IDL83 Season 2: Building Great Leaders, Who Build Great Teams with Lucas Jadin

How do you build on your mental strength? What is the toughest challenge that holds you back from being you? Do you want to build a black belt skillset?

Lucas Jadin is the author of two incredible books, Win in The Dark , and The Twin Thieves: How Great Leaders Build Great Teams. Our conversation today looks at insecurity, and together, Lucas and I unpack the ways insecurities affect leaders. Although insecurities are a fact of life, we discuss how to leverage them for growth - using them to build our mental strength.

Meet Lucas Jadin

Lucas Jadin is a professional mindset coach, keynote speaker, and best-selling author who helps world-class business leaders, educators, and elite athletes thrive in competitive environments.

He is the Co-founder of Jadin Jones Coaching and Consulting, as well as the founder of the non-profit Inspire Sports which has served thousands of athletes with special needs.

Lucas has trained professional sports teams and Fortune 500 companies to break through to new levels of resilience, connection, and performance with his transformative mental skills training.

Among the many people impacted by Lucas’ work, Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Robert said, “When it comes to leadership, culture, and mental training, Lucas is the guy I go to and who I trust the most. His work has helped take me and many of our people to another level.”

Lucas has been commissioned by many of the best, including the Los Angeles Dodgers, the US Army, Wells Fargo, MLB, Sherwin Williams, Texas Longhorns and Stryker Medical.

Visit Jadin Jones and connect with Lucas on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

IN THIS EPISODE WE DISCUSS:

• The twin thieves - 03:53

• The source of the twin thieves - 06:21

• Shifting insecurity into strength - 11:33

• How unaddressed insecurities impact the team - 22:59

The twin thieves

For the thousands of people that Lucas interviewed – and many more everyday people in the world – the twin thieves are fear of failure and fear of judgment, and they can keep people stuck and struggling to fully step into who they are.

If you are not aware of the conversations that you have in your head about yourself and what you may need to overcome, then you could be self-sabotaging your greatest dreams if you do not believe and think yourself to be worthy of achieving them.

Lucas helps people individually overcome their inner saboteur and then the teams that they work in so that the whole unit can thrive.

The source of the twin thieves

It may not seem like it but your fear of failure is trying to keep you safe.

So, you are not broken for experiencing the twin thieves because they are biologically wired into all people for survival.

This is why people look to their leaders for guidance.

To overcome the twin thieves, you have to overcome the old mechanisms of fear, past traumas, and fears to find new levels of freedom, peace, and success.

Shifting insecurity into strength

1 – Separate your thoughts from reality

2 – Question your thinking: is this thought 100% true?

3 – Commit to being courageous

How unaddressed insecurities impact the team

Unchecked insecurities can spill over into team spaces.

If the leader does not address the environment and connect with their team members, the shared space will become overrun with poor communication or unproductive, destructive habits such as:

-        Division

-        Gossip

-        Blaming

-        Complaining

-        Defensiveness

Coaches or leaders need to set the example.

You have to also voice and show the choices that you make every day so that your team can see the inner workings of your behaviors and habits.

Resources, books, and links mentioned in this episode:

BOOK | Lucas Jadin and Joshua Medcalf – Win in The Dark: Some Think You Shine Under the Bright Lights [but] the Bright Lights Only Reveal Your Work in the Dark

BOOK | Lucas Jadin and Steve Jones – The Twin Thieves: How Great Leaders Build Great Teams

Visit Jadin Jones and connect with Lucas on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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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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You have to use your voice. It’s [the] voices and the choices that you make every day.

Lucas Jadin

Podcast Transcription

[TYLER DICKERHOOF] Welcome back to the Impact Driven Leader podcast, this is your host, Tyler Dickerhoof. Thanks for listening in. If you're watching on YouTube, what's going on? You might notice I have a little mustache today. It's right. I didn't shave. Our well was out. If you live in a place where you have a well, you understand that there's two things that really, you take for granted, one is electricity, two is running water. Maybe you live in a part of the world that you have to carry buckets. I understand that and today I'm just grateful that we have our water fixed. That's just a piece of life. Has nothing to do with today's podcast, but I just thought I'd share that. Thanks for being here. I appreciate you being a listener. I appreciate you guys sharing and referring these podcasts to so many people. I love to see the comments and the reviews and the shares on social media and wherever else, not for me, but knowing that it takes the valuable information from guests like today, Lucas Jadin, to so many people. I'm excited to share this conversation with Lucas. Lucas is an author of a couple different books, Win in The Dark, he co-authored with Joshua Medcalf, and then his latest book, The Twin Thieves that he co-authored with his partner, Steve Jones. This byline of the book is How Great Leaders Build Great Teams and this story in this book goes through a football team. I got so much information, so much out of it, yet there's one cap that you will hear. We talk about The Twin Thieves. You've heard me talk a lot about this, is insecurity. As Lucas and I break down and talk about all the different attributes and leading yourself, leading others and getting to that servant, one thing I want to remind you is that we all have insecurities, every single one of us. I'm not excluded, and I hate to break it to you, but you're not either. But that's okay because we can grow and we can get through those. Lucas shares a lot of information how to do that, a lot of tools but also as leaders, whether you're a parent, whether you're a leading organization, whether you're just someone who's just professionally getting started, or they are even just a someone in school listening in, I'm glad you're here, and know that you can utilize these tools to benefit yourself and anyone around you. The number one thing that we talk about in this podcast is mental strength. Mental strength comes from within, but it can be displayed outwardly and the more we display that outwardly, the stronger we get and the more we benefit others. Again, thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Can't wait for you to hear this conversation, watch this conversation with Lucas. If you're not subscribed to YouTube, make sure you do that, wherever you listen to this on, Vocally, yes, right, Vocally, is that the right word, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, whatever it is. Glad you're listening in. I'd love for you to share with someone else. I'll catch you back at the end and we'll wrap this up. [TYLER] Lucas, welcome to the podcast, man. I'm so excited to have this conversation with you today. In the open, we were talking about some of how our paths have crossed. What's amazing to me is in the world that you evolve and especially get into leadership space, you start to understand that, man, there's more connected than disconnected. So I'm excited to have a conversation with you. Just in preparation for this, of doing everything, but what caught my attention is your book, The Twin Thieves, which released earlier this summer that you write with your current partners, Steve Jones. What a tremendous story. I have pages of notes from it, and I want to first start off and let's talk about these two Twin Thieves. So that's jumping off point for you. Let's go. [LUCAS JADIN] Yes, well, thank you Tyler, for having me on your show. I just want to thank anybody who's tuning in. The Twin Thieves man, it's started off as a very personal thing. When I was growing up in Freedom Wisconsin, a very small town, I had a lot of good things going, but a lot of people listening to this podcast may have been in a spot where they had a lot of things going externally, but internally was the challenge. For me, that's where I found myself as a high schooler and is now the source of this work. But what I was experiencing at that time that I know now was The Twin Thieves. The Twin Thieves, what we've found is there's always two games going on for high performers. There's an external game, whether it's our sports athletes, whether it's our people in business where they're executing the plan, but then that other game is a bit more subtle and it's invisible, but it's massively important and that's inside the ears. We've asked this question 20 to 30,000 times. Now we have data on this question that says, what's the toughest challenge that holds you back from being the best version of you? Over and over and over again, what came up was fear of failure and fear of judgment. So not always in those exact words, it might have been I don't want to let my dad down, or I'm constantly comparing myself to other people, and it's paralyzing me when I try to perform. And across context with, again, with teachers, athletes, people that lead businesses, we saw common similarities and we just drew upon it and my partner, Steve Jones, named it The Twin Thieves. We call them thieves because we believe they steal more than anything in America from people's potentials. We don't believe that your greatest enemy is the external. We believe that oftentimes it's from within. That most people that we get to meet and start working with, they are by far their own toughest critics, almost to an abusive lens. It starts with The Twin Thieves, fear of failure and fear of judgment. So our work is about how do we help individuals overcome them, and then ultimately teams overcome them to thrive. [TYLER] We could jump right into the deep end, three minutes into this, what's the source of The Twin Thieves in your mind, and as you guys have done work, what have you identified the source? [LUCAS] It's a really good question. One thing that I really help my clients to understand and highlight is, you're not broken for experiencing The Twin Thieves. Because biologically it's wired into all of us. So the source, and we don't need to dive too deep into the neurobiology, but it's really simple. Every healthy human has a fear center in their mind. That fear center was really important for us when we were solely focused on surviving. What did it do? Because when you're constantly fearful, you're at least probably not going to die with the most common threats. In particular, what we see the most is you were going to be very aware at that time when you were just trying to survive as a human hundreds of thousands of years ago. You're going to be really aware of what do the leaders in my tribe, because we always lived in tribes because of strength in numbers, what are they thinking? And if I align with them, I'm safe. But let's say Tyler wants to dress a little different, or he wants to push the comfort zones of what might be the accepted norms. That fear center was going to freak out, and it was going to scare you back into being "in line" because, well, I mean, what would happen if they decided you weren't fit for the tribe? You'd get kicked out, unless, I like to say, unless you were like Jason Borne out there, your chances of survival weren't going to be pretty good. So what I bring up is, at a very rudimentary level, The Twin Thieves were woven into every healthy human to help us survive. But today, the clients that I get to work with, they no longer just want to survive. They don't just want to get by because fear is great for that. They want to thrive. In order to thrive, you've got to rise above the old mechanisms, I label it as the lizard brain, but the old mechanisms to find new levels of freedom, new levels of peace and operate from that instead of the fear. So at a source level, that's how I would label it, is from where humans evolve from. [TYLER] Yes. I mean, there's a perspective here that as I look at that and hear what you're saying, and that has driven so many people, and yet for us to unclick those to separate out those, I'm sometimes getting away from the tribe is our best survivability. The world that we live in today, because sometimes the tribe, the standard of doing business hours that's been done is their biggest detriment. The ability to uncouple that can be very hard because we can be pressured into, well, this is the way it's always been done. As I read through the book, and as I've prepared, really what stuck out to me is I believe that The Twin Thieves are the manifestation of our insecurities. To me it's this fear of failure. Oh, what happens if I fail, again, that judgment, then my value, what value I have is being questioned. So that's where I really as you were saying, that security and then it's transformed into our current state over the world as, especially as a leader or as a performer, or as someone just trying to contribute, well, what value do I have? What worth do I have? That really, to me is exemplified through the fears of both failure and judgment. [LUCAS] Yes, yes, absolutely. I would fully agree with you, and that's why we call them The Twin Thieves, because when you think about what you just said, when people lead from a heart posture of fear, these are great people that are unconsciously oftentimes doing this. Because I believe most people behave from 95% of their decisions are unconscious and most of that unconsciousness is fears, past traumas, mistakes that they haven't processed. A, it's good people, but that are oftentimes a very much underperforming as a leader, or B, hurting those that they lead, because fear is contagious whether we like it or not. That insecurity that you talked about is absolutely the root of it. So that's what we do at a very deep level, is help people to get an unwavering conviction and exactly who they're, because there's a lot of lies that we automatically believe. So we want to help them to become conscious about the unconscious so that then we can build teams that are winning teams. I didn't get into this seven years ago to talk about what I call the little man voice for people, to talk about dungeon days and the inner critic. I got into this because I wanted to help people win, period. But when you start working it backwards, what I saw over and over was insecurity, fear, and The Twin Thieves were robbing people of maximizing their potential and ultimately winning. [TYLER] Let's take a step back in your own history. You talk about this before the person for you that it wasn't the external pressures as much as the internal. Help us as, and especially somebody listening and is like, okay, how do I go through that transformation process where I start to identify these different mechanisms at play and how do I start to subside The Twin Thieves? How do I really embrace my insecurity to where now all of a sudden it becomes a valuable strength instead of really a chain that holds me back? I'd love to hear your journey through that process. [LUCAS] Yes, so I love that you use chains because when I speak to people, I actually bring chains and I'll wrap them around my shoulders and just share with people, to no judgment of their own but most people are operating on a day to day their day to day life with their family, in their work coaching the teams that they might coach with metaphorical chains on their shoulders; the weight of these lies that they're living through that have become habituated and everything's heavier, everything's tougher. The only reason I can speak to it is because I know very much what it's like to wake up in the morning and feel like instantly there are chains on you and everything's harder. So if we go backwards, I won't spend too long because I don't want people, this is about your group, but hopefully they can learn through my story. As I brought up, I was really into all sports, but specifically in high school, it came down to distance running and basketball. Those were my two favorite things, and I loved them. But right around my, as a 15 year old, I started to have these, my mind was constantly on the go. I don't know if any of your listeners have experienced this one that you try to go to sleep at night and you close your eyes, but it's like your mind just takes off. I was experiencing that. My mind was either stuck on the past, something I should have done better, how I made a mistake that I lost an opportunity, or it was addicted to the future. I used that word addicted very intentionally because the future, like I'm on the JV Basketball team. Am I going to start as a senior? Like going through the depth chart, trying to figure things out, like just an obsessive circle. What it led to is I just couldn't sleep. I was doing four on a good night, four to five hours of sleep a night and trying to hide it because then the next day I would go to school and everyone thought Lucas had it all together. I was doing my damn best to make sure that that image was put out there. So it came to a breaking point, though. I had tried a lot of things to sleep. Man, I prayed more. I tried Night Quill a couple of times, and the thing about that is it worked. I can smile about it now, but that's a scary time but over time you just need more and that isn't a good situation. I tried many other things on my own, because the thing that scared me the most was telling my friends about it or my parents. My parents are loving, incredible people and I'll never forget the night when I was like the four year old that I have now, who just yelled out from my bed like, "Mom." I'll remember she came in, she's like, "What's going on?" It was like, 1:00 AM and I just poured it all out to her. God bless her because no mom wants to hear, man, your son hasn't been sleeping and is really struggling mentally. This was 15 years ago. So the best option that we really had at that point was you went to the doctor. That was hard for us, but our doctor was great. He prescribed medication and that was really about it and to grow. But what I learned was, when you just prescribe a medication, but you don't upgrade your thinking, nothing's going to change because I didn't want to be on the meds for my whole life. So ultimately, when I took away the meds, I found myself back in the same place three years later. That right there was the precedent for me to just dive in because I was just completely convicted that I wasn't broken, that there had to be something that I have not learned or figured out or been coached on that could help me get freedom from my own mind. I remember thinking in those moments, like, if I can just sleep, if I can just get free of my own mind, man, I will pay back the universe, God, in whatever way, because I will be forever grateful. That's where my journey began. I got to learn, it put me on a street to just read a lot, learn from people that were advanced in this field to the point where I got to learn the truths about the mind and how to rise above it and experience more freedom. That was the pain journey that then led me into learning the things that I now teach today. [TYLER] If we were to take a step back, because I think as again, for me listening in and thinking about, okay, how can I learn from what you just shared, the question that I want to ask is what, what was the root of that? What do you feel was the root, or what have you figured out was the root of that perpetual reflection and addiction to the future? [LUCAS] The biggest thing is, and this is where you asked about like the transformation, this is then the work that I get to do with people, which is just, it's more than work. It's just a absolute privilege and almost like a sacred way of me being able to do what I do. But number one is just the lack of understanding about the mind, like how much do we learn about our brain, in our mind growing up in elementary school and in middle school? We teach people how to add and we teach them how to read, but we oftentimes, don't teach them how to think about their thinking. So number one is recognizing that you don't control all of your thoughts. I know that for many people now in the new age of understanding, that's basic but for Lucas, at the time, I liked to control everything. My sports, if I ever ran into a challenge, I worked harder. I dove in further. That was just my motto. The challenge is when that little man voice comes up in our minds. What that oftentimes sounds like to my clients that I hear is I'm not good enough or I'm not blank enough and you can fill in the blank. Strong enough, pretty enough, old enough, whatever it is. When that comes up, if you could just stop it, you would. But you didn't, you didn't wake up this morning going, I can't wait to have that thought of self-doubt. I can't wait to have that thought of fear. That should be our first inkling that it's not fully within your control. I'll oftentimes have my client snap their fingers and I'll say, "Stop." They stop right away. That's fully inside of your control. But do your thoughts work that way? They'll be like, "Oh, no." What have you noticed, like when a thought of self-doubt or fear of insecurity comes up and you try to drown it out, what tends to happen to that thought? [TYLER] To me it grows. You just poured water on it to grow. [LUCAS] Yes, it's like trying to hold a beach ball under the water and then you get exhausted by it. So for me, if you believe you're in control of every single one of your thoughts, then the only person to blame for it is you. So it's a sick cycle of there that thought pops up, which is totally just a normal healthy thought that you just got to respond to differently but I was sitting there blaming myself for why am I having this again? What's wrong with me? I thought I was the leaders, those people over there having these thoughts of lack of confidence or belief in themselves. So number one is awareness. When we talk about awareness, I'll just share a quick story. I worked with one of my athletes who was unaware that his little person voice was the driving force of why he did what he did. He grew up in the streets of Miami, grew up as a fighter, it was a dangerous environment, and either you fight or it's not going to work out well. He transferred a lot of that energy into becoming really good. He worked harder, thrived on that. The challenge was he made it through the minors and he got to major leagues. When he got to the MLB, he was operating out of that energy of, I always worked harder than everybody else, to the point where he was taking 500 swings a day in the batting cage. He was doing it out of a compulsion, out of fear, out of insecurity. What do you think happened to him over time when he's taking 500 swings a day? [TYLER] I mean, to me it just physically and mentally just breaks down. [LUCAS] Yes, and that's what I see people come to me as is, he was broken down. It was out of though the driving force was this fear that he wasn't even aware of. So first off, we unpacked, well what is that little person boy sounding like? Well, he was worried that if he didn't do that, he wouldn't be in the league anymore. That was his edge. We challenge that. So number one is be aware that every healthy human has the little man voice but then number two, have the ability to question our thinking, is that 100% true? Is that 100% true? So my challenge to him is like, well, is that a hundred percent true? It was almost like the first time in his years that he really thought about that. I was like, "Well, no, maybe if I take 50 quality cuts that might do the trick." So we shifted to that, which was uncomfortable for him, but all of a sudden his body started to recover better and his reactions were better. Thinking about what does your little person voice sound like today and then thinking about questioning your thinking, Is that 100% true? Where might those thoughts have started to take root in your upbringing? For me, it's very clear, I was the oldest son on our family. I was the oldest grandchild and I had so much love and support, it wasn't even funny. But the last thing I wanted to do was let people down. So the way that Lucas filled up his insecurity was just achieve more but that's like guzzling salt water. It doesn't ultimately quench. For me it was becoming aware of that so it doesn't just run me. Whatever you're not aware of owns you and most leaders are getting owned by their past history, tribulations and their little man boys. So number one, become aware of it, then two question it, and then three, commit to what is being courageous, which is oftentimes doing the opposite of what that voice says. [TYLER] So if we're to take that, which you said from an individual point of view, which, if I go to the pyramid that you guys shared in The Twin Thieves, which I've already used to talk to some people about, it's the first step is leading yourself, but then you're really not leading until you're leading others. So let's transition from identifying that we have that awareness. We've identified where the thieves are entering into our life, our insecurities and our ability to perform individually. How do those, one spill over into our, how we treat others, but then how do we work through that? [LUCAS] I love that you asked that question that way, because when I look at coaches, a lot of them are just unaware how divisive the little man voice, The Twin Thieves can be if they're not taken care of. What tends to manifest inside of teams that are driven by fear, division, siloing, gossip, blaming, complaining, defensiveness, and a lot of coaches just address the fruit, we want to get to the root. What we want to look at then is, number one, can you lead yourself and rise above that voice so that you can show up the most courageous and connected version of yourself? Then what we start to see in leading others is, well, now we don't believe you can truly be a leader just by leading by example. You have to use your voice. It's voices and the choices that you make every day. What holds people back from using their voice is the fear of judgment because they got to put themselves out there to hold a teammate accountable or to challenge somebody or even to go up to somebody authentically and say, I care about you. Well done. That was awesome. Sometimes a genuine compliment takes vulnerability. What we want to see is we start to see that in a team where people are rising above that and it becomes contagious. There's a word that we really like when people are leading others, and that's called mudita. Mudita is somebody that can find joy through the success of other people. If you really, that is a disciplined human being that has risen above their little person voice because The Twins Thieves and their little man voice is always focused on us first. But building a team that's disciplined and committed to mudita where man, someone else scores more than what I did, and I'm just as pumped as they are. Or someone else brought in the sales and I'm committed to bringing in sales too, but Tyler did even better but I'm going to, instead of getting jealous, instead of getting resentful, I'm going to learn from him, celebrate him. That's a culture of mudita and that's one of the things that we see in teams that are rising above The Twin Thieves. Then the only other thing that I'll add to that is in teams that are rising above The Twin Thieves, we see a white belt mindset. That is really simple. It's as teams build a black belt skill set, they're getting better at their craft. They might start to win or make some money. Sometimes that success can be the exact thing that then breaks them down for future success. What we want to challenge people on is as you start to lead others and really serve other people, is can you keep a white belt mindset, the mindset of a beginner, of someone that's hungry for feedback, that knows they've got to go all in, make mistakes, do the dirty hard work, even while you continue to hone and have a black belt skill set? So when we look at our teams, you don't get a team like that unless you have individuals that are courageous and can overcome their little man voice and then special things happen when you have a team committed to mudita and showing a white belt mindset. [TYLER] Let me, I'm glad you brought up mudita. That was a new word to me and I love it. I think there's ways, you talk about it a little bit in the book and we could dig into it deeper, but culturally, how you build that, how you recognize and support those people, if you're in a compensation type of organization, how you compensate towards that, whether it's through bonuses, whether it's through just recognition pieces. But I want to leave that aside to go to what actions drive those that have black belt skills, black belt skills, let me spit that out properly to have a white belt mentality. Because to me, there's probably an action or two I can think of, but I'd love to hear from you where you see organizations, teams, leaders that really maintain, we're going to drive our skills to black belt, but we're going to have this white belt mentality. [LUCAS] Well, I'll give you one example, is very clear is I've had the privilege to work with a lot of people within the LA Dodgers organization. One thing that I was blown away by in our first session of coaching, what I do with people is I ask them to write their obituary. I want to know, let's strip away all the labels and the things that we hide behind what truly matters to you. Number one is they're willing, people that are willing to be vulnerable and have those conversations around what really matters. The second thing that I see people in elite organizations doing, and I got this, install this with the Dodgers and was blown away by it, is how curious they were. So if I'm being real with you, when I first started working with them, here's one of the most successful organizations on the planet like, how open were they going to be to a dude like myself over here in Wisconsin, that didn't play past my sophomore year of baseball and I was blown away. They were relentless in their questioning. They're relentless in learning. So that's an action. One thing that I notice in high performing people that I get to work with, and probably number one with my partner Steve Jones, and then also with people from the Dodgers, is their learning velocity is incredible. That's a term that I think I created, but I don't know that, I could have heard it subconsciously somewhere, but learning velocity is in this world of consumption, how fast can you consume, articulate, but then turn what you learn into an actionable thing that actually gets better. So I think that learning is a super skill that you can get better at learning faster. When it comes to a white belt mindset, that's what I just challenge our people around and see the best doing is, number one, they're willing to say, I don't have it all together. I want to learn and grow. Then two, they relentlessly ask for feedback and grow. Another colleague of mine shared a really cool tool that I've been using for the last three years. It's just after any presentation asking people, "Hey, what was one up and one forward? One up and one forward is what was one thing you liked but then forward is, what's one thing I can do better? At first people tiptoe around the what's the one thing I can do better? They give you the softest things but if you build a culture where the leaders are asking this saying, "No, I want your feedback because what I care about is getting better." When you embrace that from the top that it's safe here to do that, man, you start to build a culture that gets better fast. Those are two and the underlying though, when you hear that is building a team built on psychological safety. That goes back to Google's biggest, their project Aristotle that was looking for what drives winning teams. They tested so many variables, put in thousands of followers, millions of dollars, and they come back with the number one thing is psychological safety. What do we start to see then? People are willing to take feedback, they're willing to ask questions, they're willing to be vulnerable, but that's the bedrock, that connection, that love, that psychological safety to be vulnerable. [TYLER] There's a theory and belief that I have that organizational, cultural, psychological safety helps break or unlock the chains of insecurity of those fears. To me that's the greatest opportunity a leader has is what can we do organizationally to drive this psychological safety? As you mentioned earlier, if you have a community, a culture of fear, that safety level is really low. I think also you bring up baseball and one of the thoughts that I have, and I'd love to just play this out with you a little bit here, is the ability to take black belt skills and have a white belt mentality that actually will get you to the next degree of black belt is having the opportunity or responsibility to teach those skills to someone else. As I've learned in myself, and I've seen the best way for me to really conceptualize and learn something is have to teach it to someone else. I think what I've seen, and I've experienced that vulnerability of, oh, I maybe don't fully understand this, so I need to learn and actually understand this better in order that I can extend that to someone else. To me that's something that has to really keep that white belt mentality. But the difficulty there is when you're like working with a baseball team and you're like, all right, I'm third baseman and I got to go teach the other guy, who's a third baseman, how to really scoop this fast-driving ground ball. I think if you create that culture to where I'm only as good as the other people around me, to me, that again comes from that whole safe mentality of instead of pinning people against each other. [LUCAS] Yes, absolutely. And I want to anchor on like, pinning people against each other is a cheap way to get immediate results, but it's like rocket fuel, it will burn out. So what we see is love or care is the deepest and the best for sustainable long-term growth. Do you have kids, Tyler? [TYLER] Yes, three. [LUCAS] What are their names? [TYLER] Briton, Braxton, and Landon. [LUCAS] Beautiful. Beautiful. I would encourage anybody that pushes against that, because there are people that like, nah fear, you got to make them scared of you then they'll respond. What I would say is like, so when you think about your three kiddos, how old are they? [TYLER] Almost 16, 14, and 12. [LUCAS] Man, all right. [TYLER] In the thick of it. [LUCAS] So imagine one night you're laying there and you're in your bed and all your kids are in their rooms or whatever, and you hear somebody break into your house and they're going to be a danger to the kids that you love the most, by far beyond anything else. What's most likely going to happen to that person that broke into your house? [TYLER] They're not going to last long. [LUCAS] There you go. I want to be very clear on this. It's not because you hate that person, you don't even know them, but it's because they're threatening the people that you love the most. That realization is when you build strong, trusting, loving relationships, you'll get people to fight for themselves, not just for a day, not just for a week. Not just because they have to, but for months, if not years, because they want to. I don't know about you, but I still have teammates or colleagues to this day that I haven't spoken to in five, 10 years that if they called me up right now and said, "Hey Lucas, I'm struggling. Could you help me with this?" I would drop everything to help them because there's a bond of we got to know each other and we cared about each other at a deep level. That's what we want to help people to see. Even the people that all they want to do is win, what we're encouraging is whatever winning looks like, the best way to get there and to retain talent and to do all these things is to build a culture of connection care, and I would say love. [TYLER] As I look at that, there's a, winning at all costs will eventually cost you and it'll cost you everything that you desire, want, and have. And I think that the idea of connection and if we go back through these different steps of figuring out the root for yourself and having that awareness and then figuring out how to pour into others and leading others and inviting them. I love how you shared that, it's one to say, hey, I lead myself but if you're not choosing to use your voice, if you're leading by example, that's great, but if you're not using your voice, you're really not a leader. You're not influencing others towards something bigger than yourself and themselves. Then I think ultimately, as you share in the pyramid that I think is a perfect wrap here, is you start to serve them and it's not about you. To me that's the biggest adage of leadership. It's not about you and when you choose to be that servant, then all of a sudden you just put all of those things you just shared into place and it's not about what you get. It's not about, essentially it's not about where you're going, but it's who are you going with and how are you getting there. [LUCAS] It's beautifully said, well said. If I just, for those that might just need a very clear depiction, what you're referencing is our leadership blueprint; a triangle broken up into three tiers. Level one lead yourself, level two lead others and then that top is servant leadership, which the depiction there is what is your motivation? You can lead others but still be in it for yourself. It happens all the time all the time. But that top level is you are choosing to be the guide instead of the hero. What's so interesting with the people that I get to work with is the individuals that are in more of an individual pursuit, albeit a high performance sport or in business. Maybe I'm thinking of like the lone wolfs, the people in sales or, is when they commit, like if they come to me struggling, a lot of times they're talking about themselves. The challenge I'll give them is what you brought up earlier. Who can you mentor? Who can you help? Because I want to get them outside of their own mind because what I found over and over and over again is when people get to that servant leadership level, what happens to their results is they continue to go up because they're outside of their own head. They are now just fully embraced in the moment and when you pour into other people, it frees you up to continue being at your best. What I've found is people will give up on themselves way before they'll give up on other people that they love. So it's why a lot of our elite individual athletes, they train in groups. They're not trained for the marathon, for the Olympics by themselves because they don't want to give away the secrets. No, they find a trusted circle that they know if they don't show up the next morning, they're going to be letting that person down. It's that connection that pulls them through when they would've given up a long time ago if it was just about themselves. [TYLER] Lucas we wrap up here, I'm just thinking, what do you see as we're evolving forward in our society and our leadership growth? What do you see as the next hurdle that you guys, you're recognizing, as you're hearing from people that you're like, all right, we have to anticipate getting over this hurdle? What's that next hurdle and what do you see coming in front of you when you're working with your clients and when you're seeing other people, what do you recognize? [LUCAS] It's a really good question. I think one thing that stands out to me is a fragile youth that are now becoming the beginnings of the workplace. What do I mean by fragile? When you look at rates of suicide, depression, anxiety, they've never been higher. What's interesting is with the oncoming of social media now in the last 10 years, like this is like the wild west for a lot of teens and a lot of young adults figuring out what is my identity, what are my principles, how do I handle my little person voice? I have so much respect for our young people. I still get to teach a class once a month in a school district nearby here where I started my teaching career. They saw the value in the work and allowed me to still continue to help in some ways. I get to work with about 90 high schoolers every year and I'm blown away by the stuff that they're doing, Tyler. Like the accomplishments, the resumes are unbelievable. The challenge is, I think the opportunity to grow a team is going to begin with how healthy is your group? How good are they at overcoming and winning in the dark, for lack of better reasons. I call the dark when you're alone with your mind. And right now I think we're struggling when we're alone with our mind collectively as a whole. So what I'm excited for are the companies, are the higher education institutions that are starting to really value mental skills as an X factor. That man, if we can help our people learn how to think better, that can be more free mentally, they're going to be better individuals, number one. Then two, it is going to help us grow. I just think that, I think it's an opportunity coming up here and it's not going to go away anytime soon in the next few years. [TYLER] Oh man, having the opportunity, having a couple kids in middle school and high school and working with a lot of middle school and high school kids through different sports what I think is interesting there is, you can obviously see that and yet there we do have a lot of tools. We do have a lot of people like yourself and others that can help us bring tools to them. It's, do we recognize it's a priority or, oh, that's something. Ah, we'll get to that. We'll work on the technical things. I think that happens every single workplace as well. It's like, oh, let's work on our technical skills, but yet we don't worry about the people, we don't worry about the mental side, which absolutely trumps everything technical. I mean, that's how I view it and I see it. [LUCAS] Yes, no, and what I would say is the shift is here. It's happening and you have people who are already on it because they can see it happening that are like, we need to, when we onboard clients or onboard new employees or whatever it might be, we're getting really intentional to teaching them, here's how we want you to respond under pressure. Here is the most beneficial way to do so. Here is our culture. They're getting really intentional because the payback is so great and the people who aren't making a priority are starting to pay for it because their employees are leaving. They're not responding to challenges faster and so it's coming, it's just a matter of if people are getting proactive or going to be reactive. [TYLER] I think that that isn't a matter of making people comfortable but it's about making people safe and it's about saying that, hey, we have a culture where there's a lot expected, but we're going to do that within the confines of being safe and understanding and appreciating and not we're just going to push you or we're not and we're just going to let you be comfortable because that that's not a solution either. [LUCAS] No, no. One of my favorite stories is swords and medieval times were really important and they were absolutely crucial tools. In order to make a really good sword, people would go to the sword smith and the sword smith, to make these swords, would put a block of steel into a molten hot fire, 2000 degrees, and then start to melt it, take out that steel and pound it with a mallet, starting to shape it into a sword, but then put it back into the fire, take it back out, put it back into the fire and repeat this process. It was called the sheek. Ultimately after 20 reps of that the sword would come out light enough to be carried in the field, but with an edge to do what it needed to do. What you're bringing up lends to this because 100% what we're not saying is just positive fluff, like you don't need to go through the fire. We're saying in order to be great, if you're going to have to go through a hotter fire than you ever imagined. You're going to face the pounding. If you want to be on the cutting edge, you're going to need to do it. But we want to help you proactively with the tools to give you the best shot to stay in the fire, to get through the pounding, to take the lumps that are required in order to be great at anything. But unfortunately, we just see a lot of people, people that don't have the tools, don't have the support and when the inevitable fires, metaphorically speaking, come they drop out or they give up. We just want them to be supported so that they can thrive inside of that environment. [TYLER] Lucas, it's been great. I enjoyed the conversation here. So much value in what you've shared. Thank you for spending time with us today. [LUCAS] Well, thank you Tyler. I appreciate you. [TYLER] All right. I want to wrap up today's show with the last piece that Lucas shared, this idea that what's next is really been in front of us. And we struggle with it so much. We struggle with, oh, only the strong don't have to deal with mental, whatever. As Lucas shared that every single person fights some type of mental capacity, somewhat. When I say mental capacity, it's the ability to break the internal external, what were those barriers, those thieves? Are they interior? Are they external? The more that we understand every single person, not just you, not just that person you work with is dealing with something internally, the more empathy we can have. To me, the great solution, and when I listen to Lucas and I hear all these things, and the great opportunity for leaders is to understand how to be empathetically healthy. We can have low empathy by being hard and callous and just telling people to deal with it. We can have low empathy by trying to make everyone else comfortable and take it away from them. I mean, to me, the healthy point of empathy is putting your arms around someone and walking with them. It's making them comfortable to go through the fire that Lucas just shared, because that's when they're going to get stronger. Because I know when two people put their arms around each other, they are stronger than if they're just standing alone. That's our great opportunity as leaders, is to help people be psychologically safe, not comfortable, but psychologically safe to know no matter what, they're able to make it through the fire. That's how we get better. That's how we make great teams. That's how leaders we get better too because sometimes having our arms wrapped around a teammate comes back to what Lucas just shared. We realize it's more important than us. There's someone else that's holding me accountable. That's the great opportunity to get better. That's the great opportunity that we have as leaders to build great teams. It's not by getting in their face and causing fear and all these consequences. Those are going to be there. They're going to be there for all of us, but to face those consequences in a safe manner, because we have other people with us. We're not in it alone. Professionally, years ago, where I felt probably at my lowest, when I was alone on an island, I literally had my own business. It was just me. My wife supported me yet it was me out in the field every single day trying to express to people what value I had and I had no idea. That was my internal thief. That was the thief of failure and the fear of judgment, is what if I couldn't perform? What if I couldn't do it? What if I wasn't able? You're not alone if you think that. You're not alone, if you're going to think that in the future. Every single one of us do and as I had to learn, the more that I was vulnerably open with that, I allowed myself to go to the point to where, yes, I have to deal with it. That's when I got stronger. I hope you got value from today's episode. I'd love that you could share, check out Lucas' work, his book, The Twin Thieves, wherever you can. Thanks for being here. Till next time, have a good one.