HOW TO ACHIEVE COMMITMENT TO BUSINESS EXECUTIVE TRANSFORMATION | EXPERIENCES AND LESSONS I LEARNED

Every experience I’ve ever had in my life together have added up to me becoming the person I am and doing the work that I do. However, there were three seminal experiences that have really cemented in me that commitment. To develop leaders and to helping executives lead more effectively. In today’s video, I’m going to share some of those experiences so that you could learn some of the lessons I’ve learned to become better and leading your business. 

Back in the late 90s, I worked for about a decade as a psychotherapist. And as a psychotherapist, I worked with every group possible. Whether it was a major mental illness, to empowered men, to couples, families, kids. For a while, I ran a couple of treatment centers, drug and alcohol treatment. I remember one individual who came into one of the treatment centers. He was a great guy. What they would call a ‘functional alcoholic’. He drank a lot every day and had to drink to keep going. But he wasn’t the kind of guy who was staggering around drunk. In fact, you wouldn’t even know it. You would know he was an alcoholic by his behavior, but if he stopped drinking, his body would go into withdrawals. Serious reactions. They call him the tremors very painful. So he drank. Now, this all started when he was in the war in Vietnam. This individual went over when he was 19 to Vietnam and he said when he was in Vietnam, everything was provided. Any kind of substance he needed, whether it was marijuana or alcohol, to cope with the stress of being in war every day, and people were under the influence a lot of the time in that situation according to him. Well, that was how he dealt with it and how it was expected that people would deal with war. When he came back to the United States, the way he dealt with the aftermath was to keep drinking, and he drank consistently. For decades, he just drank as a way of dealing until he was drinking at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and after dinner, he drank all day long. Well, we got to the point in his life where he was the drinking was starting to really take a toll on his life. One of the benefits he got out of it was it repressed a part of himself that he had experienced all the way back in Vietnam, but it also repressed the part of himself that showed up in his family and showed up as a business owner and showed up in all these different areas of his life. He wasn’t bringing himself to the game. He was always under the influence and because of that, his relationship fell apart. He was estranged from his kids, he had lost his house but he hadn’t lost his business. He made a decision though that he had to do things differently now and came into the treatment center that I was a director of.

Now, this was at the time a six-month inpatient treatment facility. Great guy, after a while he went through, we had medical help to help him get through all the withdrawal symptoms of alcoholism when you stop. But then when he was clean off alcohol, he started having some difficult experiences, flashbacks. Suddenly, walking down the city street, he would see the Vietcong on the building across the street and snipers in windows. He was having hallucinatory flashbacks in a way that was absolutely debilitating to him. What I discovered in this process and helping him uncovering, unpack these layers and layers and layers in getting down to the core, the core of who he is, the core of his own vitality, his own energy, his own basic goodness to peel back, all these layers of self-hatred and loathing and repression, everything and get back to that core was an innocent 18-year-old. And then to help him build on top of that to become the person he wanted to be was phenomenal. To watch his eyes brighten up every day and to see him become more and more in charge of his own life every day. It was absolutely phenomenal. Then to watch as he reconnected with his spouse and rebuilt that relationship, and rebuilt a relationship with his children and with his community, and took his business to the next level, he became the person that it was truly possible for him to be. This was such a powerful experience for me when I realized that he’s no different than most people. Now, most people aren’t alcoholics, but we are all dealing with something. We’re all trying to manage ourselves in a way and be the best we can, but we don’t necessarily know how and what I found like discovering that time was people who get resources allocated their way to becoming better at being human or people who are having big difficulties in doing it wrong, or people who are in leadership positions and what I discovered is people who are in leadership positions, their decisions impact the most amount of people possible. If you’re a leader of a company in an organization, your decisions impact the livelihoods of everybody in that organization. It is absolutely critical that you get it right. It’s absolutely critical that you get out of your own way. Then you stop telling yourself the garbage you’re telling yourself, and you clear up your thinking. I know this to be true because after having that experience with that gentleman and watching him reinvent his life and suddenly take his business to the next level and truly find contentment on earth, contentment as a human, I recognize this is something that everybody needs, but nowhere is it more important than people who have the influence of others-leaders. This was the first thing that cemented in me, a commitment, a commitment to help people grow as leaders.

As a psychotherapist, I began applying the same things that were effective in transforming individuals who need help to the organization. And started studying the craft of leadership academically as well as experientially, and became a leader of these organizations. One thing led to another and fast for over a decade and now I’m working solely as an executive development consultant and helping leaders develop themselves so they can grow their companies and their organizations. Living down in North Carolina working for the consulting firm that I worked for, we ran a five-day flagship workshop. Now, in many ways it was kind of reflective to the six-month program I worked with, I ran that help people who are in recovery from addiction. But now this was an intensively condensed five-day program for high-powered executives. People who ran large companies, larger organizations, and whose decisions had the biggest impact. These were boot camps. Folks came Monday morning and they worked. They stayed on campus all day, every day, five days a week. I remember one client in particular because a week later after he left, I got a fruit basket delivered to my office. A food basket. This was from his spouse. I had never met her before, but she said I don’t know what happened when my husband came to leadership camp, but thank you. He is a changed man. What happened? Well, guess what most executives experience. They experience a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety. They work hard, they work all the time and they start to lose the sense of what’s important to them a sense of if you’re like most, you understand this. What is really important to them? Because if you’re like most, she caught up in the day-to-day of your work. And the high stakes that you’re involved with every day and what often takes the big sacrifice in the family, your wife, your kids. They see less and less your life, you see less and less of that because you’re continually pulled back into the fray. Often men are really good at being the hero, being the one who fixes things and takes care of business and gets things done. 

Not necessarily the guy who’s good at giving himself permission to set boundaries, right? To spend family time. Almost without exception, in every business I work with I see the same story again and again and again. The man becomes the marginal Roman, but who’s ever the executive at the helm becomes the merger. They work too much. They sacrificed themselves. They sacrificed their family. They sacrificed their, their kids, and ultimately it’s not a sustainable path because as you experience that level of stress, your brain starts to operate how it, uh, changes how it’s functioning. Your limbic system starts to take over and affect your decision, your decision making. So I remember this one individual whose wife sent me the fruit basket a week later. He came into this five-day workshop. There are nine other executives in the room with him. He was a hardened individual. He knew what he needed to do and how we needed to do it as a leader. I wouldn’t say he was completely closed to the process, but he wasn’t excited to be there. He was tapped by the board. It’s your time. We need you to get better. Of course, like most executives, he believed he was doing the best he could, but he didn’t know what he didn’t know. And this is one of those experiences that cemented in me that commitment to growing leaders because I watched as we took him through the process ii’s like the Marines peeled, help him peel back the layers, peel back the layers of self-belief and the concepts he had he had created and understand the patterns that were playing out in his belief system, peeled everything back till he was completely vulnerable and yet look at himself with complete clarity and complete awareness and honesty and then build the layers back up in the way that allowed him to be the person he wanted to be as a leader and had the impact he wanted to have, it was phenomenal. In fact, I remember watching this hardened executive. Now, this was a pretty progressive program. Watching his heart and executive just go through this emotional turmoil with tears on his face that he has never experienced before. Regarding the stuff he had been holding for decades that had been affecting how he led, it has been affecting the results he was getting in his business. It was affecting the results in his life and his relationship, but he didn’t see it. It was all hidden buried beneath the surface and what came on the surface was the hardened executive who could get stuff done. But underneath it, was the vulnerable individual that he was completely out of touch with. And when he learned to merge the two, I watched the person who left at the end of that week and it was distinctly different than the person that came in. In fact, part of the process was a 360 assessment, right? So we would do an assessment for their entire organization to give the executive feedback and then do the same assessment six months later and the results were starkly different. Six months later, he was behaving in a completely different way. And guess what, he was happier. 

He was more content. He was more satisfied and he created an organization that was thriving. Simply because of that self-awareness, we peel back the layers and learn to be honest with ourselves and learn to really understand what got him here, as I always say, weren’t going to get him where he wants to go, who’s getting in his own way. Thanks to the board for tapping him on the shoulder to go be part of this process. He transformed himself, transformed his life, transformed his leadership, and because of that, his community, the community that’s impacted by his organization, it’s so much better off. That’s the second experience I had that really cemented in me. That commitment to leadership development. Being part of that crew and facilitating that five-day workshop as I did that for close to 10 years and watched the transformative power of that workshop and somehow it impacted the businesses when they return, I was 90% of the way to full commitment. But there’s one more experience I had that absolutely sealed the deal.

The last major experience I want to talk about that completely changed how I understand leadership and my commitment to it happened as I was working more in the capacity of a business coach. As a business coach, my job was to go in and work with business owners to help them grow their businesses. It wasn’t psychological. It wasn’t as much about leadership or team development or culture. It was about small business owners understanding all the metrics and the different areas in their business that they need to focus on to grow. Whether it’s sales and marketing, its financial business, analytics, or operations, to be able to tackle the whole business and scale it. One of the things that I recognize with one particular organization I was working for, one leader I was working for, is that he was on a roller coaster. And the roller coaster of his business was driving a roller coaster in his state of mind,  he became very reactive. I watched up and down and up and down as the business was feast or famine. So many businesses are and during times of feast he was happy and his family was good. During times of famine, when we traced back and looked at the history of his company during those famine times or when his family started to pull apart at the scene, his relationship suffered and his self-concept suffered and he started to feel depressed. He started to feel anxiety. During those times when the business hit the down part of the cycle. When we were able to plot out and identify where the areas of his focus needed to be, at what stage of the development as we scale the business up to help make sure we had clear marketing and sales plan so we could bring the business in and then to be able to make sure operations was clearly executing it, the most effective level high quality on time, low waste products and then going to be able to measure the profitability in the margin of all the different products as he did that more and more, we started to eliminate the well, we didn’t eliminate the roller coaster, but we made the downswings less and less impactful and upswings were higher and higher and higher. Until over years. That business grows more and more and more, and you are more removed from that emotional turmoil that happens when business owners experience that natural cycle that happens in just about every business. And as that happened, I watched his life start to transform. He stepped more into his own shoes. He was driven less by emotional reactivity because he had a thriving business, had a multi $1,000,000 business. An 8 figure business that was doing really well and growing and scaling and then paying attention to the culture he built allowed him to have an impact across the culture. In the form of the livelihood of those people who were there, they like to show up to work. They like to be there. They did the heavy lifting for him, and he then began to experience that kind of freedom that can happen when you let go and let others do the work they want to do and need to do, and let them really be self-autonomous and drive the success of the business when you do that, there’s a certain sense I saw in this individual of relief and relaxation, and he became. The best leader possible. The best leader he could possibly be by letting go and by delegating and scaling this business and having all those clear systems in place. When I watched the impact that had on him and not only him but his family and not only his family but the family of individuals, he called his work. There were 100 different individuals working there, and each one of them changed as he changed, they felt more secure and that the entire community then was impacted by him when I saw those kinds of impacts, those kinds of impacts when individual leaders change and become better, it impacts not only themselves, but it’s a resounding like a stone thrown into a pond, rippling out and has a huge impact.

So these kinds of experiences have created in me a profound drive and need to be, to help leaders take it to the next level. Like to get out of their own way. Whether it’s someone using alcohol and drugs to compensate. Or an executive who has hardened over time. It always has to be the top performer, and that performance is getting in the way. Or an executive who is reacting to business growth and can’t scale up the business. All of these points back to the same thing. For me folks, if they can do it, if they can create this transformative impact for themselves, for their family, for their life, and for their business and the business community, if they can create that kind of radical impact in their business, then you can do it. Then you can too, and that’s why I do the work that I do to help individuals just like you have that radical impact in your life to lead with intention and to create an impact in your community that makes the world better off by creating successful organizations that are profitable with high revenue, big customer base, that have the impact. That’s unparalleled.

Folks. Hey Doctor Kevin here. Love talking about how to create more impact in your business. In fact, it is, though it’s my purpose, my purpose in life is helping businesses do that. So stay tuned for the next video and learn more about how you can create and how you can learn those tools and techniques to create more impact, more wealth in your business.

Bye for now.