have to do with sports, but that was my life for the first 24 or five years of my life. So the first moment that came to mind was going from, you want me to answer, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I would hear this. The first moment that I'm thinking of was the spring of my eighth grade year when legendary head coach Bob Gregg at Centerville High School and offensive coordinator Ron Ollery who would go on to become head coach when coach Greg retired came to me as an eighth grader and said we want you to work out with us you're going to have a chance to play be the first freshman to ever start at quarterback for centerville high school a big division one school here in southwestern Ohio and I thought this is crazy and it's like we have actually a quarterback

coach who we think could help you like improve your mechanics and you're going to work out in the gym with us and you're going to run with us and you're going to throw up. with us over the summer and no promises but we'll see what happens and so this is a turning point that I still vividly remember because I didn't think I was good enough I thought I was a pretty good player I was pretty good growing up at all sports didn't think good enough and what happened was I felt like I learned the power of somebody believing in you to help they believed in me more than I even believed in myself and I wasn't even sure why but what that did is it injected this confidence and it made me want to work out harder in the gym. It maybe really want to work in my mechanics.

It made me really want to run a lot more to be overly prepared for when the season would start. And I'd say that's part of actually why I do this show is because I understand the power that leaders can have on other people. They can lift them to levels that even the people didn't think they were capable of if you buy in, right? As a follower, if you buy it. I was following them. And so that was the first moment that I think changed the the arc and the trajectory of my life. that I'm still writing to this day because of those two guys. So when they came to you, you must have been scared. Yes.

Because you just told me that you didn't think you could do it. No. So I didn't think I was good enough. No. The person you had to fight was yourself in that moment. You had to fight yourself. And there had to be a moment where you confronted yourself. So there had to have come a moment during that training.

And you know, you can keep this moment private or you can share it if you want. but there had to come a moment in that training where you knew you weren't good enough. You realized I'm actually not good enough and then you had to overcome it. So there had to have been a moment where you gave up. Part of you gave up on yourself and another part of you said, no. And it wasn't just about the coaches encouraging you. It was actually about you leading yourself. There was a part of you that learned to lead yourself.

So can you think of a moment where you were going to give up, where you realized? And there might have been many moments. One of the things I've learned about working with teams as they go through some of these trainings is there's often a lot of moments where you think about quitting, but then there's often one specific moment where you're just like, I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to keep going, but you find something inside. So the very first day of summer workouts in early June, I was told, and I didn't know anybody in the team. I was the only freshman working out with the varsity. I was told, hey, be here by 5 o'clock in the morning. And that's when the weight room and all of the running stuff's going to start. I didn't have a drive. I was 14. My parents dropped me off at 4.55. I'll be early, a little bit early. And as I get there, the whole team had already started working.

They were already in the middle of a workout. And I thought, like, oh, my God, what am I doing? I literally, as I was walking in, seeing them already working out, I considered turning around and running back to the car. Because I thought, they forgot. They told me the wrong time. What happened? And I paused, though.

I'm like, I got to keep going. And luckily, my dad started driving away, so I didn't even have an option. And as I walk up to him, They're like, what are you doing? You're late. And I go, well, you guys told me it was five o'clock. It's 455. And they go, you know five o'clock means four 45. We're already started. And I thought like, oh, I learned the new, the new, what a new clock is for these particular people. Five o'clock is not five o'clock. I am still super early to everything because I remember that day and how I felt like a complete idiot.

But you had to kind of push through that in order to say, no, I'm just going to do it. I'm going to keep at it, even if I look like an idiot, which I definitely did. And the older guys were like, who's this guy? Who's this little skinny guy? Like, what is he doing here? And he's late on top of everything. And I could seriously consider, I remember thinking, this is just not for me.

Let me go back to the freshman team. See, that's exactly right. And so I want to say two things about that. So the first is what I like is that you're consistently being modest as you're telling this story. And you're like, well, you know, my dad had already left in the car. So, you know, I couldn't really go back. And there's all these ways in which you're basically planning it wasn't you.

And I think that's good when you tell the story to other people. But when you tell the story to your story to your story, yourself, I always say to people, own your choice. It was you that did it. All the other people that you say, oh, they help me. That's true. But there were a million other opportunities that you could have just given up. And so when you're telling the story to yourself, don't give credit to the other people. Give credit to your past self because that was what when you're telling the story to yourself or when you're telling it to somebody else. When you're telling the story to yourself. When you're telling the story to other people, it's great to be humble. It's great to be modest. It's not a

bad thing to do. But not fake. If it's fake, though, it doesn't work. I'm just telling, I did not plan to do this, but I'm telling it as best as I remember it, trying to follow your prompts. But this is really how it went. People who've listened to this know how much I've talked about Coach Greg and Coach Aller. They're everything to me. And obviously, my parents are too. But I do think it is important. If you're telling to somebody else, you can't, just like we said along, it's got to be real. Got to be the genuine element of how you tell it. Not, not this. So let me be a little self-deprecating just to kind of get a pop from the crowd. No, no, I totally agree.

What I'm saying is, is that real leaders activate the leader in you. And I think it's a myth that leaders create followers. I think leaders create leaders. And I think that in order to be a leader, you had to lead yourself. And so I think in that moment, as a 14-year-old, I don't doubt that there were a million different things going through your mind, like, oh, my God, I don't want to go forward. Oh, my God. My dad's gone and all these kinds of things.

But at some moment, you had to be like, I'm going to lead myself into this. I'm going to confront my fear. And the reason that's important is because when you remember that moment in your future, going back to that moment can help you through any other moments. I'll share another quick story from a special forces guy. Earl Plumley is his name. He won the Medal of Honor. And I called him up because I wanted to talk to him about how we won the Medal of Honor.

If you're interested, the story about how we won the Medal of Honor is one of most incredible stories I've ever read in my entire life. Basically, he's on this Ford operating base in Afghanistan, an explosion. goes off. He walks out, sees that there's all this haze. He starts walking through the haze. He sees 10 Afghan soldiers walk towards him. And so he's like, oh my goodness, someone must be trying to kill these soldiers. And he walks towards them. No, it turns out that they're actually suicide killers in disguise. They start attacking him. He only has a pistol. They've got assault rifles. They're wearing suicide vests. The story is insane. Anyway, I started asking about that. He said, I don't want to

talking about that. I was like, okay. He's like, I want to talk about the first time I was in combat. I was like, okay. I was like, what did you do the first time you're in combat? He's like, I hid. I hid. When the bullets started coming in, I hid. And I was like, okay, you know, well, what made you stop hiding? And he was like, my team leader, he just started asking me all these simple questions. He's like, you know, are the trucks ahead of us still there? Are the trucks behind us still there? And I start kind of like looking around and then, you know, step by step by step, I got out of my fear and I started moving forward. Earl Plumley credits his team leader with helping him through that moment of fear. And whenever he's on a battlefield and you see someone in their first firefighter, he always does

the same thing. He always goes over to them. You know, the bolts are flying around. And Earl's like, hey, here's a simple task for you, you know. But the truth is that what that leader did is he helped Earl lead himself. Because after the leader stopped asking Earl to do these things, Earl took ownership of the situation and started to lead. And that's why he was able to walk down this path that eventually led him to the Medal of Honor. And it's the same thing with you. I'm not denying that those leaders helped you uncover the leader in yourself, but at the end of the day, they would want, and the truth is for you to acknowledge that you became the leader. And at a certain point, it was you. It was you that did it. And so whenever I work with leaders, that's always the thing that I do,

is I always say it's good to acknowledge other leaders. It's always good to acknowledge people that helps you. That's important. But you want to remember that. story. And whenever Earl Plumley thinks about some future event, he walks back in his mind to that moment, he was scared. And he took that first step. And it's the same thing with any leader is you go back to when you were 14 and you went into the locker room at 455 or whatever. You actually go back. And it's that primordial story that helps give you the momentum to keep going forward through all the kind of chaos that intercedes. Whenever I come across somebody who has a real comfort in their own skin and a confidence, but a humble confidence, I have to ask how. Where does this comfort

in your own skin and this sense of confidence I feel from you? Where does that come from? How have you acquired that? So this is actually the story that I told that units. I won't tell you the whole story because there's parts of it that I can't share, but I failed out of boot camp at 17. And I field out of Marine Corps boot camp. And I was there for all the wrong reasons. I was there because I got to college. And when I got to college, I was just really disappointed with college. Because, you know, I spent my whole life working to get to college. And then I got there and I was like, this is just more school. Like, why am I here? What's going on? And it just seemed like a complete waste of time. And I just did not want to be a cog in a machine. You know, I just, I wanted to do

something interesting with my life. I wanted to be challenged. I wanted to grow. I didn't just want to keep kind of, you know, ticking the checkboxes. And so I saw this Marine recruiter. walking around. He seemed like he knew what he was doing. I convinced him to kind of give me a shot. He trained me up. I did not do sports in high school. Unlike you, I could not have made, well, technically at my school, you had to be on a team. So I was always on like the eighth grade team as a senior. But I was not even allowed to play on the eighth grade team, you know? I would just sit there with the book, you know. And this Marine recruiter, he trained me up. He trained me up until I got practically a perfect physical score. You know, I was just like cranking out pull-ups, running for days,

doing all this stuff, you know, just amazing, you know, guaranteed. And, you know, I've got a big brain, as you'd probably determine. So everyone's like, oh, this guy's going to be a killer Marine. He's going to just rock boot camp. Anyway, plane to Quantico, plane to D.C. lands. I'm just about to take my suitcase out of the overhead bin when I get struck in the face because the guy ahead of me has pulled his suitcase out and it's just like hammered into my face. at the time I was wearing a pair of glasses that had been specially picked to be indestructible for boot camp. Guess what? They broke in half. And I have these glasses in my hand and I get off the plane and I'm just remembering what my recruiter told me, which is go right to the bus and do not

draw negative attention. So I'm like 17 years old. What do I do? I throw out my eyeglasses and I get in line for the bus and I go to boot camp line. And I actually attempted to go through boot camp not being able to see. It was a total disaster. There's a lot of funny stories that I won't share. A lot of things went wrong. And also, to be honest, in order to even survive, it had to deflect attention a lot by doing a lot of crazy things and trying to hide the fact that I couldn't see from everyone. So it was it was a pretty big mess. But I came out of that experience. And after I came out of that experience, it was like too embarrassing for me to talk about for a long time because I really wanted to succeed at it. And I'd spend so long training, I couldn't even face the recruiter when I came back.

But through this recent process that I've been talking with you about, where I start to work with the Army, I met a lot of nurses, Army nurses. They encouraged me to do what I've done with you and walk through my past. I came to this story. I told them this story. And they were like, you should tell that story to the special operators. I was like, I can't tell that story to special operators about how I tried to go through boot camp line and screwed it up. And they're like, If you're scared to tell them that story, tell them that story. And I did. And once I told them that story, I can be honest to do I've never been afraid ever to tell

anyone anything about my life because I realized I could tell them that. I can tell you anything. Wow. That sense of confidence comes from doing something scary. Is that what you'd say? You stood up in front of a group of very intimidating humans and you did something that you didn't think you should do or at least you were really scared to do. And then you did it.

And I found confidence can be. built by providing evidence for yourself that you can do hard things. It feels like you provided yourself a big piece of evidence on that day. Absolutely, yeah. And the core thing I would say is we're all hindered by our own fears. Yeah. What's really holding us back in life is our own fears. We just build up these walls when I say, I can't do it because I'm scared to do it.

And if you just punch through your own fear, you all of a sudden realize I can pretty much do anything because really the only thing holding me back is my fear. That doesn't mean you're going to succeed it every. thing, but it means that you're never going to be limited. And I can just be honest to you, I was terrified. I was terrified of telling that story. I didn't even share that story with my wife when we got married. I mean, she was like, oh, you went to boot camp. I was like, you know, I got a foot infection, which was true. That was one of the many things that happened to me a boot camp. I was like, I got a foot infection. You know, she's like, oh, okay, that makes sense, you know.

And people don't look at me and think that I have any desire or aptitude to be a Marine, you know, so it never comes up at normal conversation. It's not something I usually talk about. It wasn't until I started hanging out with these military guys, but they were like, oh, do you have any military background. I was like, kind of, I have like the most embarrassing military background you could possibly have. But it's your own fear. It's your own fear. And there's no fear that's stronger than social fear. We don't want to disappoint people. We don't want to appear like losers. We don't want to appear lame in front of other people. We don't want to be ashamed in front of people that we want to respect us. And that's like I was going back before when I was saying, if you want

to be a leader and you go to the board, you want to tell them something. At a certain point, you just have to show them. I have no fear. I respect you. I want you to admire me. And I'm going going to be completely transparent with you anyway. I'm going to tell you things that are hard for me to tell you to tell you that way you know that if something's going wrong in a company, I'm going to tell you immediately. And you're going to know if I'm out past my ability level, I'm going to tell you immediately because I'm not here to keep secrets and I'm not insecure and I'm not here to pretend that I'm something that I'm not. So that's really what it comes down to me is facing your own fears and particularly your social fears.

I feel like I read a story Adam Grant wrote about the success or failure. of entrepreneurs when they're pitching investors. And there is some data provided that the ones who openly stated here is how and why this could fail and they were very knowledgeable of that part of their presentation. They didn't hide it. They didn't act like it didn't exist because everybody knows that there's a potential. But there's the potential for that with any new business you're starting up. But the ones who were very well versed and open and shared that secured more funding than those

who tried to act like it wasn't, or those who left it out of the presentation, meaning they're willing to go there and say, look, this is why this thing may not work. This, this, this, and this. Here's another challenge. This is a big thing that we're still fighting against. Those people did better than the ones who tried to act like there was nothing potentially scary about investing for them. That's exactly right. And that's not just because of the power of the presentation, although I'm sure it made it more powerful presentation. That's also because when they walked out of the room, they had that same fearlessness to look at all the things that could go wrong. And they had the same ability day by day by day to confront that. Because when you're confronting your fears, you're winning.

Instead of putting your head in the sand and ignoring all the things that could go wrong, you're actually being proactive, you're being assertive, and you're evaluating and managing risk and volatility and danger and uncertainty. And that is what you want a leader. You want someone who's comfortable and confident when the bullets are flying. I mean, it's just stressful to be in that and you want someone who can handle it in a calm manner. And there's nothing that shows you can handle something in a calm manner than getting up in front of the people you need to impress and being honest with them about all the ways that you could suck. If somebody hired you to sit in the room while they were going to hire for leadership roles, let's say a CEO, and this may have happened, I don't know, and they say, hey, you're going to sit to my left. You can ask questions if you want or you can just sit here.

But at the end of us interviewing all these people for some of our leadership roles, you're going to help us make the decisions. What are some of the questions you may ask? And also, what qualities are you looking for in someone to be a senior leader? And let's just assume we're at a Fortune 500 company. You want to push people as rapidly as you can to their limits. You want to put them in a situation where there is not a right answer. So one of the things that leaders, I would say, you know, young leaders always want is they always want there to be. a right answer and they always want to have it. There are no right answers. There are just things

that work long enough for you to figure out something better. That's literally the secret to life, you know? Okay, it's kind of working. Okay, let's see if there's something out there that we're all just figuring it out as we go, dude. That's what I've learned over 530, whatever of these. Everybody is figuring out as they go and some are just a little bit further along the path. They figured a few more things out. But that is literally the one-liner of this thing after eight years. It's hilarious, but it's true. Yeah, well, honest people are in that situation. Yes.

You know, everyone else thinks that there's a plan or they're like managing someone else's situation. So what you do is you put that leader in a position where there is not a right answer. And then you hammer them for it. So I saw this again, this is without revealing any confidential things, when you train young special operators, you put them in these situations where there aren't right answers. So, you know, for example, you pull aside a leader and you're like, okay, your medic and your interpreter are both bleeding to death you can save one of them who do you

know and you know and you know what are you hoping to get like what are you hoping to get to learn from that question though well every answer is wrong right right if you let if you let so you're just trying to see how their mind works or what are you trying to gather no no no you're trying to see how they react to the failure You're trying to see how they react to you exposing their limits. It's the same thing that if you're playing quarterback, and what I do is I basically tell all the quarterbacks without telling you what your progression is.

And they just start picking off every single ball you throw. So we have a practice. You're out there. You're just throwing stuff and every single thing you throw, the cornerbacks are just picking it off all over the place, right? I want to see how you come back to the huddle. Do you just come back and just go right at your next progression and do it again? What's your response to that, right?

Because that's telling me about your psyche. It's telling me about your core psyche. Like, who are you as a person? How can you handle these things? And you can just imagine, like, if it's like, well, I, you know, I saved my medic. Okay, great, your interpreter is dead. Now nobody trusts you. You know, none of the people who you've been working with trust you anymore.

You've broken faith. No one trusts America anymore. Your mission is over, right? And then they'll freak out. Oh, okay, I guess I wouldn't do that. I guess I would save him. Okay, great. Now your medic is dead, right?

Now, no, you know, and you go through this whole thing. And the point is, there is no right answer. As a leader, there are no right answers. How do you handle that? I just want to see your mental process. And what I'm saying to you in this conversation is, I want to see you go back to when you were 14. I want to see you go back to when you walked into that room at 455.

I want to see that you are scared out of your minds by me. Like, if I'm not scaring you in that interview, then I'm not doing my job. And I got to find another question that's scaring you. I want to see that you're scared. And then I want to see that you take a gut check moment and you just go ahead with the best that you've got. Responding to adversity is an extremely important quality for you when you're going to make the choice to hire a leader. Yeah.

I mean, as a leader, that's all you do. Yeah. What else is your job really? I mean, otherwise. Because it's easy when everything's going well. It's easy. Like everybody, when you're up by 40 and everything, it's great. When you crush your number, it's easy.

And this is happening for some companies and leaders I'm working with right now. My dad would always tell me when I was young manager, I got promoted too early. And I would call him and I'd complain. Like, God, this sucks. This isn't working. This person's not doing that. I'm like, I'm doing everything, man. I'm working so hard.

And he'd say, this is why you exist. If everything was great, they wouldn't have managers. They wouldn't need you. The team would just go and crush it. So be grateful for this opportunity to show how good of a leader you are. Right now, not so good. I'm like, ah, he's so right. He's so right because I'm not doing a good job right now.

All I'm doing is complaining like most people do when things get hard. When in reality, that's why you exist. That's the whole point of being a leader. Your dad sounds awesome, by the way. I'd love to hang out with him and get motivated by him. So the key there is that if you're up by 40, you're not leading, your team is leading. Your team is leading, right? Like, that's what's happening.

When you're down by 40, that's when you need to lead. Because you go in the locker room and everyone has given up. And you have to say to them, we're just going to fight for the next five minutes. We're going to have a kind of, you know, seal psychology here, and we're just going to forget about the future. We're just going to focus on the now. Like, can I survive the next two minutes? Can I survive the next three minutes?

So we're just going to fight. And in those moments, we're going to build that character. And then we're going to know the next time we're in a situation like this, we're just going to fight back with everything that we have. And your job as a leader is to maximize the potential of the people under you. That's your job. It's not to win. If you maximize the potential of the people under you, you're going to win 99% of the time,

honestly, because it's a competitive landscape and no one else is doing that. But you don't want to focus on winning. You just want to focus on this moment now, maximizing that potential. And as I was saying earlier, the number one thing that causes people not to hit their potential is they give up. They just get scared. They just stop trying. And as a leader, you have to give them the emotional resources and then you got to give them the plan. The plan is what allows them to shift from that emotional moment of belief into, oh, this is actually working.

So if you just get in the locker room and you give them a rah-rah plan and then it's a rah-rah speech, and then you go back to the same plan that you were losing within the first half, not leading. you get them engaged and you say, and this is the different wrinkle. This is a different trick. And then they start to do it. They're like, oh, this is starting to work. And all that comes down to when you're playing sports or in the military and business is not that different is regaining the initiative. What can I do now that's just a little bit different that's going to surprise the environment?

That's going to build confidence. That's going to get us moving forward. And then we can figure out something better. A lot of leaders, part of their job is to get up and give talks. in front of their team. Tell stories, share an update, town hall meetings. They do them on Zoom. They do them in person. I would bet this is something you're really good at. You're a teacher, right? You get up and speak in front of people a lot. I know this is a little bit of departure we were talking about, but it still flows with leadership. What's the difference between somebody who is

excellent at speaking in front of a group of people versus someone who's just good at it? So if you're really good, you're engaging your audience to create the speech with you. And what I mean by that is that like bad talks are like these teleprompter things where you've got it all figured out in advance and it's all perfect and you're just like, and you're trying to program your audience to think what you're thinking. But good talks feel spontaneous. They feel, the audience feels like they're there with you, that they're engaged and that they're helping you create the story. And to do that, you again, have to display a little bit of

vulnerability. You have to display a little bit of openness. And you cannot be defensive. So the number one thing that I see leaders fail at when they're in these public settings is they open it up to engage. And then when you open things up, people start to question you. Because of course. And then the leader gets defensive and closes down as opposed to being like, yeah, I have that question myself, you know, And I've thought about it. As a leader, what you want to show people is not that you have the answers, but that you've thought about the questions before they have. That's your job, not to have the answers, but to have been thinking about the questions. And so whenever I'm in public and whenever I'm counseling leaders, I say invite questions and then show to people by the fact that you're relaxed when you

receive the question, that it's not a new question. Because nothing shows that you haven't figured out how to handle a question and tensing up and getting defensive. And that's what corrods confidence in your leadership. So if something gets up there and it's like, oh, we're losing money, you're incompetent, everything's a disaster, you know, you're just like, yeah, man, I feel you on all those points, you know, you know, and then you start to lean into it and say, and what you haven't said is this, and you haven't said this, and you haven't said this, you know what I mean, and you start to get them back and like, okay, and then you make the turn. And you say, okay, and that's why we're making these shifts or why we're doing these other things. But it's that engaging

your audience. It's your bringing them into a conversation as opposed to trying to program things. And I imagine that's something in this podcast you've discovered and you've been very effective at is probably a lot of your best podcasts. You have no idea what the person's going to say, but then you roll with it. Well, just so you know, I have three full pages of notes, single space, and I haven't asked a single question from those notes. So thank you. That only happens if the guest is awesome. And we get off on wild tangents, which we have. And I appreciate. And it is a little risky at times to say let's flip this and let's do real time coaching which when I didn't prepare you for that and didn't frankly prepare myself but this is what I would do if we were going out to lunch and I like

these conversations to feel like that if we were going out I'd probably be peppering you with these exact same way what wait okay now can we do that on me you know that's how it would go and I think that is how I try to be genuine and follow my genuine curiosity with great rigor as Brian Kauffleman told me that's why this thing is good is because I can sense you're following your genuine yes that's exactly it it's more for me than anybody else. Now, I'm happy if other people can listen and gain value from it. That's why this thing gets to keep going. But it's really about, okay, what am I most curious about? I think that can be an attractive quality and people in general is when you sense someone

is just deeply curious about something. I totally agree. And I'll be honest with you, I mean, you mentioned earlier that I was on Bray Brown's podcast. I've never been on a podcast other than hers than in which I've felt a kind of a more spontaneous connection than the one I'm on now. And I think that's a real tribute to the fact that this has just been a conversation. And I've been totally honest to you. And I said a whole bunch of stuff I wasn't planning to say on this podcast and hopefully haven't broken too many confidences. But again, that's what I think leadership is.

I think leadership is authentic. It is honest. It's not being afraid to make a mistake because you know you can correct your mistake. And I talk about that all the time with the special forces guys. It's like everybody makes mistake. Life is a mistake, you know. But the key is the confidence to know that you can come back from it. And it's only the people who,

don't have that belief that are scared to make mistakes in the first place. And as a leader, you just got to accept a lot of what you're doing is just rebounding and recovering. But that's a great place to be because it allows you to rethink your preconceptions, rethink where you came from, and genuinely innovative. Love it, man. One more question before we go. So you work with students, you're a teacher. So this probably happens all the time. So you may be better suited for this question than most. You're having a one-on-one with someone who's early to mid-20s. They have an undergraduate degree, let's say. They want to leave a positive dent in the world. They want to do good, right, like you have. What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you'd give to that person?

So the number one thing that I always do when I'm working with my kind of 20-something students is I say to them, you already have the answer in yourself. Life has made you question it. And this happens because our school system does not prepare us to transition into the real world. We spend all of school trying to please this system. We're trying to please our coaches, please our teachers. We're trying to get scores on these standardized tests. We're trying to do all these kinds of things. And as a result, we get kind of decentered.

And then when we go out in the world, we're expecting constant feedback from people, like telling us, oh, this is what you got to do and this is what you got to do. no, you have to develop that internal sense that you're doing it your way. And that is strongest in you before you go to school back when you're four and five before you start being programmed by school. And then all of a sudden you lose that. And so what I always say to them is I want you to go back and discover your core self. I want you to find out who you are.

The number one problem we find with people when they feel like they've lost their way is it turns out there's been a moment in their life when they've been scared. And when you get scared, you become much more susceptible to taking other people's advice. And so someone might give you good advice in that moment. They might sit you down and be like, hey, I think you should go to medical school, or I think you should get your MBA, or I think you should do this other thing. And that might be really solid advice, but that's not coming from you. And so you start to live somebody else's life.

And so you start to become decenter. And so what I always say is go back, find out who you are, own your own life. And then once you have that, nothing can shake you. you can just walk right up to the gates of hell and you're not afraid because you're like, this is where I die. This is where I make my stand. And so that's the number one thing I work on with people in their mid-20s is to help them get out of the disorganization that has occurred in school and to get out of the loss of self-epicacy

that's been created by school to find the drivers inside themselves. That is so hard to do, but it feels like you are really good at helping people do that. I think for me it's taken many years beyond being 24 to do that. But I love it. We might have to have a round two here, Angus, because there's just a lot of good stuff. I didn't really touch on your books at all. I mean, some of the things we talked about you'll find in your books, but I do highly recommend them.

Wonderworks, the 25 most powerful inventions in the history of literature, I think is great. And then this morning, I was just reading story thinking on my Kindle here, the new science of narrative intelligence. there's there's just you know you on top of being fantastic verbally you're you're amazing as a writer too so i just want to say i'm super grateful for you being here today and being able to just kind of freestyle with me this was a lot of fun and i learned a lot and i'd certainly love to continue our dialogue as we both progress man it was a ton of fun ryan and absolutely i'd love to feel like i found a kindred spirit here in ohio i love it man thanks so much dude absolutely enjoy it's the end of the

podcast club with Dr. Angus Fletcher. Thank you so much for being here. A few takeaways from my notes, his advice, you already have the answer. Life has made you question it. Develop an internal sense that you're doing it your way. You have to discover your core self in order to do this. And then being a leader is all about contemplating fear and confronting fear. Stepping up when adversity strikes is why we exist as leaders. It's easy to lead when everything is going well. We want to be known as the leader who is there when it's hard. Again, that's why we exist.

These are great opportunities. These moments when it's tough are when we step up and truly show what we're all about when it comes to being a leader. And then confidence is earned by creating evidence for yourself that you can do hard things. Angus did this when he shared his story of not making it through Marine Corps bootcats. camp when he's standing up in front of a room of what sounded like a bunch of amazing military heroes. He did that as a way to be vulnerable and earn trust.

So good. Once again, I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two. Hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Dr. Angus Fletcher. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader. And because you continue to do that and you continue to go to Ryanhawk.net, which launches you into Apple Podcasts. And once there, you write a thoughtful review and you rate the show hopefully five stars.

By doing that, you are continually giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.