Ep23 Developing Deep Leadership in Your Organization

Jason Croft:
Welcome to Concentric everyone. Gary, how is it going?

Gary De Rodriguez:
It's going great, my friend. How are you?

Jason Croft:
I'm good! Rocking and rolling, glad to be jumping back into doing these.

Gary De Rodriguez:
Yeah, me too. It's like, um, I always look forward to when we can catch up and have a conversation and I think it's going to be a great, a great podcast tonight. So I'm really happy to be here.

Jason Croft:
Yeah, me too. This is good. I like this topic that you brought up today. And I haven't heard it really talked about in this way. So this idea of deep leadership, right? And I have my own ideas of what that could be. And of course, leadership as a term and a focus is a great buzzword out there because it is something really important. But as you pointed out before we jumped on here, a lot of it is kind of surface level. It's like, it's bare minimums, right? Like you're going through, you're going to be a manager, you need to learn some leadership. It's X, Y, Z, right? And what we're going to get into today is a much deeper concept and a much deeper aspect of leadership. So walk us through what that means to you and how we should be thinking about it in terms of deep leadership.

Gary De Rodriguez:
Well, I'm going to just give you a little bit of history on how I kind of arrived at this place of really desiring to develop trainings, in-house trainings and public trainings on deep leadership. And one of the reasons because many of the organizations I've been working in for years now, the leadership development curriculums that they've been exposed to. have been all behavioral based. You do this, you get this result. It's all about changing behaviors as a leader to another set of standards that have been laid out by a variety of different leadership gurus through the years, which is all admirable, it's all good. There's everything good about that. However, what's not good about it? is that very, very seldomly can an individual who is embracing the leadership concepts actually bring it into the DNA of their behavior, their thoughts, their beliefs. Rarely can they do that. Most of the time, because it's behaviorally oriented, we do not ask this one fundamental question, which is what drives behavior? Because if you're trying to shift your team's behavior or your leadership prospects behavior, if you're trying to shift that, the thing that begins to occur is you never seem to ask the question, what drives behavior? So what drives behavior is always our emotional states. And so then the next question, the next deep leadership question down is, If you know it's emotions that drive behavior, then what creates the emotions? Because it would only make sense that if you're gonna really make sustainable changes to a leader's DNA, you have to go to the very, very deepest level of where it all starts. And that is the way that they perceive their world, which is what will then create the emotional response, which then drives the behavior. So then you come back to what constitutes the way a person perceives their world. Like what is the glue that holds that together? And when we're having the leadership idea or training that we wanna present and we know we want certain outcomes to happen in our fledgling leadership development that we have maybe for up and coming managers or people that are higher up in the organization. and someone's going to be retiring in the executive team and we have to bring up a leader from the ranks and files to fill that position or higher from without, we have to make sure that they're first of all a good cultural fit, second of all, that they have the internal wherewithal to be able to hold that position in a way that's going to exhibit the values and the mission and the purpose of the organization. They have to be a great cultural fit. So when we look down, how do we then evolve people to actually become that conscious, aware, humanistically based, cultural driven, values driven, purpose of the organization infused leader, how do we do that? You have to begin at the base core of that individual's personality. You have to help them understand. First of all, what's driving their behavior? This is the heartbeat of what I call deep self-awareness. Not like, oh, I'm self-aware of that, I just said that thing and it may have offended X, Y, and Z person over here. Self-awareness is way, way deeper than that. So I have to understand when that person says this over here and I get triggered, What is that? Like, what is the trigger that I'm actually feeling? And if that trigger is a deeply emotion, I have a deep emotional response to it, then what from my history is causing me to respond in that way? Because if you have a adverse emotional response to something in the workplace that someone, either someone said or did, or just their very essence, they trigger you, you have to look at. What is that for me? Because a lot of teams, they have a incongruency together. They're not cohesive because of personality conflicts. But rarely do leaders go, well, what's that for me? Like, why is that? What is that is actually being triggered off? There'll be mediations when people don't get along on an executive team or on a managerial team. where HR will come in, let's sit down, let's talk about this, let's figure out, let's try to understand each other better, but the innate trigger is still there. And it doesn't necessarily, it gets resolved on the surface, but it doesn't get resolved at the deep structure. So. All

Jason Croft:
Yeah, real quick to that.

Gary De Rodriguez:
right.

Jason Croft:
What's what's coming up and what's so fascinating too, is that it there's kind of parallel tracks going here too, because we're talking about becoming a good leader. So we're thinking of that person who is moving into that leadership or they're in that position and they need to be better, right as a leader.

Gary De Rodriguez:
Yeah.

Jason Croft:
But at the same time, not only do they need to get in touch with all of their stuff. like you're talking about and going deep, but they need to then be able to do that with the people they're leading. So it's that person in the leadership, but it's also the people they're leading that it all needs to get addressed at this deeper level.

Gary De Rodriguez:
Absolutely. One of the things that I have discovered and realized and, you know, God, I say I've coached 30,000 people worldwide, but it's probably more like 50,000 people worldwide in my career. I've coached a lot of people. I've been in the trenches for 35 years working with people. And one of the things I consistently discover is that people's issues that are emotionally triggering for them. goes back in time to core traumas that have remained unresolved. Now, as soon as people hear the word trauma in leadership, they're like, oh, I don't have trauma. We all have trauma. It is compounded, small, significant events compound against each other, and they repeat over time through our life until we become so reactive to that particular situation that will evoke that emotional state that we lose our emotional control. And... Peter Drucker said it best, you know, leadership is not about being clever or even smart. It is about consistent, congruent behavior. You cannot have consistent congruent behavior when you are being emotionally triggered by outside circumstances, our people's behavior or words or the way they dress or the way they look or whatever it is. We cannot afford as leaders to have that little self-awareness to allow our emotions to become overwrought. and for us to take actions or have a tone of voice or interact with people that are breaking the cultural, kind of the cultural norms of our organizations and our own personal as well as organizational values. So people will become inspired by leaders who they admire and they feel like they want to follow. It takes years, in my opinion, to win the trust and devotion of individuals that view you as a leader. It takes one conversation to destroy it. So this is why it is so imperative that leaders begin to start understanding they have to do the deep dive. There's no more fooling around. We have to do the deep dive. And that means I have to look at myself like what are the core issues I've been carrying emotionally. even the small ones that compound upon each other and make me upset when I know that I'm over responding to the situation, I don't even understand why. So one of the questions that I always ask myself, because I'm my own laboratory, you know, I'm all about digging in and finding out what's going on. And I remember I got triggered, just recently actually, I got triggered by this woman at... at our pool. I live in this kind of country club place and late at night I go there and I just hang out in the warm water. It's pretty warm here and fireflies are in the forest and it's really beautiful. And this is an adult kind of environment, right? And this woman comes late at night, started coming late at night with like five middle school boys in tow. So you know what that's like. I'm like, uh. There's also several adults over here like with me and we're in the pool and your kids are all doing cannonballs in the pool and I'm like, this is not okay. You know, like this is really not okay. And I kept feeling like why am I so, I mean convenience, but why am I really angry? Like almost a mild like rage building up inside of me. I'm thinking I'm super over responding like what the heck is this? And so... I started thinking about who does she remind me of, who does she trigger off in me, who in my past has actually been like this, at least in my mind. And I landed on this whole slew of memories that I had not worked on myself, where I won't go into that story, but it was a whole slew of memories when I was in my probably early 30s, I was living in this community. And there is this woman who was just like aggressively calling the police on us. I mean, it was outrageous. And so I just thought, wow, you know, she is evoking those sayings in me. And we have to remember that obstacle is always the way, meaning the obstacle, the emotional obstacle, gives us an insight into the emotional states that we don't have handled. And so if we don't have it handled, it goes back to a root cause. If we find the root cause, we can begin to unravel the gestalt of it all and respond way differently. I've actually made friends with her because I went in and started working on all of that stuff from that period of time. And what I mean by working on it is, you know that I developed the trauma memory solution technique. That's a technique I train in organizations, I train in public seminars. It decodes your nervous system in anywhere from 10 minutes to 25 minutes from any trauma. So I go through and I make a list of the memories that I have a negative response to, and I neutralize them in my nervous system. If we're not sitting on a pile of unresolved emotional stuff, that this trigger over here, like that lady at the pool, would trigger off in me. I, at that moment, I had to get up and actually leave. I had to get up, get in my golf cart and leave because I couldn't, I knew if I said anything, I was gonna way betray my values. I was gonna sink into like not a good place. So I left. And so I started working on it, working on it, working on it, and I went back. And I've been back several times when she's there. And I did all this work on myself. We actually got in a conversation. I actually said, you know, this is... you know, an adult pool, if we could just manage to either stagger the times you're here, or, you know, so I can come at a different time and commit to that, that would be awesome. Or if, you know, you could keep your children from cannonballing and screaming, that would be awesome. Or I just come at a time that you're not here and that would be, no one has to change anything. And she goes, oh, we could totally do that. And I said, that would be awesome, thank you so much. You know, but I was able to negotiate that out. in a way that was really respectful of their needs and also of mine. But I would not have been able to do that emotionally charged like I was at the very beginning. I quieted everything down from my history that was no longer being dragged into my present and I was not over responding projecting onto the screen of her life the things I had unresolved from mine. So this becomes a process of leadership that we question First of all, if there is an obstacle, meaning an emotional blockage, like we are triggered, we don't know why, we're just triggered, we think it's them because that's what the ego does, it projects out onto the screen of our current reality and go, it is your fault. When we're doing that, we cannot resolve the issues with other people. Our conversations and our executive team meetings become majorly dysfunctional because there's generally... some sort of conflict between people in the executive teams. Very rarely do people take accountability for their own contribution to the conflict. They will look outside in the cells and blame the other. What I'm suggesting, if we're gonna have a functional executive team or even managerial team, we have to start looking at teaching people the skills that are powerful and effective enough to help shift the history so they don't drag it into the present and projected onto now and disrupt or interrupt the projects, the planning and the strategic innovation that needs to happen to keep the organization at the cutting edge and be competitive in the market. It comes down, always boil down always to what's happening at the executive team level. If they're not functional, then it is like a tsunami wave all the way down. the structures of the organization. This is why executive team members have to go deeper. They have to understand that there are systems that are not out there, they're not taught in your, you know, your other major leadership trainings that are currently being so popular throughout the corporate world. They only come from doing the deep dive into deep leadership where you actually address what's happened to you. The cool thing is, especially with that process I just mentioned, the trauma memory solution technique, it is content free. No one has to divulge any story about anything that has ever occurred to them. They just have to close their eyes and go, okay, well, I got an event, 1969 it happened, or 1980 it happened. I just truly dated myself. 1980 it happened. And just go, this is it. facilitate me and someone else can facilitate him. The executive team members can even facilitate each other. Look, I'm really pissed off at you right now, but I know it relates back to X, Y, and Z. Let me do some thinking on that. I'll come back, maybe we can facilitate each other and get through this easier. The bottom line is, this is the deepest form of self-awareness, the deepest. Executive team members need to know what's driving them. They need to know how to not re-imprint. those particular issues back again. They have to be able to shift their language, change their beliefs, neutralize the traumas that have occurred to them, and take full ownership of their own emotional states. When they do that, they do not contaminate the executive board meetings with nonsense that is a projection from their own issues that they have not addressed. If we're gonna lead, we have to have self leadership first before we can have executive leadership.

Jason Croft:
Yeah. And I love this multi-layered, like, like example that you gave, which is so powerful, because we get a lot of these, what to do in the moment, what to say in the moment, how to navigate and stop and assess and use language that doesn't trigger the, you know, we have those things and they're fantastic, right? But there are certain times, like what you've mentioned, when it's this multi-step of prosph... process or multi-step approach. Again, it's that self-awareness to go, I am, even though they don't even see it right now, I am really overreacting in how angry I am right now or upset

Gary De Rodriguez:
No?

Jason Croft:
or whatever it might be. And then there's nothing in that moment for you to say or do to handle the situation other than step away and go do what you talked about. you mentioned in your example, anything that would have come out, doesn't matter the technique, the phrasing, anything, would have come from this ultra-triggered place. And so first going in, okay, what in the world is causing me to be this upset? And now going through that process, and then you can come back with, you know, the skills that you know maybe you've gotten somewhere else in languaging and how to communicate and all of those things but you're absolutely right until you get to that place and you get that resolution it's not just time some people say you know go count to 10 and come back you know maybe that that's better than you know reacting in the moment but this is the stuff that's really gonna change something and like you mentioned too um i love this because i really hadn't thought about it before the trauma resolution deal that you've got that it really is so corporate friendly in the sense of by its very nature, you aren't divulging anything because I mean, that's I mean, from anybody going into corporate or sharing something corporate, I mean, anybody going into, you know, therapy to sharing something at a corporate level, that's a that's probably letting somebody know I did this or this happened or you know and when you can go through something with this kind of resolution to it without

Gary De Rodriguez:
I have content free, completely

Jason Croft:
oh

Gary De Rodriguez:
content free.

Jason Croft:
that's

Gary De Rodriguez:
And

Jason Croft:
so powerful

Gary De Rodriguez:
this is what's so important to me, anyways, is because there's lots of interventions that help you put a bandaid over your response. So what people will do is put, oh, well, I'm going to change my language. I'm going to use this phraseology or that phraseology. But the bottom line is that almost creates more distrust because that person is stuffing the emotions down. Only 7% of the meaning of your communication is what you say. 38% is your tone of voice, but 55% is your physiology. And your subconscious mind runs your physiology and your subconscious mind is a highly honest and moral entity inside of you. And your... physical body, your body language will betray the containment of your emotions. You'll be silently imploding. You'll start having muscle movements. You'll start having face twitches. You'll do all of that and someone will look over at you and know that you are just barely containing it. You're putting it in a compartment, but you have no resolution. That person that you have managed not to lash out at, is going to read the energy, read the body language, read the tone of voice, and they're going to even have less distrust for you, because they know it's not resolved, and it's going to come out at another time, at another place, are covertly sabotaging you during some part of your job description being executed. So this is what will happen with people if you don't reach the deeper resolution and have it be authentic and transparent. instead of superficial, stuffed and compartmentalized so it looks socially and culturally good to another person. That breeds more distrust in an organization than anything else that I've ever seen. So

Jason Croft:
Yeah.

Gary De Rodriguez:
this is why the authentic stuff is so important, the deep leadership.

Jason Croft:
Oh yeah, and not only that, but there's also an aspect of this of when you truly make that shift and realize not just from a, oh, I'm not going to be upset when Janet does this, whatever, but when you really go and do the deep work and realize that's what it was, and you really are. not triggered anymore by that, it's the most phenomenal thing that their behavior changed. The other person who was triggered, like so much of the time, they'll stop doing that.

Gary De Rodriguez:
Exactly.

Jason Croft:
And there's never been any more like that energy aspect of all of this is very real as well.

Gary De Rodriguez:
It's very real. And I think the extended benefit of doing deep leadership work is that when you are able to use the obstacle as the way to find the thread that goes back in time to the thing you don't have handled, when you are utilizing your life as a way of being extraordinarily curious how you become the most the most aligned leader you can be. That means that when you shift that one thing that used to trigger you off and make you crazy and you project it out, let's say, onto Janet, whoever she is, onto Janet, and you realize it was never Janet. It was the constructs in your own head being projected onto the screen of Janet, you actually begin to finally start seeing her as who she actually is. What that does, it adds a jewel in the crown of your identity and you start to becoming more humane, more compassionate, more empathetic, not by some sort of training you got three months ago, now I have to be empathetic, or I have to think this way, it is something that is a natural state of being. I don't think human beings need to be taught how to love. I think we are love. But what happens for us by the events of our lives, it winds these gossipier cloths around the brightness of who we are, and it dulls our light because we have to protect ourselves from what we've made up about what happened to us. And because we protect ourselves from ever experiencing that level of pain again, we wrap more cloth around it and more cloth around us until we can barely see out of it into the world that actually is. So it creates a naturally more humane, more compassionate, more empathetic leader, not by laying on a set of techniques or a set of behaviors you know you should be doing. It becomes who you are rather than an adaptation to you. This is not about adaptations. It's about awakening our true humanity. by the ceasing of traveling into our future, carrying the boulders of our past.

Jason Croft:
Fantastic. That's so powerful. So somebody's listening to this and they're like, I'm on board. What do they do? What's step one? Is it reaching out to you? Is it learning more there? What happens?

Gary De Rodriguez:
Um, you can contact me at, um, gary at peopleistic.com and that's spelled P E O P L E I S T I C. That's gary at peopleistic.com. That's my email address. I'm very happy to have a conversation with you. Also, you can click into my website, which is peopleistic.com. and that will take you to the website as well. We are an international company. We have our main office in Perth, Australia, our, my US office here in Dallas, Texas, and we're passionate about what we do. It's about, for me, this is my spiritual purpose is to give individuals this, this set of skills. Fundamentally, the government's never gonna do it. Religious organizations are never gonna do it. But consciously run organizations with enlightened leadership at the helm, they're the ones that can contribute to the communities in which they serve and do it consistently. It is probably the best capitalistic edge you could ever get because you endear the communities to you and you spread this air of goodwill. by having philanthropic outreaches into your communities, especially for the kids and the teenagers and helping them grow. I've worked in school districts where kids would pile food on Friday from the cafeteria into the backpacks because they knew they weren't gonna eat that weekend because their parents had no money to feed them. So this is a place where organizations can really make a difference. But first it has to be run by leaders that have resolved their stuff. and gotten out there and created this absolute synergistic executive team that is effective, that is innovative, that thinks outside their own box and has people before profit. And when you do, you make more profit. So that's my dream. If we can empower executive teams to go the distance, to dive deep enough, and to create services that touch millions of people. Why wouldn't you? Because that's the best legacy you could ever leave.

Jason Croft:
Absolutely. It's powerful. This has been a great one. I appreciate

Gary De Rodriguez:
I love

Jason Croft:
you.

Gary De Rodriguez:
it. Appreciate you, buddy. Thank you so much.

Jason Croft:
and we'll see you all next time.

Gary De Rodriguez:
Bye bye.