March 2021 - Beyond the Crucible by Warwick Fairfax

The Greatest of All Time. Shorthand, GOAT — especially in sports contexts. But the single-minded pursuit of being the best (fill in the blank) in your sphere of influence can invade your professional and personal life, too. And when it does, it can be dangerous. Crucible Leadership founder and BEYOND THE CRUCIBLE host Warwick Fairfax talks with cohost Gary Schneeberger about why we should avoid chasing GOATdom – and, more importantly, how to do it. Warwick unpacks five insightful steps we can take to decouple our achievements from our identity to help us pursue a life of significance and a legacy we can be proud of. “Truly great leaders,” he explains, “don’t focus on their own greatness.”

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Transcript

Warwick F:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Crucible Leadership. So it’s not just for these great athletes, it’s very tempting to want to be the best in our field of endeavor, which is not wrong. But it’s getting your whole sense of identity at being perceived by your friends and neighbors and colleagues as being the best in whatever your arena is.

Gary S:
And it comes with dangers. It comes with great dangers of a loss of identity, where if your identity isn’t being the best oral surgeon and you’re not the best oral surgeon, then your identity is crushed in some way. That’s a crucible. One of the dangers is it allows you to, or it leads you to put your emphasis on the wrong things. I go back to The Natural. You put your emphasis on achievement, not relationships. And that’s one of the things that almost passes Roy Hobbs by in that film. He finally does get back together with his high school sweetheart, but a lot of years pass where he is putting his emphasis on trying to get achievement, and he’s missing relationship, he’s missing those things that are truly important that lead to what you call a life of significance. So there are some dangers that come from being wrapped up in pursuing single-mindedly being the greatest of all time.

Gary S:
The greatest of all time. Maybe you know it better in the context, we’re discussing the concept today, by the acronym G-O-A-T, GOAT. It’s a discussion often had over athletes, who’s the GOAT of the NBA or professional golf or pro tennis. We discuss that aspect on today’s episode, but really only as a jumping off point to talk about how this idea of being the GOAT invades our own professional and personal lives, and the dangers it presents when it does.

Gary S:
Hi, I’m Gary Schneeberger, the cohost of the show, and the communications director for Crucible Leadership. Today, Warwick and I talk at length, not only about why we should avoid the pursuit of GOATdom but how. Warwick unpacks five insightful steps we can take beginning today to decouple our achievements from our identity to help us pursue a life of significance and a legacy we and our children and their children, and so on and so on and so on, can be proud of. As Warwick wisely says about halfway through our discussion, truly great leaders don’t focus on their own greatness.

Gary S:
So, listener, we have a fun episode today, and we’re not exactly sure what to call the episode. Warwick sort of thought it up, and we talked about it. And when we did, we sort of just put the name GOAT syndrome on the show, GOAT as in greatest of all time, a common discussion in the sporting world. Who’s the greatest quarterback, basketball player, tennis player, football player of all time. So Warwick and I the sort of threw out GOAT syndrome. We were going to call Warwick’s blog something about GOAT syndrome, and one of our team realized that there is actually something that’s a syndrome involving farm animal GOATs. So we didn’t want to call it that. So we’re not exactly sure what we’re going to call it.

Gary S:
I came up with this morning while I was getting ready, let’s call it, we shouldn’t be GOAT roping, we shouldn’t be trying to rope in and lasso being the GOAT. That’s not necessarily a great thing. But we will unpack in this conversation why sort of a single-minded pursuit of being the GOAT, the greatest of all, time is not necessarily the wisest thing for your life. And Warwick, what are your initial thoughts on why that’s true, why pursuing GOATdom is not necessarily the wisest course of action for us?

Warwick F:
We’ll unpack more the challenge with trying to be the GOAT or GOAT syndrome, so to speak, is you get your identity wrapped up in achieving that. And even if you’re the greatest of all time, at one point in sports or even in life, the challenge is, your chances of staying there, it’s not always that high. Some people will retain that position forever, but in many cases, they won’t. So it’s sort of an ephemeral goal that risks being beaten by somebody else. Everybody wants to be the best in whatever their field is. And so having your whole sense of identity being wrapped up in the greatest of all time, in sports, or at some field of endeavor, it’s a slippery slope that your sense of self and identity could be shattered. It’s a goal that is probably not sustainable, at least in terms of your inner sense of self-worth and psyche.

Gary S:
And this would probably be a good time to sort of begin the discussion by saying what we’re not saying. And we’re not saying, I don’t think, we’re not saying that you shouldn’t try to be the best you can be, you shouldn’t aim for being the best you can be. But being the best you is different than being the best them. In other words, the idea of a GOAT is to be the best of everybody who ever lived or everybody who ever played this game or did this profession. And that can be unhealthy. Trying to be a better you, working hard to be the best you can be, that’s a good thing. But wrapping your identity up in being the best whoever did x, y, z or q, can cause some problems.

Warwick F:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s nothing wrong with striving to be the best in whatever your field is. Having your identity being wrapped up in being the best of all time in your environment, your profession, or even having your identity being wrapped up in achievement, in goals. Trying hard is good, realizing your whole sense of self and persona is not about what you do. Who you are is a lot more than achievement. And that’s really the root of GOAT syndrome, if you will, is getting your identity wrapped up in achievement, whether it’s the greatest of all time or being the best. So that’s the subtle thing, which we’ll unpack more as we go on.

Gary S:
Right. So, if you’re out there GOAT-roping, if you’re trying to be the GOAT, that’s where the problems can come in. And it’s fascinating to me as we talk about this, so many times in life, some of the best analogies we can make to a situation that we face in our day to day lives is through the sporting world. And the term GOAT tends to be used mostly in sports. People will argue incessantly. There are talk show careers that are made on who is the GOAT in football, who is the GOAT in golf, who is the GOAT in tennis, in hockey, in Jai alai. Who is the GOAT in whatever the sport is, that tends to be where the conversation starts. And that’s helpful to discuss in order to see how difficult it can be to one, establish who a GOAT is, and two, to stay there and how that can sort of knock us off our feet as we talk about as a crucible experience.

Warwick F:
Yeah, absolutely. And three, that we’ve really discussed was in golf, football and tennis. And part of the impetus for this discussion was the recent tragic car accident that Tiger Woods had in California. He was chasing Jack Nicklaus’ record of 18 major golf championships. Tiger Woods was at 15, Tiger’s now 45, which is getting a little old, frankly, to win golf majors. I think Jack Nicklaus won his final Masters at Augusta at 46 I think. It’s not impossible with modern fitness but it’s tough. It was always going to be tough.

Warwick F:
Tiger’s definitely had his challenges, physically and otherwise. But then this car accident on top of that, which shattered his lower legs, it just made you think, oh my gosh, it was tough before, it’s even tougher now. And so, everybody, including me, just felt so badly for him about what he went through and we all hope he can come back and win more majors. Nobody knows exactly where his thinking is but it’s got to be tough. I mean, he’s got to be thinking, Jack Nicklaus’ record, love to beat it. The morning after the whole car crash has got to be, oh my gosh, now what.

Warwick F:
So that’s kind of was in my mind, and then you have others. Tom Brady recently won his seventh Super Bowl this last one with Tampa Bay before as we know it was with New England.

Gary S:
And that is, by the way, let me just add this, his seventh Super Bowl, just to put that in perspective, there have been 55 Super Bowls. 13% of all Super Bowls that have been won had been won by one quarterback. That is just astounding to me, and that is one of the reasons why people throw the word GOAT around when they talk about Tom Brady.

Warwick F:
Yeah, I mean, obviously you’ve got Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw with four Super Bowls. And not having grown up in this country, you would know better than I do, Gary, about this, some people look at Joe Montana’s stats, but certainly, Tom Brady certainly has a right to be in the mix of being called the greatest of all time, if not lay claim to it. Winning seven is not going to be the easiest, and he’s still going, it’s not going to be the easiest record to break. But who knows?

Warwick F:
In tennis, which all Australians love tennis, there we have a real active discussion about who the greatest of all time, and is in a potential changing of the record. Roger Federer currently holds 20 Grand Slams. He eclipsed Pete Sampras’ record of 14, a number of years ago, which people thought 14, how can you break that? So he’s at 20. Now you’ve got Rafa Nadal that recently also got to 20. And because Rafa Nadal is so dominant on clay on the French Open, if he is vaguely healthy, he has a very strong chance come June when they play that championship in Paris of being considered maybe the GOAT in tennis, he will have broken the tie at 20. You’ve got Novak Djokovic at 18 majors. You’ve got three of the greatest players of all time playing in the same era.

Warwick F:
If you’re Roger Federer, it’s like, well, gosh, I thought I was in good shape. Just my luck to have, it’s almost like being Tom Brady playing against Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw in the same era. It’d be like seriously, really? Not that it’s easy now, but it’s that kind of a deal. But the point of those analogies is being the GOAT is ephemeral. Roger Federer is considered the second greatest player on clay in some ways. But he keeps getting beat by Rafa Nadal, so it doesn’t matter when it’s clay. So the sporting analogy show that Tom Brady of the three maybe has the greatest claim to being the greatest. Records are meant to be broken. It’s tough. And then the whole sense of, we don’t know where these three players stand, they’re different folks. But having your identity wrapped up in that, it’s a dangerous thing.

Gary S:
To the point that you just made about it being ephemeral, I’ve got a statistic sheet here in my hands. When he retired, Brett Favre, former quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, when he retired, Brett Favre was the NFL’s all time leader in passing yards, passing touchdowns and quarterback wins. That’s GOATish statistics, right? He’s been retired for more than a decade, he’s been retired a while now. Now Brett Favre is the NFL leader in most times sacked, most career interceptions, and most fumbles. So, what was GOAT-ish in the good sense, greatest of all time, now is sort of GOAT-ish, in you’re the GOAT, the guy who kind of ruined the game. If you fumbled the most, been intercepted the most, and sacked the most, those are not auspicious statistics.

Gary S:
So, all that to say, if you wrap your identity up in what your numbers are, whether they’re numbers on a playing field or numbers in a ledger, from your career, numbers in your bank account for how much money you make, if you wrap your identity up in those things, those things can change. There’s a story, Warwick, that I’ve heard you tell a time or two, that I want to, as we sort of shift from the sports analogy into the real world. I’ve heard you say on a couple of occasions, and you write about it in your book, Crucible Leadership: Embrace Your Trials to Lead a Life of Significance, coming out this October from Mount Tabor Media.

Gary S:
You say in the book and I’ve heard you say before that while you were going through the period where you were the heir to the family media dynasty, you were told by family members, by your parents, that you had the ability, you could be, if this goes right, Warwick, if your running of the company goes the way it could go, with your experience at Oxford and at Harvard Business School, with the way you’ve prepared yourself for this, you can be not just a great leader of the company, you can be one of the great Fairfax’s, perhaps the greatest Fairfax since the founder of the company, your great, great grandfather, John Fairfax. That had to have been a lot to live with.

Warwick F:
Yeah, well said. That’s true. I mean, as I think I’ve said elsewhere, I made the mistake of working hard. Growing up in a wealthy almost aristocratic family, I sometimes jokingly feel like, it does feel a little bit like the royal family, it doesn’t feel like you had a whole lot of choice but to go into the family business. But I jokingly say that I made the mistake of working hard. So I got grades in school, I went to a good private boys school. Got into Oxford where my father, grandfather, elder brother has gone. Worked on Wall Street, got into Harvard Business School. So, all of that kind of working hard to do my duty and make my parents and family proud, that made people think, gosh, I mean, he’s intelligent, he works hard. Could he be one of the great Fairfax’s since the founder, John Fairfax?

Warwick F:
And so while humility is very important to me, that sense in my mind, I think it started affecting me in the sense, gosh, maybe I could do a whole lot of good for Australia. Maybe my name would be known generations to come. The thought did creep into my brain. And then you had some people around the time of the takeover, well-meaning believers saying, gosh, we’ve been praying for God to raise up somebody in the heart of the media for 20 years or more. And you’re an answer to prayer. Gosh. I could be one of the greats since John Fairfax, I’m an answer to prayer, I could have an impact on my country.

Warwick F:
Even somebody like me where humility and faith is so important, it starts seeping into your psyche and consciousness. So when the whole two billion plus takeover ended, it’s like, well, now what’s my mission? It’s almost like, you get too old to play football and now what do I do? Well, that mission’s over, that goal, that dream. It was a tough thing to deal with. So there’s some part of that GOAT syndrome in some sad way that I can identify with. Having your whole identity wrapped up in a goal or a persona, or what people are saying about you, about who you potentially could be.

Gary S:
And is it safe to say, I mean, you’re crucible, you lost the family business, 150 years in the family, gone. Price tag of $2.25 billion dollars, gone. But is it safe to say, even with that, that it was the sense of failure, the blow to your identity was even just one tick harder because of that? Did whatever bit of GOAT syndrome, GOAT roping, whatever bit of that seeped into you, did that make it even that much worse, even just a click worse, that failure?

Warwick F:
I think it was. It was a failure of epic proportions, and while it wasn’t so much the money because money has not been a driver for me, the sense of, gosh, the impact I could have had on the company, bringing it back to the ideals of the founder, have it be run well, the impact through newspapers on the country, that sense of what might have been and what could I have done, it’s sort of like unfulfilled promise. Somebody that may have been an incredible high school football or basketball player suffers a devastating injury, and they never know what would have happened in college, or professional, what might have been. And so, you have to live with the what might have been. And that’s not uncommon unfortunately. Because of the expectations others were putting on me, and I was putting on myself, that sense of what might have been just added to the difficulty, the bitterness almost, that feeling of failure certainly.

Gary S:
And that feeling that you had, that’s why we’re talking on Beyond the Crucible on the podcast that deals with how do you bounce back from crucible experiences. That’s why we’re spending so much time talking about great football players and tennis players and golfers and all of that. The reason we’re talking about that because it can affect us in our own pursuit of our professional dreams, our professional goals. And those are the dangers. Your identity gets wrapped up, not just in what you do, but in being the best there ever was in what you do. You and I’ve talked a lot about, in the movie, The Natural, with Robert Redford, there’s a great scene that you love in that movie. Describe that scene what happens and why that then applies to all of us in some way, what happens to Robert Redford’s character?

Warwick F:
The Natural is one of my favorite movies. It’s about a young guy from Nebraska that kind of makes a mistake, a woman that just is somewhat psycho, and she kind of basically injures him. And so, his promising career seems to be over. He comes back and, they don’t tell you, but I’m guessing somewhere in his 30s, with the mythical New York Knights team. I think you have a jersey.

Gary S:
I have a hat, a jersey, a T-shirt, I have the whole-

Warwick F:
Which I think is so cool. Anyway, just because he’s an honest guy that won’t kind of play ball with people who want to bet on sports, he ends up getting poisoned and he’s in the hospital. And the woman that he knew from when he was growing up played by Glenn Close, he’s in the hospital bed, and she is at his hospital bedside trying to comfort him. And Robert Bedford’s name in the movie is Roy Hobbs, that’s the character he’s playing. And he just says to Glenn Close, “Things really didn’t work out the way that I had hoped.” And she says, “What do you mean?” “Well, I just thought I would be one of the great baseball players of all time. I’d walk down my hometown and they’d say, there goes Roy Hobbs, the greatest there ever was.” And she says to him, “Well, Roy, but then what?”

Warwick F:
He looks at her. He does not understand the question what she’s saying. So you’re the greatest of all time. Well, then what? What’s after that? Almost not so what, but is that all there is? He cannot fathom the question that Glenn Close is asking him. I’ve thought about that a lot. And that’s just a perfect scene that epitomizes GOAT syndrome, that sort of there goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was. Could be, there goes, John Smith, Mary Jones, the best there ever was.

Warwick F:
I guess the point of this episode is not just about great athletes or sports heroes. It could be, maybe you could think, gosh, maybe I could be the best lawyer in my town, the best surgeon, the best real estate person. Maybe if you’re a student, maybe I could be the best high school basketball player, swimmer, diver. In whatever arena you’re in, there is a temptation to say I want to be the best in my field, in my area, so that all my friends will say, gosh, there goes Joe, there goes Susan. They’re the best at what they do. They are the best. They’re the best I know personally. They’re the greatest.

Warwick F:
So it’s not just for these great athletes. It’s very tempting to want to be the best in our field of endeavor, which is not wrong, but it’s getting your whole sense of identity at being perceived by your friends and neighbors and colleagues as being the best in whatever your arena is.

Gary S:
And it comes with dangers. It comes with great dangers of a loss of identity, where if your identity is in being the best oral surgeon and you’re not the best oral surgeon, then your identity is crushed in some way. That’s a crucible. One of the dangers is it leads you to put your emphasis on the wrong things. I go back to The Natural. You put your emphasis on achievement, not relationships. And that’s one of the things that almost passes Roy Hobbs by in that film. He finally does get back together with his high school sweetheart, but a lot of years pass where he is putting his emphasis on trying to get achievement, and he’s missing relationship. He’s missing those things that are truly important that lead to what you call a life of significance.

Gary S:
So there are some dangers that come from being wrapped up in pursuing single-mindedly being the greatest of all time. And that’s why we’re having this discussion, and that’s why we’re going to pivot here in a minute to start talking about ways in which we can cut short that pursuit, that all encompassing pursuit of being the GOAT. By cutting that short, we can avoid some of the pitfalls and the heartache that come from it.

Warwick F:
Absolutely. I mean, I think it’s really two things. One is trying to avoid the pitfalls of getting into the GOAT syndrome. But then sadly, others, me to a degree, we’ll have times in which maybe, I wasn’t ever the GOAT perhaps, but I guess I had my expectations of trying to make a great contribution to the company and the country. But for those who are legitimately in conversation about being the GOAT in sports or in business, once you’ve had a fall from grace or you’re no longer in the mix, that’s hard to deal with too. So it’s really both the ones, maybe you’re on your way up, or how do you avoid the GOAT syndrome pitfalls. And if you’re already on top of the mountain and have fallen, what do you do then, how do you recover? So it’s both almost like vaccination, if you will, before you get the disease, and if you have the disease, how do you recover? It’s kind of both.

Gary S:
And when you’ve roped the GOAT. When you have achieved GOATness, not only is it ephemeral, but it’s not fulfilling. Here’s a quote from 17th century French poet, Jean de La Fontaine, said this, “Neither wealth nor greatness render us happy.” It can be not just fleeting, but it can be not fulfilling in the sense of you can get it and it’s not, it’s Glenn Close saying, and then what? Is that all there is? There are other things that are more important than just being identified from the outside looking in as the greatest of all time.

Gary S:
And we just had a guest on the podcast a few weeks back, Hank McClarty. And Hank talks about this. Hank was in many ways, close to the GOAT in his financial services career. He was on the cover of magazine, his firm’s were ranked in the top 10, 15, whatever they were. Hank, by his own description said he started drinking the Hank Kool-Aid, believing his own press clippings, and his life collapsed. He spent more than two years living with no direction and no job off of credit card points in a hotel relying on the free breakfasts. Not only was that not his identity, his identity was gone. He didn’t know what to do but he didn’t have a job, he didn’t have a direction. And what he found was significance. He was able to rebuild his career as he talks about in the episode. He rebuilt his success. But more important to him, based on gratitude and humility, he was able to build significance. And that’s what not focusing solely on being the GOAT allowed him to do.

Warwick F:
That’s absolutely true, and that’s a great example, the sad thing is, for those on the way up, there’s this myth that once I get to the top of the mountain, then I’m going to be happy and fulfilled. And the reason you feel stressed is because you haven’t succeeded in your goal to be the greatest in whatever field it is. I’m reminded of that fable, if you will, about there’re an anthill, and the ants were crawling over each other to get to the top. And one ant says to the other, “So, why are we doing this? What’s up there?” And says, “I didn’t know, it must be amazing, because everybody else is headed up the top of the hill.” And it’s like, yeah, I don’t know why we all try to be the number one financial advisor in the country, or the top real estate person or the top surgeon or the top this, I don’t know. But once I’m there and everybody goes, wow, this guy, this woman, they are the best.

Warwick F:
You want to realize that that’s ephemeral because sometimes, you might be spending your whole career to get there, and you’ll get there later in life. And by then, I wouldn’t say it’s too late to turn, but your years to change the whole legacy deathbed experience as we talk about. There won’t be as many. That’s almost the worst case scenario is reach the peak of success in business or in some other field when you’re over 50 or over 60, because you spent your whole life chasing being the GOAT and it’s like, well, now what.

Gary S:
And this is a danger, we haven’t talked about this in advance, we haven’t talked about it since you first brought it up, but you mentioned one time, when we were going through some stories to film a video for Crucible Leadership about some retirement community somewhere, where there were all these people who had had these great careers, and they were just so unhappy. Am I remembering that right?

Warwick F:
You’re right. I think it was outside of Denver, a bunch of wealthy folks, and that achieved success, but now they’re in some retirement home, and it’s like, well, now what. Probably mention it later, you’ve mentioned before about the whole headstone deal. It’s like, what do you want your legacy to be, and when you’re on your deathbed, you’re thinking about what people are going to say at your funeral, it’s typically not Joe, Mary, they were the wealthiest, the most successful, the best athlete, the best this. That’s not how you’re going to want your family and friends to remember you. It just is not.

Gary S:
It’s ephemeral and it’s fleeting. It’s ephemeral and it’s fleeting. And that’s why significance is neither of those things. significance is not ephemeral, it’s not fleeting. So, how do we, those of us who are listening here today, how do we avoid the pitfalls? How do we solve, what’s the solution to being so wrapped up in pursuing GOATness that we end up falling victim to its more insidious aspects? What are some keys to how we can avoid those things happening to us?

Warwick F:
I think the first one is, don’t focus solely on records. Records can’t be a benchmark of how we’re doing, especially in sports, wins, losses, stats. But rather than focus on records, I think some of the best athletes do that, focus on day to day improvement. Just focus on how can I be better. If you’re in business, what can we do today to serve our customers better? What can we do today to improve our product? If you serve your customers well and improve your product, you’ll probably make more money.

Warwick F:
Some of the most successful people in business know this, if ever you ask a CEO, well, what’s your vision, what’s your mission? To increase revenue 20% for the next five years. Smart business analysts will say, really, that’s it? That’s not a vision, that’s not a mission. The smart ones will say, it’s really to serve our customers, to treasure our employees. Some of the best companies like Southwest Airlines, their whole mission, what started them in Texas, was to unite families, bring families together by bringing the cost of an airfare at an affordable level at a time when air travel was incredibly expensive. That was their mission. Well, they’ve done fabulously well and been very profitable for many years.

Warwick F:
But that wasn’t the goal. The goal was really not about numbers. It was about a thought of bringing families together. The best companies, the best organizations are focused on, not so much on the records, but day to day improvement that’s really anchored by an altruistic mission, or vision.

Gary S:
And that’s the best way for an individual to live in pursuit of goals as well. One of the things I thought about as we were talking about this episode was focus on goodness, not on greatness. Focus on how you can be good, how you can do good for people, not on being great for yourself. I think that shift in things can be an enormous boon to your joy, not your happiness, happiness is circumstantial, and it can be rooted in success. But joy is internal. If you’re focused on bringing goodness to the table, not gathering greatness for yourself, I think that is one of the first prerequisites, one of the first steps toward a life of significance.

Warwick F:
I think that’s very true, is really, it’s what we talk a lot about when we talk about a life of significance, which at Crucible Leadership we define as a life on purpose dedicated to serving others. So it’s not about your own stats, your own record. It’s about the team, it’s about serving your customers, your employees. I think of Jim Collins, his book, Good to Great, which is really a great testament to what we’re talking about. He wrote it a number of years ago, but basically, he analyzed companies that had 15 years of reasonable returns, and then 15 years of incredible returns relative to the stock market.

Warwick F:
All of the leaders he looked at were what he calls level five leaders, in which they were driven, but they were humble. And when he asked these leaders, so what accounts for your success? He says, well, gee, I don’t know, I’ve got a great team. They’re almost humble. They didn’t say, well, I’m brilliant, I work hard, I’ve got a good strategy. We’ve got a killer app. I mean, whatever it is, it was just a humble sense of, it was outward focused, it was other focused. We have a good team. The truly great leaders are like that. It’s not about their own personal success, it’s about the success of the team. And serving their customers, serving their clients, serving others. There’s this altruistic other centeredness. The success, the numbers, that’ll all come. That’s a byproduct of their heart, which is other focused.

Gary S:
Another quote I’ll throw at you, Anne Frank said this, “Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness.” That’s exactly what you just described. It’s not about “success.” It’s what do you bring to the table, what do you offer other people that you’re interacting with in the area of character and goodness. What’s another step?

Warwick F:
I was just going to say, just before, you triggered another thought by saying that.

Gary S:
Good. That’s my job, to trigger thoughts.

Warwick F:
As listeners will know, I love history. And two of the greatest presidents as historians would view would be Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. And their greatness wasn’t in their numbers. Yes, George Washington defeated the might of the British army that was the greatest army on the face of the earth in the late 1700s. That was an amazing stat, to defeat the greatest army in the world. Abraham Lincoln won the Civil War, at tremendous cost. So their stats were pretty good. But yet, you look at somebody like Abraham Lincoln was clearly very driven, very committed to the cause of preserving the Union and abolishing slavery. But he was humble, it was about the team. He didn’t want accolades for himself. George Washington was a man of great character, great self-control. And he wasn’t focused on his own accolades, some of his generals and people almost wanted him to be a dictator at one point when the war looked like it was almost over. And he said, no, this is not what it’s about. We’re about creating a democracy.

Warwick F:
So, the greatness of the two greatest presidents was really the greatness of their character. And that’s why they’re remembered, not just because one won independence for America and the other one preserved the union. It was really their character that was their greatness to your point.

Gary S:
And it’s not impossible, it’s certainly not antithetical to be the GOAT and to have great character. But if you’re caught up in pursuit of GOATness, if you’re caught up in pursuit of being the GOAT, sometimes you can take your eye off the ball, to go back to the sports metaphor, to take your eye off the ball of character. And that’s what our guest last week, Hank McLarty, talked about. He was pursuing success, success, success, and he lost some of his character, he lost some of his integrity, he lost some of his humility, and that cost him dearly.

Warwick F:
Absolutely. Truly great leaders don’t focus on their own greatness.

Gary S:
Right. Great place to move on to point number two of how we can avoid some of the pitfalls of trying to single-handedly become the GOAT, pursue the GOAT. What’s another way that we can sort of short circuit that and avoid that pitfall?

Warwick F:
Yeah, I think another way, and you hear athletes talk about this a lot, the great ones, is enjoy the process. It’s about getting better each day, but it’s like, enjoy the training. If you’re a football player, enjoy watching film. The truly great players, they love getting in the gym, they love watching film, they love trying to get just a little bit better. And what’s interesting is with these great players, if they’ve done their utmost to train, to prepare, to improve, if they lose, it’s like nobody likes losing, certainly great athletes don’t, but it’s like, well, I did my best. The better man, the better woman won today. The great ones are often humble in victory and magnanimous in defeat, because, yes, they want to do well, but the focus isn’t on, okay, the sheer act of winning. It’s they’re focused on the process of what do I need to do to be the best that I can be.

Warwick F:
It’s the training, it’s the little things. I’m sure, and you would know better than me, Tom Brady, probably practices endlessly. I think somebody that listeners wouldn’t know here, Steve Smith, is a cricket player in Australia and considered one of, if not the best in the world at the moment. He’s had his challenges. He practices incessantly, more than any other player on the planet, he’s just obsessed. He’ll be in his hotel room with his cricket bat, you’ve heard of shadow boxing, will be like shadow practicing. It’s just like move after move after move endlessly, 100, 1000 times in his hotel room. Does he ever sleep? It’s like he’s obsessed with every little part of his technique. And it’s all about the process. The great players are all about the process. So that’s another key is don’t focus on the result, just focus on each day, how can I get better? How can I enjoy the training, enjoy the practice. Enjoy the process.

Gary S:
And that’s not just obviously for sports. That is in your professional life, that is in your leadership life. Enjoy the process of having people entrusted to you to lead, enjoy the process of being able to lead that.

Warwick F:
Absolutely. It’s helping them improv, delegating. Certainly I know in Crucible Leadership, whether it’s a book cover or anything we’ve done, there might be like 10 meetings to get to a good result. I’m impatient by nature, but it’s like, you’ve got to realize, this is the process, to get a great result, you’ve got to have a good process, keep the team on board, listen to good advice, and just enjoy the process. Even if that’s difficult, for a lot of us, good things come with patience and a good process. I’m not into bureaucracy, but I have come over the years to realize a good process is the key to a good result. It’s critical.

Gary S:
The next step that people can take to avoid getting caught up in the negatives, for lack of a better phrase, GOAT syndrome is what?

Warwick F:
I’d say having other areas to focus on. I mean, one of the ways that it helps to have your whole identity separate from being the greatest in sports or in business or the arts, what have you, is have an outlet. It could be being with family, it could be hiking, running, painting. I think of, certainly it helps with stress. I think of Winston Churchill in World War II, and certainly some consider him to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest Prime Minister in British history. He was a very good amateur painter. So when he had to make incredibly tough decisions and things were looking very dire in the midst of World War II, he would get away to the country, and he would paint.

Warwick F:
So, having an outside relief, not just for stress, but just don’t have your whole sense of self-worth, your whole sense of self wrapped up in your profession. Have other outlets. It could be community groups that you’re involved in. Some people may be the coach of their kids sports teams and middles middle school, or what have you. Just have other areas that are outside of your main profession, I think really helps to provide a bit of balance, and frankly a bit of sanity.

Gary S:
The word that comes to mind as you talk about that, and the next point, point four, is having perspective. Having perspective. And I think it applies, having perspective on this whole question of being the GOAT and pursuing GOATdom. But there’s also having perspective on your crucibles. When I heard you just talking about your family and thinking about, and really spending time with your family. I think about in your crucible with the loss of the family company, your family, you were married, you had children. That perspective, that other areas to focus on, helped you get beyond your crucible so it can help you avoid the GOAT syndrome and some of the trappings of that, the negative trappings of that, but can also help you get beyond your crucible to have that perspective, right?

Warwick F:
There’s no question. When my kids were young in the 90s, after the whole takeover ended, just being able to play. I have two sons and a daughter. So boy, girl, boy. With my oldest son, those first few years, being able to throw a baseball or kick a soccer ball, or just the simple things of life, it just was immense joy. When I was working in the aviation services firm, I’d come from work, and like a lot of dads and moms would appreciate, they’re looking in the window of our house, and you’re walking down the path to the front door and it’s like, Daddy’s home, and they kind of run up to you and give you this massive hug. It just gives you a perspective. They don’t care that gosh, daddy’s lost this $2 billion company. They didn’t understand that at the time. They were too young. It’s hard for them to relate to too much even though they’re in their 20s.

Warwick F:
But those simple things about being able to play with your kids. I remember one year when my oldest son was 10, I co-coached his soccer team. Coaching sports is not really my gifting, but they were desperate and needed somebody, so you kind of, I don’t know, do what you need to do. It was okay, it’s just not the sweet spot of my gifted-ness. But all those things with my young kids at the time, it just gave you a perspective that they didn’t care about all that stuff that I was involved in. It’s just those simple things in life, being able to play with your kids, taking a walk in nature, it’s like, it gives you a broader perspective, than everything being thought of of what you do.

Gary S:
And another perspective generating point is your next point about keeping your identity separate from your profession. I’ve heard you say this often on Beyond the Crucible in your blogs. Why is that so important to stave off some of the negative consequences of pursuing at all costs being the GOAT?

Warwick F:
It’s so easy, we’re all human, unfortunately, and it’s so easy, especially if you start doing well, think maybe I am the best basketball player or the best real estate person or the best surgeon. Let’s say you get some awards and magazines, top surgeon in Maryland, Wisconsin, Illinois. There are professional publications that come out, and your name is there, one of the best. And that’s tough. And so, you have to realize who you are is not about what you do. It’s really more rooted, as we say in Crucible Leadership, in who you are as a person, your inherent value.

Warwick F:
We believe that, I think of Psalm 139, which says, we are beautifully and wonderfully made. Just as human beings, we have inherent value and worth that has nothing to do with what we do. I’m fortunate to have a wonderful wife, and she loves me not because of what I do, but because of who I am. And even in those first few years after the takeover, that never wavered. Now, I realize we’re not all blessed, we all have different family situations. But that helps you realize, who I am is not wrapped up in John Fairfax and some takeover. It’s more wrapped up in who I am as a person. So that’s really key is, you are so much more than your success and your profession. You are so much more than that. You have intrinsic value as a human being in terms of your character and who you are. That’s really the most important thing that people have to really get their head around. You have value in yourself.

Warwick F:
I almost think sometimes when people achieve is because they have an inherent feeling of lack of self-worth. I don’t know that this is always true, but it can be, an inherent maybe, a little bit sense of worthlessness or you should value who you are as a person. If you do that, it will make the fall from the pinnacle, which is maybe not inevitable, but records are meant to be broken. It will make it easy if you see yourself having value as a human being.

Gary S:
Yeah. Some of it might be tied to, you have to prove yourself worthy. You have to prove yourself worthy so you accumulate this record, you do this thing, you do that thing. And that becomes who you are. I want to run a real time experiment here. We have not talked about this. But you just said something when you were talking about keeping your identity separate from your profession, about accolades that came in. And we just went through a process.

Gary S:
Again, I mentioned earlier that your book, Crucible Leadership, is coming out in October. And one of the things we did on your book is we gathered endorsements from a wide swath of folks, people we’ve had on the podcast, people who are business leaders, people who are theologians, people who are business school professors and business school educators. I read those endorsements of your book, 28 of them, 29 of them, at the end of the day, we had 29 of them. And there were some incredibly positive things said about you. As someone who has just gone through the experience of having deep words of affirmation about your work presented to you, how do you keep your perspective in that moment? Help the listeners and the readers who are eventually going to grab the book, help the listeners process how to do that, because I just watched you do it and it was beautiful to see.

Warwick F:
That’s a really interesting question. I think part of what kind of occurs to me is, I mean, my faith is my life. As listeners know my faith in Christ is a bedrock of who I am as a person. I never want to go back to believing the press clippings or believing oh, I could be one of the great Fairfax’s. I’m human, I don’t want to be like, oh, look at this book, look at Crucible Leadership, Warwick’s back, redemption. I mean, I’m human, we all have our temptations. And so, if ever I start looking at these things and go, boy, that’s pretty, and I’m grateful, I’m unbelievably grateful for the very kind words that a number of people, many said, there. Almost it’s like a mantra, it’s like it’s all you Jesus, it’s all you, God. I just bring it right back to Him saying, it’s not me, any gift I have, it’s ones that God has given me. And the good fortune and the good team, good circumstances, the resources I’m blessed with to be able to do what I do, it’s all the Lord.

Warwick F:
So it’s really my faith helps me, if I ever I get tempted, I’m human, it’s like, it’s not me, it’s you, Lord. I just sort of open my hands and just say, it’s you, Lord, it’s not me. I’m just trying to be a faithful servant. I just turn praises back to him. That’s kind of what I do. It works for me. Whenever you feel like your temperature rising a little bit, your arrogance, your believing your own press clippings, that’s when I just turn to my faith and say, it’s not me, it’s you, maybe working through me. I don’t know how that translates more broadly maybe, maybe it’s my family, it’s my team. I’m just trying to be faithful here. I think there’s a way of looking at it more broadly a bit. That’s kind of what I do.

Gary S:
And that’s helpful. That’s a real world application of keeping your identity separate from your profession, and specifically, your achievements within that profession, because that’s where I think the GOATness comes in, it’s your identity is tied up not just in your profession, but your achievements in that profession. And when you write a book and you get endorsements from people, it’s easy to think, wow, I have achieved a lot. And to be able to tamp that down and recognize that you are more than that, that you’re more than your achievements. We’ve talked about it before on the show a lot. We are all more than our best moments and more than our worst moments. We all sort of live life in the middle. And that is true I think for pursuing GOATness. We’re more than how many Grand Slam titles we’ve won, how many Super Bowls we’ve won. And that is what really matters in life.

Gary S:
We’re getting to the point where, since we’ve talked so much about sports, I’m going to say the clock is winding down or something like that. I can’t think of a good metaphor for, captain’s turned on the fasten seatbelt sign. We’re going to land the plane here shortly. But you have one more point that I think is really critical for listeners to find the strength, to really take strength, find the strength to turn away that desire, as you just described it, the heat rising up, of wanting to embrace and pursue and even grasp at being the GOAT. And what is that final point that you have, Warwick?

Warwick F:
It’s hold it all lightly. Records come and go. Maybe you’re in the prime of your athletic career or the leader of the organization. But it won’t last. Records will be broken. And if you’re the CEO of your company, newsflash, you won’t be CEO forever. You’ll retire, you’ll get replaced. You might be asked to leave. I remember when my dad was, he was chairman of John Fairfax Board, before he was thrown out by some other family members in 1976. And as chairman of the large media organization, he would be invited to government functions and embassies deals, consular things. I think I remember my mother telling me that when he was removed as chairman, not only did those invitations not come. In some cases, I think he was told you don’t need to attend. The invitation was withdrawn. That does happen. Unfortunately, anybody that’s been in some area of success, there might be some who have experienced that. Well, you’ve got to hold all these records lightly.

Warwick F:
Of the three people we spoke about, one of the folks I most admire because I love tennis is Roger Federer. And I don’t know his psyche, but he sure seems like he has a pretty balanced life and has his head on straight. He has a nonprofit that helps underprivileged folks in Africa. He has a young family, I want to say he has two set the twins, which is kind of crazy. I think he actually blew his knee out one time helping bathe his kids and took him out for six or nine months. If you’re going to blow your knee, that’s probably not a bad way of doing it, right?

Gary S:
Absolutely.

Warwick F:
Recently he was asked because he’s tied with Rafa Nadal, and now they’re probably got to beat him in that record in the next few months, what he thinks of it all. And Roger Federer says this, as he’s talking about playing against some of the most incredible players of all time Novak Djokovic and Rafa Nadal. And Federer says this, “But all records are there to be broken. The guys are unreal,” in other words, his competitors, Djokovic, and Nadal. “We all know that. I hope they keep on going. I hope that they do everything they possibly want and they look back with no regrets. We want to leave the game with no regrets, and I think from that standpoint, we all sleep very well at night.”

Warwick F:
I don’t know whether they do but you sense that Roger Federer does. He loves the game, he’s like 39 years old, which is ridiculously old for a tennis player. Why does he keep playing? As that saying goes, for the love of the game, he honestly loves playing tennis. He wants to do well, and if he’s not the greatest of all time, his record is broken, which undoubtedly will be, he seems like he’s about as much peace with it as any athlete is, as any elite athlete is. So there’s something about him that really impresses me. I feel like of all the athletes I know, he handles the whole GOAT syndrome about as well as I know. Maybe his psychologist, if he has one, says actually there’s the real Roger Federer nobody knows.

Warwick F:
But as far as anybody knows who watches tennis, everybody feels like gosh, this guy, not only does he handle it well as is good character, and what’s the result of that, pretty much everywhere he goes, everybody cheers for him. People love him, not just his grace and ability to play tennis, but who he is as a person. It’s okay to be cheered for the right reasons, which is not just about his tennis, but about his character. If you’ve got to be cheered, let people cheer for you as a human being.

Gary S:
And that is true, not just of folks who are playing sports, that’s true of all of us in any field of endeavor that we’re involved in. As we wrap, Warwick, let me say a couple of things. One, all of the insights that we’ve discussed on the show today, you have in a blog that folks can find on crucibleleadership.com. So if you want to revisit any of these posts and sort of look more deeply into some of the points that we’ve made, Warwick’s perspective on them, you can read them at crucibleleadership.com under the heading of blog. You can find that there.

Gary S:
But there is a a summary of all this. You had these five points, but it all leads to kind of one great big summary of what our goal should be. And I’ve often thought of this in the last couple of months, in particular, as we talk about a life of significance, that what you’re about to talk about, legacy, seems to be like the the postscript to a life of significance. We live a life of significance and we leave a legacy. But how do all of these points when they add together, why is legacy such an important true north to go for?

Warwick F:
In some ways, people talk about living life backwards, when you’re on your deathbed, when you’re thinking of your kids and your spouse, giving your eulogy, if you could write it for them, one of our folks, I think it was Mike Valentine talked about what would you like your eulogy to be like, which is an amazing comment that he made. It probably won’t be about fame or success, it might be about being a mom, a dad, brother, sister, maybe about serving the people that you worked with, serving the people in your community. How do you want to be remembered by your kids, grandkids, and friends and neighbors? That’s kind of in part what we talk about legacy? Well, how about living your life today in accordance with what you would like the eulogy to be like, in accordance with those last moments of consciousness before we pass? You don’t want to be going oops, I blew it. I’m on my third or fourth marriage, my kids hate me. My employees think I was just the worst jerk imaginable. That’s one legacy. Do you really want that to be yours?

Warwick F:
And so, now’s the time to leave a legacy that you can be proud of. And that’s why we talk about a life of significance because to live a life well lived, to leave a legacy you can be proud of means to do that, I think from our framework, you have to live a life of significance, which is a life lived on purpose dedicated to serving others. When your life is other focused, when it’s built on a foundation of character, of values, of faith in something beyond yourself, that’s a life that you can be proud of. And ultimately, we only get one life, and it may be short or long, we never know the day, it’s just one of those uncertain things in life. So how about living a life today that you’ll be proud of tomorrow and that your kids, grandkids and family members will be proud of as they gather for your eulogy. Live your eulogy today.

Warwick F:
And if you do that, you probably won’t be so focused on being the GOAT in sports or business or the arts, or whatever field of endeavor. You’ll be more focused on other people, about, yes, using your talents to benefit others, working hard, but it will be more other-focused rather than self-focused. That’s really part of what it means to leave a legacy you and certainly others can be proud of.

Gary S:
And to tie the idea of legacy up in the idea that we talked about here, this idea of being a GOAT, we’ve talked about this before, and you alluded to it earlier, arguably the GOATs of country music, of rock and roll music and of jazz standards music, and that would be Johnny Cash in country, Elvis Presley in rock, and Frank Sinatra in jazz and standards. These were the GOATs in these musical genres, but their tombstones, their legacies, two of them don’t even mention that they were musicians at all. Johnny Cash has a psalm on his, Frank Sinatra simply has, “The best is yet to come,” a lyric from one of his songs, on his. Elvis Presley doesn’t mention that he was a recording artists, but the main things about how he was a son and he was a father, those very things that you talked about, having other things to focus on, having a perspective.

Gary S:
If anybody had the right to go out to as the curtain closed, since they’re all performers on their lives, as GOATs and to really trumpet their GOATdom from their tombstones, it was these three gentlemen, and none of them did it. They all focused on those other things you talked about, those other things that bring joy to life, that bring meaning to life, their families. That’s what they focused on. And I think that’s a great place to kind of tie the bow on the package of our podcast here today.

Gary S:
So listeners, thank you for joining us. Until the next time we’re together, remember this because it’s true, your crucible is painful. We know that. Warwick knows that. I know that. We’ve been through crucibles as well. But it is not the end of your story. In fact, your crucible moment can be if you learn the lessons of that crucible, and you apply those lessons moving forward, your crucible experience can be the jumping off point to a new chapter in your story. And it can be the best chapter of your life because that chapter will lead you toward two things that we talked about on this episode. And it won’t involve another one. It doesn’t lead you to GOATdom. It leads you to a life of significance and it leads you to a legacy you can be proud to leave.

He was, in his own words, an “intense goal-setter” from the third grade. And Hank McLarty achieved most of what he set his mind to: a football scholarship to Auburn, a financial services career at prestigious firms, recognition and wealth as one of the youngest and best in his industry. But when he started to “drink the Hank Kool-Aid” and believe he was as fabulous as the press coverage he earned said he was, his world collapsed. Living in a hotel with his two boys for two years, needing its free breakfasts to make ends meet, he slowly began to recast his vision — away from success and toward significance. Today, he says he’s blessed to have found both through Gratus Capital, the firm he founded on the principles of gratitude and humility.

To learn more about Hank McLarty and Gratus Capital, visit https://gratuscapital.com/

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Transcript

Warwick F:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Crucible Leadership.

Hank M:
I had a thriving business, a stellar reputation, but what I thought was a good marriage. Two amazing boys, a brand new house I had just built, like I had all these things and literally with the flip of a switch, I lost everything in a very, very quick amount of time. And so, I think I was in a state of shock. I was embarrassed, I was ashamed, I couldn’t talk to anybody about it because I didn’t want anybody to know. And I was petrified because for the first time in my life, I didn’t know what to do. And I had these two little boys looking up at me every day with a big smile on their face. Like, “Daddy’s our hero. He’s going to…” They didn’t know what was going on, except that they were now living in a hotel with me, and I just didn’t know what to do, and it was definitely the scariest time of my life.

Gary S:
Have you ever felt like that? Knocked down so hard by your crucible that you aren’t sure which end is up, let alone how to get up. You just heard today’s guest Hank McLarty, discuss the fallout from his fall from grace. Life in the fast lane to life at the Residence Inn. Hi, I’m Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show and the Communications Director for Crucible Leadership.

Gary S:
In this far ranging interview with Warwick, Hank opens up about how a lack of humility and gratitude led to him losing the lavish life he had built in the financial services industry and how his low point became his turning point. When he found the grit, his word, to rebuild his career and his reputation, he did it by forming his own company, Gratus Capital, where his goal is to grow his team and his character as he grows the portfolios of his clients. He’s recaptured success, yes, but far more important he says, is that he’s found true significance.

Warwick F:
Well, Hank, thanks so much for being here, really looking forward to the conversation. You’ve done a lot from your football career to finance and wealth management and non-profits. I’d love to just maybe start just, just to get a feel of your background, family, growing up, siblings, so tell us a bit about Hank McLarty and kind of how you grew up in that environment?

Hank M:
Well, growing up my childhood was pretty unspectacular. A normal kid playing sports, I have one younger brother, mom and dad, the four of us. So I will say one thing that was a little different about my growing up was, at a very young age, I started setting goals and that was something that I don’t know why it wasn’t something that went on in my family, but it was just something that I felt it gave me comfort to set goals and work towards things.

Hank M:
And so, as early, as third and fourth grade, I started setting goals for doing physical things like pushups and sit-ups, and would ask my dad to test me on Sunday. So as a normal childhood, other than when I talk about my childhood now, people look at me a little cross-eyed, like, “You were doing what?” And I’m not really sure what the motivating factor was, but I was a fairly intense goal-setter at an early age.

Hank M:
And so, by the time I got to high school, I started playing football and junior high, and that seemed to play into the whole goal setting and physical workouts and all of that. And for some reason, when I was in the 10th grade, I decided I wanted to earn a college scholarship for football, which is not that uncommon. It’s very uncommon for somebody that’s not starting for their JV year, their varsity team. And so, I wasn’t even good enough to start in high school, so setting that goal was a little bit unusual to say the least, but I liked what it did for me because it gave me kind of a North Star to focus on all through high school, and so, I worked extremely hard. It kept me out of trouble because my answer to everything was I’ve got to work out or I’ve got to run, what have you.

Hank M:
And so, by the end of my junior year, I still wasn’t starting for my high school team, which is not a good sign when you’re hoping to get a college scholarship. So, usually players by their junior year are known throughout the state, they’re on the newspapers all the time and there’s colleges recruiting them. So I asked my dad, I said, “Dad, I need some help from you. This goal is getting very far off in the distance, I need to do something drastic. I need to move away for the summer to get ready for my senior year.”

Hank M:
So he helped me to get a job on a horse farm in Kentucky, and I lived in a cabin by myself that summer. And so, I worked on the horse farm mid day, I ran in the morning and I worked out every afternoon at Wildcat’s Gym in Lexington, Kentucky, and I worked hard and it was a lonely summer because I didn’t know anybody there, but I came back for my senior year and I was in phenomenal shape. And that set me up to have some success. So third game of my senior year, there was a lot of college scouts at that game to see players from the other team that were already getting a lot of notoriety, and I had the game of my life. And the next day I got a full offer, a full scholarship offer from Auburn to go play linebacker there.

Hank M:
I got other offers from Tennessee and Georgia and Kentucky and so forth and ultimately decided to go to Auburn, so that’s kind of in a nutshell, my childhood, and getting out of high school and kind of that, I guess the genesis of all the goal setting and kind of intensity that I’ve had throughout my life and setting goals.

Warwick F:
I mean, that’s fascinating obviously from the earliest age and not everybody’s driven. A lot of people are laid back and it’s not right or wrong, it’s different, but you’re obviously driven from an early age, did you see any of that in either of your parents or grandparents? I mean, where did that drivenness come from? I mean, do you have any role models in your family that kind of, you emulated a bit?

Hank M:
No. Which is a strange answer, but no. I think for me, my home life, I was never hit or abused or anything like that, but my parents had a very tough time. It was very unsettled at my house, a lot of drama and things of that nature. And I think setting goals kind of gave me something to focus on other than things that I wasn’t happy about. And so, it had nothing to do with any role model, it just something I fell into and it made me feel good, it made me feel good to accomplish something and check a goal off and to go do something that was hard to do and do it well and look back on it. That’s really the only reason I can say that I was doing it.

Warwick F:
So it’s not like your dad, for instance, was like ex military or one of these very driven people that you often hear stories about dads driving their sons like, “Hey son, you had a good game, but I know you can do better.” They’re always pushing, pushing.

Hank M:
No.

Warwick F:
It wasn’t that kind of upbringing, it sounds like.

Hank M:
No. In fact, I think my dad was confused and bewildered as to why I was doing all the things I was doing, making sense with him.

Warwick F:
Well, sometimes it actually can work out better when somebody is not pushing you and you’re doing it for you not to make anybody else happy. I mean, that’s to me almost the ideal. It’s too many pushy parents, I’m sure you probably in high school and in college, you probably ran across your fair share of your buddies, who had the pushy parents and scholarship stars in their eyes and they’re going “Come on son, you can do better,” and I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of that in your time?

Hank M:
Oh yeah. Certainly children living out their parents’ dreams and through that. So I guess in that sense when you put it that way, I’m probably lucky because the only reason I ever pushed myself was because I was pushing myself, nobody ever pushed me.

Gary S:
Hank, I want to jump in just for a second based, because I know from a conversation we had as we were preparing for the interview, there is the one story, right? About your dad when you sort of had it with football and you were going to quit and you talk to him and he did, even though he didn’t push you, even though he wasn’t trying to live his dream through you, he did help you, right? Stay focused on your dream and stay with your goal?

Hank M:
That’s a great point, Gary. Yeah. So, when I got to Auburn I had worked so hard. I mean, I had worked myself really hard in high school, maybe even to an unhealthy level to try to achieve, attain this goal. And so, once I got the goal, it was kind of like, “Okay, what do I do now?” So all these athletes at Auburn, most of them didn’t have to work that hard to get there. They’re just naturally gifted. They’re much faster, much bigger, much stronger, so I remember driving over to Auburn my first day, driving over to move into the dorm and start a summer practice, being very intimidated and insecure about my abilities. Can I hang with these amazing athletes? Because I had to work probably 10 times harder than them just to get here.

Hank M:
And so, I went over there with that attitude, “Am I worthy of being here.” Which is not a great place to start, but it’s where I started. So in my sophomore year, and so, I struggled a little bit, my freshman year. My sophomore year, a coach came up behind me in practice to motivate me and he didn’t mean to do it, but he kicked me, kicked me in the behind, and said, “Hey, come McLarty, let’s go,” and when he did, he just happened to hit my tailbone right on the end, and it was kind of like a funny bone, right?

Hank M:
It’s like a cattle prod on my butt or something. So I jumped up and I lost my temper and I spun around and I grabbed the coach and which obviously that’s not a good thing to do. And so our head coach at the time, my whole time there Pat Dye a known disciplinarian to do things the right way, he was up in the tower and he saw it happen.

Hank M:
And so, a lot of things happened, but one of them was, they ran me off the field, I thought they were going to kick me off the team, but they didn’t kick me off the team, they just ran me until I won. They just ran me every day, and it’s kind of like, to see what he’s made of, does he really want to be here, and so they were testing me.

Hank M:
And I wasn’t passing the test very well, I wanted out of there. I was whining to myself how unfair it was, and I called my dad who was living in Las Vegas at the time and told him I had this elaborate plan to leave Auburn and get a job at university of Georgia at the time, financially, my scholarship was paying for everything and we didn’t have the money. So I figured out this grandiose plan to get out of all these mean coaches and go to University of Georgia and get a job, and I was going to pay my own way.

Hank M:
So within about 10 hours, my dad was at the athletic dorm, he flew immediately from Las Vegas to Atlanta and drove down and I’ll never forget. He said, “Son, I’m going to tell you from personal experience. This is your scholarship, you’ve earned it, if you want to quit, I’m not going to tell you, you can’t. But from personal experience, I’m going to tell you that if you quit now, when things are difficult, it’s going to make it easier and easier in the future, when things get difficult for you to quit and walk away from something. And I don’t think you’re a quitter.”

Warwick F:
Wow. I mean, that’s… As you look back I mean, that is some profound advice that your dad gave you. I mean, that was a gift that don’t you think that he gave you back then?

Hank M:
Yeah. And that’s not what I wanted to hear. At the time I was probably 260 pounds and just a big muscle up baby sitting in his car, talking about how unfair the world was to me, and so, I wanted him to say, “Yeah, get out of here. This is unfair.” I mean, and he didn’t, he just said, “I don’t think you’re a quitter.” And there was no way I could respond any other way than to stay, unless I was just spineless. I mean, he challenged me in a unchallenging way and I got out of the car so mad at him, because I knew I couldn’t leave now, especially I had just met him. But he challenged me as a man and I stayed and I worked through it.

Hank M:
And it definitely is a foundation that of all the other times that we’re going to talk about today, that I could have quit. I didn’t, and that one instance was the foundation of me learning to never, ever stop when things are tough because you need to make a decision work through it and then make a decision when you’re not feeling negative about it, it’s a horrible time, took me a long-term decision.

Warwick F:
Yeah. I mean, that’s a lesson that I think the audience needs to hear, is you don’t want to quit for the wrong reasons, you want to quit because, oh, it’s hard, and life is unfair, well, life is unfair. Everybody alive knows that. So to quit for that reason, you always inevitability will regret it. You don’t want to make a decision that you know you’ll regret. There’s a time to quit for the right reason and a time not to quit.

Warwick F:
And so I want to jump to the really first crucible, but kind of one of the things I’m thinking of is sometimes, and we don’t need to get into all the detail, but sometimes when there’s a bit of drama and uncertainty at home, by setting goals, it’s like, “Well, I can’t control the drama, but I can control who I am.” I can set my own goals, I can set my own path, and so sometimes we live our lives in reaction to things. And so, I don’t know, maybe there was… maybe you’re wired that way anyway, but when there’s things that you can’t control. “Okay, what can I control? Well, I’m going to set some goals, and I’m going to chart my course.” Does that kind of make sense? Maybe there was a correlation way back when…

Warwick F:
Yeah. So this is an amazing story because anybody that follows sports, there’s some people who were so gifted and sometimes they work out really well, and there are a number of folks that are really gifted that never live up to their potential, because it was all too easy. I mean, I grew up in Australia, so Australians follow tennis, I can think of without naming them. I can think of one or two tennis players that can’t miss. Going to win multiple Wimbledon’s majors that didn’t… I’m sure there’s football players, baseball, there’s a number of them, but the ones that have to really work hard and don’t have as much physical ability and natural ability, they’re often the ones that go further.

Warwick F:
Sometimes the ones that coaches want, right? Coaches want folks who have a good attitude and a work ethic that watch film.

Hank M:
There’s a kind of word that describes that grit. They have grit, that means that they have the intensity and the wherewithal to push through things when they’re not going well, and ultimately we all know that’s what’s necessary to succeed in life. I mean, life doesn’t always go well, so yeah, absolutely I agree.

Warwick F:
Yeah. Do you have the grit to get through it? So the first kind of major crucible you went through I understand was when you’re in college and you’re diagnosed with a blood disorder. So just talk about that whole… How that all happened and what happened and yeah, that story?

Hank M:
Yeah. So, after I went through that whole quitting exercise with my dad, things got much better and my attitude was great. I started feeling finally, like I was worthy of being there. I worked really hard and got myself in a position that I was really going to be contributing to the team and getting a lot of playing time. And so, I went into summer camp in August, in Auburn, it’s a little hot. It’s a very hot place, so in August, it’s a hundred degrees, very high humidity, and we’re doing… At the time we were doing four practices a day. And my coach he liked to push us a little harder than most coaches, so four practices a day and I had no idea I had this blood disorder.

Hank M:
And so, during this time of high stress on the body and so forth I had been losing weight over the previous week. I had lost about 15 pounds and it’s normal to lose some weight in those practices, but I had lost more than was acceptable and couldn’t figure out why, and I hit a guy in practice in a drill that normally I would dominate. And when I hit him, I passed out. And the next thing I knew, I woke up, they had me packed in bags of ice on the field, trying to get my temperature down. Apparently, my temperature was over 105, and so those field, the big bags of ice, you see at sports scene, so they had me literally laying down with bags of ice all over my body. And when they finally got my temperature down, they took me to the hospital and then did all kinds of tests, and I had a blood disorder that my immune system was kind of fighting me.

Hank M:
And so, next thing I know I’m in the head coaches office two days later when I got out of the hospital and they’re telling me that I couldn’t play anymore. So I had dedicated at that point, most of my life to the dream of being a starter at Auburn and being a contributor to the football program, and I was told I couldn’t play anymore. So that was kind of a redefining of me, because my whole identity up to that point had been… I’m a high school football player, now I’m an Auburn football player. I really didn’t have a whole lot going on in my life, other than that. And my grades were just, okay, so I had to… Well, first I had to get over the depression because I stayed in bed for about two weeks, I didn’t go to any classes.

Hank M:
My roommates were worried about me and I just didn’t want to get up. And that’s the first time I had ever been through anything like that. And then I finally got up and had to go beg some professors to let me make up some work, so I didn’t fail classes, and I worked through that. And then generally I got focused on my grades, I graduated, I think I had about four more semesters out of school, five more semesters, after that I made a 4.0 in all of those and got my GPA up to a respectable level and moved on after college.

Warwick F:
So were you a junior when this happened? Or what year were you? So you’d spent your whole life focusing on goals, football was sort of the medium, if you will, that you were going to… The playing field that you were going to aim for and you weren’t a starter for most of your high school, you’re able to get a college scholarship, I mean, some things maybe stars were aligned, you played hard, you were thinking of quitting, your dad gave you that talk and there you were, and then it feels like this is unfairly taken away from you sort of the coach kicking you on the backside, and you’re getting blamed for it, it seemed a bit unfair, but this is the ultimate unfair.

Warwick F:
It’s like, “How do you solve a blood disorder?” What’s the goal? What’s the program? What’s the plan? Okay, do I go back to Kentucky and work out harder? But it sounds like there was no plan that could overcome this, right? This was one goal you couldn’t achieve no matter what you did, it sounded like no fault of yours, obviously. So I know this is probably blindingly obvious, but you’ve told us a bit about how you felt that your whole sense of self was wrapped up in football on this goal, so those first few weeks, first few months, that must have been excruciatingly tough to have to deal with the new reality.

Hank M:
I think the best word is just lost. As I said earlier, kind of like, no matter what was going on, whether it was being invited to a party or dealing with girls or class, pretty much any decision I had to make my whole life from high school on, the North Star was always football. I always had an… like, I could just think about, “Should I do this or shouldn’t I?” How’s it going to affect this goal that I’ve set?” That was what I valued everything off of. And then I just felt lost without it, and I wasn’t really sure how to make decisions anymore.

Warwick F:
Well, inevitably for most of us and as listeners would know it’s a very different parallel, I suppose, but I grew up in a large 150 year old family media business, and when that ended on my watch, largely because it was my fault, I had this massive loss of identity. Well, who was Warwick Fairfax, if he’s not part of this Fairfax family media empire. I mean, I’ve no identity, it was just kind of crippling. So yeah, talk a bit about that few, because I imagine there have to… Would have to be in a hit to your identity, who is Hank McLarty without football? I mean, was that part of the sense of loss? It’s like, “That’s who I am. Who am I now?” Is that part of your internal discussion?

Hank M:
Of course, because I didn’t even know what it meant to just be a student. Without this thing I was passionate about outside of that. It was just a huge void there, that joining a fraternity or going to some local gym or something, none of that was going to fill it. And I had to start really… Because I’m a goal oriented person I had to start thinking about, “Okay, what’s the next phase of my life, I’ve got to get these semesters of school finished and go start a career.” And so then I started focusing on my career and that started filling the void.

Hank M:
Then when I started making good grades, which I wasn’t used to, you know I’m making great grades. I wasn’t used to that, that started filling the void and before I knew it, I was out of college and looking for a job, and then that became my identity. So I-

Warwick F:
It sounded like you sort of shifted. I mean, we’re all different. I’m a reflective person which has its good and bad sides, but it sounds like you’re a driven person that you don’t sit still for long. I mean, we’re all human, you might wallow for a few weeks or month or so, but you’re not going to sit there. It’s like, “Okay, this is over, it sucks, it’s awful, move on.” What’s the next goal? What’s the next one? It sounds like… Which can be…

Warwick F:
Reflection is good. It’s one of our guests said, there’s a difference between ruminating and reflecting. Ruminating is, “I’m a terrible person, oh my gosh, what happened?” Reflecting is like, “Okay. This sucked, this was awful, what can I learn from it, let’s move on.” Radical difference between… So you’re more on that healthier spectrum. So you shifted from understand to saying, “Okay, football’s over. What’s the next goal?” And so why did you pick finance? Why did you shift to that to be the next goal?

Hank M:
I’d like to say it was a dream, I had the dreaming of high school and college and I had this big plan, surely because I majored in finance really for no reason. And when I got out of school, I was like, “Okay, what does finance mean a bank or a brokerage firm?” So I’ll go interview at brokage firms. That was the very simplified basis for doing it. And I will say I interviewed probably 20 different banks and financial advisory slash brokerage firms, and every single one of them turned me down because I had no experience, I guess, to them I was a cocky former football player that probably was too big… in four months, who knows? I don’t know, I probably wouldn’t have hired me.

Hank M:
So I was certainly no glamorous high grades depth of experience with a passion for the markets, that was not me. I just wanted a job. And I think people saw through that and nobody wanted to hire me.

Warwick F:
So yeah. Because often, especially in this day and age of three kids in their twenties, I kind of know it’s like people build their resumes now it’s crazy, you know high school, summer jobs, I mean, just by the time you’re a college graduate, there’s all the stuff that they’ve done. President of the Auburn Finance Society they’re already invested on different batches of stocks and it’s all this stuff… I mean, how do people do all this? But they do. I mean, you hire people in your current firm, you’ve seen it, it’s just crazy what people at a given age have done.

Warwick F:
So I hear the challenges, so how did you get that first job? I mean, given people were… Well, you say seeing through you. I mean, at least rightly or wrongly they had a perspective of you, which maybe didn’t feel that flattering at the time, but you’d have…

Hank M:
Probably it was.

Warwick F:
I mean, you’re a smart person, you could probably tell what they were thinking, right?

Hank M:
Sure.

Warwick F:
I mean, how did you break through that barrier if you will?

Hank M:
So I wouldn’t say I broke through it. I found an angle. I went to an Auburn alumni supporter, a very wealthy man that lived in Atlanta that I’d become friends with. I had lunch with him and I told him I couldn’t get a job. And he said, “Well, I have all my money at Merrill Lynch, let me call the manager over there at Merrill Lynch.” I said, “Okay, I’ll take any help I can get.”

Hank M:
So I went to meet with the manager and he was so unimpressed, even after that guy called, he said, “Yeah, you’ve no experience, we’re just not hiring right now.” And so, I was at the time, I was living with my grandfather, I had a one bedroom apartment in Atlanta and I was living on his pullout couch, and I was pretty desperate. So the only person that I had had a conversation with that I had a reference point was the manager from Merrill Lynch.

Hank M:
So I went back to the Merrill Lynch office the next day, waited on him to come in from the parking deck, approached him again and said obviously I didn’t make a very good impression first time. I’d really love the opportunity, he blew me off, the next morning I went back, and the next morning I think he was a little frustrated and annoyed, but also somewhat impressed, I guess, that I was back there again.

Hank M:
And he said, “Here’s I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll let you take the Series 7, if you fail it you’re fired, if you pass it, I’ll give you a shot. But you won’t become an advisor, you’ll have to work for somebody as an apprentice. And in the meantime, while you’re studying, you wear jeans and a t-shirt to work, you go pick up lunches, move furniture, basically be a gopher for me and I’ll pay you $18,000 a year.” I was like, “Okay, done.” So, that’s how I got the job. It was very unglamorous.

Warwick F:
Again, another good lesson is even when people say no, just that level of persistence, I mean, I don’t know many people that would wait for the guy to go in, in the parking garage, like three days in a row or what have you, I mean, that’s not normal. But that shows persistence does pay. I mean, if somebody… Not to say everybody should try that, turn the tables and do that to you, but if proverbially, if somebody has that level of get up and go, I don’t know if you’ll say yes, but you’ll pay attention, right?

Warwick F:
It’s like, “Okay, this guy’s persistence is impressing me.” Okay. So you got your start at Merrill Lynch, and from what I understand, when you join a brokerage firm, it’s kind of like dialing for dollars. It’s like you just pick up the phone book. I don’t know if we’re pre or post internet then, but it’s a tough road those first year or two building the client base.

Hank M:
Yeah. For sure. And I didn’t like it at all. At least on the football field, I could see who was hitting me, right? I mean, right in this situation, it was just calling people that hated the idea you were calling them and throwing some cheesy line at them about, “Hey, I’m so-and-so from Merrill Lynch, how can I earn your business? Or some silly line like that.” And there’s nothing about it that’s good or fun or whatever, and frankly, I was failing miserably at it. I was in a group of people that they had hired and I guess, a class of people and we all trying to hit goals, so we didn’t get fired and you know hopefully move on to be an advisor, and I was way behind on all those goals and just kind of miserable just wasn’t clicking for me, and I started really questioning, “I don’t think this is for me, I need to find something else.”

Hank M:
And so about the time I was ready to, here we go again, quit I cold called this man in Atlanta and I threw the same cheesy line at him that I did to everybody else, and he cussed me out worse than any football coach had ever cussed me out. He said, “I’ve never even heard of that before.”

Gary S:
But he didn’t kick you.

Hank M:
No, he didn’t kick me. He didn’t grab me by the face mask, but if he could have, he would have, I promise you. He yelled and screamed to the point that I literally… I finally, when he slammed the phone down on me, I hung up and I thought nobody’s ever talked to me this way, I got to go get in this guy’s face. So I was like, “I’m good, anyway, who cares?” So I drove out to his office… I mean, I remember it like it was yesterday, I drove out to his office, I knocked on the door and here came this guy probably 60 to 65 years old.

Hank M:
He came and answered the door, like, “Yeah, yeah, what can I do to help you?” I’m like, “I’m the guy, you just said, this, this, this, this to, and I’m not… on your show. And I wanted to see what I could do to earn your business,” and I got up kind of real close to his face when I said that.

Hank M:
And he said, “Oh, I’m so so sorry. Don’t take it personal, you guys call me all day, I’m so frustrated with it and all, come on in, let’s talk.” So anyway, I talked to him for about three hours that afternoon, about life and sports and whatever, and then he introduced me to his partner who was the CEO. And they ended up great. They got a private equity firm to invest in their company, and they brought in about $15 million, and they called me up, this is after months of me building this relationship.

Hank M:
They called me up and they said, “Hey, you’re a little green, you don’t really know exactly what you’re doing, but we like you, and we trust you get somebody with some experience in your office and partner up with them and we want you to come pick this check up.” So I went and picked that check up and brought it back. I had to raise $10 million to get off the program, and this check was… So in one cold call and one client, I broke all my goals and graduated before everybody else and went from a dog to a hero overnight.

Hank M:
And the main thing that came from that, well, there were two main things that came from that. One was, it was another example for me. I was on the verge of quitting and yet again, I learned that every time I feel like quitting something, there’s something incredible on the other side of it, if I’ll stick with it. So, that was a massive part of what we’re going to talk about in a minute.

Hank M:
And the second thing I learned was I got this job by being direct and myself and confronting things with the manager to get the job. I got this huge account by being direct and professionally confrontational, like dealing with things. I think maybe I can do this job if I quit worrying about all the things, I don’t know, focus what I do really well and use all the resources of the firm to help me with the other areas. And that’s how I started building my business.

Warwick F:
With those and profound lessons for people, be yourself. I mean, you have this direct, never say die attitude. I mean, everybody can learn from that. I mean, very few people when somebody curses them on the phone with you know you play football, so I imagine your vocabulary is pretty decent in terms of different colorful language, but when you say, “Boy, there are some words I’d never heard off.” I mean, that’s… This guy obviously has a level of creativity in that arena that’s impressive.

Warwick F:
Most people would say, “I’m not going to go confront that guy.” 99.9% of people wouldn’t be but you said, “Okay, you know what? I’m not going to just sit here, I’m going to go and…” Because he was almost embarrassed, he gave you a shot and I mean, amazing, so what was… I can’t imagine what your manager’s face was like when I got so-and-so at X firm and he’s going to bring in Y millions of dollars, I just need somebody to partner with me. I mean he did his jaw fall on the floor. I mean, what was that manager’s expression like when you told him back at Merrill Lynch?

Hank M:
You know, I don’t know what they thought of me. I certainly was not an eloquent speaker of the financial markets and I was not. I didn’t have all the terminology and the language down pat or anything like that. I don’t know what they thought of me. I don’t know if they thought I was on my way out the door or maybe they thought I had more potential than I thought. I’m not really sure. I mean, they were definitely happy when I got off the program and brought in these accounts and I don’t know if they thought, “Well, that’s a one hit wonder and he’ll be out of here, I don’t know.” I was never that close with that manager, he didn’t give me a lot of feedback.

Warwick F:
So he never said, “Hey Hank, well done, you had more in you than I thought you did.” He never really gave you any kind of feedback? You never kind of…

Hank M:
No.

Hank M:
No, I don’t remember that.

Warwick F:
Oh, that’s kind of-

Hank M:
Maybe he did, I don’t remember. I just know that my belief in myself went up, at that, more so my belief in my style of doing things and I didn’t have… There was a lot of guys and girls in my class or in that firm that were significantly smarter, better, understanding of the markets, better understanding of financial planning, all of that. And I was just constantly looking around thinking I need to be more like that person or more like that person. And the result of this was more, I need to really train myself on what I’m good at and focusing on these things that I’m good at and be a student of the market and start to really step up my game. That’s really what I’m…

Warwick F:
Yeah. And now I want to shift here a bit to the kind of next step or crucible, but certainly as an aside, I mean, I’ve been blessed to work with a lot of good people and have a tremendous financial advisor. It’s funny, you said off air, you started at Merrill Lynch and went to Morgan Stanley. I also have a financial advisor that was at Merrill Lynch and when he moved to Morgan Stanley, I went with him. Well, I’ve been with him, I don’t know if it’s 15 years, I mean, a very long time, and the question is why? He knows his stuff about finance. I mean, markets, technical stuff, he knows that, but the reason that I have used him for so long is I trust him.

Warwick F:
Yes, he’ll speak straight to me, but I trust that he’s not going to sell me a line, oh… I understand a bit about how it works, the powers that be at Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, they’re pushing something and they’re telling their brokers, “You’ve got to push X security because we’ll make more money off X security.”

Warwick F:
I knew he would never ever do that unless it was good for the client. It wouldn’t even occur to him. So I don’t need somebody to push me something just because the powers that be want to make… That’s what they’re selling this month. So trust is huge. I mean, I’d rather have somebody that I trust than somebody that was the equivalent of a rocket scientist in finance. There’s armies of people at Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. I mean, it’s all these resources that if you’re smart enough, you can bring to bear, but it’s that trust, trust is everything. And obviously you’re in this business. I mean, I’m not preaching to the choir here, but whatever your style is, clearly the people that you work with, they trusted you that you will be straight with them and you are going to fight for their interests, not because of somebody in the firm told you it’s Tuesday and this is the security we’re pushing. Does that make sense?

Hank M:
Yes. For sure.

Warwick F:
So, okay. I want to shift, so you went from Merrill to Morgan Stanley, so how did that shift happen? Was there just an opportunity there at Morgan Stanley? Or…

Hank M:
Yeah, so Warwick… When I’m backing up for a second, when I closed that account, then it was kind of like, I see you don’t remember when I set my goal to be a major college scholarship football player, so now I was like, “Okay, it’s time for another one of those.” So I said, “My family’s not wealthy. I don’t come from money and so forth.” So I was like, “You know what, if I keep doing this, I bet by the time I’m 30, I can make a million dollars,” which to some people that’s not a lot of money, but to me and where I came from, that was a massive amount of money.

Warwick F:
From where you came from, and at that age, anybody was going to say, that’s a massive amount of money.

Hank M:
That’s right. And it would imply huge success starting from zero, to get to that point. So I’d set that goal by the time I was 30, I had a beautiful wife and two healthy young boys, toddlers, and I was making a million dollars or over a million dollars a year. And then Merrill Lynch made a few mistakes with a couple of our largest clients, and it almost cost me the relationships, and I decided to make a change to Morgan Stanley as a result of that, I moved my team over to Morgan Stanley and transitioned our entire… All of our clients, a hundred percent of our clients and our team over there, and I continued to grow. And I really… By this point I was pretty darn good with the markets. I was really good with client relationships. I knew very well what I was talking about. And I started to get notoriety for it.

Hank M:
I started to be on the cover of magazines and rising young star at Morgan Stanley and flying me all over the country to talk to other advisors about how I built my business, and unfortunately, all the humility that had gotten me to this point started to fade a bit, and I started kind of drinking the Hank Kool-Aid and my ego started…

Hank M:
Frankly, a lot of people in that business, right? It’s a very ego driven business, and I started falling into that trap. And so, the more magazine covers that I was on, the more I was actually… They wrote a book about the top 20 financial advisors in the entire United States. And at 34 years old, I was listed as number 12 across alll firms.

Hank M:
So I had reached a level of success at an age that was pretty unusual. I was aware of that and I believed in it and it made my ego feel really good.

Warwick F:
And that’s a tough thing. I mean, it’s a… Failure is not easy, but success, that’s pretty tough too. It’s tough to withstand when people are saying, “You know, Hank, you’re one of the rising stars here at Morgan Stanley, you’re reading this stuff and my clients love me, I am pretty good. I’m pretty hot stuff.” I mean, it’s hard… I don’t care where you come from, that is intoxicating.

Warwick F:
I mean, humility is funnily enough one of my highest values, but nobody’s impervious when I was growing up in the newspaper business unlike some people that come from wealthy backgrounds, I always worked hard and got good grades. I didn’t want to be some dilettante heir to some family fortune. So I had my dad saying, “Boy you could be one of the great Fairfax’s, because it’s five generation business and come back, I’m about to launch a 2 billion plus takeover,” and being a person of faith, I had some people say to me, some believers, older believers we’ve been praying that God would raise somebody up in the heart of the media in Australia. You’re an answer to prayer.

Warwick F:
I mean, you add all those things up. It’s like, “Gosh maybe there’s some preordained plan,” and I worked hard at Oxford, worked on Wall Street for three years, Harvard Business School. It was like, even though humility is one of my biggest values that it tends to erode that a little bit when you’re hearing some of this press and other people and you work hard, which is not a whole lot of people from wealthy backgrounds, frankly, do work hard. So it’s good. But then you can get pride over that, right?

Warwick F:
Look at me, I’m working hard. So yeah. Success is a tough thing to withstand, so you were rising high, you’re doing great, and then there was a fall. Sadly, sometimes it happens when you’re rising high, right? It just feels like the laws of nature. Right. The markets go up and down, I don’t know. It feels weird, so tell us about that fall, you were doing so well at Morgan Stanley and two boys, a wife, what happened then?

Hank M:
Well, speaking of my wife, at that point I think I was full enough of myself, she was getting pretty frustrated with me because I had developed into a ego centric person, not necessarily the humble person that she had met originally. So she was frustrated with me. I got approached by another firm to leave Morgan Stanley, it was a new firm that had some very established people running the firm. They had already brought in a couple of teams from Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley to join them in other cities, their headquarters were going to be in Atlanta. And they said all the right things that my ego needed to hear to convince me that I would be the man at this firm.

Hank M:
My team would be the anchor team of the whole company, and they were going to pay me a huge amount of money up front to come do this. And so, I introduced the CEO of this firm to a couple of my top clients, the clients… These are my two biggest clients. They loved the CEO. They thought it was a great move, but in my getting caught up with everything they were saying and the money they were going to pay me, I never checked their financials.

Hank M:
And so, I went in and resigned at Morgan Stanley, and the Morgan Stanley leadership went crazy because they had been promoting me, they said they were going to ruin me, and I didn’t care because I thought I had it all under control. And I left Morgan Stanley and got in my car to drive over to the new firm, and when I did, I called them and said, “Hey, I just resigned. I’m on my way over.” And they said the ever fateful words, “Well, we’re waiting on our next round of funding, we can’t write you your check yet, we should get it tomorrow. Come in tomorrow.”

Hank M:
And I thought that was curious, but I didn’t let it bother me, but it ended up… They never got their next round of funding, they shut down. They went under and I never walked in their office once. And so, Morgan Stanley increased my team. I had a team of nine people working with me, they increased their salaries and income and they cut my clients fees that were there and bad mouthed me to the clients, and then I ended up with nothing. I lost my entire business, and my wife and I split up. And the next thing I knew, all my assets were frozen and I had very little liquidity at the time because I’d spent most of my money on showy things.

Hank M:
And so, what little bit of liquidity I had, I had to give that to my ex-wife. And I moved into a small little motel that I lived in for 14 months with my two sons and wondered what I was going to do next, because I had no income.

Warwick F:
I mean, that must’ve been excruciating on so many levels. I mean, you’re a very smart person. I mean, the due diligence you do for your clients. How did you avoid… I mean, I spent years beating myself up because of launching the takeover I did and making some massively stupid assumptions months after graduating from Harvard Business School. I mean, I wasn’t an idiot, but sometimes there are reasons that smart people make really dumb decisions. Did you go through… I know this is obvious, forgive the obvious dumb question. Did you go through a period of self-flagellation, self-recrimination like, “How in the world could I have made that decision? How could I have not looked at the books?” I mean, come on. How did you process all of that?

Hank M:
You know Warwick, I don’t think it was so much, how did I make that decision? It was more, “How do I get back?” What, literally two days ago, or three weeks ago or whatever I had. I had a thriving business, a stellar reputation, what I thought was a good marriage, two amazing boys, a brand new house I had just built, like I had all these things and literally with the flip of a switch, I lost everything, in a very, very quick amount of time. And so, I think I was in a state of shock. I was embarrassed, I was ashamed, I couldn’t talk to anybody about it because I didn’t want anybody to know, and I was petrified because for the first time in my life, I didn’t know what to do.

Hank M:
And I had these two little boys looking up at me every day with a big smile on their face. Like, “Daddy’s our hero, he’s going…” They didn’t know what was going on, except that they were now living in a hotel with me, and I just didn’t know what to do. And it was definitely the scariest time of my life. And for a little while, I didn’t know what to do, and basically just kind of had to sit and marinate in it for a while. And just feeling like I’m going to throw up 24 hours a day.

Gary S:
And there’s a story that you told me when we first talked Hank, about the hotel you were staying at, had free breakfast, and free food. Talk about that. I mean, from being a man who covers of magazines, flashy stuff. You’re living in a hotel that has free breakfast and you were surprised that that was so important to you at that time, right?

Hank M:
Yeah. I mean, in all my spending on the credit cards, I had built up a massive amount of points on the credit cards. And fortunately those points would work at this hotel, at the Residence Inn, in Buckhead, and so it just happened they had free breakfast too. So our morning routine was to get ready and before I took the boys to school, we’d go up to the little cafe area in the guests check-in of the hotel. And of course, living there for 14 months, we got to know him pretty well. But certainly it wasn’t a place that I had ever imagined that I would be after achieving the success that I had. But that being said, a lot of tears were shed at night after I put the boys to bed, a lot of self analysis, a lot of self-awareness coming around that maybe wasn’t there before.

Hank M:
So it was definitely the scariest and most painful thing I’ve ever been through. But at the same time, what I learned about myself in that process and what I’m still working to become, but I realized I have potential to become… A hundred percent of that came from those moments of just being scared as hell, and realizing… I mean, sometimes the only motivation I had… Because there was plenty of times I felt like giving up. If I hadn’t had those boys so dependent on me, I’m not sure that I… Who knows, I don’t know, it’s hard to imagine, but certainly, it was my motivation, was to be with them as much as possible and make sure that I was a good role model for them and make sure I could provide for them. And that was really the motivation to start the new company.

Warwick F:
What is it you mentioned that you obviously can’t imagine it was devastating time given how high you were flying and how well you’re doing, what is it that you learned about yourself during those very dark days? And probably at night, the boys are asleep and you’ve got time to think, which is not always a good thing, but you had that time, you’re looking at them and I got to provide for them and give them hope, what were some of the lessons that you learned about yourself during those dark days?

Hank M:
I learned a lot about my perseverance that became… James 1:4, it’s a Bible verse that I had framed and put in… At one time it was in my hotel room and it was in my office. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. That was something that kind of became my mantra because I didn’t know how this whole thing was going to turn out. I mean, there were many days that I thought I’m going to end up on the street. I learned that I’m a lot tougher than I thought.

Hank M:
I was spiritually, mentally, and even though I kind of figured out that I could work really hard and make anything happen with the getting a scholarship to Auburn, like I really realized in this scenario that I’m capable of a lot, but the gratitude and the humility that are necessary to be the kind of leader or the kind of father or the kind of friend that I want to be, are something that I have to stay constantly focused on, versus allowing the things of the world and shiny, flashy things to become important, or affirmation from others that really shouldn’t matter that much.

Hank M:
I should be affirming myself, if I’m living up to what I believe I should be doing. So those kinds of things were a lot of self-awareness that came from it.

Warwick F:
Those are some profound lessons. I think everybody can value from, especially people who are successful. And I believe you can truly be successful without gratitude or humility. If you don’t have that, in my book, you’re not successful. And certainly, you’re not somebody that I would admire or you would admire, right? Does that make sense? You’ve got to have some gratitude. And ultimately, people get tired of working with arrogant people.

Warwick F:
Clients don’t always like… It’s not a good way for a long-term relationship. It’s rather than, “Well, of course I have your business. I’m giving you 20%, 30% return a year, why should I be grateful? I’m the one doing the work, why should I be grateful?” You can have that attitude, but clients don’t appreciate it. They want you to be humble and grateful. So not only does it make good personal sense, it kind of makes good business sense too.

Warwick F:
And I’m sure you’ve said some young high flyers that have worked for you. You’ve seen, it’s like, “Okay, you’ve been there, done that, let me see if I can help you avoid some pitfalls.” You learn some perseverance about yourself that you… But you have a lot of, you hadn’t really seen. So talk about how that led you to Gratus Capital and maybe a new vision of how to do things. Because I’m sensing what you do now. I’m sure you do well financially, but it’s more than just the financial, the way you do business and the people you work with is different.

Warwick F:
You mentioned one other thing I don’t want to lose just seeing your sense of self-sufficiency and who you are, not needing others praise, it shouldn’t be like, “For my car to run, for my Ferrari to roll, if I don’t have the adulation from others, it’ll go nowhere,” no. Your car shouldn’t need other people’s adulation to roar down the highway if you get the metaphor. So that’s another huge lesson. Be internally motivated, don’t depend on others adulation. And again, I’m sure these are all lessons you’ve imparted to your team, but talk a bit about Gratus Capital and where that vision came from and what it’s about and how who you are is such a huge part of who Gratus Capital is.

Hank M:
Well, when I started the company it was really the only choice I had. I knew wealth management. I knew how to take care of clients, and why would I go to another company when they didn’t really… I didn’t have anything of value. I didn’t have clients anymore. I had to start over. So I decided to start my own company because at least I could be in charge of all aspects of it. I decided to do it differently. I didn’t want to name the company a Wall Street name or my last name, and it’d be about me, or a name that has to do with money and typical type stuff you see. So I spent a lot of time and came up with the name Gratus Capital because it was Latin word for grateful, and from day one I said, “This company is going to represent something different in the marketplace. It’s a company that’s going to be built on gratitude for our team, for other people, the clients that we work with. It’s a company that’s going to be built on humility.”

Hank M:
And I’m not sure I would have been capable of building a company on those principles prior to having gone through this. So the vision I had originally, it was just survival. It was just, I’ve got to figure how to make this happen quick. I’ve got child support, alimony, private school tuition, and I have no income. And so, I was in a very desperate place. I didn’t have time to cold call. So I went cold walking. I mean, I knocked on people’s doors, I got escorted out of buildings by security for soliciting. But at that point I was so low, I was kind of feeling like, “What’s one more person kicking me?”

Hank M:
I had really… I was so desperate at that point that I just needed to build the company and slowly but surely, I will say when I was out, I had that book that have been written about me. It was the only thing I had that kind of certify or clarified that I was somebody that knew what I was doing, even though my company was very young and I didn’t have a track record or anything like that. I did have this book and I could say, “Oh yeah, look at chapter 12, that’s me. There is somebody I used to know, have some access to media, and I used to have people write things about me that said I knew what I was doing, so take a look at that.”

Hank M:
So it was for some credibility anyway and sure enough, I closed my first big account, had a little bit of money to hire somebody and got a little bit of money to buy some software and then build some momentum and hired some more people and closed some more accounts. And then, we really started to build momentum. But it was really through the attention and the care that I paid to clients in a very different way than I did before. Because I was just so damn grateful to having clients trusting in this new company that I had started all on my own with nothing, and it was just a very different feeling and a very different approach.

Warwick F:
So talk about, let’s say, I don’t know some club, or what have you had. Some of your biggest clients from your Merrill Lynch Morgan Stanley days, and let’s say they’re ran into some of your clients at Gratus Capital and say, “Oh, you use Hank McLarty, a great guy. So tell me about Hank, what’s your experience?” What would they say about you, sort of the folks you knew in the old days and the folks that you know now? What are the contrast of the two, Hanks, if you will?

Hank M:
So if one of my clients that I deal with now… I only deal with a handful of clients now. Because I spend all my time running the company, but there’s still a few that I spend time with. They would tell you that I will fight for them like nobody that they’ve ever worked with. That I won’t take no for an answer, I’m an advocate for them, and that I’m extremely tenacious when it comes to making sure that their situations turn out the way they should, the way that I told them they would, and that when it comes to dealing with outside people that have impact on their situation, that I fight for them.

Hank M:
The asset management, the returns on their stocks and investments and the trust, estate, and the tax strategy, all of that is a given, my team is phenomenal. They’re the best people that I could ever get on a team, but what they would say about me personally is what I told them. That I’m extremely passionate about taking care of them.

Warwick F:
I’m just trying to contrast, because I imagine the folks you knew, when you were at Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley days might say, “Well, that’s the guy who we know. He fought for me back then.” What would be the difference between the Gratus Capital Hank and the Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley Hank? Are there any… What made the difference?

Hank M:
I fought for clients back then but I wouldn’t say that I would go to the lengths for clients then like I would now. I would say that the approach that I have is there’s just a whole different level of appreciation that I have for the clients that we work with. And I was never unappreciative before, I just didn’t really think about it a lot. Today, I and this team that I work with, we built this, we have a very special company, we built this. So when we have clients come and they trust us with other than their children and probably the most important thing in their life, like, I recognize that.

Hank M:
And my attitude, and my passion for taking care of them, and my team’s attitude and passion, because it all comes from the top is much more personable and much more intense than it was when I was in my prior.

Warwick F:
Do you think that there’s a level of humility and gratitude that has taken your level of perseverance, even your desire to perform for your clients to another level, in some ways if that makes some degree of sense?

Hank M:
Yeah, for sure. I also think that one thing I’ve learned, our company is close to 40 people now. And as we achieve my vision will be over 200. The greatest satisfaction I’ve ever had in my career has been building this team. I love taking care of our clients, but I’ve imparted that on my team members because they’re running the company now. So I think the greatest honor and responsibility that I have other than raising my sons is ensuring that this team can reach their potential. And it is now my North Star.

Hank M:
It is us achieving our vision as a company, me constantly working on my leadership skills, my ability to impact this team, bringing them together and getting them to believe in our vision. I mean, how many work places have a team that believes in something bigger than themselves? Like that is what motivates the hell out of me. Is looking now on Zoom calls, it used to be face-to-face. Now on Zoom calls and I’d go over our values and our vision twice a month with our team, and I see their eyes light up on the Zoom calls and I see them totally focused on what I’m saying because they buy in. There’s nothing in my career that I’ve ever done that gives me the motivation that that does. That-

Warwick F:
I want the listeners to hear that because what I’m sensing is there’s a big shift from Hank McLarty being focused on his own performance, maybe primarily in the old days to well, yes, you want your individual performance to be good, but I’m hearing you talk a whole lot less about Hank and a whole lot more about the team at Gratus Capital, and you used the word North Star. Your North star is helping your team be the best they can be for the client.

Warwick F:
Does that make sense? It’s a bit of a shift from I to we, and yes, the results are going to speak for themselves that vision and values will translate into superior performance. But do you know what I’m saying?

Hank M:
Warwick, I know exactly what you’re saying. I think that’s a great way to put it. I would not have put it that way but now that you do, I think that’s exactly the difference that maybe my clients today might say, because I take zero credibility for any success with our firm or any success with clients. Frankly, my team is all, they have more designations than me, my only designations is the rise and fall.

Hank M:
And then right again they’re all smarter than me, they’re more talented than me. The only thing I’ve been really, really good at is bringing them together into a team, because my team is amazing. And the only other thing I’ve done well is to motivate them and get them inspired to work together and get them to believe that our team is a unit, is more important than them as individuals. And I say that to them constantly. And a lot of that comes from the lessons I’ve learned the hard way that I hope none of them ever have to learn it the way I had to learn it.

Warwick F:
I know we’re getting to the point where we probably need to summarize here a bit, but again, this is probably an obvious question, but as you look at where Gratus Capital is, and yeah, just one of the things that we’ve have, it says that Gratus Capital today is ranked one of the top hundred firms in the US by Forbes. I mean, that’s a pretty amazing accolade, there’s a lot of financial firms out there and you’re obviously doing amazing. But as you look at what you’ve achieved, would that have been possible without just the crucible you went through being in that kind of Residence Inn, with two boys sitting there late at night, and I don’t know how I’m going to be able to afford everything from school and food on the table, and just those darkest time. What you’ve achieved at Gratus Capital would’ve been possible without the lessons and those hard times that you went through?

Hank M:
Maybe for some, not for me. I think for me, I needed my ass kicked, and I got it kicked.

Gary S:
Not by a football coach?

Hank M:
No, no. I got my ass kicked by life. And as a result of a hundred percent of my own doing and my own decisions. But for me to realize what my potential and my abilities were, were never going to happen where I was. And I do think I have some good leadership skills, I have a long way to go, but I’m committed to becoming every aspect of what I can as a leader, and I think the major thing that motivates me now is I’m 51. Before you know it I’ll be 70 if I make it that far or 80, and I am scared to death of looking back on my life and saying, I did not leave it all on the field.

Hank M:
And I know for me to leave it all on the field, it’s not a dollar sign, it’s how many rock stars can I bring into this company and mentoring coach for them to become better than me. If I can look back and say, maybe that’s 20, maybe it’s 200, whatever the number is, I would never have been able to do that, had I been the old me. There’s a lot of people that will impact thousands, millions of people, they’ll make hundreds of millions more than I’ll ever make. But for me, looking back knowing what I’ve been through, if I can say that I have to my fullest potential worked hard, become a leader, a great dad, and had an impact on the team that I am lucky enough to get to lead, then that does it for me.

Warwick F:
And that’s one of the things we talk about is legacy. That’s a kind of a legacy that you’d be proud of, right? When the folks that you’re mentoring now, let’s say 30, 35 years down the track, your boys in 30 years, who was Hank McLarty? These are some of the things you’re hoping they would say, “Yes, a good dad. He was there for me.” Coworkers, “He fought for me, he helped give me opportunities. He developed me. He coached me. He mentored me.” Sounds like that’s the kind of legacy that you would hope or the portrait that would be painted of you, right?

Warwick F:
That’s kind of, I don’t want to use the P word, the plan or the goal, but it’s nothing wrong with plans and goals, but that sounds like it’s shifted, right? That’s the kind of image that people in 30 years time or 40 years time, that’s what you would hope that there’ll be saying of you, right?

Hank M:
So I’ll just, unless you want to ask me another question, I’ll kind of close my comment on that with this. When I turned 50, we had, I don’t know, maybe 30 friends come to my lake house for my birthday party and my sons were there. And at the end of the dinner, they started going around the table and making some very gracious comments towards me about who I am as a person, whatever. And my oldest son stood up and hopefully I can get through telling you this real quick, because I get emotional every time I talk about it.

Hank M:
But my oldest son stood up and he raised his glass and he said… He’s 24, so he would have been 23 at the time. He raised his glass and he said, “Most of you have no idea some of the things me and my dad and my brother went through. But I want to toast my dad because no matter what we went through, there’s never been a day that my brother and I ever wondered if we were my dad’s number one priority.”

Hank M:
And for me, even my friends came up to me after he said that and he’s like, “Buddy, you won. Like you won. When one of your sons or both your sons say that about you, you win.” And so yeah, to your point.

Warwick F:
Well said.

Gary S:
That sound that you heard was not a barking dog, it was actually the captain turning on the the seatbelt sign because it’s about time to land the plane. Until we do that though, Hank, I want to ask you a couple of things. One is, you named the business Gratus Capital because gratus means what?

Hank M:
It’s the Latin word for grateful.

Gary S:
Correct. And if we could see it, if it were summertime and we were at the beach, you have tattooed on you, a couple of words that guide your life as you’re moving forward, correct?

Hank M:
Correct.

Gary S:
And those words are?

Hank M:
Gratus and humility.

Gary S:
Two key principles for how you’ve moved on to live your life. And one of the things about this conversation, and I think listeners will agree with me, in many ways, Hank, while your story is so unique, the beats of your story are almost prototypical, Crucible Leadership. The idea that you go through crucibles, you learn the lessons of the crucibles, you bounce back from those crucibles, and then you apply them to your leadership in business, in your profession, in your community. While at the same time you learn and how to lead a life of significance, focused on something larger than yourself, larger than just success.

Gary S:
You’ve got success, you’ve also got significance with your son saying what he said at that 50th birthday party. Before I wrap up with sort of what I think are three good takeaways, I’d be remiss Hank, if I didn’t give you the chance to let our listeners know how they can find out more about Gratus Capital.

Hank M:
Sure. www.gratuscapital.com. G-R-A-T-U-S.

Gary S:
Thank you for spelling that.

Hank M:
Yeah, definitely not gratus meeting free.

Gary S:
Bravo. That sound you hear is Warwick laughing and the plane landing, so Warwick did you have a final thought before I close?

Warwick F:
Just thank you so much, Hank, for being here and just your transparency, and it’s easy to talk about failure in a lot of ways and tragedy, but you’ve had your challenges, but you’ve also had success, and being able to learn how to be successful and be content, to be humble and grateful and successful, that’s very difficult to be. I doubt that you know too many people outside your orbit of Gratus Capital have all those things that are successful financially and are humble, and are grateful that is… Trust me, it’s really, really tough.

Warwick F:
And the fact that you’ve done that and the testimony from your son, and I’m sure if your coworkers had got up, they would have shared. Obviously your son is going to be the pinnacle of who you care about in terms of your kids and all. But I’m sure your coworkers would have shared some amazing things about how you fought for them, and you’re with them, and supported them, and so yeah, I think it’s just… We talk about a life well lived, it feels like you’re doing that. You’re living a generous life, focused on others and that’s an amazing journey that you’ve been on.

Warwick F:
And so I think listeners can really learn from this. It’s fine to be successful, but you’ve… I’m sure known a bunch of successful clients. And obviously I grew up in about as a wealthy, a privileged upbringing, as it’s possible to grow up in. There’s a lot of miserable folks who are very wealthy and so nothing wrong with being successful, I’m all for it. But being successful, and content, and happy and filled with joy, it requires some of the things that you’ve learned, some humility and gratitude.

Warwick F:
So that’s I think a message for folks that they don’t always hear. You can be successful, but you want to be joyful and happy, you’ve got to have some of those other things too, humility and gratitude. And so that’s a very important lesson for folks, yep.

Gary S:
I have been in the communications business long enough to know in the last word on a subject has been spoken and that was yours Warwick. I do have in summary, let’s call it an epilogue to the last word being spoken. I have a summary of some takeaways from this conversation with Hank McLarty that I think listeners you can apply to your own crucibles in your own movement beyond those crucibles.

Gary S:
Lesson number one, and Hank said it at the very outset of our conversation, you are never too young to set goals. Hank started doing it in third grade. Identify the things you’d like to achieve, to bring your vision to reality and break them down into milestones you can pursue as you walk the path to make that vision a reality. A goal set is a stone laid on the path that will lead you to the life you want. Despite the bumps along his path, Hank’s dedication to setting goals has helped him not just find success as Warwick just mentioned, but has pushed him through setbacks and failures to find significance.

Gary S:
A second takeaway point. The lesson Hank learned from his father. Don’t quit. Listen to Hank’s dad listener, don’t quit. Especially when you’re in the abyss of your crucible. When the chips are down, stick it out, stay the course, build your character, build your grit, is the word Hank used when we were talking about it. You will not only move beyond your crucible that you want to abandon, you’ll set yourself up to weather the crucibles that will certainly come down the road. And we heard it from Hank, his first crucible with football ending was not his last crucible. He’s been through others, and the grit he developed along the way has helped him through that.

Gary S:
And then finally, a third point is, don’t drink the, insert your own name here Kool-Aid. Hank’s greatest crucible as he explained, occurred out of a lack of humility and gratitude. He was on a roll and impressed with himself. His words not mine. So much so that it contributed to his crucible. It led to all that he believed to be true and important about himself to crumble. And it was in the rubble of that crumbling that he discovered a new vision. One that he’s passed along to both his children and to his employees. He took his focus off the only goal being the brass ring, and he put the focus on his offspring. It was the start of his life of significance. And that sort of shift in thinking can be the start of your life of significance as well.

Gary S:
So listeners until we’re together the next time, thank you for spending time with us in this truly moving and informational and hopeful and helpful conversation with Hank McLarty.

Gary S:
Warwick and I have a couple of favors to ask you, one, tell people about the podcast, if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard here, let people know that we’re out there, share a link with them in social media so that they can benefit from this as well. And while you’re at it, we’d really appreciate it if you would click subscribe on the podcast app that you’re listening to our show on right now.

Gary S:
So until that next time that we are together, remember this truth about your crucible experiences. Yes, they’re painful. Hank’s certainly were painful. Yes, they can knock the wind out of your sails that happened to Hank. They can change the trajectory of your life. They did that for Hank a couple of times where he felt like his identity was stripped away. But the good news is if you stick with it, if you learn the lessons of your crucibles, they’re not the end of your story.

Gary S:
In fact, as Hank’s story proves, they’re the beginning of a new story that can lead to a far better conclusion than you ever thought possible. Because the conclusion that your new story leads to is a life of significance.

Seton Hall University students who attend the Buccino Leadership Institute discover early the value of learning and leveraging the lessons of their crucible experiences. That’s because the institute’s executive director, retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Bryan Price, teaches a freshman course in which students share their most painful setbacks and failures with their classmates as a means of building confidence in themselves and camaraderie among their peers. It’s leadership authenticity Price learned as captain of the baseball team at West Point — spotlighting how vulnerability for a purpose pays big dividends in our lives and careers. And the sooner we learn our identity is not tied to what we do but rather to who we are, the better we become at the essential skills of reframing failure and not falling victim to imposter syndrome.

To learn more about Bryan Price and his leadership coaching services, visit www.topmentalgame.com

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Have a question or comment? Drop us a line at info@beyondthecrucible.com

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Transcript

Warwick F:
Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Crucible Leadership.

Gary S:
In organizations, when you try to put all the ingredients together of what makes an organization successful, one of those things is trust, trust between leaders and followers, trust within in peer groups, trust with the organization. And in order to trust you, I have to know you. And if I to really know you, you have to be vulnerable and share parts of yourself that normally, you might be willing to kind of keep from others. And so when we did this class, the setup was before the class starts, I asked my students, each student to come up with between one and three crucible moments in their life, and I described them very similarly as you and Warwick did at the outset. And I had those ahead of time. And then in that class, I talked about the importance of it, just very similarly to how Warwick did, and their importance in our growth. And then I lead from the front, I share my crucible moments with the class, and I ask some of my associate faculty, my associate directors to do the same. And then we turn it over to the students to volunteer. So you don’t have to volunteer if you don’t want to. But boy, the past couple years when we’ve done this, the emotional response that we’ve gotten from students that have shared their crucible moment has been extremely powerful.

Gary S:
College course on crucibles? You bet. At Seton Hall University, Dr. Bryan Price teaches his students the power of vulnerability with a purpose of sharing some of their most painful experiences in life as a key element of the leadership skills he’s imparting to them in the classroom. Hi, I’m Gary Schneeberger, the co-host of the show and the Communications Director for Crucible Leadership. Dr. Price also shares in this interview with Warwick the lessons on Life and Leadership he learned on the baseball diamond, at West Point as a military officer and as head of Seton Hall’s Buccino Leadership Institute. A major theme of the stories he tells and the perspective he offers, the essential roles authenticity and identity play in mustering the resilience to move beyond your crucible.

Warwick F:
Wow. Well, Bryan, thank you so much for being here. I know we’re in a bit, we’re going to talk about what you do at the Buccino Institute at Seton Hall, the Crucible Moments class, which given what we do at Crucible Leadership and Beyond the Crucible, it’s all about crucibles and critical moments. I love the fact you have a class called that. So we’ll get to that here in a bit. And you’ve had just an amazing career at West Point and teaching there and Army Aviation and a number of combat tours. But before we get into all of that, tell us a bit about growing up in Sea Girt, New Jersey and kind of what was your family like and who was like a young Bryan Price and your family and all?

Bryan P:
Yeah, sure. So I’m actually reporting live from Sea Girt as well, which is, if you’re not familiar, it’s a postage stamp. It’s kind of a sleepy resort town on the Jersey Shore. And the reason why it’s called Girt is because we’re surrounded by water. It’s almost like a little peninsula where you have water to my north and south. And then the Atlantic Ocean is obviously on the east here. And I’m living in the same house that I grew up in. So that’s also interesting. So I was actually born in Elizabeth, New Jersey. But then when I was less than one, my family moved down to Sea Girt. My father was a sports writer and wrote for the Staten Island Advance for 44 years. My mom was a nurse. And I grew up with two brothers, one older and one younger. And as we speak right now, they are probably within three quarters of a mile from where I’m sitting. So fantastic opportunity growing up. As I mentioned, we’re on the Jersey Shore. So my years were spent playing sports, going to school, and then we had the beach and as we say here, it’s like, our lives are other people’s vacations because people would come to our town to vacation and we get to live here. So it was awesome.

Warwick F:
Oh, that is so cool. I mean is obviously growing up in a newspaper background. You were never tempted to follow in the family business and be a sportswriter or something? Did dad ever say, “Bryan, come on. I got in at the Staten Island paper and maybe from there who knows, the Newark Star Ledger or whatever.” Did you ever think of doing that or not really?

Bryan P:
I did. In fact in high school and this might be the first that I think anyone’s ever hearing about this. While I was playing on the basketball team, I went under a different name in my local town paper and was the beat writer for our team, which it’s funny. I went under a name from my favorite baseball player, which not many people knew named Mickey Hatcher.

Warwick F:
Oh, yeah, Mickey Hatcher, yes.

Bryan P:
And I wrote for the Coast Star. And so the funny part is, is like you could imagine, the access that I had to that team was amazing in terms of the reporting, because I was on it. But I had to be careful. If you go back through those files, I don’t want to write about myself. So it was all about the team and those sorts of things.

Warwick F:
You had to be careful. If like, the team played well, but boy the coaching was really awful. We could have won that but the coach was just asleep.

Bryan P:
Exactly. Who is this Mickey Hatcher guy?

Gary S:
I’m intrigued, I’m intrigued because Mickey Hatcher was a bit of a character as I recall, baseball player. He played for the Dodgers, mostly. And he was a bit of a, I wouldn’t call him a flake, but he was a bit of a character. So why was he your favorite player?

Bryan P:
One word, hustle. If you ever saw him play, whenever he would draw base on balls, he would sprint to first base. Whenever he hit a home home run, he would sprint around the bases and kind of interesting factoid on him, only hit two home runs the entire regular season in 1989. Kirk Gibson gets hurt so he gets to play in the World Series, he gets a starting job and hits two home runs the World Series. But he was a character, but I loved him less for the character and more for his hustle. And I emulated that in my play, or at least tried to.

Warwick F:
That’s awesome. So obviously high school, you mentioned three sport athletes. So which sports were they, out of curiosity?

Bryan P:
So I played football, basketball, obviously since the beat writers aspect. And then baseball was the sport that I probably excelled in at the most.

Warwick F:
Awesome. And then I know you went on to, you were the co-captain at West Point. So that was a huge deal, baseball. And do you ever, I mean, obviously, there’s a sports writing angle. Do you ever think, “Gosh, could I be good enough to kind of get to the next level?” Would you ever toy with that about minor leagues or more?

Bryan P:
So as a kid growing up, I mean that was always the dream. But at my size, I was always undersized. So in my playing days, I was no taller than I usually say I’m 5’7 1/2″. I don’t even know if you know and that half, if I’m there yet. But I know I got the most out of my my playing days. And my co-captain, Mike Scioletti, who will probably watch this, did get drafted by the White Sox. But he turned it down to continue his army career. But I felt like I got the most out of my out of my athletic ability. I’ve no regrets.

Gary S:
And one of the things that’s probably true, as you describe your baseball career, and your physical stature in the way that you played the game and what you liked about Mickey Hatcher, I imagine the name or the adjective scrappy was assigned to you at some point. You were a scrappy ballplayer. But as we talk about overcoming crucibles and moving beyond those failures and those setbacks, and what you’re teaching to your students now, being scrappy, I’ve never thought of it in these terms, but being scrappy is a key personality element to overcoming a crucible.

Bryan P:
Yeah, it’s funny, Gary, when you mentioned this. We all have like different narratives that rattle around in our brain over time. And by the way, just to answer your specific question, if you go back to the media guides during those time periods, I guarantee you’re going to find the word scrappy there. So you’re spot on, you’re spot on. But I don’t necessarily classify this as a crucible moment. But it’s one of those moments that it’s so definitive in my life, and I think to your point, helped shape how I saw myself and how I wanted to perform not just in sports, but in life. And so I was in eighth grade going into high school. And I had, again multi sport athlete, we have like an advanced version of, they call it the Babe Ruth League, where I come from, so there’s Little League, and then you kind of advance to this Babe Ruth League, and I had just been voted MVP of that league. The summer was winding down, and I would go and play, one of the great things about my dad was his job as a sportswriter, was he had a fair amount of flexibility. So we could go out in the summertime and practice and play.

Bryan P:
And I remember we would go to the high school, the local high school to play and inside of high school, they had a Coke machine. So we’d go play in the summertime, it would be super hot out. We kind of walk into the school. This is pre like school shooting days where you could just like walk into the school and go use the Coke machine and the janitor was there and the janitor happened to be from a family in our town that was known for athleticism, multiple generations of top athletes, and he saw me play so he came in and he said, “I’ve seen you hitting out there with your dad.” He said, “You look pretty awesome. Pretty good.” He goes, “What grade are you in? You are going into what? Sixth grade?”, and I was about to become a freshman.

Bryan P:
And again, it doesn’t sound like much to anybody. But to me, it was my height and my stature at that time. I said right then and there, I was like, this is how people are going to perceive me whenever I walk into the room. So I’m not going to impress anybody with my I saw your Tom Brady bit the other day Warwick, which is great. No one’s going to fall in love with the scouting report just off of paper. So I felt like I had to outwork everybody in whatever organization or group that I was in, because I wasn’t going to impress you on paper.

Warwick F:
Yeah. And that’s really tough when you’re a kid, and somebody thinks that you looked good for sixth grade and you’re about to be a freshman. I mean there are some stereotypes people have when they don’t really know who you are. But anything that’s physical, it’s sort of obvious, and they size you up. And so okay, therefore, he can’t do A and B. It’s like, all Australians play tennis these days. And some of these top tennis players for guys, they’re like 6’1″, 6’2″ is kind of about the minimum. And then some of these guys are 6’4″, 6’5″. The women, it’s like 5’9″, 5’10”. You’d be hard pressed to find a woman who’s in the top 20 or the elite that’s much smaller than 5’9″, 5’10”. So if you’re a some five foot girl growing up, five foot four. I mean, you get a lot of coaches saying, “Yeah, and I’m not really seeing it.”

Bryan P:
Yeah, exactly.

Warwick F:
And it just feels so unfair. It’s like it doesn’t capture the whole Tom Brady thing, which as everybody knows, his scouting report was just kind of abysmal, not mobile.

Gary S:
Weak arm.

Warwick F:
Yeah, I mean, doesn’t throw a tight spiral. I mean, you would never draft that guy, but it misses the heart. Clearly you had a heart, passion, hustle. I want to talk a bit about before we shift to West Point and Seton Hall, everybody’s had crucibles. I think you mentioned your parents got divorced when you were young, and you lost your mom to cancer at 9/11, I mean, clearly around 9/11. That’s obviously tough. I mean, how did those things shape you? I mean some people, like parents getting divorced, you can be angry, and it’s always devastating. But some people are able to move on in some fashion, and some are not.

Bryan P:
Those two moments kind of stick out for me the most in the sense that as a kid, all you know is you’re a nuclear family. And when there’s a divorce, that can really shake up a lot of families. And in my case, it did, because my dad moved out of the house, but also my older brother went to go live with him, too. So it wasn’t just one person moving out, it was two people. But one of the things that I tell people in terms of why I felt like it was impactful to me was because I saw what love was like, and so my dad literally tried to find the closest place to our house where he can move, and again, a resort town, so it’s not like there’s a ton of apartment complexes around here. It’s mostly residential houses. And so he found an apartment that was four blocks away. And so I had the opportunity growing up, even though my parents were divorced, to see both of those individuals almost on a daily basis, to make it as normal for us as possible.

Bryan P:
And I think when you look at leadership, and putting others in front of your own interests, I saw my dad do that, because it wasn’t the greatest appartment that he was in, but it was close to us. And that was more important to him than having some type of great place to live. So that was kind of telling. The second one was, as you mentioned, so I ended up losing my mom in October of 2001. And that was also right around the time of September 11. In fact, when I found out, my mom had been sick for that year prior, but it really started to elevate in September. She was supposed to go into her first bout of chemotherapy on the morning of September 11.

Bryan P:
And so when I actually got home from physical training, I was at Fort Hood as a lieutenant as a platoon leader at that time, and so we just got done from our morning physical training, I come home and my mom is calling and I knew that she was supposed to be going into her chemo that day. So she says, “Turn on the TV.” We talked about it. Turn on the TV. And obviously, that was after the first plane had hit and then I was on the phone with her for the second plane.

Bryan P:
The hospitals had actually called her to tell her that her chemotherapy was going to be canceled that morning because our area’s hospitals were preparing for the triage. We’re close enough to New York City where they felt like they were going to be feeling the effects of of this tragedy. And so less than probably three and a half weeks later, she was gone. So everything accelerated very quickly. I know there’s lots of people out there that have lost loved ones at various ages. For me at that time, it’s tough. You never want to see your parents in pain. And it’s just kind of a wake up call. And maybe the silver lining out of all that is when you do experience that pain and personal loss, I think you look at the world differently. It’s kind of like somebody proverbial shaking you out of your rut and the lifestyle that you’re in. And it shakes you to say like this thing we have here called life is short, and you have to take advantage of it. And so I took both of those lessons from the divorce, but also from losing my mom, and hopefully trying to make that impact, that life of significance that you talk about in your fantastic book. And I think that even though no one wants to go through those tragedies, those things can serve a purpose in your life, if you’re open to it.

Warwick F:
Yeah. I mean, it’s such a good point. That makes you think, well, every day is precious. You have obviously married and I think you mentioned earlier, you have a daughter and you said one kid?

Bryan P:
Yep, she was so perfect. Why bother?

Warwick F:
Well said, but it makes you value every hour every day, with your family, with students. Yeah, you go through a crucible, as we say, and you can either, which is understandable, wallow in them, hide under the covers, and be bitter and angry, either at the world or at yourself, if it’s through your own mistake. And setbacks can be one of varieties. Or you can say, “Yeah, this is pretty awful. But how am I going to move forward? How am I going to maybe use this in some way?” Obviously, you have empathy for people that have gone through those sorts of things. And just, yeah the silver lining I think with your dad, that’s sort of a remarkable story that irrespective of how the divorce happened, the fact that he was so dedicated to his family, that he was so close and spent so much time with you, that was something that it’s like, even when bad things happen, what’s important to you in life, you don’t let that go. And that probably was an incredibly invaluable life lesson that you learned from your dad’s actions. It’s often we learn as much or more from people’s actions than their words, right? His life, the way he modeled love and putting family first in that situation was, it was remarkable, really. I mean, a lot of dads wouldn’t do that. They’d say, “Okay, I’m out of here. And off I go.” But not your dad.

Bryan P:
He completely put his kids at the forefront and put his entire life, including social life on the back burner. Another kind of interesting thing is, again I mentioned the small town. And so my brothers and I, we would play sports all the time. And my dad, again given his schedule, was willing to be able to go out whenever we wanted to go practice. And so looking through the eyes of our 2021 lens back then, I’m sure there are tons of people in my town that thought my dad was crazy, and maybe demanding that we would go out and play. But the beautiful part is, I can’t remember one instance in my entire life, where my dad kicked me on the couch and said, “Hey, Bryan, you got to get out and practice, let’s go.” It was always us asking my dad. And he was like, okay, and going into the sports crazed world that we are today, and I have a daughter, obviously played sports, we talked about that earlier, that was also a gift for me of whenever my dad wanted to play with me, he was available. He was never the one putting guilt or pushing me to get out and practice. So that was another life lesson.

Warwick F:
And now I’ll shift here to West Point. But just to kind of talk about this for one more beat, what your dad modeled for you, I’m sure that you model for your daughter. Your daughter, you mentioned earlier is like an elite athlete on the top team for 12 year olds in the country. She’s obviously one of the top 12 year old girls in the country. Well, a lot of dads in those circumstances would be like, “You got to train, you got to do this, you got to do that. You could be in the U.S. women’s team, you could be the Olympics.”, and I strongly suspect that you encourage and support. But you’re not saying, “It’s 5 a.m. You’re working out, are you?” You’re probably not that dad.

Bryan P:
If my wife was listening to this right now, she would say, “Bryan, you better be taking your own medicine.” And so I have to fight that impulse in order to do that. And I’ll just be honest, while I think I am not bad in that regard. I feel like my dad was better, and it’s something to kind of shoot for for sure.

Warwick F:
Yeah. So I want to hear about the Buccino Institute. But tell us a bit about West Point, because obviously, and afterwards, you played on the baseball team, co-captain and I think there was some important lessons you learned about teamwork probably throughout your whole career, but I’m guessing that might have been the capstone of it. What did you really learn about yourself, about teamwork just by playing on the baseball team there?

Bryan P:
Yeah, well, I think just to expand it even further, the entire experience at West Point for those of you that are not familiar, it’s essentially a 47 month leadership laboratory. And so from the moment that you arrive to the moment that you leave, you are consistently learning about yourself all the way. And one aspect of that leadership model which is pertinent to this conversation, is that it’s designed to make you fail at something. And the way they do it is very interesting, because they give you so much work to do, that no one can possibly do it in a 24 hour period. And so you have to, at a very early age, kind of manage your expectations of what tasks are you going to do well, and what tasks are you just not going to.

Bryan P:
So for example, the differences between cleaning your room, studying for your chemistry exam, and shining your shoes for inspection the next day, and you have 45 minutes before lights are out, you got to figure out how to manage that. The other thing I’ll say is, no matter how skilled you are, no matter what an athlete you are, or how academically adept you are, there’s going to be something that you fail at. For example, you have to go off the 10 meter platform in the pool. And so there’s lots of people, I don’t know if you’ve ever gone off a 10 meter platform before, but even if you’re not scared of heights, that can be a significant emotional event. For another kid, it might be chemistry. For another kid, it might be on the marksmanship range.

Bryan P:
So what West Point teaches you, and I think the baseball team as well is, even when you do fail, you have to pick yourself back up, and then move forward. And I think that’s an especially important lesson for leaders, because I think all too often, there’s this streak of perfectionism in our society where leaders have to do everything perfect. And when you think about it, the most impactful leaders probably in your lifetime were ones that were authentic, and authentic people are vulnerable. And it’s okay to admit if you’re not great at something, or if you failed at something, and then move forward. And so that’s one lesson that I think West Point does a great job of teaching.

Warwick F:
I mean, that’s so great, because so often in society, you see people that won’t admit their failures, that will not apologize and double down, triple down, what have you. But I imagine in your army experience, like in any organization, there are good leaders, bad leaders, and so so leaders. It’s just part of being human. Were you able to observe leaders that were able to admit that they made mistakes and were wrong, and maybe you were right, others were right. Did you have modeled for you leaders that you think these are folks are actually doing it right?

Bryan P:
Oh, 100%. I mean, on average, I don’t care what profession you’re in, you’re going to run into leaders that are good and bad in every profession. And so one of the things that West Point also teaches you is consider yourself kind of carrying, they call it a kit bag, but good lessons, bad lessons, put them in that bag, and reserve for later. But when it comes to servant leadership, which is the kind of model that we try to espouse at Seton Hall, is definitely espoused in the military. I feel so blessed and fortunate to have had leaders in my orbit, in my network that are some of the best people on the planet. And of course, you can see those things come out in crisis moments, because you’re in the military, whether you’re in combat or when the stakes are high, that’s when you really see people’s true colors. And to see people that you really trust, respect, and look up to, it’s been awesome. So yeah.

Warwick F:
I mean, it occurs to me in the military, if you’ve got some stubborn colonel, general that doesn’t want to admit failure, I mean bad things can happen to them. I’m not really a military student. But yeah, I think maybe World War One, you had them fighting 19th century battles with full frontal assault against machine guns, which was insanity. It was never going to work and thousands or maybe millions of people die, but general after general, whether it’s, I don’t know, French, German, British, maybe Americans later, they just kept with the same battle plan. And it’s like, this is idiotic, but nobody wants to admit that they’re wrong or that they’re clueless. And they haven’t been trained in tactics for what was then modern warfare. They’ve been trained in 19th century cavalry charge tactics when they were in their 20s. It’s just mind blowing. How could you keep doing the same thing and wasting enormous numbers of lives? You just have to think a little bit of arrogance, a little bit of, well, I don’t want to admit that I don’t know what to do here. I haven’t been trained to deal with this situation. What do we do?

Bryan P:
I think one of the phrases that helps manage that kind of aspect of it, and by the way, in the military, we’re probably one of the most hierarchical organizations that there are. There is a rank structure. But I do believe that they in certain aspects of the military, they do respect you to speak truth to power, and especially in the planning stage. But once the decision has been made, then it’s execute. But there’s a phrase that I think I gravitated towards when I was in the military, but one that I think is also applicable to whatever profession that you’re in. And its mission first, people always. And so, sometimes when you’re in the military, you get asked, saw the helicopter pilot. So what if you get to go take this very dangerous mission, maybe behind enemy lines, where you might have a high likelihood of some of your folks not coming back? And so they say, “Well, do you do the mission? Or being the leader, do you take care of your folks, and you not do the mission?” And you do both. You accomplish the mission, but you also take care of your people. So mission first, people always is kind of a nice catchphrase that I think is also applicable in business and sports and whatever profession that you’re exploring.

Warwick F:
Absolutely. So after West Point, obviously you became an Army helicopter pilot, did that for a number of years before going to Stanford. So before we get into sort of the Stanford and then combating terrorism center, were there are any key lessons you learned by being a helicopter pilot in Iraq, Afghanistan, and just all of that with sort of life leadership lessons you learned from that period?

Bryan P:
Yeah, I think both of them offered kind of their own different lessons. But as I mentioned earlier, when you are in those situations, you learn a lot about yourself, both good and bad, and maybe some things that you’re not super proud of about your own leadership. But I think so when I was in Afghanistan, for example, as a company commander, I had 106 people that were underneath my charge. And having that sense of care, love, devotion for those people, I don’t know, when I talk to people about, actually this is an interesting thing that we do with our students at Seton Hall, which is on their first day in our program, I ask all the students to take out a piece of paper and fill out and say, “What is your definition of leadership?” And when they do that, they can’t use Google, I don’t give them any primer, I collect all the answers. And then I put it into a word cloud.

Bryan P:
And for the past three years running, I’ve done this and the one word that comes out above any other is others. And if I had to use any one word to define leadership, that’s what it’s all about. It’s all about others. And if there’s one thing that leading in combat or being in the military taught me is the importance of others. And so that type of servant leadership style is kind of in our DNA. And it’s what we’re also trying to do with our folks at Seton Hall. One quick side story, I go from being responsible for 106 people in Afghanistan, weapon on me every single day, flying all over the country, I get back. And then within weeks, I’m in Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, which is one of the most beautiful places on the face of the planet. And I went from that environment in Afghanistan to Stanford where I was only responsible for myself. And in my first meeting with the graduate school people there, I said, “I’m here to see so and so.”, and she’s like, “Oh yeah, we’ll bring her right out.” And she walks out. And she’s barefoot and her dog is accompanying her. And I was like, it’s like culture shock, but two very high performing organizations, going from the military to Stanford. Again, I feel just very blessed that I had the opportunity to kind of learn in these really interesting leadership laboratories.

Warwick F:
And before you got to Seton Hall, you spent a number of years at the West Point Combating Center. But I think you mentioned when you first applied to teach there, it didn’t work out. But what was that like? I mean, it obviously worked out eventually. What was that like? Was that like, how could it not work out? I mean, I think I’m pretty qualified. I mean, what was going on?

Bryan P:
Yeah, this was really interesting. So I did my first tour there. So I went to Stanford. And after I got the Ph.D., I then started working at West Point in the Department of Social Sciences. And then I went to Iraq, I deployed to Iraq. When I went to go, there was a job opportunity that opened back up to become a permanent professor. So West Point is a mix of rotating faculty that will rotate every couple of years, and then a small segment that is kind of permanent faculty. So a permanent faculty job opened up and I applied to it and I thought I was relatively qualified for it. And I went and I interviewed and I thought I crushed the interview. And I don’t think I’ve ever told anybody this story either. So this is twofer here, Gary and Warwick.

Gary S:
Wow, we got exclusive here on Beyond the Crucible.

Bryan P:
So I’ve already given up my pet name of Mickey Hatcher out there. The second one is in the military, I don’t want to say the real army, but you don’t wear your dress uniform. It’s not like the movies. You turn on the movies and they’re wearing their dress uniform to go eat breakfast every day. That’s not happening. You were in your kind of fatigues, your battle dress uniform. And so for this opportunity at West Point, I had to wear my dress uniform. Well, the Army’s got this crazy thing every couple years where they’ll change up uniforms, and ribbons and all this stuff. And so when I went to go do this interview, I thought I did very well. But a couple weeks later, I get a phone call, it says, “Hey, you were not selected for this position. And oh, by the way, we noticed that your uniform, your deployment stripes were on the wrong sleeve.”

Bryan P:
And to me, when you talk about when you walk into the room, that’s what people see, this is something that was not super important to me, probably should have been. But I had taken my uniform to the military complex where I was stationed at, for them to put all the proper accoutrement and all that stuff on there. Well, the woman made a mistake and I didn’t catch it. And so I don’t know if that was the reason why I was not selected. But it was the only piece of feedback that I had gotten. And that was tough to swallow. I don’t know if that qualifies as a crucible moment. But that was one where I was like that was tough to swallow.

Warwick F:
Because you’d be thinking, “Seriously? I hope there was a better reason than I’ve got my, I’m not lying about my deployment. It’s not like I put on a ribbon I didn’t deserve, which to the military would be a serious deal, which I don’t think any right thinking person would ever do. But putting it on the wrong sleeve. I mean, my gosh, think of a better reason.” And there may have been a better one, but humanly speaking, it’s easy to go there and say, “Seriously?”

Bryan P:
But that’s never been my mentality Warwick. If anything, I was turning all that inward on me. My thing wasn’t, I can’t believe they would only focus on that. My thing was just beating myself up over. How could I have not? I should have checked that. I should have, and in the preparation for it, so I don’t fault them for it. But it was one of those where it’s like, “Man, I thought that was great opportunity.” And as it turned out, life is weird how it turns out, an even better opportunity opened up with the Combating Terrorism Center.

Warwick F:
Yeah, and then I want to get to Seton Hall. Is there anything you want to say that’s relevant to this conversation about your time at the Combat Terrorism Center, about learning about yourself and leadership? There’s probably, you’ve been through a lot so I don’t want to skip anything before we get to Seton Hall.

Bryan P:
I think the only thing I would say there is it was a very different leadership experience, because my team was all civilians. There were civilian researchers. And so leading a different type of individual, and then the other component of that opportunity was we did research that was in high demand for senior leaders in our military, as Gary mentioned in the intro. And so there I was as a major and then a lieutenant colonel, having to present information to Secretary of Defense, the CIA Director. I testified in front of Congress. In all those moments, those are like, you’ve heard of the imposter syndrome. I was battling that in severe ways. But what I learned about leadership there, I think, which is pertinent to this discussion, is someone told me one time when I came out of a meeting with my first, I think it was a four star general meeting that I had presented at, and I came out and my boss at the time said, “How did you think that went?” I said, “It went well.”, and he pulled me aside. He said, “You know, Bryan, the best leaders that are out there, you can tell by the proportion by which they speak in a meeting and the proportion by which they listen.”

Bryan P:
And by golly if I didn’t kind of think of that every time I was in a room with a senior leader, and to see how they operated, that’s a pretty doggone good heuristic for senior leaders is how much are they in transmit mode versus how much are they listening and taking in information. It was powerful.

Warwick F:
Well, that is a good that’s a very good lesson. So what made you decide to leave West Point and the Combating Terrorism Center and found the Buccino Institute at Seton Hall? Because if you’re a West Point person, a lot of West Point people will be like, “Okay, maybe I missed out on that full time faculty thing, but I kind of want to be here forever.” You’re West Point sort of for life. It’s funny as some listeners know, I’ve never been in the military and I’m from Australia, but I live in Annapolis, which is the home of that other place. I notice that you put in the bio on Seton Hall, it says West Point, the world’s premier leadership development institution. It may well be. I don’t know what the Navy folks think but that’s another story. But so what made you want to leave West Point and found the Buccino Institute at Seton Hall? Because that’s a huge decision.

Bryan P:
Yeah, it was. Thankfully, it was made for me by my wife. So I had always told my wife that if she would kind of follow me around for my first 20 years in the army, by the way, that’s what the time you can become eligible for a pension in the military. And I said, “Once I hit 20 years, then you can kind of get full veto power over whether I stay or go.” I thought she had forgotten about that. But apparently not, she didn’t. So that was the decision. But to me, the decision was like I had spent the bulk of my professional career going after and studying bad leaders and terrorist group leaders. So I wrote a book called Targeting Top Terrorists, which was published by Columbia University Press. And so that was my dissertation. That was my research. But that could be really depressing Warwick. And I wanted, I loved leadership, and I felt like what a great way instead of studying and going after bad leadership, can I help develop the next generation of good leaders? And so it was a tough decision, because I love my West Point team and my Combating Terrorism Center team. But it was a easy decision from a professional and a gratification.

Warwick F:
And as you look back, you’re probably gratified you made that decision, maybe gratified, because if you got full tenure at West Point, that would have been a lot tougher decision, it might have been, to leave.

Bryan P:
Yeah, no, I mean, so I could have stayed at West Point until I retired.

Warwick F:
So that wasn’t an issue. But it’s interesting, yeah. But shifting from studying bad leaders as you put it, I’ve never thought about it that way to hopefully instilling young leaders who will become good leaders, one of the most terrible things is if you study “bad or evil leaders.”, that they might be using good leadership tactics. So it’s like using good leadership tactics for bad or for evil. That’s got to be the ultimate depressing thing. It’s one thing if they’re hopeless, but when they’re not hopeless, and unfortunately, some evil people, some leaders of poor character, they understand a bit about how to motivate people.

Bryan P:
I think so. You’re exactly right. Osama bin Laden, for however evil you think he is, and sign me up for the person that thinks he’s evil, he demonstrated a lot of servant leadership. And one of the reasons why he had so many followers and was so impactful. I don’t buy into his reasons. But in terms of leadership, he was willing to sacrifice for his cause and be there for his people. So yeah, but it’s so much funner, more fun, working with, making people good leaders, as opposed to…

Warwick F:
So talk about the Buccino Institute. In particular, I love this course you have, Crucible Moments, what was really on your heart when you came to found the Buccino Leadership Institute? What was the vision you had for helping undergraduates learn about leadership?

Bryan P:
So they had a previous organization that did leadership in the business school, which is not uncommon for a lot of universities. That’s where leadership sits. But the university made a decision in the year that I arrived to expand that program. So it was the entire university as opposed to just the business school. And I think one of the things that makes our program unique, particularly in today’s world, is the fact that we are teaching leaders how to be leaders in an interdisciplinary environment. So it’s not just business school kids. I have a poet sitting next to the education person sitting next to the diplomat sitting next to the scientist, and learning about leadership in a four year program, I think is important to get that interdisciplinary field because that’s where the world is moving. We’re moving out of our silos and we’re moving more towards small teams of diverse groups. And that’s one thing that we’re trying to do there.

Gary S:
And it’s true, I would imagine, as you’re thinking on this crucible leadership course of study, your athletic experience, your experience on teams, because teams, I’ve been on teams, sports teams, I was a baseball player, too. I was never described as scrappy. I was the fat kid who caught. I was the fat catcher in the Bad News Bears, but teamwork on sports teams, sharing successes, sharing failure builds camaraderie and confidence. I suspect that was at least in the back of your mind, perhaps the forefront of your mind when you decided to talk about crucible experiences with your students.

Bryan P:
Yeah, you’re 100% right there. And whether you take that from the sports world, you could say the same thing in the military. But the reason why I had that course, I think in organizations, when you try to put all the ingredients together what makes an organization successful, one of those things is trust, trust between leaders and followers, trust within in peer groups, trust with the organization. And in order to trust you, I have to know you. And to really know you, you have to be vulnerable and share parts of yourself that normally you might be willing to kind of keep from others. And so when we did this class, the setup was before the class starts, I ask my students, each student to come up with between one and three crucible moments in their life, and I described them very similarly as you and Warwick did at the outset. And I had those ahead of time.

Bryan P:
And then in that class, I talk about the importance of it just very similarly to how Warwick did and their importance in our growth. And then I lead from the front, I share my crucible moments with the class, and I ask some of my associate faculty, my associate directors to do the same. And then we turn it over to the students to volunteer, so you don’t have to volunteer if you don’t want to. But boy, the past couple years when we’ve done this, the emotional response that we’ve gotten from students that have shared their crucible moment has been extremely powerful. I think it’s powerful for them, because it’s a cathartic moment of getting this off their chest and sharing something that they haven’t done with others.

Bryan P:
But it also empowers them that when they do that, afterwards, you see the kind of stress relief, but also the pride that they have that they were able to get through something very tragic, meaningful, difficult. And yet, I think there’s another side of it too, which is the students that are in the audience that are hearing these experiences, because some of those 18 year olds, and I’m happy about this, haven’t experienced that life trauma yet. And so the fact that they are seeing one of their fellow students get up and share this experience where they’ve endured this thing and have emerged stronger on the other side, I think it’s important for them to hear because in their minds, they go, “You know what? This is going to happen to me eventually. And when I do have that moment, I can be just as strong as this other student.” And so it’s a really powerful, powerful lesson.

Warwick F:
And that’s such an important point, because at 18, obviously you had some experiences with divorce, and obviously, I guess you weren’t 18, but later on your mother dying, but a lot of kids these days, they will have had crucible experiences. But even if they haven’t, life is not easy. They will. I can’t think of anybody that’s lived on this earth that hasn’t gone through a tough experience at some point. It’s sort of inevitable. Life is not easy. Things will happen at home and the workplace.

Warwick F:
And so yeah, just being prepared. I mean, one of the phrases, I know Brene Brown talks a lot about vulnerability. One of the phrases that I love that we’ve begun talking about is vulnerability for a purpose. And I’m sure you would talk about this with your students. It’s not always like, with a bunch of co workers, let me tell you about every dumb thing I did in school, whether it’s drugs or whatever, that has no relationship to the situation or what people are going through. That’s just sharing every dumb thing you did can be useful, but not always. But maybe if you’re leading a bunch of folks in the military, maybe you’re saying, “Yeah, first time I led a company of 10 people as a lieutenant, I was scared stiff. I couldn’t sleep that night, or I figured the noncommissioned folks, the sergeants knew way more than I did. But over time, I realized that OK a day at a time, I learned more, got a bit more confidence.”

Warwick F:
I mean, that’s the kind of thing and just not saying you’re in that position, but I’m sure it’s somewhat common for new commanders sharing that with other newly minted lieutenants. Well, that’s vulnerability for a purpose, because it’s like, okay, gee, if somebody that I respect, like Bryan Price, or whoever it is, can be nervous, I guess it’s okay to admit that I’m nervous too. Does that kind of make sense?

Bryan P:
Yeah, and I love, I’m a huge fan of Brene Brown too. And when she talks about vulnerability as a purpose, I think to tie it to leadership, you need to be vulnerable. If you’re vulnerable, you’re seen as authentic. And authentic leaders are trusted. And that to be an effective leader, you need to be trusted and then you can be effective. So I think it all ties together, for sure.

Warwick F:
Absolutely, and part of it with crucible moments is part of its vulnerability. And one of the other things I find is I’m sure you found this with your students, it’s when students share sometimes, let’s say it’s a mistake they’ve made. They think, well, if other people knew how stupid I was, they’ll judge me and I’ll be shunned. As a young 18 year old, a 19 year old, you’re absolutely thinking that. You’re thinking about that later, but when other people kind of slap you on the back, give you a hug or whatever, and say, “Hey, that was amazing you did that.” It’s like, “Well, you’re not judging me? I’m not ostracized?” That’s also and I’m sure you’ve seen that. It’s like, because that’s what you think if I share this, I’ll be rejected. I’ll be a pariah or something.

Bryan P:
Especially in this kind of Instagram happy environment that we have, where you have to put on these airs in order to show everybody that everything is fine, when in reality, my analogy for this is, I coach business leaders outside of West Point too. It’s the duck. When you look on top and you look on Instagram, the duck is kind of moving gracefully through the water. But if you had that underwater camera of said duck, that thing is churning, the water’s all muddy and churned up. And so I think people should not be afraid to show that underwater view of what’s going on in their life, and particularly when it comes to mental health, you know, when you need help get it in this world, in this country. I don’t know how it is in Australia, but I’m interested in your thoughts in terms of the comparison. When I coach athletes, if they have a sprained ankle, they go to the doctor for the sprained ankle. In this country, if you have a mental health problem, there’s still this stigma attached. I think it’s getting better, but I don’t think we’re there yet.

Warwick F:
No, I think I know there’s some elite cricket players, I probably get it wrong here. But I think it may be Glenn Maxwell. But there’s one of these folks that has unbelievable talent, but does struggle with this. And then he says, “Look, I’m sorry, I can’t play for Australia or some elite team right now because I just need to take some time off.” And that’s accepted and they go through protocols. And so that’s great, which is important. The other aspect of crucible moments is vulnerability. But it’s demonstrating to young folks that it’s not the end of your story is as we always say in Crucible Leadership. You can learn from that, if it’s your mistake, learn from your mistakes. Even if it’s not, okay, what maybe I can help people who are survivors of this, whether it’s cancer, or whatever. Maybe I can use that to serve others. So it’s seeing crucible can be an opportunity for a life’s mission, a life’s calling can come out of that. And I’m sure that’s probably part of your discussions, I imagine with your students.

Bryan P:
You said something on our podcast that stuck with me, and I’ll probably butcher it, I’ll paraphrase you. And if I screw it up, you can fix it, Warwick. It was kind of like your crucible moment or your worst day doesn’t define who you are. And to me that is powerful, because when I work with athletes and business leaders, I try to decouple what they do with their identity. So when I work with elite athletes on the mental game, oftentimes they will self describe themselves as “I’m Sally, the swimmer.” And I say, “Okay, that’s a recipe for some self esteem and some identity issues down the road.” I say, “You’re Sally, the awesome kid, the awesome daughter, the awesome everything who also happens to swim, but you can do some other things in your life.” And I think it’s important to kind of decouple what you do with your identity, in order for both your sanity but also your self esteem, and as a leader, because you’re going to have those bad days, but like you said, don’t let those bad days define you.

Warwick F:
And that’s so key. Boy, that’s the whole issue of identity. I’ve been thinking a lot about that recently. But I’m sure you probably have, I would guess, conversations with your daughter. I mean, she is one of the elite soccer players of her age. She might be on the U.S. team one day might be in an Olympic team, or maybe not. But try and instill in her she is not defined by her soccer ability. You’re happy for her. But she is defined by who she is as a person. I’m sure you, I mean, this is on your heart and mind, I got to believe, I don’t know whether it’s a conversation that you’ve had at least some, helping not get too wrapped up in it, because there is going to be some people. They’re going to say, “You know what? You’re one of the best players I’ve ever seen. I’ve been watching young people for 20 years. And you’re incredible.” They try to be helpful, but that’s not always so helpful when people tell you that. You know what I mean?

Bryan P:
It’s funny, first off, if you look at the statistics, it’s likely that she’s not going to be any of those things. I mean, just based off of the numbers, but this is an area where I wrote a blog piece about this, and I’m interested in your thoughts. I was actually hoping that she would have a failure moment earlier in her life. Because I mean, look, she’s a good player, but she’s on a fantastic team. The team is ridiculous. But I would prefer at some point, not to say that I want her crucible moment to arrive earlier in life than later. But if you go through life and you don’t suffer any type of adversity, how do you react? This would be a great research project to look at in terms of are people more successful or less successful, based off of when is that crucible moment happened in their life? Would you have been the same if you were 45 as opposed to when your crucible moment happened? I don’t know.

Warwick F:
Yeah, I never thought about that before. But that’s an insightful point. I was probably, in some ways fortunate that the whole thing, well, the takeover happened of the family media business when I was 26. And that ended by the time I was 30. But yeah, I mean, certainly the whole issues of identity growing up because I unfortunately worked hard, got good grades at school, Oxford, Harvard Business School. I was sort of, I’m not going to be this young, dilettante, wealthy kid. I’m going to work hard. And yeah, I mean, sort of, I wouldn’t call myself scrappy. I’m not a hustler in the sense of I’m a contemplative person. But in terms of determination and perseverance, I’m very, if not extremely high. And so yeah, that didn’t help all these expectations. You could be one of the great Fairfaxes, you could have this huge impact for your nation.

Warwick F:
I mean, so once when it ended, it’s like, huh, well, that’s not going to happen. I’m never gonna achieve anything, no matter what I do that is at the level that I might have achieved. So that’s where you really got to do some serious soul work and say, “Where is my identity? Is it being a Fairfax in charge of this mammoth media organization or as a person of faith? Is it in what God thinks of me? Is it in more spiritual eternal?” So yeah, I had some years to figure that out. But identity a huge thing.

Gary S:
So gentlemen, we are in a hover at the moment. But we are descending, and we will soon put the skids down on the helipad. Before we do that, I know Warwick wants to ask some questions about the things that you tell your students when they talk about their crucibles and how they get through them, because they’ll be very applicable, Bryan to our listeners. But before we get to that question, let me, I’d be remiss if I didn’t give you the opportunity to tell listeners how they can find out more about you, more about the Buccino School about anything that you’ve talked about here. How can they learn more about Bryan Price and what you do?

Bryan P:
Yeah, sure. So almost all my social media is under Top Mental Game. So Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. For the Buccino Leadership Institute, you can get ahold of us at www.shu.edu\leadership. And then on Twitter, it’s @shuleadership, and Instagram, it’s @buccinoleaders.

Gary S:
And we will put those in the show notes, listeners, so you can see them written out.

Warwick F:
Just as we close here, I know one of the things you mentioned in advance, we talked actually quite about a lot of these things. There are some key principles that you advocate. And I think we’ve covered actually a number of them. But just wanted to give you a chance to explore any of these further. You talk about the ability to reframe failure, overcoming imposter syndrome, becoming aware of negative narratives, proper goal setting, process over outcome, identity questions. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff that we’ve covered. Any of those you want to as we close, just really touch on a bit for our listeners?

Bryan P:
Yeah, I think one that is kind of near and dear to my heart, and it just keeps popping up over and over is kind of a combination of that imposter syndrome and those narratives that I told you about. In the past week and a half, and I just had a recent post on this as well, I coached a former Major League Baseball pitcher, who is now in the corporate world. I’ve coached a gymnast who is at the top of her game. I’ve coached a CEO that went from nothing in his family and he’s brought up, he’s the CEO of his own internationally known organization now. And it’s funny when you coach these people, one of the consistent themes that emerges through that is, at some level, there’s a confidence issue.

Bryan P:
And those confidence issues are usually borne out of this thing that we call the imposter syndrome where you feel like you’re not worthy of your promotion, or whatever things are happening positively in your life. Or it’s they’re based off of these narratives, oftentimes that are formed at very young ages. When I talk to this one person, not to give her age away, but she’s around my age we’ll say, and yet she thought back to a moment when she was 13 years old when somebody said something to her. And these things rattle around in our heads, but worse, they influence or negatively influence your ability to act.

Bryan P:
And I think that’s the most damaging thing and I told an individual that is in the corporate world, I say can you imagine if you are able to do coaching for every person in your organization and get to the root causes of either that narrative or that imposter syndrome, how much more productive, how much happier, how much more effective both that individual and the organization would be? I think that’s where the secrets lie. And it doesn’t matter, oftentimes, why this is so frustrating for both individuals and organizations is your feelings about your narrative or your suffering under the imposter syndrome is usually not rational. One of the things I try to do with my clients is to say, “Look at all the areas in your life where you have succeeded. And all you want to do is focus on that area where you failed or stumbled.” And I don’t know, I just think that that if we could unlock that both as you know, an organization, but as a country, I think we’d be happier, more productive because people are holding back. They’re playing small, and for no rational reasons.

Warwick F:
Well said.

Gary S:
It’s interesting what you said there, Bryan, about that woman with the 13 year old experience. One of the things we’ve discovered on this show, this is the 58th episode that we’ve done. And one of the things that keeps coming up, and you actually alluded to it earlier in the episode, it was sort of a drive by moment, but you were talking about when you were about to be a freshman, I think and someone thought you were in sixth grade when they saw your stature and that, I mean, you’re not a freshman anymore, but that’s still the forefront of your brain. When you got asked that question, you talked about it. And we’ve discovered so many people on this show whose crucible moments or one of their crucible moments date back to single digits or early teenage years, those things that set up what you describe, what others describe as the imposter syndrome. And those things are hard to outrun. And one of the one of the goals of what Crucible Leadership does is to help you learn and leverage those things, so that you can then apply them learn the lessons of them and move beyond the crucible, so you can lead a life of significance. Warwick, any final words you want to leave our listeners with before I wrap?

Warwick F:
Thank you so much, Bryan, for being here. I mean you’ve served our country, you’ve helped students at West Point, you’re now working with students at Seton Hall and other athletes and folks in business and really teaching them about what true leadership is, what servant leadership is, what vulnerability for purpose is. None of us are perfect. Getting over the whole imposter syndrome, I mean that is really important. Almost, I’d say soul work, to be really effective leaders, you’ve got to start at the root. And that’s often at a soul level. You’ve got a good foundation at a soul self image level, you’re going to be so much more effective and compassionate. You have a bunch of weeds or some issues at a soul level, you’ll find it very difficult to care for other people. So you’re really dealing with what I’d call soul work, both with the athletes and the business folks you work with as well as the students. I don’t know whether they quite see it that way. But you’re setting that solid foundation that then enables them to be fantastic leaders to make a difference in this country and beyond. So thank you for the work that you do.

Bryan P:
Oh, thanks. And it’s always awesome to wake up every morning with those kind of challenges. And I hope I continue to have those opportunities. And thanks for what you’ve done with this podcast and your book and sharing your experiences. Because I think that’s where this is a topic that you’re bringing up in terms of crucible leadership that I think is going to move the needle for sure.

Gary S:
That is the second time listener that Bryan Price, our guest today, has said the word book. I am remiss in that the first time Bryan said the word book, I didn’t say the book Crucible Leadership comes out by Warwick in the fall. We actually have right now, October 19, as an on sale date on Amazon. So the book is called Crucible Leadership: Embrace Your Trials to Lead a Life of Significance. So I just embarrassed Warwick. But it is, to Bryan’s point really encapsulates all of what we try to do here on Beyond the Crucible and even more so, what Crucible Leadership tries to do.

Gary S:
Speaking of Beyond the Crucible, until we are again together listener, Warwick and I have a little bit of a favor to ask you. And that is this. On the podcast app that you’re listening to the show right now, click, push the button whatever you need to do to subscribe. That would be a real great help for us, and that it helps us share it with more people interviews like this one with Bryan but it also will help make sure that you don’t miss one of these episodes where we talk about how to move beyond your crucible. So until that next time that we are together, always remember this and we’ve talked about it from the opening bell of this show, that is your crucible experiences are painful. They’re real. Whether you know the name crucible experience or not, you know what it feels like to go through if you’ve been through one. They’re painful, they’re real. But this is the great news. They’re not the end of your story, as we’ve talked about here with Bryan, as Warwick talks about every week on the show. Those moments, they’re not the end of your story. They can be the start of a brand new story, the best story because as you learn the lessons of them, as you apply those lessons and move forward, where you end up headed, the destination you end up getting to, where your helicopter lands, is at a life of significance.

From the outside looking in, Tracy J. Edmonds’ life couldn’t have been sweeter: a high-profile executive job with a Fortune 30 company at which she excelled. But on the inside, where she discovered it really counts, her career had come at a high cost because of a self-imposed crucible: not being her authentic self. So she decided to embrace both her figurative and literal wild hair — trading her corner office for a cubicle and tackling a vision that not only meshed with her gifts and passions but also allowed her to live who she truly was rather than conform to a corporate mold. She’s found her life of significance in coaching other women of color that to be the best versions of themselves, they have to be the real versions of themselves.

To learn more about Tracy J. Edmonds and her book Wild Hair: A Courageous Woman’s Guide to a Bold and Authentic Career, visit https://tracyjedmonds.com/

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Transcript

Warwick F:
Welcome to Beyond The Crucible. I’m Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Crucible Leadership.

Tracy J. E:
When we talk about being authentic and living your best life, having the career that you want, it always comes down to four components, self honesty. You’ve got to look yourself in the face and face the demon, whatever that may be. Or just clearly articulate what you want out of your life and your career. You have to have the courage to own that. Once you say it out loud, you have to own sometimes what’s very ugly, but also, the big dream of what you could be.

Tracy J. E:
You have to have the confidence to work it out and the resilience to stick with it because it’s never just a straight shot. There’s going to be hills, valleys, turns, things you’re going to have to navigate. Times like I had in my career when I restarted my career where people say, “Oh, you’re not so good at this.” Wow. Ego blow. Never heard that before. But I didn’t give up. Now, I cried about it, and I said, “Okay, here’s the plan.”

Gary S:
So, what is the plan? Your plan to learn and leverage the lessons of your crucible to put yourself on the road to authenticity and the life of significance that flows from it. The woman dispensing the wisdom you just heard is leadership coach and author Tracy J. Edmonds, whose new book, Wild Hair; A Courageous Woman’s Guide To A Bold and Authentic Career, offers plenty, more insight and inspiration where that snippet we just played, came from.

Gary S:
Hi, I’m Gary Schneeberger, cohost of the show and the communications director for Crucible Leadership. In today’s episode, Tracy tells Warwick about the breakthroughs in her personal and professional life, that she set into motion by embracing both her figurative and literal wild hair truths. She chose to move from a corner office to a cubicle in her career, because the success she achieved in the former, didn’t give her the purpose she found in the latter. She explains it all in truly poetic terms. Keep listening all the way to the end and you’ll learn why that word poetic is very, very intentional and quite beautiful.

Warwick F:
We’re going to get into your book here in a bit, but I have to say that I loved reading your book Wild Hair, and we’ll get into it more. Why? Because not everybody’s viewing this on YouTube, but people might think, “Well, why Wild Hair?” It’s not just a physical description, it’s a meme of your philosophy of life that can help so many women and so many people in general. I love that whole concept of Wild Hair. And subtitle of the book is, A Courageous Woman’s Guide, To A Bold and Authentic Career.

Warwick F:
You’ve been through a bunch of experiences, successful corporate career, and a lot of successes and challenges as there is with anybody’s career. But I’d love to start just with who is Tracy Edmonds? Kind of how’d you grow up? Parents, background. What’s the story behind the story, if you will? Who is Tracy and…

Tracy J. E:
Well, first of all, thanks for having me. This is exciting to be able to have this kind of conversation and talk about crucible moments. Because in fact, I have a chapter about that in my book. I’m super, super excited. One of the things though, I am not is a poet, so I appreciate the distinction. but to be honest, when I thought about what we could talk about with your listeners, it was important for me not to describe myself in the more traditional ways, but to describe myself in terms of my life experiences. And who those life experiences have changed me into and how I’m ever evolving. That’s just what came to mind. I did not have it prepared. I wrote it and said, “Hopefully they won’t send me a note back and say, “Okay, this is not what we’re looking for.”

Warwick F:
I thought it was brilliant. That was terrific.

Tracy J. E:
Well, thank you.

Gary S:
It was so good that it, we didn’t know that we could look for it, if that makes sense. I mean, truly it was informational and beautiful. SO thank you.

Tracy J. E:
Well, thank you.

Warwick F:
Absolutely.

Tracy J. E:
Who am I? I the African-American child of two alcoholic parents who came from very different backgrounds. A mother who came from the South in Tennessee, who’s struggled and had a difficult life and who was very, very dark skinned and a father who came from a sleepy, river town and was as fair as you, Warwick. I share that because I am the mix of that.

Tracy J. E:
I am the mix of two people who come from the same race, who had very different experiences being black in their own skin. Because that shaped me into who I became and I think quite honestly, drove me to address issues of diversity. They both had their challenges, which meant I grew up in a household full of love. I have two younger brothers, we are extremely close, but I also grew up in a household that was emotionally unstable, very often.

Tracy J. E:
I found myself stepping into, as the oldest, more of a leadership role to help sometimes my brothers to eat that night, because my parents were struggling with their own addictions and their own issues. Those things kind of shaped me into this young woman who believed education was everything, and went off to college to be an engineer, two years at Cornell University, and realized that I hated these classes I had to take.

Tracy J. E:
And found her way back home and back into college, but also working while I was going to college. That began like a 30, 31 year journey with one organization, honestly, that evolved over time, and a career where I could learn to bring all of that, that I just shared with you, into who I was as a leader, and to help other women and men, but women, especially, to lead in their lives.

Warwick F:
I mean, one of the things I observed from reading your book is that, you’re a driven, passionate person, has a heart for the world and to help folks. Where did that maybe drive and passion come from? Did you have like a role model? Where were the seeds of that?

Tracy J. E:
In my family, quite honestly, my mother and father, and it sounds like such a contradiction, because we were not a perfect family by any stretch of the imagination. As I mentioned, my parents had their own addictions and their own struggles. But we were loved and we were taught to be fierce and strong. I can remember my father sitting me down on the edge of his bed when I was 12 years old and saying, “Tracy, you are a black woman in this world. You will have to fight for what you get. You will have to be better than everyone else. We never give up, we never quit. That’s what it’s going to take for you to be successful in your life, but you’ve got it in you. You can do it.”

Tracy J. E:
My mother was an extremely compassionate woman, who had struggled a lot in her life, growing up as a child in the South, horrific things that had happened to her and finding her place in the world without losing that compassion. She was a victim of incest. She was a victim of racism, in some of the strongest ways. And for her to still have compassion and love and to see the good in people, I think she passed that on to me.

Tracy J. E:
I have this fierce desire to succeed in this life, whatever that looks like, but a desire to take my challenge and pay that forward. Whatever the journey is, it’s there to make me a better person. Hopefully, I can share that with others and help them along the way.

Warwick F:
You know, one of the chapters in your book talks about the value of mentors and in particular, those who are truth-tellers.

Tracy J. E:
Yes.

Warwick F:
You’ve had a dad who was a truth-teller, in a sense, he was your first mentor perhaps.

Tracy J. E:
Yes.

Warwick F:
And he was giving you encouragement, but he wasn’t sugarcoating it. He said, this is going to be tough for a black woman. Certainly, as you were talking as a young woman, it’s probably not easy today, it probably was worse back then. Not that it’s great, but there’s sadly often always worse. And he wasn’t sugar coating it, but yet he was encouraging you.

Warwick F:
I often think biblically, they talk about balance of truth and love. Your dad gave you truth, your mom gave you love. I’m sure your dad gave you love too, but truth and love that will make a lot of folks grow done in the right way and the right balance. Even though they weren’t perfect, did you look back and say, “Look, they weren’t perfect, but they were gifts in many ways. They were blessings as parents.”

Tracy J. E:
Gosh, absolutely. They were absolutely blessings. I would not trade my life growing up as a child, for anyone else’s. It was not perfect. I mean, I can think of times when my parents were arguing and I was sitting outside just crying, like, “Why is my life like this?” You think of everyone else’s life as perfect. Of course we know as we grow older that, that’s not always the case. But I can remember crying and thinking, “Why can’t I have a better life?”

Tracy J. E:
A moment came in my life when I had the opportunity to pay forward the gift of being a child of an alcoholic family. I had the opportunity to say to a woman sitting across from me at work, who was struggling, that, “I am a child of an alcoholic and I know how that feels.” Because she had a son. And to be able to have that conversation with her and get her on the right track to get the help that she needed and to turn her life around and become a productive employee.

Tracy J. E:
I don’t trade that. Because we don’t know when those moments of what we perceive to be negative experiences, will come back and be the gift that we give to someone else.

Warwick F:
That’s such a profound thought. Again, I’m being authentic when I say this, there was so many profound moments when I read your book. And that was, I forget exactly how you coined it, but sometimes crucibles can be a blessing. The crucible of growing up with alcoholic parents, you’re able to, as you just said, pay it forward and help that woman that I think you described in the book.

Warwick F:
I term it sort of vulnerability for a purpose. You can be vulnerable about things, that won’t help anybody, it’s oversharing. It’s like, “You’re telling me this, why? You did something stupid in high school and took drugs. Okay, fine. But so what? What’s that going to do with my situation?” And if it has nothing to do with it, it’s like, “Thank you, boss. This is not helping me at all.”

Warwick F:
But in this case it was sharing for a purpose. That’s such a key lesson. One last thing on your mother, and obviously she was, as you recount, like one of your best friends, cheerleader, you speak very movingly about her. Her ability to go through unbelievably difficult, if not horrific circumstances, I’m guessing not countenance what was done, but yet not be bitter, not let anger and quickness destroy you. That’s powerful.

Warwick F:
Forgiveness doesn’t mean acceptance. It doesn’t mean condoning. It’s a very, very big difference. That must have been remarkable. I don’t know if she told you everything that happened. Certainly as a kid, she probably wouldn’t have maybe giving you the PG version or the G. but that sense of not being bitter, that’s also a remarkable example, as I’m sure you looked back.

Tracy J. E:
It was a powerful example. I think what it gave to me, what her example gave to me, is that we have the capacity to forgive, for one. But also what we can take from the experiences that we have. I think a lot of times negative experiences happen, and we’re quick to say, we just want to push that out. We want to forget about that, we want to move on.

Tracy J. E:
But what I have found is that, every crucible moment, every one of those times, when I thought it was horrific, there was something in there that I could take from it, to forge a better version of myself. That was one of the big aha moments. I spent my 20s just being angry. I mean, I grew up in this environment where there was constant emotional upheaval. My parents couldn’t hold it together. They were struggling and fighting some real demons.

Tracy J. E:
Once I got through my 20s and got into my 30s and went through that moment where I had a child, I lost my mom. I had lost my father. I lost my mom. I bought a house. I had a child, got the big job. When all those things happened and I didn’t know how to juggle that, I essentially started falling apart. I would sit in the rocking chair with my new baby, she was three months old when my mom passed and I would cry. I could barely keep her in my arms because my mom was my best friend. And she died suddenly. Didn’t know she was sick, found her on the floor, took her to the hospital, dead in five days.

Tracy J. E:
I was distraught. I can remember saying to God that, “I hate you for doing this. How do you let a woman who struggled so difficultly in her life, who finally was getting over alcoholism, loses her husband, starts drinking again, and then dies. It’s not right. It’s just not right.” But what that ended up being, first of all, I had to vocalize that to be brave enough to vocalize that. Then also to realize that this experience of losing her, taught me how to be my own woman.

Tracy J. E:
I was a mother now and I needed to step up and be that mother. I had immersed myself in work because that’s what I knew how to do well. I didn’t know how to be a mom. My own mom left me. How was I going to be a mom? I didn’t know how to manage my marriage. I was only a few years into it. What I had been doing since I was in my early 20s was working. So I dug in on that.

Tracy J. E:
And I had to realize that, that was not what I wanted for my life. We have to think about what do we really, really want? Self honesty. I had to be honest with myself and say, “What’s most important to me is not work. What is most important to me is this child and my husband and family. How do I create that? How do I forgive myself for being so angry at my mother and at God and what do I learn from this?”

Tracy J. E:
Because my mom had that heart of forgiveness. It was like, “Oh, you have to understand, you don’t know someone’s journey and what brings them to the point where they show up like they do and not always in the most positive way.” What can I learn about me, out of this? I learned that I was a lot stronger than I ever knew.

Warwick F:
That’s a remarkable thing that your mother said. I mean, to be able to say, “Oh, you don’t know their journey.” I don’t need to know the details, but you do. At least many of them I, bet. For her to say that it’s like, how can you possibly say, “Oh, you don’t know their journey.”

Warwick F:
I understand intellectually, but how in the world, can you say it and mean it? It blows my mind. I think for most people that’s like, “I don’t get it.” You talked about kind of superwoman, if you will, that that’s sort of a level of, I don’t know, a superior character quality that’s mind-blowing to me.

Tracy J. E:
I think she was phenomenal. I’m a little biased, but what I learned like you just articulated so well, was her capacity to love, to forgive and to understand that our journeys do create our testimony. They do create how we show up. And that a lot of things that she forgave people for, because of the challenges they had in their lives, that created the worldview that they had, the actions that they took, even the ones that hurt her.

Tracy J. E:
She was amazing in that capacity. As I think sought to emulate that, or actually do the best I could with my environment, I drew upon those things that were taught to me. And I talk a little bit about this in the book. When we talk about being authentic and living your best life, having the career that you want, it always comes down to four components, self honesty. You’ve got to look yourself in the face and face the demon, whatever that may be.

Tracy J. E:
Or just clearly articulate what you want out of your life and your career. You have to have the courage to own that. Once you say it out loud, you have to own, sometimes what’s very ugly, but also, the big dream of what you could be. Then you have to have the confidence to work it out, and the resilience to stick with it. Because it’s never just a straight shot. There’s going to be hills, valleys, turns, things you’re going to have to navigate, times like I had in my career when I restarted my career where people say, “Oh, you’re not so good at this.” Whoa, ego blow. Never heard that before. But I didn’t give up. Now, I cried about it, then I said, “Okay, here’s the plan.” I think I learned those things from her.

Warwick F:
Remarkable. I want to talk a bit about just some of the professional path you’ve gone through and really led to the book. And now you have your own kind of consulting company to try to help and uplift women and particularly women of color. It’s probably your mission in life and maybe that’s your calling, God given calling or universe calling, however you frame it, which is awesome.

Warwick F:
You had a very successful career and became a chief diversity officer at a very large company. Talk about some of that journey. Because, that seemed like a sort of a challenge in which, and I think as you articulated very well in the book, for many women, and I think as you’ve mentioned, women of color, there’s a sense of, “Oh, I need to do certain things to be corporate, to fit in.” Because otherwise you don’t rise up the ladder. You will hit a glass ceiling. Talk about just that journey that you and others have been through and why that whole wild hair metaphor is so important. Because I thought that was just a brilliant way of articulating that message and your journey. Talk a bit about that whole wild hair meme and the whole wanting to fit into the perceived corporate mold.

Tracy J. E:
Absolutely. I kind of grew up in corporate America. I started my career in my early 20s in a frontline role. Worked for a major insurer in the state of Ohio and really just processing health insurance claims. I spent, as I mentioned before, 31 years at that company. And that company went from being just a statewide, small insurance company, to a national Fortune 30, public company. One of the most prominent in the field.

Tracy J. E:
During that time, I went and achieved degrees, got married, had children and navigated my way through that. But for a good portion of that part of my life with almost 20 years, I would say that I wasn’t really authentic. I wasn’t really owning my career. I figured out what it took or what I thought it took to succeed in that environment. That meant keeping my hair straight, looking as close to white as I could and playing the corporate game. Being the corporate soldier. And that worked very successfully for me.

Tracy J. E:
So I reached a level where I was right below the executive ranks, just about to make it into all the big bonuses and packages. I was pregnant with our third child and I kept hearing this voice in my head that was going, “What are you doing? How did you get here?” Like, “What? How did I get here? Well, I worked really hard and I did all these things.” And, “How did I get here?” It wouldn’t go away. It stayed in the back of my mind saying, “How did you get here?”

Tracy J. E:
The reality was, I was miserable. I had achieved success. I was making good money. I had the corner office. Literally, I had the corner office that overlooked the little brook in the back. It was beautiful. I had an assistant that sat right outside my door and I was miserable. I was on the phone from morning to evening. I was exhausted when I got home. I wasn’t as fully engaged with my children and I’m going, “I’ve worked for this company 20 years, but how do I reach this point?” I was doing something I didn’t even care about. I came to a company for tuition reimbursement and 20 years later, I’m a regional vice president of operations with 300 employees. And I’m going, ‘Okay, how the hell did I get here?”

Warwick F:
That’s an interesting crucible to discuss. Because in essence, it’s a crucible experience of success, right?

Tracy J. E:
Absolutely.

Warwick F:
There was a feeling of, I think you wrote somewhere, sort of a feeling of being trapped in the success. Most people don’t think of crucibles as “good things that happened to us.” But as the old saw goes too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. As you bore more deeply into that good thing and explored that corner office and explored that assistant outside your door, you realized what it took to get there, was to subjugate your personality a bit, to subjugate who Tracy was. And that was the crucible.

Tracy J. E:
That’s absolutely right. I realized that the “success” that I had in my career, was primarily due to what others saw in me. Now don’t get me wrong, I benefited by a great paycheck, a lot of perks, nice house, nice car, wonderful things that came from that. I didn’t take a job I ever didn’t want. But it was because others saw something in me and they wanted that. It was never about what I want.

Tracy J. E:
I had succeeded myself right into the crucible and I was burning up. I was literally burning up, because I was miserable, it was inauthentic. I came there for tuition reimbursement, my God, and I’m still there 20 years later, doing something that I found myself not caring about. So, my moment was when I realized, when the dissonance and the voice in my head got so loud, I had no choice but to answer it, “How did I get here?”

Tracy J. E:
That’s where those four steps we talked about, and I talk about in the book of being self honest, having the courage to face what you learn about you, the confidence to execute a plan to make that happen and the resilience to see it through, come into play. The wild hair, was the moment when, even after I made the transition and I left what I knew and moved into human resources. I did the soul searching the self honesty. I navigated a path into a new role and I built myself up.

Tracy J. E:
But even as I was in that space, I still was kind of playing other people’s game. Until finally I said, “You know what? I need to be me. I have got to do me.” And my hair was an expression of that. Not because I was trying to do some big thing that stood out and shocked people, but simply because I had been tired for years of the process of making my hair look like white hair. That process took a lot of time. That process damaged my hair. That process was not what I really wanted.

Tracy J. E:
It was a big decision to say, “I’m going to let this wild hair out, simply because this is who I am and what I want at this moment in time.” When I did that, oh my goodness, let me tell you, there were people who could not close their mouth. They literally jaw dropped, “Oh my God.” And you could see the look on their face because it was something so unexpected for them to see me look in this way.

Tracy J. E:
There were others who absolutely loved it. It was like, “This is you. This feels like you.” It was my kind of wild hair moment. But what it really stood for is, finding that wild hair, that thing that you are at a crossroads over and handling it and addressing it and doing yourself in the process, being authentic.

Warwick F:
It inspired other people, right?

Tracy J. E:
Oh, yeah.

Warwick F:
They said, “Wow, if Tracy can do it, maybe I can do it.” Right?

Tracy J. E:
Absolutely.

Warwick F:
It’s like they admired your courage. Just like, “I can’t believe she did that. I’d be too scared to.”

Tracy J. E:
Right.

Warwick F:
You sort of laid a trail if you will, for other women, other women of color. Because you write in the book, you spend hours on a Saturday or something. We’re not talking five minutes. There’s a beautiful moment where the person that did your hair said something like, “Finally,” or cheering you on. People don’t like to say anything, but when you do something, it’s like, “Oh, hooray.”

Tracy J. E:
You know what? I took a stand. In this case, I took a stand on my own beliefs and what I wanted for myself. But it has become symbolic for me, in terms of what I’m really trying to do. When you talk about purpose, I stand unapologetically for women. I stand here, all women, no matter what shade we come in, I want to be that inspiration. I want to be a source of affirmation, more than anything. I want to affirm them, that when we don’t look like the majority, it’s still okay. You are affirmed. I want to be that strength for them. For them to lean into their own leadership and show up in the way that is most comfortable for them.

Warwick F:
You mentioned some statistics in the book, which I think most people are probably pretty familiar with, about women getting paid less than men, less women in the boardroom, the corporate C-suite and stats, according to your book, which I’m sure is true. It’s even worse for African-American women or women who are minorities relative to women in total. It’s not easy.

Warwick F:
But you’re really preaching a different message, a different sermon, if you will. Some women would say, “Well, the key to success is fit in. Be like the corporate folks. Be more like the male executives.” You’re saying there’s a different road and it might actually be more successful, but at least you will feel better about yourself, whether it works or not.

Warwick F:
Not to put words in your mouth, but I think you believe not only will you be more true to yourself, it actually might be more successful than trying to be somebody or not. Is that kind of a fair summary?

Tracy J. E:
I think that is a fair summary. Because, I have found at least for me, and it’s not just for me, quite honestly, the women that I’ve coached. When I was true to myself, whatever that meant, if that meant the hair, if that meant putting my voice in the room, whenever I didn’t allow that dissonance between what others expected of me and what I wanted to be, when I closed the gap between those two, I was more successful. I had more impact, my career evolved and it happened for other women as well.

Gary S:
Now, Warwick said he doesn’t want to put words in your mouth, but I will put words back in your mouth, Tracy. Because, you and I have worked together a little bit on a press release for your book, which is coming out soon. Which in fact, by the time this airs may indeed be out. But you said this, I wrote this note down on something you said on this very subject. You said this, it was so good, I wrote it down to put quotes around. I’m putting these words back in your mouth here on the show.

Tracy J. E:
Awesome.

Gary S:
“No matter where you work, it always comes down to your values,” you said. “If you can’t express your realness, you don’t need to work there.”

Tracy J. E:
Absolutely. I wholeheartedly believe that. And I advise others on that, every single day. I had a really powerful moment with a young woman who met with me after I participated in a panel for the United Negro College Fund. Working with UNCF, they have a leadership program for their college students and they bring professionals and executives together to speak all the time. I had my natural hair at that point.

Tracy J. E:
Afterwards, this young woman comes up to me, beautiful long, natural hair, African-American young woman. She says, “I have to talk to you. I am beginning my interviews for internships. I’ve spoken with my mom and my aunt. They both are telling me to relax my hair and to straighten it. I really don’t want to do that. That’s just not who I am. But I’m afraid I won’t get jobs.”

Tracy J. E:
I told her, I said, “You know what? I’m going to counter your mom here. But are you comfortable with your hair?” “Yes.” “Are you able to style your hair in ways that you believe will be professional?” Because let’s be real too, we have to know our environment. Can we style our hair or shape it in a way? I mean, even people who have straight hair come to work with styles that are appropriate, colors that are appropriate for the career that they want.

Tracy J. E:
“If you’re able to do that, my advice is for you to wear your natural hair. Because, if they cannot accept you for who you are, when you show up in a professional manner and you are capable of doing the job, then you don’t want to be there. You don’t want to be someplace where you have to subjugate who you are.”

Tracy J. E:
The challenge is when we get into environments, there’s so many cues that we get. Even when no one says directly, “Be less, be different, be straight hair.” What you see around you sends you those messages. When I looked up, as I was growing in my career and I would look up, no one looked like me. No one. When I would sit in the talent conversations and they would talk about the successful leaders and the folks who should move up in the succession ranks, typically, there was something wrong with the folks who came in a little bit browner skin. There was something they just had to work on. “We love her. She’s great. If we could just hone off this edge.”

Tracy J. E:
And so that, as you listen to that, you start to say, “Oh, I better hone that edge down. I better straighten the hair.” Because when I see what is successful, it doesn’t look like me. Part of what we have to do, when we embrace our authenticity, part of it is, we are creating the path for others. We are breaking new ground. We’re breaking glass, right? To say, “This is what it takes and this is how it can look.” Look at our vice-president. This is how it can look.

Warwick F:
Absolutely.

Tracy J. E:
And be successful.

Warwick F:
It takes courage to authentic. It won’t work always. I’m sure part of what you counsel is, be careful where you want to work for. Some environments are more friendly than others. None will be easy, but there’s impossible, difficult, challenging. Maybe, perhaps you’ll get there. If you can go for the, maybe rather than you’re sure to fail, because no matter what you do, they won’t give you a chance, maybe avoid those ones.

Warwick F:
But there is, I think, the power and we live in a culture where increasingly, a lot of young people of all backgrounds, they want authenticity. They want vulnerability. We had a guy on our show, Chris Tuff, wrote a book, The Millennial Whisperer, and a lot of HR research shows that young people, they want real. Give me the straight scoop. Don’t tell me the pandemic’s going to be over tomorrow. Be real with me. Tell me what’s happening. Be authentic, be vulnerable.

Warwick F:
There is part of a societal trend in that matter. It doesn’t mean it’s going to solve everything, but it helps a little bit. Even a couple little ripples or waves can be helpful. But it takes courage, because you think it may not work. It probably hasn’t worked for decades or hundreds of years, but just being who you are and being willing to share some of your experiences, which may be very different than your bosses, your coworkers, your life experiences.

Warwick F:
That provides a basis of connection of sharing stories that sometimes we can be our own worst enemy. Again, not saying it’s people’s fault, but by not sharing and trying to fit in, I actually think it makes it harder in some ways. I don’t think it makes it easier. You may think it might, but it’s like people might say, “I don’t really know who that person is. They’re just so tight lipped.” If you want to have an excuse, you just actually giving them excuses in some sense. You’re not helping yourself.

Tracy J. E:
Absolutely.

Warwick F:
I don’t know, in some ways it’s a bit like jumping off a cliff. By being authentic and being vulnerable, it actually can create more connection and give you a greater chance of getting promoted. Not always. That sounds like radical stuff. Does that make any kind of sense?

Tracy J. E:
No, it makes total sense to me. When we’re vulnerable and we are ourselves, we create a human connection and that’s very natural. Humans, desire connectivity and connection. That’s part of why mother has a baby, they lay the baby skin to skin. They want connection. It’s a part of who we are as human beings. It’s interesting because I’ll tell you another story, that when I was chief diversity officer and I was doing a tour, if you will, where I was speaking about our plan for diversity, but I would talk about my hair. Because what I wanted leaders to know is that there are subtle cues, like we talked about, that say, “You don’t fit in.” I talked about my journey to my hair, what I share with you all.

Tracy J. E:
After that, lots of people come up to me, primarily women come up to me, because women can relate, not just African-American women, but keeping their hair from being gray. I have a woman who told me directly that she had a leader tell her, “And get rid of that gray, because people won’t… You look old.” Because she grayed early and she was in her 20s when she started to gray.

Warwick F:
Oh, my gosh.

Tracy J. E:
But here’s what really got me, is a white male came up to me afterwards and said, “Thank you for sharing your story.” I was a bit shocked. I said, “Okay, sure.” Because he in the majority. There’s a bunch of him. So I’m like, “For sure. You struggling. You’re really struggling to make it to the top.”

Tracy J. E:
But he said, “I have often not felt that I could fit in because I like to wear a beard, but none of the men here wear a beard. And I’m going to start wearing a beard, because that is what I like to do in the wintertime. But none of the men here, none of the executives here, none of the folks who report to the CEO, they don’t wear beards. And I didn’t want to be unsuccessful. But that’s who I am.” I was just so surprised that that resonated for him, in terms of how he wants to show himself to the world.

Warwick F:
There’s a sort of a little secret here that people, I don’t think, fully realize, every human on the planet is insecure.

Tracy J. E:
Absolutely.

Warwick F:
Some show it by the shyness and reticence, others by their bravado and arrogance. But arrogance is just a sign of insecurity, deep insecurity, frankly. So we’re all like that. It’s funny, I grew up in about as different a background from you as possible to grow up in Australia from a very wealthy, affluent, 150 year old media dynasty, very respected family in the community because we owned the equivalent of Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal. It’s one thing to have money, it’s another thing to be respected for generations as positive contributors to society. You’re used to hit all the benchmarks, right? You can have money, but be vilified.

Warwick F:
But yet Australia being a very egalitarian place, which is good in a lot of ways, even though I went to a very good boys, private school, everybody would say, “So, Warwick you think you’re better than us, do you?” Because their dads or mothers, they were bankers and lawyers, which you make a fair amount of money, but that’s not like media mogul level. In my own small little way, it’s like I wanted to be normal. I wanted to fit in. But I felt like I was in a class of one. Because nobody was sort of like our family.

Warwick F:
Very different background, not trying to compare it, not saying, “Oh, it was also terrible.” It wasn’t. It’s nothing compared to what your mom went through. But my point is, as I was starting to talk about my story, it’s like, who would want to hear my story about losing a 150 year old $2 billion business? Who would care?

Warwick F:
The time that changed for me is, we go to a nondenominational church in Maryland and I shared my story with just some regular folks. It’s like, they said, “Thank you, Warwick. Your story helped me.” How in the world can my story help any other human on the planet? Because nobody has gone through what I’ve gone through in that sense. Not that it’s so bad, but it’s in a small way a bit like your story. How in the world can a wild hair example of an African-American woman help some white guy? How in the world? But it could.

Warwick F:
I’ve learned in my own small way, how your truth, your story, if it’s shared with authenticity and vulnerability, can actually help other people. We think, “Oh, nobody can relate to me, because I’m so different.” In a very different way, I’ve sort of not felt what you felt, but you get what I’m trying to say. Is people tend to be insecure and tend to be, “Nobody really would understand me. If I tell them about who I am, nobody will. They’ll laugh or they’ll reject me.” Every human’s like that.

Warwick F:
When you share your truth, it allows other people to do that. It won’t solve everything, but it’ll help more than you know. Anyway, long-winded way of saying I agree with you. But does that kind of make sense at all?

Tracy J. E:
It totally makes sense. I think that that’s a very powerful point in these times in particular. When we think about how divided our country has been and continues to be quite honestly, that power of human connection, is where we can start to build communication. My story and your story may seem like they don’t relate to the people that we tell them to, to our audiences.

Tracy J. E:
But invariably, we have someone who says, “You know what? I get that. Because, here’s my story.” What that created, was communication and dialogue and understanding between two people at a human level. Once we can start to really humanize one another, we can build from there in terms of the issues that we address. We may not always agree on things, but we’ve reached a place of commonality of humankind.

Warwick F:
Exactly.

Tracy J. E:
I think that’s what’s so critical in resolving some of these issues today. Because, like I said in my bio, I am an intelligent mother of a black son and I worry daily for his life, simply because of the skin he’s in.

Warwick F:
Sure.

Tracy J. E:
So for me to be able to make connections with others who don’t look like me and have a different point of view, that’s powerful. That’s how some of these issues can be resolved. Maybe one day I won’t worry every night.

Warwick F:
I think what you’re saying is so profound because, when you know somebody and their story and you humanize them, it’s hard to hate somebody that you view as a human being. I’m not an expert in racism, I’m not a psychologist, I’m not a sociologist. But just looking at history, people who are hated, often it’s because of gross ignorance and you don’t know them as people. You think of them as objects. Whether it’s Nazi Germany or wherever, there’s a lot of terrible examples of racism and inhumanity.

Warwick F:
But you start to know somebody as a real person, you might have all sorts of baggage and all sorts of screws loose, but it will tend to maybe melt the iceberg a little bit. If you treat them as a human, if you seek to understand them. I love that phrase of St. Francis of Assisi, “Seek first to understand then be understood.” It sounds really radical. “What do you mean?” Your mother was actually living that in a lot of ways.

Tracy J. E:
Absolutely.

Warwick F:
Again, I’m not excusing anything, but the more we can try to understand people who are different than us, it’s hard to hate people that you like and care for and understand. It makes it harder, right? Why wouldn’t we want to make hatred harder and coalitions more possible.

Tracy J. E:
Absolutely. And we moved from labels, putting me in a category of Democrat or Republican, Trump supporter. We get away from the labels and we go down a layer and we start to see each other as like you said, humans, individuals, feelings. There’s a lot of similarities amongst the diversity.

Gary S:
And a key way of doing that is what this conversation has been sort of orbiting around. That is, wild hair, right? Is the metaphor of wild hair. Meaning, the true essence of who you are. You are far, far more, Tracy, than your hair. But your hair is emblematic of who you are. To suppress that, denies the world the opportunity to know you. Denies you the opportunity to be known by the world. That’s why it’s so important, why you’ve discovered such freedom to pursue new things in your career when you’ve made that decision to let that essence of yourself, that emblem of yourself show through.

Tracy J. E:
Absolutely. It’s about kind of giving yourself that gift of acknowledging and being everything that you can be. That means you can’t deny part of your essence. We can only rise to the level of our authenticity. We only go as high as we keep it real. We have to be, again, that self honesty comes in, and sometimes that’s depicted externally, like in my hair, but most times it’s that inner work of what I really want and having the courage to pursue it in your career. That’s really important.

Tracy J. E:
What I try to do with everyone that I coach, is tap into the sense of what really defines them, their values, what is important to them. It starts being from a place of values and what you value in your life and the change you want to make in this world. Then we can define our careers in lots of different ways. We can’t let other things dictate who we are and what we value.

Warwick F:
I just want listeners to understand what you just said, because it’s so profound. I love, in your book, you talk about “authentic values alignment” more than just work life, which is related, but slightly different. But just helping listeners, whether it’s African-American women, women in general or people in general, it’s just be true to who you are and what you believe and follow a purpose that’s in line with those values.

Warwick F:
We actually talk about this in a sense in Crucible Leadership, is understanding your values, belief systems, faith, wherever it comes from and having a purpose that aligns with that. Then as you start to make career and job choices, it’s like, “Okay, does this organization, is this going to embrace who I am and my values? Can I be my authentic self? If I’m not, then see you. Moving on to the next place.”

Warwick F:
If you have some drive, there will hopefully be some options. That is so true, especially with young people starting out. You can obviously help folks in their 40s, 50s, beyond, but helping young people learn this at the beginning, rather than later on, that’s so huge. When you talk people, especially let’s say young women of color, do they hear what you’re saying? Or do they say, “That’s good for you, Tracy? But this isn’t the real world.” You say, “Well, I’ve lived in the real world for decades.”

Warwick F:
Do you have like some challenging conversations in which they say, “I’m not buying it. I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid. This is Disneyland. What are you talking about?” How do people that you’re trying to persuade of your message, how do they respond? Do they hear you, or do they just think you’re just full of it and just don’t know what you’re talking about?

Tracy J. E:
Sometimes it is challenging for the younger generation in those conversations. I test this out on my children who are 35, 32, 23, 20, the ones that are out there in the workforce. I find that those that are a little bit older millennials, the 30s, tend to pick up on this because now they’ve lived a little bit and they’ve seen this. But the conversation with the 20 year old, 23 year old, they come from an environment and I don’t like to label groups, but I think what we can say about that generation, is they are a generation that had access to technology from birth.

Tracy J. E:
Unlike me, I didn’t. I grew and then technology came in and I learned it. What that has done is it’s created this sense of hyper-connectivity, this sense of immediate gratification, the sense of access. So those things are happening constantly. There isn’t always the time made to reflect on values. Values, honestly get shaped by what they are connecting to and seeing thrown at them in some ways.

Tracy J. E:
I literally had a conversation with my son a couple of days ago, where we were talking about the amount of crime that we’re seeing in our city, the city of Indianapolis. And especially the black men who are being killed or killing one another. The conversation is centered around what kids or young adults their age, want. And it’s money, it’s success.

Tracy J. E:
When you come from an underrepresented and a socioeconomically challenged area, you don’t always see the ways to get that better, safe and honest and value based. What you see is how can I get this in a way that’s may not always be legal, it’s the quickest way to get there. Sometimes I think that the much younger end of the millennial generation, does struggle with defining their values.

Tracy J. E:
Now, I was pleased to say, and I have to give my son a plug, that he talked about what he had learned at home. While he shares their perspective of, “I want it now,” there are just absolutely some things he won’t do, in terms of illegal things that he just won’t do to get it. We as parents, we play a strong role when we show up authentically and drive a values based family system. But also, we have to remember that our children are impacted by so many things outside of our control.

Warwick F:
It’s really a values war. They’re going to learn these lessons at some point, but hopefully it’s not like on their death bed. One of the things we talked about, is legacy. When you’re having your last breath or it’s your kids and grandkids at your funeral, what is it you want them to say about you? At that point, you don’t want to say, “Yeah, I was married three times, my kids don’t know me. Oops.” You don’t want to be having that as your last thought.

Warwick F:
We talk a lot about success versus significance. I mean, there’s a reason we talk about lead a life of significance. Again, this is an area where I know something about, because I grew up in about as wealthy, a background, as you can. I can tell you, there’s a lot of wealthy people that are unhappy, kids on drugs, on their third or fourth marriage or beyond. I mean, okay, you have all this money and you’re miserable. So what? It is possible to be successful, have money and to be a blessing. Let’s say you have focused on others, perhaps, maybe philanthropic. But just there’s a way that money can be a blessing. It doesn’t have to be a curse.

Warwick F:
But the idea that money makes you happy, that’s a lie that some in the world preach. But everybody realizes that at some point, but you don’t want it to be on your death bed when it’s like, “Oops.” I get why a lot of young people are thinking that way, but it’s a false God. It’s an idol, the risk of getting spiritual. You can be successful, you can achieve, you can go for it and be happy. You want to be happy? Think of others on the way up. Think of the bigger picture. Don’t just think of yourself. A self-motivated vision won’t lead to joy. If that makes sense.

Gary S:
That is a perfect time, I think I heard the captain turned on the fasten seatbelt sign. It’s getting close to the point that we’re going to land the plane. But before we do that, I want to do a couple of things. And, Warwick, I’ll give you another chance, of course, to ask Tracy a question. But Tracy, the first thing is, how can listeners find out about your book, Wild Hair? Where can they find out more about you and about your book?

Tracy J. E:
Absolutely. They can go out to my website, it’s tracyjedmonds.com and it’s Tracy with a Y-

Gary S:
And Edmonds with an O.

Tracy J. E:
Edmonds with the O. That’s exactly what I was going to say. On there, you’ll find out everything about me and you can scroll down to the bottom of any page and subscribe to get information about the book release and to stay in touch with me.

Gary S:
Fabulous. That last bit of conversation that you and Warwick had, Warwick was talking about legacy. And listeners, if you’ve been with us from the outset here, you heard early on in the conversation, Tracy said to me, “Well, I’m not a poet.” That comment came from something that happened, unless you’re watching us on YouTube, if you’re listening to us just in a podcast app, you didn’t hear the whole thing.

Gary S:
That is, we ask guests to give us their bio and most guests copy and paste from their corporate page, here’s their bio. Tracy did something different and I think better and beautiful. Tracy wrote what I described, or Warwick described, as a poem. I’d like you Tracy, as we do begin to land the plane, to just read for listeners. Because I think this is a perfect legacy. If one’s going to leave a legacy, what you wrote here is a great legacy of your life from stem to stern. Would you read what you wrote to us as your biography?

Tracy J. E:
I’d be happy to. I am a daughter, sister, mother, a wife, a friend, a survivor of loss, a rebuilder. I am an entrepreneur with depression, a speaker with anxiety, a successful chief diversity officer and a recovering corporate soldier. An author, a listener, a fearful, intelligent, black woman with a son. An open mind and open heart. A leader, a Lakers fan. I am a failure fighter success. Complicated, multi-dimensional, unexpected. A coach, a consultant, a fierce believer in possibility. Always growing real.

Gary S:
Warwick, you’re braver than me to say something after that. I would wrap. But I’ll let you have the last question and then I’ll wrap the show after you and Tracy have a chat.

Warwick F:
I just want to say thank you Tracy, for being here. I just found your message really inspirational. Just that metaphor of the wild hair. It’s funny, in the spiritual circles actually baptism, they talk about an outward manifestation of an inner transformation. You go to a baptism class and a Baptist church. My church is not Baptist, but I guess philosophically, I guess it probably would be. That’s in a sense what you’re talking about. It’s an outward manifestation of the inner transformation. Being authentically yourself.

Warwick F:
I love that just championing women of color in particular women. But I would say your message is focused on that, but I think it is helpful to all human beings on this planet, being yourself, not compromising, being true to your values, living a life of purpose, that’s based on your values. That’s a message everybody needs to hear. I’m an optimist by nature, all things being equal, that will help you be more than less successful, though I’m not naïve. But that’s a message that I’d say all people need to hear. I just found it very inspiring, and thank you so much for being here.

Tracy J. E:
Thank you.

Gary S:
Well, that’s interesting. I say to Warwick, “Do you really want to follow what Tracy just said?” And then Warwick steals what I was going to say? That’s pretty much the summary I was going to give. The idea about crucibles being an opportunity to ask, “What can I learn?” The idea of embracing authenticity and following your values as Tracy calls it, “authentic values alignment.”

Gary S:
Warwick, it’s funny, you didn’t really follow Tracy, but you stole from me, which is great, because you’re the host of the show and that’s the way it should be. With that, listener, we want to thank you for spending this time with us today. We have a little bit of a favor to ask you, Warwick. And I do, if you like what you’ve heard here, please click “subscribe” on the podcast app on which you’re listening right now, trundle over to the spot where you can leave a rating for us as well. What those things do, is allow us to get the show out to more people and more conversations like this one with Tracy Edmonds, that offer hope and healing through times of crucible.

Gary S:
Speaking of crucibles, remember this, as we part for today. Your crucibles are painful, there is no doubt about that. What Tracy described here today, was some painful times. What Warwick has described from the outset of this podcast that we’ve had here, has been some painful times. Your crucibles are real and they are painful. But, they are not the end of your story. In fact, they can be the beginning of your story.

Gary S:
That new beginning, for you, can be the start of a chapter in your story, that’s the most rewarding chapter yet. The reason why, is because what Warwick said and what Tracy explained, both of them in their own ways, have made this to be true. Why it can be the most fulfilling time of your life, is because in the end, that road you’re on, when you learn the lessons of your crucible and apply them, is a road that leads to a life of significance.

1. Don’t focus solely on records.

2. Enjoy the process.

3. Have other areas to focus on.

4. Keep your identity separate from your profession.

5. Hold it all lightly.

Reflection

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Transcript