--:-- Ryan Hanley: Employers are afraid of their own employees. They're afraid of them walking in and saying, "This is disrupting my mental health." And because I don't understand what mental health really is, or how that might actually disrupt someone's mental health, I'm afraid that it might be. And it's like stepping on the cancer word. Like, "I have cancer, I have mental cancer." And I'm like, I don't know what that is. And I don't know how to fix it. Is this deadly? Is it problematic? I work with employers every day who are literally afraid of their employees. They're afraid to stand and say, "Yes, it's hard to take no's on the phone and you're going to be okay."
--:-- Natalyn Lewis: I'll give you a fun tool if you want to work with these guys. So if you solidify a strategy and the answer is "yes, but," then what's happening is your guys will not stay consistent with their action plan. They're going to do something and then they're going to not do it at all. You're going to watch them not change behavior. If you come in and you can get them into a "yes, and" category, they will start to change behavior.
--:-- So when you come in and you say, "Okay, great, we're going to go after this one product," and they go, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but..." then say, "Okay, fantastic. With every 'but,' I actually want you to define the concern. But what? Define the concern. What is your concern about going after this one product?" Write them all down. "What's the other guy? Yeah, what's your concern about going after one product?" Write them all down. If you actually put them in front of their face in writing so that they can give voice to it, see it on the board, and then you acknowledge that in your move forward plan and they literally see that this action compensates for that concern, they'll move to a "yes, and" and they'll start to form that behavior and they'll stick with it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What a great exercise.
--:-- Natalyn Lewis: There's a little piece of neural pathway. As a human being, we have a picture, and this picture is a future. That future has a lot of unknowns and a lot of uncertainties. If I look into the future and all I see is unknown and uncertain, then I've got to go grab onto everything in my past because the past is the only known and certain I've got. What that creates is your "buts." "Oh, I know we're doing that, but..." "Well, I was looking forward, but..." "I'm trying to run in this direction, but..." When we actually capture the buts, capture all the concerns that are showing up, and then we show that the action plan moving forward addresses the concerns, the mind stops barking at them. It can calm it right down, and they can actually focus on an action-oriented item that they have control over. It starts to make them feel like they control the destination of their future.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Absolutely love that. So were you lying when you said in your LinkedIn post the other day you're not a therapist, you're a coach? Because what you just gave me sounded more like therapy.
--:-- Natalyn Lewis: It's actually performance coaching. If you think about it, I'm not going to go in and understand why each of these individual humans looks to the past. There is neuroscience that tells us this happens. A therapist in that same situation would say, "What happened to you in your childhood that made it so that you really like to think about the past? What makes you scared of pursuing your dreams in the future?" And I'm going to be like, "Oh heck no."
--:-- Here's what we know. We've got neuroscience that tells us that innately as human beings, we need to feel safe. Do you know what safety looks like? It looks like the known. And the only thing that's known in our life is the past. So why are some people so blasted fixated on staring at their past, trying to recreate a success they previously had? Because it feels safe, because it feels known. But the only thing that as humans gets us exhilarated, gets us excited, gets us pumped and living life, is actually progressing into the unknown future. So how do we do that with safety? We actually honor the concerns that pop up. We focus action on what we have control over, and we go to create the heck out of the future. Then you get people that actively engage in that. You're not driving, you're not whipping them into shape anymore. They're running and you're just keeping up.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I saw this documentary the other day. It was a mini documentary, like 20 minutes, on YouTube. It was talking about the big mistake in psychology. I love this stuff similar to you because I find one of the reasons that I love leadership, talking about leadership and this role in a company, is because of all the psychological and behavioral things that it takes to be good at it.
--:-- What this video outlined was how essentially—and I'm going to forget the exact dates—there was Freud and there was Adler. Freud was exactly what you explained on the "yes, but." Everything is about your past, the way your parents looked at you, treated you. You have to dive into your past and ruminate in your past. Then there's Adler who was like, "Okay, your past happened. It's real. But the only way forward is what you said with 'yes, and'—you have to address the future and what you can do to make your life better in the future."
--:-- Essentially, what this documentary positioned was that Freud was a better marketer. This entire therapeutic industry of digging into our past and psychoanalyzing everything from our past is because Freud was a better marketer than Adler. If Adler was a better marketer, we would not have to deal with all this shit from our past all the time. I was like, that's crazy. I'm sure there's more nuance to it than that, but just the idea that one guy's ability to market over another literally created entire generations of therapy.
--:-- I don't know if you saw—I think her name's Abigail Schreier. She came out with a book that I listened to the audio version of called *Bad Therapy*, which is essentially what you just described. All of this rumination on the bad shit that happens in our past. Our body doesn't know the difference. When we're thinking about this bad experience we have, our body's literally having all the same feelings. We're reliving it. So essentially, all you're doing is forcing your body to re-experience this stress and pain and hardship, which doesn't actually take you anywhere. I thought that was really interesting.
--:-- Natalyn Lewis: People ask me all the time, "Why is it worse now? Why now? Why is this where you are needed now?" Historically speaking, this sort of thing was not all that common. Why? Because people were progressively just moving forward. There became a time where—which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did it come first that we started to put so much emphasis on mental health that we went too far the opposite direction? Humanity has a tendency to do this. We tend to set our sights on something and then we overcompensate.
--:-- I am a big proponent of mental health. I think that people have pushed so hard into mental health that they forgot that mental resilience is important. We've moved to a place now where if I feel any form of emotional or mental unsafety or emotional mental discomfort, it's like, "Uh-oh, I need to stop." Well, no. Your brain operates in such a way to give you clues that, "Hey, you've never done this before, so proceed with caution. I'm going to make you a little uncomfortable so that you become more aware. I'm going to make you a little uncomfortable so your senses are more heightened because this might not be safe. I don't know. We've never done it before."
--:-- But people just stop in those moments. So we get people who are like, "We're going to go focus on one product. We're going to go focus on one strategy and we're going to go all in on this thing." And I've been doing four. I'm like, "That doesn't feel safe because if I combine all my revenue from four sources, can I compensate with one? I don't know. I've never done it before." All of a sudden I feel a little unsafe and a little uncomfortable. That doesn't mean it's the wrong idea. People have a tendency to stop and say right there, "That doesn't feel right, therefore it must be wrong." That's what gets people into problems.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: For the audience, I met Nat at an event in Utah. You were speaking, phenomenal. I was blown away by your presentation. I love the way that you talked about leadership, and I want to dig into some of that.
--:-- I get a lot of questions, and I do very minimal leadership coaching. At any given time, I have one to three clients that I work with because I like to be operational too. I find it to be both very rewarding and also helpful for me when I'm teaching my philosophies to them.
--:-- The questions that I get a lot recently are about—and you talked a little bit about this, and I think you got a couple of questions in the Q&A section around—I'm going to throw a very combative generalization and say the softness of team members, employees, et cetera. I want to give you a brief context on where I'm coming from, and then I'll let you run.
--:-- I coach baseball. Both my sons play baseball. They're 11 and nine. A big problem—and I see it as a problem, I don't see this as healthy—is the crying, pouting, woe is me, self-orientation, the rounding of the shoulders, all this inwardness that people go when they don't have success, particularly in a sport like baseball. Because it's not like basketball or soccer or hockey where if you mess up, you can bust your butt down the court and make a play and get right back in it. If you boot a ground ball, you might not get another ground ball the rest of the game. Now you're sitting there marinating on the fact that you messed up this skill you're supposed to do.
--:-- My kids don't cry. They'll get upset, don't get me wrong, but they're not criers. I had a parent come up to me one time and she was like, "I can't get my kid to stop frigging crying every time something doesn't go the way he wants." She said, "What do you say to your kids?" Excuse my language, but I said, "I tell them to suck it the fuck up." I didn't mean that to be so harsh. I don't necessarily always say it like that, but in context of that phrase, what I'm saying to them is, "Dude, you booted the ball. Go do the next thing. What is sucking inward and crying? Who are you doing that for? You're not doing it for me. I don't feel sorry for you. I played baseball too. I booted ground balls. I don't feel sorry for you. So who are you putting on that performance for?"
--:-- My kids learned very early that they would not be rewarded in any way. I'm not going to yell at them for doing it if they do, and I'm certainly not going to go over and go, "Oh, hey, do you want a drink?" It's no big deal. That's probably a little far on the spectrum in terms of parenting. I get that.
--:-- So where—and we can take this out of sports—but I know you coach as well and played sports. How do we start to find the sweet spot from my being just a little more harsh and rough to that "everything's going to be okay" mother coming in the dugout? I had a mother force her way in the dugout because her kid struck out. That kid's being babied by his mother in the middle of a game because he struck out for the 13th time that season. How do we find that sweet spot?
--:-- Natalyn Lewis: I am a huge proponent that that sweet spot comes with leadership and understanding. If you are a leader of an organization and you do not have EQ, if you could not rank yourself at a 10 in EQ, you better get there. Because what causes this so much is fear.
--:-- Employers are afraid of their own employees. They're afraid of them walking in and saying, "This is disrupting my mental health." And because I don't understand what mental health really is, or how that might actually disrupt someone's mental health, I'm afraid that it might be. It's like stepping on the cancer word. "I have cancer, I have mental cancer." And I'm like, I don't know what that is. I don't know how to fix it. Is this deadly? Is it problematic?
--:-- I work with employers every day who are literally afraid of their employees. They're afraid to stand and say, "Yes, it's hard to take no's on the phone and you're going to be okay. This is what we're going to do. We don't need to take a day off. We can push through it." The problem is, if we don't understand what's happening ourselves, can we really stand with confidence with our employees and walk them through it, coach them through it, teach them through it? Or do we just think we're going to step on that mental health landmine that's going to blow us up?
--:-- That's what's happening out there. We have a world where mental health is being weaponized. In my opinion, I see it every day. They walk in and it's like, "Oh, I can't do that anymore. It's so hard for me. I'm getting anxiety getting on that phone call." Okay, well then you don't need to get on a phone call. That is not the right answer. If your job is to take phone calls, the right answer is not "don't take phone calls." If that makes you anxious, we'll find another job for you. No, if that makes you anxious, let's give you training that teaches you how to deal with anxiety in a phone call situation, or you can find another job. But we get super, super cuddly because there is a complete lack of understanding. It's fear-based.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What are they afraid of? When they're picturing it in their mind, this bad thing that could happen, what are they actually picturing could happen if they don't handle this mental health concern properly?
--:-- Natalyn Lewis: I've seen it across the board. I've seen leaders who are afraid they'll have an employee commit suicide and it's going to be on their head. I've seen that they're afraid they're going to have employees that turn them in and they're going to have problems on their hands with the state or with agencies. It's funny because I'll say, "Who are they turning you into?" And they don't know. They just know they've heard the stories that you can't treat—you have to treat these people of fairness. There's fear that this person will sue them, that they didn't handle their health circumstances well. Because mental health is such a hot topic, they're going to lose.
--:-- They're often afraid of these people because they aren't them. People who are leading and running companies tend to have a little bit more resilience and a little higher natural level of EQ and grit. Because they don't understand how this person could even walk in their office and have a conversation like, "My job is to get on the phone every day and it's giving me anxiety. So do you think that maybe I don't have to get on the phone today?" It would never cross this leader's mind to ever have that conversation. So now they don't understand the person, they don't understand the ramifications, they don't understand the consequences, and they don't know what happens if they just say no.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: How much of those fears is real? Of the things you just listed, what is the actual potential of one of those things happening? Is it a real concern or is it mostly just a manifestation in their minds?
--:-- Natalyn Lewis: Minuscule concern. Minuscule. The reality is, if they don't handle it well, could you get sued? Sure. If you didn't handle it well, could something happen? Sure. Again, it comes back to that. That is why I feel like so much of it is a lack of confidence on the side of the leaders in understanding these emotions and understanding the difference. Right now they just deal in fear and frustration.
--:-- It's super frustrating to have employees that have zero emotional resilience. I see in every company I've worked with, Ryan, in every insurance agency I have worked with, this is 100% true. If you go look at their retention numbers, they start to change if you actually time out the calls with timing in the day. After 2:30 in the afternoon, because these people have taken calls all morning, there's not an understanding of how to actually handle this or how to deal with the emotions coming up. By 2:30 in the afternoon, they've reached hyper states of emotion or hypo states of emotion, and they're no longer servicing the customer base well at all. People are staying on hold longer because the person doesn't even want to answer. People are getting transferred when they don't have any reason to be transferred because that person does not want to deal with that customer and answer the questions on the call. You watch retention go down in late afternoon. It's a fascination, and it correlates.
--:-- Why does that happen? How come the leader can't look at that and say, "I'm going to help my people increase their emotional resilience" as opposed to just being frustrated by it? They don't know how to do that because they don't understand it because they never went through it themselves. Most of them have a very natural level. You don't get to leadership and ownership in a company, especially in insurance where you're in sales constantly, without a little natural resilience and grit. Since my leaders all have that, they look at the person next to them and say, "What the hell is wrong with them?"
--:-- It's kind of like how Hall of Fame athletes make terrible coaches oftentimes. They don't even know how they got there half the time, so they can't teach the basic technical skill necessary. The same in leadership in these positions where sales are dominant and service is dominant. The person who has become exceptionally good at it often had some natural capacity. So they don't actually know how it is that they're more resilient. They don't know why it doesn't hurt their feelings to get a no. They don't know why it is that they walk in every day and say, "Four no's equals one yes. Let's go, baby, bring it." They don't know why the person sitting next to them can't do that. They don't know why the person who had somebody yell at them on the call about their insurance policy stood up and went to the bathroom and cried for 10 minutes. They're like, "What? It's about an insurance policy. It's not about you, man. What's your problem?"
--:-- The minute there's understanding, there is power to coach, train, support, and push. Without the understanding, how do you push them? If you just take somebody who's crying about that and you say, "Look, suck it up," how do you do that? How do you actionably suck it up? What are they supposed to actionably do to improve that? They don't know. You don't know. Eventually they either shove emotions so far that they erupt on somebody, or they quit.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The part of my response to the mom about my children that I didn't tell her—mostly because she asked me in passing—was that after I tell them to suck it up in the car or when we get home, I explain to them that the reason I tell you to do that is because there's no value in having that reaction.
--:-- What I tell them is: when you feel that emotion, you get one moment to release it. That could be an MF into your bag when you get back into the dugout. It could be a quick slam of your helmet on the bench, and then you put it in your bag. You get a moment to release that pent up energy that you're feeling. Then you get back out there. Because if crying at your position after you struck out helped you be a better fielder, then I would be all for it. But it doesn't help you be a better fielder. That's why I tell you to suck it up. It doesn't make you better.
--:-- Natalyn Lewis: I have the advantage of coaching soccer players, and I coach them very similarly. I say, "Look, guys, having an emotion on a field is not a bad thing. That just shows you're passionate. The difference is one player is going to experience the passion and it's so uncomfortable that they quit. The other player is going to experience the passion and they're going to sprint their butt off and hit somebody on that field and feel great and perform well." The release of physical emotion is super important, and there's a way to do that in a super healthy way. With athletes, it's a really fun thing to teach them because it completely shifts the dynamic of their performance.
--:-- When you're working in an office setting and they're like, "Okay, I'm sitting at a desk feeling trapped in my little cubicle with my headset on and my screen, and this person's yelling at me. I'm feeling all the emotion. At first I felt rage, then I got pissed off, then this person got personal, and now I'm just flustered. My mind went blank and I can't figure out what I'm doing." What are they supposed to do? There are tools for this, but a lot of people just don't know the tools or they don't understand it. So they come back and they're like, "Well, you just gotta suck it up and take the next call." But they don't know what that looks like or what they're supposed to physically, actionably do. Since the leader doesn't know, and they don't train their staff, when their staff keeps coming to them, they get more and more uncomfortable with the question because they don't know the answer. That's a very uncomfortable position for leaders because they don't like it. They like having the answer.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm interested in your take on this. How I solved this problem in my own business—I had a national digital commercial insurance agency. We created a private Slack channel. We were never politically correct, but we called it the Bitch Channel. Essentially, when someone had a really shitty sales call or service call, I said, "This is free reign. You are not talking about each other. We're not spending all day in here. You go in if you just got blasted off on this son of a—blah, blah, blah, blah—said this, and you just got hit."
--:-- What I found was they used it for a while, and then eventually it almost started to self-heal the wound. I basically gave them permission to vent all the crap they had. The best part was some of the shit that they would say is hilarious. "This guy said this, house," you know. But then they would be done and they would get on to the next call. I don't know how healthy that is or how appropriate it is. I'm super interested in your take on that, but that was how we solved it. It actually did help because it was almost like they kept all this emotion in and then it would spill over because they felt like it was inappropriate or they didn't have a mechanism to release it. Once I gave them this vent—whether it's the right thing to do or not, and thank God it's deleted and I hope it still doesn't exist on the internet—a lot of that gave them what they needed: the ability to just blast off on someone without any repercussions. Then they could come back. I said, "This is not for each other. You need to take that home and tell your partner, your therapist, or whatever, ChatGPT. But this is for clients, to get it out of your system." It seemingly worked kind of well.
--:-- Natalyn Lewis: There's some science to why that would work. It's the idea of emotions like a still bottle of water. Everything that happens in the day adds a little carbonation, and then the big moments shake it up a little bit. Where do you want to open that thing? You want to open it on your nice carpet, or you want to open it over the sink with rubber gloves and goggles on? When you give somebody a sink and some rubber gloves and some goggles, like, "You're welcome to open this," then the opening is no longer this trepidation or this crushing it down or hoping it doesn't come out on somebody. It's actually quite enjoyable to release it. That's the idea behind it.
--:-- I have a client where they have a pad of paper, and the pad at the top of the paper literally says, "Let It Out." What they do is when they're on the call with their client, if the client says something and they want desperately to say something back, but that's not the time—like a client calls and says, "You told me this," and the person sitting on the other line is like, "I know for a fact I didn't say that," but you can't say that to the customer, it's not going to help anything—they would just write down, "Be like one second," and they would write their note, but it would be like, "I never said that." They gave themselves the voice that they weren't allowed to have vocally over here. The call would end and they would rip it up and throw it away and start the next thing. We called it the Write and Rip Pad. You're just letting it out, letting it go.
--:-- In the service situation specifically, there are so many times they never get a voice. You notice your service people will get a lot of rapid heart rate, really tense necks, and tension here and here because they never give themselves a voice first. They can't really stand up for themselves in those moments. They just kind of get crapped on. Giving them space and giving them freedom to release is key.
--:-- I have another client that does breaks on the 50s. They rotate different groups. Half the group does a break on the odd 50s, and one does a break on the even 50s. They just take 10 minutes at the 50 to get off the phone, get up, get ice water, go in, crank the music if they need to, go outside and get a walk—just move and release whatever tension built up over being on the phones. Give them that sink, the rubber gloves, the goggles. Give them a space to get it out.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What else is going on in leadership right now? When you're getting phone calls, what's the stuff that's coming in that's got people all tuned up? Any other consistent patterns?
--:-- Natalyn Lewis: Interpersonal communications. I would say the number one thing I deal with right now is teaching teams to communicate. Everybody's in a slightly heightened state of emotions. Everything gets personal. Our team can't discuss something without somebody getting frustrated or irritated, and then it's drama. I say this as a woman, so we'll be clear about that. I'm saying it as a woman to my ladies. But when men and women work together, the men get very frustrated. When two men are having a conversation, they can just throw down on each other. As soon as the meeting's over, they're like, "Dude, you want to grab some lunch?" "Yeah, let's grab it. Let's go hit around." But the women don't talk to each other for a day and a half. It creates all this dynamic in the office.
--:-- Just teaching people to be able to disagree without the deep emotions. We have a tendency where nobody can disagree with us or it's offensive or personal or emotional or heightened. How in the world are we all supposed to make good decisions in our business if we're all just agreeable? The point is to bring all these beautiful minds to the table and find all the perspectives. Those perspectives shouldn't all agree, or we're doing something wrong. Interpersonal communications is maybe one of the biggest ones I work on a lot these days.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I want to stay down this path. I used to call our team the Island of Misfit Toys. I did that on purpose to kind of let people realize that we are all so incredibly different, and that's our superpower. The differences that we have, that's what makes us strong. So it's okay that she disagrees with her and he disagrees with this one over here, because you're all freaking different.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You're all coming, you all live in different parts of the country. You all come from different situations. So it's literally statistically impossible for you all to agree all the time. So that's okay. We need to be able to do that. Sometimes that worked well. Sometimes it didn't. But they seemed to grab onto it and like it.
--:-- I was trying to set a culture of... because I agree with you. The tagline for this show is "unreasonable people seeking unreasonable success." Part of being unreasonable is being a disagreeable human. It doesn't mean being an asshole, but being disagreeable.
--:-- So you're trying to cultivate a team of people, leaders, a group, who can communicate in this way, who don't take every disagreement personally, who are kind of actively searching. I had someone on the show the other day that framed this really well: genuine curiosity for discovering the truth. That was her North Star with her company. I thought it was a really nice way of framing it.
--:-- So how the hell do you actually do this? Because this is a major issue.
--:-- Natalyn Lewis: Yeah. So I go into organizations and I teach them two forms of communications tools. If you think about it, your boys play baseball. Did you just stick your boys out there on the baseball field and say, "I'm not going to teach you how to hold a bat, how to look at a pitch, how to put your feet in the right spots, how to stand, how to get over the ball. I'm just going to put you there and let you take fastballs, and eventually you'll figure it out"?
--:-- Maybe they will, maybe they won't. Maybe they'll take a lot of blows in the meantime, and they're probably never going to be a great batter because they'll start doing really poor technique. They might get a hit one time and lock into that ugly swing. And you're like, "Okay, that'll work for Little League, but you're never getting any further."
--:-- The same thing happens with communications. We put dynamically different people in a room. They've been through college education, high school education, or the school of experienced education. How many times did somebody sit them down and say, "This is how you hold a conversation. This is the tool you use when you walk in the door and start asking someone questions. These are the words and the framework you need to use to have a conversation that ends in a positive result"? When did anybody actually teach them the technique?
--:-- When I walk into these corporations, there's not a single person in there that understands technique. They understand concept, some understand principle, and some have natural capacity. The vast majority have never learned how to have organizational communication that works well. So I teach them two tools that we use in collaboration. By the time we're done, it's a remarkable change in the organization's capacity to communicate. It's just because we teach them actual technique, actual skills they've never learned before. Why are we expecting everybody to be good at this? No one has ever learned it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I want to ask you a different question now. I want to dive into handling ego as a leader. When I look at my own career in leadership positions, my successes came when I was able to settle into a position of what we'll call authoritative humility. Understanding my role as it was, but humble in that position. When ego has played a role, that's when I've made my biggest mistakes.
--:-- Yet I think so much because of social media and Instagram and this perception of what a leader is and how they hold themselves, you get this idea that "I'm in this role, I need to make all decisions, I'm supposed to know everything." That's one that seems very difficult for people to get past. This idea that just because I hold a certain title, I'm supposed to know every answer to every question.
--:-- When you're approaching a leader dealing with ego-related issues, how do you start to break that down and get them to a more productive and healthy place?
--:-- Natalyn Lewis: The first thing we do is engage in identity work. Identity is an interesting thing because we gain identity both intentionally and unintentionally. With leadership in our world, unintentional identity is ruling the roost 90% of the time.
--:-- Where did that come from? Where did the idea that leaders are supposed to have an answer come from? Did you decide that intentionally when you took a leadership role? Did somebody tell you that? Is that what you witnessed in another leader? How did you come up with that idea that you should have the answer? If you did not intentionally decide that's who you are, then that is unintentional identity.
--:-- Why do people act the way they do when they come into these positions? Is it because they sat down and really decided, "Here's who I am, here's how I want to lead, this is what I want an organization to look like, this is how I want it to feel, this is where it's going, and this is what it looks like for me to lead them there"? If they sit down and get intentional first, then we start to find the gaps. We start to see that this behavior happening right now—is it in alignment with where you're going and who you really want to be?
--:-- We see this happen all the time. For example, I had a gentleman whose life was falling apart at the seams. His agency was rocking, but his marriage was a disaster. His relationship with his kids was non-existent. His health was going down the toilet. I said, "Your definition of a leader—what does it look like all the way around? If you gave the full complete picture of yourself, who are you? Who is this man that leads this multi-million dollar corporation? Is he sick with kids that hate him and a wife who won't talk to him anymore? Is that the real picture?"
--:-- He said, "Well, no. But I have to be here first and I have to stay longer than everybody else." I said, "Why?" He said, "Because that's what somebody who leads a successful organization does." I said, "How do you know that? Was that your idea? Did somebody tell you that?"
--:-- His dad barked that at him his whole life: "You're going to be successful in life. You have to work harder than everybody else around you, which means you show up first and you leave last." So this guy's definition of leadership was the grind, but his whole life was falling apart and he was losing the respect of his organization. He latched onto this one aspect of leadership, but it was unintentional identity. He never sat down and defined that for himself. He was just taking it on.
--:-- With leaders, the first thing we do—and I would challenge anybody listening to stop for a minute and say, "What is my perfect picture of the kind of leader I want to be? Where do I want it to go? How do I want to lead? At the end of the day, if somebody were talking and saying, 'This was what Ryan was really like,' what do I want that person saying? If my children heard that, would they be proud? If my spouse heard that, would they be proud? Do I have my physical health and well-being? Do I have a spiritual connection to some higher power? Do I live my life with purpose?"
--:-- If you can't answer those questions yet, do some soul searching and figure that out. Because if you haven't defined how you're showing up as a leader, I promise you, you are operating on somebody else's definition. Right now, you're operating unintentionally.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I love the word intention. I think so much of what we do in our life, not just in leadership or business, happens unintentionally. And we blame it on luck or God or the universe or some other person or force that we make up. When you really get down to the symptoms, you weren't doing anything with intention. You were floating through life, allowing things to happen to you, hoping you'd pluck a lottery ticket out of thin air and have this life you dreamed of that you didn't make.
--:-- The episode that will come out right before this one is with the founder of Dugout Mugs—the baseball bats he turned into mugs. He had a bunch of wins and losses in his life, all up and down. He carved this path where he took the entire summer off. He said, "I just got back from three months. I didn't touch my business once." CEO owns 92% of the company, doing 10-plus million a year in revenue. For three months, he didn't touch his business.
--:-- Who's the better leader? The guy doing 10 million but his wife hates him, his kids don't know who he is, he's out of shape, unhappy, but he's in the office every day grinding? Or the guy who had the humility to outsource, systematize, automate, delegate to the point where for three months he doesn't even have to touch his business?
--:-- Why do we hold up the grinding guy on Instagram like, "Oh, look at this grinder, work hard, hustle"? And this guy who built a business that allows him to live the life he always dreamed of—because he's not trying to go from 10 million to 100 million, there's something wrong with him? He's not as good a leader? That narrative is just not told enough.
--:-- Natalyn Lewis: It's not told enough because we're not trying at the onset of our businesses to create our own narrative. If you were to say to my client who was grinding—which I did say to him—"Paint me a picture of what you want your life ultimately to look like. Are the decisions you're making today and the way you're running your business getting you there?" There's a complete disconnect. But because he's not starting every day with a reminder of vision, because he's not understanding intentionally who he is as a man leading to that vision, there is a complete disconnect.
--:-- Then we get into reactive and comparison mode. This is where the pride comes from. The ego comes not because I'm afraid of what I want and who I really want to be, but because I don't know if what I want is good enough. I just compared myself to somebody else, and now I've got to go do better than them. It's not okay for me to want this nice life with my family because that guy's got twice what I've got, so I've got to go get that now.
--:-- If I don't really know what I want, then I'm just looking around. If I go to the store intentionally shopping for one thing—I show up at Foot Locker, I'm buying some J's, I'm going home. That's my objective. I walk in, ask for that specific shoe in my size, try it on, buy it, walk out. I'm super content and very happy. I got exactly what I wanted.
--:-- But if I just know I want a shoe and I start looking around at everybody else's shoes and walking through the mall, what's going to happen? I'm going to find 14 other things I think I might want that I never thought of before. That leads me to spend too much money, be incredibly inefficient, and ultimately leave me with credit card debt and stuff I don't actually want. Now I'm stuck in a hole.
--:-- That is how people are running their businesses. They're running reactive to something because they're not taking the time to know exactly what they want and who they are. That unintentional vision or unintentional comparison creates unintentional pride. They're functioning in a place where everybody else defines how they have to show up to go get some unknown outcome they think they're supposed to want.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Does this go back to where we were at the beginning with uncertainty? If you're not certain, then you're not safe. If I have five things, there's a better chance one of those things makes me look cool. But if I just pick one shoe, there's a better chance people might not think I'm cool for buying that shoe. Now the whole reason I came in here is blown up.
--:-- If it's unknown and uncertain, that equals unsafe. Then I will hesitate. I will function from concern. I will function like life is happening to me and I will react instead of act. Then I'm not building anything. I'm just surviving.
--:-- There are people—and I put myself in this category—who feel very comfortable in uncertainty. It's literally never bothered me. It's what made me into the leader and entrepreneur I've become. I'm willing to wade into that gray space and go, "I feel confident I can figure this out." Not always perfect, for sure. But I can't tell you I was trained on that. It certainly didn't come from my parents. My dad was a laborer on the railroad. My mom was a receptionist. Their advice was, "Go work for the biggest company you can, get a pension, and retire." I tried that. It did not work. It was a hard fail for me in that environment.
--:-- So obviously there are some people who are built to handle uncertainty. Can this also be trained? Can you be trained into this?
--:-- Natalyn Lewis: That is emotional intelligence. The tagline I start everybody with is, "We're going to get real comfortable being uncomfortable." That is the tagline of emotional intelligence for us, because that is the point.
--:-- Much like somebody can have natural athleticism, you can have natural emotional intelligence. The difference is, do you understand how to create it in somebody else? That's where the impact to leadership comes in. I might have it, but if I can't create it in someone else or understand it enough to operate with other people, that's where it starts to fall off.
--:-- I actually believe a lot of leaders of organizations—especially in any organization that requires sales—have a tendency to lean into the unknown and uncertain. They have a tendency to not be afraid of the unsafe. They have a little bit of grind that pushes them into that space. Over time, they get stronger naturally because as you have experiences with the unknown that turn out well, your brain starts to say, "Hey, we don't mind the unknown. This is not a bad place for us. There could be safety in the unknown." Now you become very resilient to that.
--:-- But if we don't know how to train that next person to take that first step into the unknown, take that first step into the uncomfortable, get comfortable being uncomfortable, and then start to create success patterns so their brain finds safety in the uncomfortable as well—if we're missing that step, we can't necessarily bring our entire organization with us. That leads to a lot of leadership frustration. Half the leaders I work with say, "I don't know what to do with these guys. I don't know why I have a team of wusses." One of my clients the other day said, "I have a team of wusses and I don't know what to do with them." That's fair because he was naturally athletic, naturally gifted with emotional intelligence, naturally unafraid of the uncomfortable. Always had been.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: How much of this is hiring?
--:-- Natalyn Lewis: There's opportunity to hire differently for sure. I've met very few people that, when given the understanding and tools, cannot shift and become. So part of it is definitely hiring. Hiring people with high levels of emotional intelligence is becoming one of the most dominant things. Harvard Business School just did an entire article on how important it is. They said emotional intelligence hiring right now is more important than any formal training, education, or background in the area. Because if they have a higher level of emotional intelligence, they can be trained faster with less frustration. They're not afraid to learn, not afraid to engage, not afraid to make mistakes, and not afraid to win.
--:-- So there is some degree of hiring involved for sure. When you have a decent hire—mid to higher—that higher can be taught with some basic skills. You got a baseball team. You got one natural athlete and maybe nine that you need to teach how to bat. Then you got your 10th one where you're like, "Bless your heart, son. No matter how many times we swing that bat, you should bowl. That's what you should switch to." I have some soccer players like that too. Their natural ability is uncanny. Once I teach them a skill, they perform incredibly well. And I have a couple that I'm like, "Cross country is a sport that's better for you because nothing will be at your feet but the ground."
--:-- It's not unlike that with emotional intelligence. You're going to have some natural athletes, some that can be taught, and some that you're like, "This is sales and service—not a great space for these people. They need to be in empathetic jobs."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I like the way you talk about EQ because I've heard in different groups and leadership meetings or masterminds, and oftentimes from people who don't understand EQ the way you're speaking about it, they use it synonymous with the negative connotation to DEI stuff or mental health. Like, "Oh, if you're high in EQ, that means all you do is care about emotions. Driven people tend to not care as much about emotions. It's more about getting the outcome."
--:-- I find that type of individual struggles with this idea of EQ. But what I'm picking up on from the way you define it and talk about it feels like exactly what they want. Someone who can emotionally respond to the demands of the job. There's a negative version of it, which seems misclassified having heard you talk about it—being soft and caving to every mental whim.
--:-- Natalyn Lewis: I totally agree that is the direction and shift it's gone. That's why I said it overswung the mark. If I were to describe good EQ, I would put it on a spectrum. All the way over here is "everybody should receive a therapy session, everyone should lay on the couch, everyone should talk about their problems at all times." That's the far left side.
--:-- If we come all the way over here, the highest end of emotional intelligence is: if you understand emotions, engage with them intelligently and intentionally, you can experience the highest level of resilience, grit, passion, and accomplishment. I believe people who hit a 10 in emotional intelligence here can have it all. And I don't believe you can have it all without emotional intelligence because you lack understanding to work with people. People are everywhere. Without them, we're never going to have it all. It impacts relationships, health, longevity, efficiency, and productivity.
--:-- If you're on this end of the spectrum, go see a therapist. That's not me. But if you're the kind of person who says, "I'm a high achiever and I need to take the next step. I need to be better at driving my people, better at motivating my teams, better at leading. I want a team that wants and likes to do hard things and get the victory afterwards"—that is emotional performance coaching. That is EQ driven in the right direction. That's the spectrum.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Natalyn Lewis, my friend, this was as good as I was hoping for. Having seen your presentation, I've been so excited to talk to you. I could talk to you for another hour about this stuff.
--:-- For people who have heard this—event organizers looking to have you come in and speak, I would highly recommend it. I've seen her do her thing live. It's phenomenal. You'll get questions. You'll get people leaning in. Even curmudgeonly old dudes who think they know everything about leadership will lean in and ask questions. I promise you, I saw it happen in real time.
--:-- For consulting and the different work you do, where can they get deeper into your world?
--:-- Natalyn Lewis: They can find me on LinkedIn. I'm there as Natalyn Lewis. My website is ascendEQ.com, the name of my company. They can reach out there or through any of my other social media handles connected on LinkedIn. Just DM me. I'm happy to talk to anyone about what's going on in their organization and how what we do can help.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I appreciate you. Thank you so much for your time.
