IDL57 Season 2: Hero on a Mission: How Leaders Adapt, with Tyler Dickerhoof
Can you make heroic choices? How do leaders become heroes? What is the meaningful journey that leaders need to go through to embody and become the heroic persona?
In this podcast episode, Tyler shares his insights on his March book of the month, Hero on a Mission. Its author, Donald Miller, has written several memoirs as well as business books, and in Hero on a Mission he offers leaders another tool to use in their toolbox.
IN THIS EPISODE WE DISCUSS:
A new tool for your leadership toolbox (1:40)
Characters in the story (6:10)
Heroes envision better futures (11:00)
A new tool for your leadership toolbox
Leaders can find inspiration and knowledge in different aspects of life, from podcasts to books, sports, and courses.
These are blueprints of different ideas that leaders can draw ideas from on how to strengthen and grow their teams and their businesses.
If something does not work, look at the blueprint and consider how to change it. If something does work, look at the blueprint and see how it succeeded.
Hero on a Mission provides leaders with new tools for their leadership toolbox to utilize when something happens that is new and the original blueprint will not cut it.
Characters in the story
The victim: life happens to a person and they become the victim by exclaiming, “woe is me”
The villain: the victim takes action negatively against their circumstances and only looks out for themselves
The hero: the victim that decides to make something more of their circumstances
The guide: the person who helps the victim transform into the hero
Everyone is a leader in some shape or form. Someone in your life looks to you for guidance and wisdom because there are things each person can do that another may struggle with. In this sense, each person has a potential leader within them.
Heroes envision better futures
A person becomes a hero when they envision a better, healthier, and brighter future and dedicate their time and energy to bringing it to fruition.
People and leaders alike become heroes when they share their vision with those around them and engage with them. Heroes engage with conflict with compassion and energy to solve and soothe instead of win or silence.
Resources, books, and links mentioned in this episode:
BOOK | Donald Miller – Hero on a Mission: A Path to a Meaningful Life
BOOK | Donald Miller – Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen
BOOK | Donald Miller – Business Made Simple: 60 Days to Master Leadership, Sales, Marketing, Execution, Management, Personal Productivity, and More
BOOK | Viktor Frankl – Man's Search for Meaning
BOOK | Ecclesiastes (The Bible)
The Impact Driven Leader YouTube Channel
Join the Impact Driven Leader Community
Connect with Tyler on Instagram and LinkedIn
Email Tyler: tyler@tylerdickerhoof.com
About the Impact Driven Leader Podcast
The Impact Driven Leader Podcast, hosted by Tyler Dickerhoof, is for Xillennial leaders who have felt alone and ill-equipped to lead in today's world. Through inspiring interviews with authors from around the world, Tyler uncovers how unique leadership strengths can empower others to achieve so much more, with real impact.
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It’s when we create our script that we are no longer trying to perform for performance’s sake.
Tyler Dickerhoof
Podcast Transcription
[TYLER DICKERHOOF]
All right, welcome back to the Impact Driven Leader podcast. This your host, Tyler Dickerhoof, whether you're watching on YouTube - yes, did you know that we also post all of these interviews on YouTube? You can go to the Impact Driven Leader YouTube channel to be able to watch those. Would love for you guys to watch them, comment there - or if you're listening, wherever you're listening to on this podcast, your favorite podcast player, would love for you to rate, subscribe, leave us a comment. We just got a couple new comments and love hearing from people just what they're learning. My sole mission on hosting this podcast is to be able to help other leaders get healthy too. In that process, I need to make sure that I'm daily practicing ways to be healthy, whether that is having great conversations with guests that I normally have, or like today.
Today's a solo. I am going to be sharing with you about the newest book, the book that will be our book for the book of the month, for March, Hero on a Mission. For those of you watching on YouTube, you can see the cover of it right there by Donald Miller. It's his latest release. If you're not familiar with the author, Donald Miller, he's written several memoirs and then a handful of business books, Building a StoryBrand, Business Made Simple, and now this book Hero on a Mission.
I'm excited to be able to unpack it today, share a little bit, not spoil it. There's a whole lot more in the book I'm not going to get into. We'll talk about it in the book level. We'll talk about it as part of the round table, but I want to introduce it to as the audience today as another tool to use in your leadership toolbox. As I talk to different leaders, as I read different books, one of the things that really catches me by surprise is how many times authors speakers, presenters, and this is not a shot over the bow. This is just something that I question I think about is how many of them build in a framework or a blueprint?
I think about it like this, I'm a sports fan. I believe it's like this, if we have our NFL playbook, we just wrapped up a couple weeks ago with the Super Bowl, the Los Angeles Rams winning. If the head coach Sean McVay, if he had one playbook and he said, these are our plays, learn our plays, these are our handful of plays, these are the only plays that we will ever play with. So he goes out into a game and he goes through his playbook and they're getting beat or maybe they have a play that work. They go back to that play and it we're works again. They're like, well, this is the play. This is we'll just keep doing this.
Some coaches have that model. It's like, keep running a play until it doesn't work anymore. But all of a sudden, when it doesn't work, do you say we need to scrap our offense? Do you say that, oh, that no longer works. It must be wrong. Or did you not take time to learn why it worked in the first place? Yes, that's what I believe when we come into leadership. There's a lot of interactions. There's a lot of situations that happen in our daily leadership journey that we've never seen before. I mean, the pandemic, as we're waning into the waning days of what that looks like with all the different protocols and all the different restrictions, we're starting to see less and less.
We go back over this two plus year process and how many people were prepared for what the pandemic offered, the challenges, leading people, the challenges of meeting people with empathy and practicing that out that you hear me talk about so often. I think the businesses and the leaders that really struggled were ones that were looking for that exact play." They were waiting to call Sean McVey on the headset and say, "Coach, what play do we run here? I saw that from a lot of leaders, regardless of their tenure of leading. They were looking for a mentor. They were looking for someone to say, "Hey, what play do I put in here? What play do we run?" Often what happened is people were lost. Donald Miller talks about it in his book, Hero on a Mission.
I had the opportunity, not only if I read the book, but I had the opportunity when I was at a leadership event last fall. I was at John Maxwell's exchange program and Donald came and spoke to us. That's when I first heard about this and as soon as I heard Donald go through it and he started talking about it, and he made a couple points and he made this point right here. We have this script, we have a scripted play, like the Super Bowl, the Los Angeles Rams had plays that they were going to go run.
As Donald shares, when all of a sudden, there's no longer a play book, when you take that playbook, you throw it out the window and you're like, what next, that's where we get lost. That is what Donald shares in his book Hero on a Mission. we've gone through a season here where we no longer had scripts, where we weren't sure what follows along in the plot next. That happens to us in life. You think about it; we're born, we go through childhood, we start school. Then we go through school, we graduate school, then we move on to a profession or further education.
Once we get through that, then all of a sudden we start to, we look for a mate, we be get married, or maybe we really try to drive through our career and really develop our profession. Then maybe we have kids. It happens a lot of times to people that are my age, maybe your age or into our early forties. We're like, what next? What does life have for me next? Why am I doing what I'm doing? Why are things happening to me? Do I choose to look around and say, oh as Donald describes in his book, there's four different types of people there, four different personas that you can have at any moment; that's a victim, oh, wow was me, man.
This is how life happened to me. These are my circumstances. It's always going to be like this. It's just, oh, this is what it is. Or maybe it's the villain. The villain is the character that I find most intriguing. As Donald describes it in different ways you think about your favorite movie who that villain is. That villain has usually been hurt just as much as the victim, but instead of the victim choosing to be wow, is me, the villain decides I'm going to get back at them. I'm going to look out for me and me only. Then I'm going to attack out of my pain. Whereas the victim just wallows in their pain.
There's a third person in every movie and every story. That's the hero. The person that decides to look around and say, there isn't a script here. There's maybe not a plot line. There's maybe not an exact thing to follow. I'm not just going to continue along. They choose to make something more. As Donald talks about in his book, he goes into the discussion for mans search of meeting by Victor Frankel and quite a lot of his book. When we come through this, the seasons of life and we're asking what's next, ultimately the question really that we're answering is what does life mean? What do I mean?
I've shared this with many people. If you're new to the podcast, I thank you for joining here. One of the things that I've done for seven years, I had a coach really impress upon me the value of growing in my wisdom. I chose to do that, part of a daily routine that I've had now for going on almost four years. That's reading the book of Proverbs every day. I'm a person of faith and so it fits into that line of faith. But I also know that Solomon, the author of Proverbs is widely respected through a lot of different beliefs.
As I continue to go through that book, one of the things that interests me is not that book, but another book that he wrote. Again, if you're someone of Christian faith or Judaism beliefs, then you understand these books. It's the book of Ecclesiasts. It was written by Solomon. In that book, Solomon, much like Victor Frankel was at a point in life like why, what is this about? It's this journey of asking those questions that I've wrestled with. I've wrestled it with at times, I've wrestled in my early adulthood. I can remember leaving college. I was 20, 21 years old and I'm like, why is this? What is this about? Why am I here?
It took me some 20 years later to be able to answer that, to understand the meaning. It's why I have this podcast; is to help other leaders get healthy too, because I had to get healthy. That's my story. Well, that ties in with Donald's book here, Hero on a Mission as we've discussed the victim, the villain. Now we're talking about this hero. This hero is every one of us. As Donald describes in the book is the moment that we decide to no longer be a victim, the moment that we no longer decide to be the villain is the moment we decide to take on the heroes place in the book, in the story.
I think this is what's most pivotal. As everyone that's listening, that maybe you're aspiring to be a leader, maybe you're a leader, I challenge you that the reality is every one of us are leaders in some way, shape or form. There's someone looking at us that we have an impact or influence over. And part of being the Impact Driven Leader and choosing that mindset is to make an impact that drives people's lives to something better. So this idea of a hero that Donald breaks down in his book is that we're choosing to say, my life has more meaning there's a purpose to my life. I'm here for something.
Donald talks about it in his book. Victor Frankel has a three step plan for finding meaning and part of that is really understanding this evolution of a hero. We've seen it in every single movie. It's this idea of how did the hero become the hero? As Donald shares from Victor's work, it's the vision of a better future. You choose to latch onto a meaning in life. That hero chooses to be better because they have a vision for a better future, whether it's them helping others, whether it's helping themselves in helping others, but it's a vision for a better future. As a leader, our greatest opportunity to lead people is by sharing the vision that we have and inviting them into it.
The second step as Donald released here from Victor Frankel was this idea that we have an interest in the world outside of ourselves. I came up with this the other day. I was thinking about it is the idea between being a narcissist and someone who is completely oblivious, is that a narcissist, in order that they live, they have to be a benefit of someone else in order that they can have everything they wanted. If I had all the world's gold, I need to trade that gold for my food to live to whatever else. I mean, have all the golds world, but I make a trade. In the process of trading that someone else is getting benefited.
If I'm a complete indentured servant to society, and all of a sudden I look in and everyone's going to hand out to me, I'm indentured, it's so much. I'm allistic. That's the proper word. I'm either a narcissist or altruistic. Please bear with me as we're going through this. I'm trying to stay with my notes here, but if we're completely altruistic, at some point, we have to care enough for ourself to take care of ourselves. As I unpack this here from Victor Frankel, as it's shared, and the book Hero on a Mission is the first step; is to have a vision for a better future.
The next is an interest outside of the world of myself, which to me is really moving that narcissist to an altruistic position. But yet the altruistic person has to have some type of self-belief that you get outside yourself, but yet you're of value to the world. I believe that's the step that we we can find ourselves into is finding that middle ground. Now, the last one I think is this further step, is the willingness to engage, to engage conflict, to be a part of it.
Donald talks a lot about it. It's a discussion from Victor Frankel, Logo Therapy. He released it post World War II after he was released from the concentration camp. This idea of people can't find meaning when they numb themselves with leisure, it's really conflict endured brings meaning. It goes back to the discussion I had earlier when Solomon wrote the book Proverbs. Then after that, he wrote the book at Ecclesiasts. If you're familiar with that book, he quite honestly, Solomon's like, whoa is life. Why does this all been? It's all worthless. At the end of it's like because of that, it's all worth it.
That's what I learned here from Victor Frankel. That's what I learned from reading from Donald; is this idea that life isn't about pleasure. It's been said that delight can't truly shine without darkness. Said another way, stars are the brightest when the sky is the darkest. It's this idea that conflict endured brings meaning. It is the story up until the point where the hero is like, I want to be changed and a part of that change that that entire journey has meaning.
I shared this with a friend and it could be really hard. It could be hard to wrap your arms around and really sit in the place of understanding why is this? What meaning is this life? I've shared before, if you're new to the Impact Driven Leader podcast, thank you for being here, but part of my journey and story is when I was 14 years old, my younger brother died in a farming accident. He was three, I was 14. This further goes on to that, that question of what meaning do I have in life as a 20, 21 year old?
It was a couple years ago, as I've shared that I had the revelation that his life had meaning. I would not be here talking about this. I would not be sharing the journey that I had to walk through. To understand the barriers around myself that protected me, the armor that I wore, the conditions that I learned to be protective of myself were the very barriers that held me back from being in relation, connection and the ability to lead others. It was the story I had written as a villain, or maybe as a victim until the choice I made as a hero.
It was through that experience and understanding the experiences I had, there was value in them to share with others. That gets us into the fourth person that Donald talks about in his book hero and a mission. I think this is where we transitioned from that person of engaging, acting, that contributor, that person that's a part of the team to someone that's leading the team, to someone that helps others make a greater impact. That's the guide. Donald in his previous book, Building a StoryBrand walks through the description of the guide as yellow Yoda, Yoda two Luke Skywalker. You could go through a lot of other examples, but it really is that mentor, that person that helps guide the person, the hero through what they once were.
Now, it's that action to me that makes this book very compelling. It's the idea that not only are we following life scripts. At some point, we're going to no longer see a script of which to watch and play out. We need to create our own script. It's when we create our own script, that we're no longer trying to perform for performing sake. If you've listened to the previous episode where I interviewed Sabrina Horn, the idea of make it don't fake it to me, a faker is a villain. We're choosing to be a hero in making it, and only by these steps of making it can I then turn around and offer my hand to someone else.
So they too can make it. That then leads me into the place of being a guide. I believe ultimately that in order to be a guide, you have to go through your hero journey, that journey of understanding why you are what you are; to go through all the different facets of your story and then to sit down with a clean slate and write a new story. What routines do you need to put in place? What barrier years do you need to put around you? Who do you need to invite into your story to be the character that maybe is going to act as your guide, or maybe they're going to help direct you in the path to find that place? So we all have difficult aspects of our story, and we can choose to let them cloud us and weigh us down like the victim, or we can choose to be jealous, have vengeance, stay where we're at and play the victim.
Or we can choose to transform to become the hero, to become the hero in our story, to be an example for others; to say, yes, you do have meaning. You have value. You're valuable to me. Just like you listening. If you didn't choose to listen to it, I might still record it, but it wouldn't have value. My hope and desire is as you're listening to this podcast today, as you're collecting some of this information, as you're thinking about what would it be to be a hero yourself, maybe hopefully you go out and buy Donald's book, go through the practices he has. I encourage you to do it with someone else.
Because what I've learned is it's real easy to sync back into the villain place, or to tell yourself that you're the victim. But when you're linked to arms with someone else, man, that's when it's easy to transform. A hero is the one that learns and transforms. How a hero solidifies that as part of their being and really writing out that script is the moment that they decide to be a guide and help others win.
Too often I think a leader chooses to follow the same scripts that were written before them. It was the leader during the pandemic that was looking around and choosing to protect and following the scripts of other people, as opposed to following the script and understanding why they were doing what they were doing. Because it's the offensive coordinator in the Super Bowl that can look at a play, understand what the other team's doing and say, "Hey, if we turn this, if we tweak this, if we stop being the villain or the victim, and we create a new lens to look through it, we're the hero and everyone else gets to join us."
Because it's not about me winning. It's about how can I help others win because that's what a guide does. I believe a person who chooses to be a leader that makes an impact stops and looks at their story, takes account of it, appreciates where they're at and why, acknowledges the challenges, the hardships, the fire that rendered them who they are today and says, you're worth it. I'm going to act myself to help you win. I'm going to play my position the best I can; not so I look good, but so you look really good. Because I believe that's what it means to go from a hero to a guide. I believe when you do that and you become a hero on a mission.
I invite you to now take part in the Impact Driven Leader book club. You can join along with us this month as we read through the Hero on a Mission. I'll give you a question every day to ponder. You could even get ready and geared up for joining the round table. We'll start again with another offering of that here in April. I hope you got value out of this a little bit shorter episode, not an interview, but just me sharing my own context; what I learned from this book, what I learned from sitting down, listening and taking notes from Donald that day back in November.
Because there's a lot of things that I've had to apply and learn and change because I'm, re-writing the story of what it is to be a hero in my life, knowing that there's people that look at me, whether it's my wife, my children, other people around me that I don't even know are watching me. And I can have a tremendous amount of influence on them and be impactful in their life. But in order to be a guide in their life, I first have to be a hero in my life. I have to learn to transform and I have to put people around me that walk with me in that pursuit. I hope you choose to do the same.
I truly hope you got value out of this episode today, because my mission is to help other leaders get healthy too. If you got value from this, I'd love for you to share it with someone else, subscribe, give a review, rating wherever you listen. Or if you're watching on YouTube. Thanks for watching. You got to see my shiny teeth and shiny head today. But I appreciate you being a part of this community because when the, as it's said, when the leader gets better, everyone gets better. When a hero wins, everyone wins.
Thank you for being here. I'll catch you guys next time.
