Episode Transcript.

What’s up guys, welcome back to THE am.

So I’m gonna talk about leadership, and I’m gonna start with just a little background, some context to give you guys just some more information as I go into this earlier, in an earlier episode, I really mentioned now 2024 was one of the best years of my life, and the hardest year of my life. And I want to talk about leadership from this aspect, because there are levels to it.

The harder things get in life. Going back to what I said, best year of my life, hardest year in my life, okay, during the hard moments and when there are hard calls to make, it requires another level of maturity in leadership, because you are not making decisions for yourself, right? You’re not making decisions if you’re in a leadership role and there’s that authority in your life, right to make decisions and to make hard calls or to determine the course of a company or a team, and you’re doing that, there has to be a level of maturity to make the hard decisions in hard times, right?

For instance, you’ve got to downsize, or you’ve got to let go of certain people in your team. Or, for instance, cool budgets are not going to be as extensive as they were, or whatever there. There’s all this stuff happening, whatever it is, hard decisions. The reason why I’m bringing this up is when that occurs, it requires another level of maturity and another level of leadership to do what is right and what is best for everybody.

A lot of leading people is not doing what’s best for me, poor leaders are actually selfish. They’ll do what’s best for them, right? They’ll do what’s best for them. Oh, I want my bonus, so I’ll make sure that we we cut budget and not give out Christmas bonuses. So I get my bonus, whatever, because I’m meeting budget or meeting my things. That selfish leadership, that’s really poor leadership.

A good leader and a great leader, somebody who’s going to be very selfless throughout their journey in that process, and whatever the team is. And I’m saying this because the harder things are to make good decisions, the more selfless you must become. I don’t want to do that. It’s going to make me look bad. Well, that’s probably the decision you need to make. If people are going to think poor of you for making that decision, that’s probably the decision you need to make, because it’s what’s best for them, not you.

And so I’m saying this because when things get hard, part of your job as a leader is to help provide perspective, context, to help boost morale within the team, because if it’s hard for you, it’s going to be hard for them, and probably harder for them, and it’s very important to see that your job is to help provide context. Your job is to help provide a correct and healthy perspective, and your job is to help set next steps to ensure success for everybody else, whatever is about to occur, or whatever hardship is occurring, where you’re setting everybody up as best as possible for the next best move that is available to them.

And this gets lost, because when things get hard, when we experience pain, one of the first things that begins to happen to us is we turn inward. And by that, I mean this, when we experience pain, if you’ve ever broken a bone, if you ever had a really deep cut, if you ever experience physical pain, one of the first things you do is you grab whatever area it is, you hold it, you go out, and all you think is that hurts, that hurts, that hurts, and you’ve lost all context and all perspective about what’s happening outside of you and outside of that moment. And that’s actually where a lot of stuff happens, right? Like I grew up running around in the woods. We get hurt, but sometimes we’re we’re a couple miles from the house, growing up off in the woods, doing stuff, we get hurt, and then it’s like, if I don’t stay calm, I gotta hike back, I gotta think about where I’m going, I’ll get hurt more, right?

I remember we were playing, and my brother got slammed into a tree in a robe swing. We thought he broke his hip, and he is in severe pain, but it’s like one of us has to be calm to help him get back to the house, so that more injury doesn’t occur, and so that we lessen whatever’s whatever is about to happen. He didn’t break his hip, but we thought he did. It was that bad and but we but it was. The whole point was to stay calm and to do the selfless thing, to come out, and then to pick our heads up, to look, to make sure nobody else got hurt. Things didn’t get worse, and we didn’t do anything because we were ways off from the house, and we didn’t have cell phones, right? We didn’t have cell phones back then.

I think it’s just so important to do the same thing as a leader when it’s hard, you actually need to stand up to do the selfless thing and to move forward in selflessness and to do what is best for everybody and set everybody else up for the right move. When it gets hard, you can’t just look inward to become selfish. You cannot look inward to become selfish and only think about how much it hurts you, or what people are going to think about you, or what people are going to do if you’re. Really worried that people are going to think badly about you. You’re really worried about people’s opinions.

That is one of the biggest changes you need to make to become a healthy leader. Because healthy leaders not worried about that. They’re worried more about their people and their people’s livelihoods and the outcomes in their lives too.

Anyways, guys, I’m out of time, so I’ll catch you later. Peace.