How To Become a More Conscious Leader

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal. I'm your host, Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. Before we hop into the show, I have a 10-second favor to ask of you. We have tons of new listeners to the podcast, and my goal is to get to know as many of you as humanly possible. Either before you start this episode or right after you finish, shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com. I read every email and I will get back to all of you as soon as I can. If you want the easiest option, just say hi in the subject line and I will respond, getting the conversation going. It literally will take you 2 seconds. Or if you're trying to be a little bit more ambitious, shoot me an email telling me a little bit more about yourself and why it is that you listen to Founders Journal. I cannot wait to get to know many of you over the coming days. It's honestly my favorite part of this podcast, building relationships with each of my listeners. But for now, Let's get to today's episode, where I am going to talk about a criminally under-the-radar framework that every leader, founder, or CEO needs to understand to realize their true potential and their business's true potential. Let's hop into it. I want to start by sharing a few stories. I'm going to start with an old story first. In the early days of Morning Brew, my co-founder Austin and I would probably. probably talk 14 hours a day. That's probably on the low side. And I would say most of the time him and I were generally aligned on things, but when we weren't, the same thing would always happen. Austin would share his perspective and then I would disagree. And I'd either disagree because I felt like we agreed too much and we needed disagreement, or that I was too much of a yes man and I had to actually kind of assert myself sometimes. But then what would happen is we'd go back and forth arguing for a while until either one of us conceded on the argument or exhaustion kicked in and we punted the disagreement to another date. As I reflect on these disagreements, though, what I realize is very rarely did I actually approach these arguments from a place of curiosity or a desire to do the best thing for the business or to learn. I engaged in this sort of intellectual warfare with the goal of dominating the conversation and being right. And we'll get to why I did that later in the episode. Next story for you. A client recently churned from my executive— a client recently churned from my executive content agency, StoryArc. Now, while I know that churn will be highest in the early days of basically any business, and especially an agency business, knowing that we could not deliver enough value to a client absolutely stung. My first reaction to the news was a feeling of fear. This feeling of, oh shit, what happens if this keeps happening and we keep losing clients? And then the second thing that kicked in was this victim mentality of we as StoryArb, or me as Alex Lieberman, did not do anything wrong. Clearly this client wasn't complying with their responsibilities as a good client. Not only was this not true, but it also took power away from me and the team being able to control our own destiny. since we were saying that our reality was a function of someone else's doing. Now, why am I sharing these stories? It's not to be self-deprecating and just openly share my flaws, although I am always happy to do that if it leads to you not making the same mistakes in the future. But I am sharing these stories because they are examples of what is known by some as operating or leading below the line, created by the Conscious Leadership Group, which is a consultancy. I really think of it as like a modality of leadership. This group was created in 2011, and they created this idea of leading from above or below the line. And it's a way of understanding the context in which you are leading your company, your team, or other people. When you are operating above the line, you are leading in a way that is open and curious, and your primary commitment as a leader is to learning. When you are operating below the line, you are closed, you're defensive, you're reactive, and your primary commitment is to being right. Sound familiar from my first story? If you're listening to this right now and thinking to yourself, you know, I for sure operate above the line, I feel like I'm always open-minded and I always want to learn. I would invite you to rethink that assumption. 95% of people are operating below the line most of the time. And you can only be leading from either above the line or below the line at any given time. Like, you can't be operating from both places. You have to be either above the line or below the line at any point in time. And all of us, every single one of us, unless you are the Dalai Lama or Buddha or Ram Dass, all of us have operated below the line in the past, and we will absolutely operate below the line in the future. And the fact that all of us have operated below the line, will operate below the line, and potentially are operating below the line right now, it makes total sense. As a species, for most of our history, our survival has depended on our ability to identify and react to threats. And in a lot of ways, that's what operating below the line is. Yeah. In the old days, like the really old days, we would see a saber-toothed tiger, and our amygdala, part of our brain, would be our biological tripwire to tell the rest of our body, yo, We need to do something immediately or we are going to be that saber-toothed tiger's lunch. And then what we do is we would prepare to fight, or we'd sprint as fast as we possibly could, or we'd play dead, or we'd stay still. We'd basically pick the option that our brain told us had the highest probability of not being eaten. Now, the issue we all face today is our brain hasn't evolved to match the context of our society today. Let's say our ancestors' level of threat at all times was a 9 out of 10 because they really had to think about Or were they going to have enough food? Were they going to be protected from threats of animals? Today is totally different with technology and the advancements of society. Our level of threat at all times is probably closer to a 1 out of 10, but our brain and our amygdala is still wired to treat our modern threats like they are prehistoric threats, like they are a 9 out of 10. And because of this biological bug that doesn't quite serve us as it used to, it leads to us fighting for survival in different ways. Now, our fight for survival is not protecting our literal life. It is protecting our identity or our image, or most of the time, our ego. And the more we try to protect our ego, the more we try to be right, and the less conscious of a leader that we are in society. But what's more important in this whole above-the-line or below-the-line distinction is not actually whether you are above or below at any given time. But instead, your ability to accurately locate where you are at any given moment, your ability to have the self-awareness to know, are you above the line right now? Are you below the line? What is the context that you're sitting in? And I think the most important mark of a conscious leader, and candidly, any leader that I choose to work with or hire, is having this deep sense of self-awareness. Because to create change in your ability to lead your company or your team, you need to have a completely sober, honest view of the context in which you are leading at this very moment. And what Conscious Leadership Group calls this, this idea I'm referring to, is the difference between context and content. Content answers the question, what are we talking about? Content is the facts of what happened, or as my coach Dave says, what's on the movie screen? Context instead of content. Context answers the question, how are we talking about the content? Context is the lens through which we're looking at the facts, or with the movie example, it is the lens through which you are watching the movie, not actually what's on the screen. And the way I personally think about this is it is the difference of what happened. That's the content. And what is the story of what happened? That's the context. The story of what happened is so important because it allows you to understand, are you operating from a place that is below or above the line? And more important than understanding what the story is, is understanding what is causing you to have this story. What ego-provoking fears are leading to us telling ourselves the story of what happened in this specific way, from a place of fear, from a place of loss of identity versus a place of growth, curiosity, creativity, and learning. Let me illustrate for you. Let's go back to the example of me arguing with Austin on a decision in the early days of The Brew just for the sake of being right. What happened in any of those moments was that Austin and I were trying to align on a decision to be made at Morning Brew. That is the fact of that conversation. My story of what happened is that Austin was stubborn. I was right, and that he should listen to me. But what's most important to me, again, is not the story. It's what's causing the story. And I wanted to be clear on what was the fear causing the story. And in this example, My fear was that Austin, as a co-founder, did not trust me as a partner. And so I had to prove by being right that I was valuable to him. Or another example is that a few weeks ago I posted on social media complaining that Twitter or X's algorithm is broken. If we go through the same exercise, here's how I'd play out the script. What happened is that some recent posts of mine on Twitter got fewer impressions than the same exact post on LinkedIn. That is the fact of the matter. The story that I chose to tell myself was that Twitter's algorithm must be broken because my post is great, and that's what's causing it to do poorly relative to the same post on LinkedIn. Now the question is, what's the fear here? The fear that's informing this story is that I fear that I suck at creating content, and because creating content is central to my identity, it means that I would have less value as a person if this story where this fear came true. So as you start to try understanding where you are sitting right now, whether you're sitting above the line from a place of curiosity, openness, abundance, and learning, or below the line from a place of reactivity, fear, ego protection, and rightness, being self-aware of the context you're sitting in by understanding your deep fears that create your context is the first step in being a conscious leader. So I wanna give you some homework as you try bringing some self-awareness to the way in which you lead and where you are sitting as a leader. And so here's your homework. I want you to answer this question: what are the stories that I have of myself that feel dangerous or threatening to my identity or ego? Okay, I'm gonna say that one more time. I want you to answer this question. I want you to list out your answer. What are the stories that I have of myself that feel dangerous or threatening to my identity or ego? I want you to list everything that comes to mind. And I think as you do that, you will start to better understand why you have certain stories that you have created around the experiences you're having within your company as a leader, and why those stories are so different from the fact of what actually happened. And just to give you a little bit of direction, I'm gonna share some of my stories, a few of my answers to the question that I presented to you. Story 1: I am not good at operating a business, and operating a business is important to me proving myself valuable in society. 2: I'm not capable of focusing for a long time. 3: I'm worried I don't have enough money, and money is a signal of my importance. 4: I'm afraid to fail because it'll show I'm a bad entrepreneur. 5, I was lucky with my first business, which shows that I'm a bad entrepreneur. 6, I don't feel or stand deeply enough for anything. Said differently, I'm a pushover. 7, I'm going to become irrelevant after Morning Brew. I think you get the gist with that. I really hope you go through this exercise because I think it can be enlightening to help you understand the way in which you are leading your teams or your company. And, uh, I asked earlier in the episode, for people to introduce themselves and send me an email. If you're trying to think about, about what to email me, share your list with me. We can have a conversation about that. As always, thank you so much for listening to Founders Journal, and I'll catch you next episode.