134: Corey Blake — How Leaders Can Show Vulnerability, and Why They Should

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Well, we're beginning to realize more and more that good storytelling is essential to great leadership and great marketing. But at the core of telling great stories is getting real, is going deeper and the access to that is the courage to be vulnerable. And that's what today's show is all about. How do you do that? Where do we access that? How do you develop that in yourself and others? So listen to this. Fascinating and just I love the show.

So listen in.

Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and Scaling up coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is Corey Blake from sort of the the northern Chicago area. Right along the lake there.

That's right, Bill.

And is it cold as heck there today?

It sure is, man. I think it's 6 degrees.

So I lived in Chicago many years ago for like four years. And I'm like, it's really fascinating to live here. And I live first on the North Shore and then I moved down to Lincoln park and I was so glad to get out of it as a Californian. That degree of cold, I just can't take it. Except today it's gray here. But it's like 58, right?

Yeah, it's rough. I hear it's rough.

All right, so guys, Corey is publisher of Conscious Capitalism and he's a founder of company called CEO. He's the CEO of Roundtable Companies. And it's all about telling story and vulnerability. And you're going to get a lot, I think, out of the show today. He's worked with a big range of companies from big companies like Microsoft and Marketo to First United Bank. And what's Magoosh? Do I know that.

Yeah. Magoosh is a GRE test prep.

Oh yeah.

Listen to npr.

You hear their commercials.

Yeah, yeah, totally. And he's helped leaders with storytelling in particular. We know that storytelling is so important to our speaking as leaders, to our marketing messages and so on. And he brings this background of theater and storytelling into the business world, into the conscious capitalism movement. We've had, of course, Raj Sisodia on the past talking about conscious capitalism in detail. So I thought we'd talk with, with Corey about this topic of storytelling and, and specifically the capacity vulnerability. So welcome to the show, Corey, again.

Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me.

Will you give us a little more. I know I've just talked a little bit of your bio stuff, but would you give us a little more of your, like, how did you arrive here at this place in this topic so we can sort of connect to that, the development of the idea?

Sure, yeah. Appreciate the invitation to do that.

The.

I'm a, I'm a believer that all of us manifest superpowers in our life through experiences that we've been through. And so I have a number of kind of inflection points in my own journey. So I'm happy to start. I'll start with my first one because I do think it's. It really set everything in motion for me. I was raised in a Jewish household by a Jewish mother, which means to say that she took all of the light inside of her and made it a point to shine that upon me. Nothing else got her attention the way that I did. And in my, from my standpoint, nothing else shone as brightly as she did. And so for the first five years of my life, I was led to believe that I was special and here to do something magnificent on this planet. And then around my fifth birthday, just.

So you know, that's not exclusive to Jewish mothers, my grandmother was far from Jewish and she did that with me extensively. I love it. I love it.

I'm happy to hear it.

That's awesome.

So this kind of transition point for me was around my fifth birthday. And I have some recollection of this experience of my mother bringing home a cherry covered cheesecake for my birthday. And I had never, you know, watched what I said because I had never said anything wrong in my mother's eyes. And yet I made this comment that I didn't care for cherries. And I saw a version of my mother that had never existed in my world before. And she got irate with me, sent me to my room, literally chased me up the stairs and slammed my bedroom door repeatedly as she yelled at me about how ungrateful I was. Yeah. And. And this kind of kicked Off a year of her severe depression and what I think today would be diagnosed as bipolar disorder, she was, she was very much two different people for a while. One who was adoring and loving, the one I had known, and this other person who felt incredibly dangerous to me. And while on the other side of this year she was properly medicated and her light came on as bright as ever for that period of 12 months or so. There was no light that, that really emanated from her and, and that left me feeling like I was in the dark entirely because nobody else is light compared to hers. Like I was invisible and, and I was, and I was afraid a lot of the time. But the gift of that, of that year was that five, this is five to six years old.

Yeah.

The gift of that time was that I learned how to read the energy of a room to determine if that room was safe. I learned how to read my father, my sister, right. And, and I, I learned during that time how to, how to make mom laugh. Right. How to, how to keep mom in a place that felt safer to me. And so I became a pretty masterful people pleaser. And, and, and, and I used performance in order to do that. So that, that became my, my trajectory.

Can you pause there for one second? Because this is, I think, really useful for all of this. It comes up again and again in our coaching. You know, I, we coach in the scaling up framework and we get leaders doing certain habits around execution and strategy and people in cash and things like that. But along the way, the leader has to develop himself. And unfailingly, what we discover is that there are these things that develop right around that time. Sometimes we don't see the origin of them back to the 5, 6, 7 year old, but it is really these early, early things that you learn that and then you develop survival skills for surviving the environment. It may not be life or death, but it is about like being safe and happy and like that. And then that gives you certain skills and gives you sensitivity to certain things and you apply on them every day. Except that they do become limiting as you'll probably get to at some point. So they're essential, they're critical, they're unique. You develop superpowers and they're always around these like, primary relationships, parents, siblings, like that.

So yes, yeah. In the work we do around storytelling, we essentially charged with helping people to unpack those moments. I didn't, I didn't really understand what happened when I was five years old until my late 30s and I'm 44 now, so I'm. I'm five or six years into really unpacking that stuff, investigating, having conversations with my mom about that time period, etc.

Totally, totally get this.

Right on. So, I mean, ultimately, I think that set me on this trajectory where I used both the performance capability and the desire to keep people around me happy as a strength. Right. And I developed it over a period of years, ended up going to school for acting. To be a performer, the ability to impact people emotionally on stage was something that I. I gained a tremendous amount of reward from. It felt like my identity, who I was. Becoming an actor was the only thing that made sense to me at that time. And then I, you know, I left school, you know, as a. As the big fish in a small pond. I went to Milliken University and. And. And was at the top of that ladder when I. When I left, headed off pretty quickly to Los Angeles and started working in film and television and whatnot. And ultimately, because I'm funny and fell into the commercial world, I started getting cast a lot in pretty big commercial campaigns for major companies, oftentimes as a funny guy. And that was this fascinating, confusing time. Hollywood trailer, glitz, glamour, fun, excitement. Everyone around me saying, you're living the dream. My mother's so proud of me, and yet I'm using my gifts to encourage kids to drink Mountain dew and eat McDonald's hamburgers and ultimate Champions. There comes a point where I'm like, this isn't really what I came here for, and yet it's paying me a lot of money. It's such a confusing experience to, you know, you make your day rate, and then when things air, you have no control over when they do air. At least at that time. This is early 2000s. There's a lot of money that just shows up in your mailbox day after day, sometimes in an astounding way. So. So this confusion of everyone's telling me I'm living the dream, but I feel pretty empty inside. I started producing and directing because I wanted more of a sense of control, and that taught me a tremendous amount about leadership without me realizing that's really what I was studying. And then I kind of got to this space where I was going out on auditions. I was getting called away from this thing that now I loved, which was building creative projects. I was getting called away to do this audition stuff, and I would get really cranky and aggravated and eventually had that realization of, okay, some young person would freaking love to do this. I should probably let it go. If I'm pissed off when I'm being asked to go make a living. And so I did. I walked away from acting and shortly thereafter was getting married and had this real sense of needing to do something that was more consistent and reliable financially. And somehow I thought I should start a company. Makes no sense in retrospect, but. But that kind of started me down this. Right. I'm a big Michael Gerber fan. Yeah. So that sent me down this trajectory of intersecting with business in this way that was entirely unexpected. But it was also a very challenging transition because if I wasn't an actor, I really didn't know who I was for a period of years.

Yeah. So your identity is fully tied to this survival thing that developed at 5 and 6, evolved and. Yeah.

Through and through. Like, it's my DNA. So if I'm not that, I'm nothing, what am I? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Sitting that for a minute.

Yeah. Well, I, you know, like, my own thing would be like, I. I decided through a variety of things that I was smart and funny and then had its pros. And. Or smart and articulate, not funny. I've become funnier in time, at least I think I am. I tend to crack myself up. The. So. So smart and articulate was like that survival method, but I also had around that. That, like. Oh. That I was smarter than most people. And if people knew that I was smarter, they would hate me. And. And so I also had that, like, I was inherently unlikable. And so I worked really hard to make people respect me. And I worried about, was I the smartest person in the room? And did I say that right? Was I being articulate? Did I say something stupid and embarrassing and like, there was a lot of obligation around all of that stuff. And only until I realized that I would never be the smartest or most articulate in the world. And. And even if I was fairly smart and fairly articulate and I use those things to accomplish personal gain at the end of my life, I wouldn't be happy with that. And so then, like, I did a life purpose exercise. Right. Imagine my memorial. And what is it that I. Who's there? And what. What do I really want them to say, you know? And that's where I came up with something that was a little more meaningful to me. Now I still rely on being smart and articulate, but it isn't the fulfilling piece. Right.

I appreciate that you bring it up.

You're.

You're highlighting something for me that's newer on my journey of admitting, which is that because of this origin story that I carry of being special. Right. That, that I have a lot of chatter in my own head around how that shows up for me oftentimes. Like if I'm on a, if I'm on a group call, let's say with a number of colleagues for a class that I'm taking and I want to say the smartest thing. I want to. I want to be the person that other people want to reflect back what I said. Like there's this inheritance. Well, it's just a lot of, it's a lot of energy. There's a tremendous amount of. It sucks me out of the present moment.

So the more internal energy, like there's an internal conversation, what do I need to say? And it is.

And it's pulling me out of the connection and the opportunity right when I'm engaged in my own internal chatter stuff. So that's something I'm paying a lot more attention to now and trying to relax that desire. That's big old stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really. So let's talk about then storytelling and the role of vulnerability in the storytelling and the work that you did there. Sure. How did that really emerge?

I think it started with having to get broken down. So before I started rtc, I had tried to start two other storytelling companies when I was in la. They were film related and both of those we did a lot right. We built amazing teams, put together great projects, raised money, filmed and, and, and created some output that was really exciting. But in both of those I made some really devastating mistakes that, that essentially I pulled the pin on the grenade for my own company twice related to romantic decisions of who I was with. I was Hollywood cliche to the max. And I appreciate your chuckle there because I do laugh at it too in retrospect, but man, it was, it was very painful at the time for someone who's got a Jesus complex to the degree that I, that mine had been manifested to, to think I could do something so wrong that when I had done so much right that, that people would still hold it against me and that was, you know, dating someone that was, that was a member of our company. The first time that I did it, I dated a married woman and I thought that I was the hero in that story because she seemed to be so unhappy in her marriage. Right. And so when that came out, trust was eliminated between a company of eight other people and myself that I had put together and built to, to tell these stories. And, and we were, like I said, we were doing things that were working, but that was that was not solvable. The deception around that and the lack of morality around it, I was blind to. Until it imploded and. And then I did it again in a different way without a married person, but still somebody that was part of the process and ultimately came to this awareness of. I was confusing the energy of creation and creativity and the aliveness of that process with. With romance and with love. And when I did it, people got hurt. Right. So.

Yep.

So I end up building these pretty intense walls around myself because I realized I can't be trusted around women. I was getting married, and I didn't want to blow up my marriage. I didn't want to blow up RTC when I started that company. So I just kind of turned myself off to putting myself in situations where I would be overly vulnerable and perhaps make bad decisions. So I just kind of walled myself off. And.

You're not kidding about talking about vulnerability, right? In this.

Yeah.

In this era. To talk about mistakes in romantic relationships at work.

Right. This is it.

Right.

Thanks, man. So we get to this point within RTC where we're like five, six years old, things are growing, things are going well, and. And I'm hiring mostly women. Like, we just attract a lot of women to our organization, and I've walled myself off from them. Right. So. So it became very easy for me to be callous and. And I hurt somebody's feelings really badly who was really important to me. And part of the reason was that I was creating extra distance with her because I was in that creative space with her, and it made me nervous.

Yeah.

So I end up misbehaving in the sense of just. Just being unkind to her, really hurting her feelings. And my leadership team really held that space for me to. While I was in a shame spiral, like, mediated a conversation with her to where I got to unpack and share with them for the first time. You know, these other relationships I'd had, how I blew up the company and that I think I had. I had built this wall around me. And. And they challenged me that day to start, brick by brick, taking it down to see if I was the same person I had been when I built it. And. And that. That, you know, in terms of vulnerability within the company context was a huge awakening about the power of. Of sharing with. With people that I was working with, because on the other side of that, there was a lot we could do when it came to business, because the trust that was required to get through that was. Was pretty immense. Now, simultaneously, as a company, we're leading people through vulnerability, we, we became well known for helping people write the book they're born to write, which is a very vulnerable, transformative experience. It's a, typically a year to a year and a half long what people share with us. You know, on day one versus three months in, six months in. At six months in of that process, someone's starting to say things to us they haven't said to their spouse. Nine months in, they're saying things out loud they've never said to themselves. Themselves before. Right. And so we were recognizing that when we were a witness to someone else's vulnerability, it was a, it lit a fire in us and it wasn't a sexual turn on, but we started saying vulnerability is sexy because it, it literally just set us on fire. We were just so honored to be in that space where someone's doing that kind of work and, and we just found it like it lit us up. Right. So, so we were doing it within our company and we were guiding our clients through it. And we just had this recognition that that more attention paid to sharing our stories with one another that we don't typically share in the workplace becomes this conduit for a deep and profound trust. And when we get to that place, we can move faster together and we can address challenges from a place that's so different than when we simply don't even know what's really going on in each other's lives.

Well, Johan said the word, or at least I didn't hear it, that it takes courage. Right. Sometimes vulnerability, it seems people are like, oh, I don't want to look weak. I don't want to be emotional. I don't want to be vulnerable. That's showing my underbelly, that's showing my soft spots, and that's a weakness. No, it takes courage to do that. And that courage is strength. And I think reframing it or having people see it from another angle makes a difference in beginning to access as a leader. That courage of vulnerability gives your team room to really address their things and to actually grow. Right. Like there's, there's room for growth when we, when we become vulnerable and we see the places that, that are sensitive and, and tender, there's immense value in.

It that you're highlighting. I also want to honor that it is a delicate space. I think you can key back to what I was saying about what someone shares with us at nine months in. There's a tremendous amount of safety that's been produced. We have a very non judgmental process where they learn, they can say things and it's safe to do it. And most businesses are not necessarily like that. So there is courage that's required. But I think there's also, there are steps that truly need to be taken to do it in a supportive way. Because when you don't have a supportive environment and people have the courage to try and get rejected for it, the scar tissue can take a decade or forever. You can never overcome it. So it is a very fragile system. You got to be careful. And there's a lot, I think a lot we can learn about how to pay attention to creating an environment where vulnerability is successful.

So when the first place that I can think of that we really do that work, aside from maybe private conversation with a leader of the business, the ultimate leader of the business is in work that we do around Team Health, from Pat Lencioni's book and work. And we start with usually an exercise early on in working with a team where we share lifelines. And I'll coach the CEO to prepare their lifeline and how to share about the lifeline in terms of the level of vulnerability and openness and, and the timing and that kind of thing. But, but that is usually a pretty powerful couple hours as first the leader and then the other people share their life story. So lifeline exercises, I simply chart my life, highs and lows from birth to now. And then I tell the story of things that I don't necessarily. And it's really up to me to decide what parts I'm going to tell and how open I'm going to be. And in the matter of a few minutes of the attention that I have from people, of course you're not going to talk to them for hours and hold their attention, but we're going to open up, we're going to go to places, we're going to develop a level of trust as a result of that vulnerability, that openness that didn't exist before. And then the team starts to be able to say a lot more things to get real about a lot of other things about the business. Right. As a result of that.

Absolutely. The leadership. Leadership sets the tone. So if you're talking about a CEO of an organization or whoever's the, the top of the ladder in the room, the depth to which they're willing to jump into the pool sets the tone. If that person is only willing to dip their toes in, nobody else is going to dive. Right. So they do create essentially the permission for where other people can go. And I appreciate what you're Doing with the lifelines. It sounds like a powerful exercise.

Yeah. Well, it's also used extensively in the YPO and the EO Forum organization practices or trainings. Those groups, peer groups of CEOs will do it as part. But when we bring it to the leadership team, where we have people, not all on the same level hierarchically, then we. We also open up a great deal of trust in that environment. It's really powerful.

Yeah, it is.

Talk to me about doing your work with a business. So working with a leadership team, building that there. Give me a. I don't know, maybe share one of the stories of that with us.

Sure, I'd love to. So eventually, through the book writing process, we kind of asked the question, can we apply our model to other areas, even other industries? And we had worked with a lot of coaches over our years and kind of felt this desire to support these CEO colleagues of ours, friends they had become with this kind of work. And one of my favorites is a wonderful friend of mine named Karen Salmon who runs partech out of Rochester, New York. She's got about a thousand employees. She's a publicly traded company, which is unusual to be doing this kind of work in that kind of environment. But she had a leadership team of 14 people, and they were going through a process of rearticulating what they stood for as a company. And I was asked to come in and support that process. And so we created this game called Vulnerability is Sexy that people can use either in business or at home just to really create powerful connection. It's set up in a way that really inspires deep listening and not talking over one another and really being present to one another. And so I brought the leadership team together the night before. We were going to do our deep dive and we played that game for an hour. And these are people, a lot of them have been together, you know, for a decade or longer, and they said things to each other just playing that game that they had never said before. And it got just super real and powerful. And there's a lot of love that was shared, a lot of appreciation. There were tears. And so when we came together the next morning to start our conversation, they were coming from that place and. And to start talking about what we stand for from a place of heart as opposed to a place of intellect, and trying to be the smart person of the room or the clever person in the room, like they just came from this kind of grounded DNA level. I appreciate everyone in the room. I understand where you come from. I understand some of your pain points. In life. And so we kind of went through. And I have this process that I use to help people zero in on really the one word of every word available in the English language, of which there are nearly 250,000. Like, what's your word?

Right.

And we unearthed Those for all 14 people in the room. And then what was the story behind that word? And they were all just incredibly profound. And people don't have access necessarily to the profundity. But I learned some wonderful techniques through the gestalt work that I've done with the Institute of Cleveland around helping people to kind of get to the embodied experience they had. So as an example, you know, somebody who. Who people was their. Was their one word of the 14, two of the people in the room. People was their word for very different reasons. And one that was just so wonderfully striking to me was the story of a guy who'd been in the military before he joined the company, and. And he had been part of a mission where. Where somebody was. Was nearly killed. And. And there was. Back in the military, there was. You're. You're responsible for the man and the woman to the left and the right of you, right? And so. So when. When we think about people within the organization, that. That's where he's coming from, right? That I'm responsible for who's the left and the right of me. That ended up becoming a part of the definition of people as a value for the organization, very personal to him, and he's a key influencer within the organization. Everyone had words like that and language like that, and we simply then were able to synthesize and build these definitions based around what is. What are the underlying stories that are driving people's perception of the world, what they pay attention to. And the value of it is also, we recognize that, you know, you've got two people who have these powerful stories around being people centric. Then we know within the organization, when we have a department that's lacking that we know who to go to and say, hey, we need your expertise over here. Where someone else may have an expertise around perseverance, right? And what that means within this kind of organization. And they've got a very personal resonance with that. So it's all about, for me, unearthing what are the real drivers that we're often not talking about that are deeply personal, unavoidable. We're not thinking our way into them. We are. This is simply how the universe has prepared us in the world to face what we do every day.

So the One word is something that you care deeply about, like a super value or something like that.

It's. Sometimes it shows up as something you care about. So my word that often shows up is special. Like, there's something about it that not only did my mother do that for me, but it has become the thing that I work hard to do for other people, to be that light she was for me, for others. Right. So.

So, yeah.

Zeroing in on what is the. Essentially, if you're. That's a way of putting it, you're an artist in the world, and you're using your work as a canvas, and you're trying to paint a version of the world that you want to see. What's that version of the world? Right. What's a word that encapsulates what you're standing for as that artist?

So it's not so much that you're trying to be special, it's that you're trying to help other people feel special because that was such a cherished experience for you.

Well, that's the two sides of the coin. Right?

Is that.

Is that there's a piece of it that inherently is always moving through me also. So much so that it gets in the way, as you mentioned earlier.

Right.

But, yes, it is ultimately the. The gift that I'm working to give to others because I recognize that. That there are parts of us that. That are special, that we. That each and every one of us, for whatever reason, we tend to bury or sublimate from, for some reason. And when we can start to own it, we become more whole. And when we're more whole, we're more powerful, particularly in the work that we do in the world. So, yeah, it's a. It's a huge mission of my. It is the mission of, I think, my life.

Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting how. And that's very distinct from being the funny guy who can read a room, although you use that. Right. It's a.

It's a device, right?

Absolutely.

It's. It's a tool.

Yeah.

And I have to be careful with it because you. Sometimes it can. I think any superpower can be used in a manipulative fashion. Sometimes we call it positive or negative manipulation, but ultimately it's an. It's an attempt to control an outcome. And so there's. There's some delicacy in. In all that.

Yeah. Yeah. My grandmother on my dad's side, what we called her Granny. She. I was the favorite. Right. I was the first of the kids, and she doted a great Deal. And she had this saying now, so I wish I knew at the top of my. But I'm guessing she was born, like, 1915, right? So from a very different generation. And. But she used to say to me, if you were any more perfect, you'd be a prick. I love it.

Oh, my God. That's the greatest. Right?

And the. The permission in the adoration there, the permission to not be perfect was just extraordinary, right? Like, okay, well, look, you made a mistake. It's fine. That's part of what makes you interesting. That's just enormous, right? And that amount of love. It was really hard for anyone that I dated or married or whatever, to. To live up to that level of relationship to me. And ultimately nobody can do that. But then, you know, it gets complicated. Then anybody who's not that is. Is like, you know, a woman who's critical of me. Well, that's like a whole other category of things like that. But you live in that whole thing. Then there's a great deal of something special about that, about that relationship. One of the things, though, that she honored ultimately became, like, my word or my purpose. So when I saw that the. The, like, smart and articulate were things that I could use but weren't satisfying, and I did that, that other exercise, I realized that at the end of the day, what I really wanted to do was live a life that made a difference for people. And that became my purpose and, like, my word for this year, right? To kick off my year's contribution. And. And I think at the end of the thing, you know, I often ask people, did that make a difference for you? What. You know, what difference does that make? That's what I'm really listening for. Was I a contribution today? And when I can hear it, when I can see it, I'm very satisfied. I feel like, okay, I did. I did my best work. It's lovely.

I appreciate the story about Granny. I noticed in myself when he said that line, if you're any more perfect, you'd be a prick. That, like. I mean, my face got. Got five times as big and my eyes, like. And I noticed how quickly I laughed. And then I had this recognition right after that of, I wonder. I don't know if you find it funny. I found it really, like, there was something unexpected about it, right? That just.

She was very unexpected.

Yeah. So what was. If I may ask. If I may ask, how was it that you. How did you take that? How did you hear what. What she said?

Special, right? Like, I am. You know, I was always like, well, you could be present, you could be an astronaut, you could be whatever you want to be. You. You come from extraordinary people. You can have the life you want. And one of the things that she consistently honored was being a generous contribution. Right. And I would hear her deride other people. They're a taker, you're a giver.

Wow.

And so she also. Alongside. Alongside of making me feel like I was special and important and blessed and all that kind of thing. Part of the fundamental thing there was someone who gives, doesn't take, someone who comes from a place of abundance and generosity. And so I think that had a big contribution to who. Who I am now. You know, from my dad, I got a sense of adventure and intellect and things like that. That. That core thing was that. Now it's interesting, actually, my mother played a smaller role, at least apparently, in things for a while. And although in the last couple years, I've been spending more time with my mother and sort of getting to know her and reconnecting that whole. That relationship.

That's lovely. I'm really fascinated at the. You're a taker, you're a giver. What a story, right?

To.

To compartmentalize and put people in buckets, like, oh, yeah, it's just really incredibly powerful. Right. Like you're one or the other, and you're either my people or you're the other kind. Right, right. So what fascinates me is. Is how those stories, you know, they tend to drive us and. And. And if we don't investigate them and unpack. Right. Then we. We have a default setting that we just live in. And.

Right.

If I. If, you know, if that was where I had grown up, give her good, take her bad. Like, that's it. It's very black and white. Right. And so I could look at anybody and. And immediately invalidate them if I labeled them a taker. Right. So you got. So there's this wonderful opportunity that happens, and I think it's particularly in business that's available and most of us are not paying attention to because we just haven't been trained to do this kind of work. What's available is to recognize that we're all powered by stories that are not necessarily in service to what we're trying to accomplish. They're just the stories that the world has put in us. And the more we can be cognizant of them, the more we can be choiceful. Through awareness, we gain choice. In the absence of awareness, we operate on definition, default. And default is just a very limiting Setting for a group of people who are trying to come together and impact the world through business. So paying attention to this work creates these awesome opportunities to revise our story, which helps us revise our behavior, which helps revise our results.

Well, it feels like that the beginning of this process from what you're saying, the vulnerability starts with this awareness, right? I'm vulnerable first with myself looking, being willing to look at the story instead of just finding. Finding something else to distract me and then expand that sharing with other people, right?

That's a great question. As you're saying it, I'm not entirely positive because I think it is a co created experience. I think we can be vulnerable to a point with ourselves. But the story we will tell ourselves traditionally about that vulnerability is often, most often not the reality of, of how it would be received by another human being. We tend to receive it with a lot of negativity or shame. But oftentimes when we've set it up well to be successful, vulnerability is most often met with love and kindness and a tremendous amount of latitude and grace. But we, but when we do it for ourselves or try to do that work for ourselves, I don't think we're able to extend that kind of compassion. So to some sense, of course that I think it has to start there. But, but being in a. Some kind of vulnerability practice that involves other people I think is where the real profound learning comes because that's where there's this collision of here's how I expected to be received and wow, is it different. Nobody's holding this against me. In fact, people seem to like me more. They're leaning in closer. Like that's not how I perceive this to happen. And that's where there's real opportunity for, for change.

So when I think about vulnerability for myself, I think two places. One I think about from this contribution place. So I'm about to go before a small group, a large group speak to like whatever and I think about how can I be a contribution? What is there to share here? And that is the place where I look to what is there to share that's a little more courageous, a little deeper, a little further than is expected. Where can I raise. And. And so there I'm looking to vulnerability. The other place that I. So it's in, in the interaction with others, coming from a place of contribution. And then the other one is I have a regular practice of literally looking in the mirror. And, and then, and it started with doing mirror work which you'll know from acting and preparing Speeches and things like that and learning my lines or my talk until the point where not only could I deliver lines, but I could connect with the person in the mirror. And then that evolved to looking at the person in the mirror and just asking, what is there that I can't be with and in my life, right in myself. And right now it's. Right now it's my fitness. Right. That's the thing that is deeply confronting for me, that my fitness has fallen off over the last couple of years to a place that I, I'm not proud of who I am and what I look like, but that, so that's what I, I go look for. What is there that I need to deal with? Right. Like the Michael Jackson song, working on the man in the Mirror. I, I look for, okay, what is there? And then, and then I go public with it because if I keep it private, it just becomes a source of shame and an upset. Right? Yeah.

I just want to reflect back to you how much I appreciated you sharing that, you know, you're, you have a wonderful voice and you project.

Right.

And, and, and, and then you, you, I experience you as this pulling back and getting real quiet and telling me, you know, about your fitness. And, and like I felt, I felt the delicacy of that. And I have, I have some relationship to body stuff too. So I, I have my own, my own correlation. Right. To how that exists for me. And, and it's a wound. That's how I'm feeling my own way into hearing you speak of it. So I appreciate that you're shining that out. When we don't talk about it, when we avoid it, it certainly does control us. Unless we've heard that from a number of different places, the more that we do express it and are received ideally with some kind of kindness, it does change our relationship to that. So kudos to you for being willing to not just talk about vulnerability, but would get vulnerable amidst the conversation.

Oh yeah, yeah. Anything else is talking about or is hypocrisy, right?

Bravo, man. You can't, you can't. When people talk about vulnerability without getting vulnerable, I have a little, I get a little hair on the back of my neck. There's one thing that you, that you highlighted this question of, you know, particularly around contribution like, you know, where, when you're speaking to a group, where's their access to more vulnerability? Something that I've come to recognize that I think is pretty through and through. It might not be a hard and fast entirely rule, but, but, but if we have Something that we are so committed to. We all have that thing, your contribution, my thing, special. Chances are there's a time in our life where we wore the polarity of that like a costume and really tried it on and felt what it was to be that other thing. So I have curiosity around, you know what, what's your awareness of, of times in your life, or maybe it was just a time in your life and you're like, you know what? I'm just, I just want to be a taker for a while and that's where I'm going to live from. And if you have that as a part of your story, chances are if you tried it on, there came a point where there was so much of a repellent feeling for having done it right that you, you may never try that costume on again. And now you're fully committed to contribution. But that's a, that's a real centerpiece for, for vulnerable conversation is what was it like to wear that for a while for someone who's not really programmed that way?

So I, I actually, I've done it lots, all the time. And, and when I have been giving a lot and feel like I didn't get what I want or I wasn't taken care of where I. Then I would indulge myself in any variety of ways, some of which were destructive and, and unhealthy and, and, and then I would feel incredibly guilty. Now, whatever addict, if you've ever dealt with addiction personally or in your family friend sphere, you'll know that cycle is really common. There's this place that the people go and they do something that they don't feel good about, aren't proud of, and then they feel terrible about it. Well, that's that flip side for me. When I would feel like the world wasn't giving me what I needed and wouldn't take care of me, then I would go do what I needed for me. And that thing could change over time. It wasn't just like one thing at any point, but then I would feel incredibly guilty, dirty, cursed the world of that. And, and it wasn't until I decided to sort of tackle that head on that, you know, and then I realized, oh, there's all kinds of addiction in my family. And, and I began to say, wow, like, I mean, my dad was an alcoholic and bipolar and he ultimately took his own life. But I didn't recognize, oh yeah, it's in me too. Some of that behavior, some of the. Maybe not bipolar, maybe not an alcoholic, but. But aspects of all that and, and he wasn't the first one right in the family.

It's such tender stuff.

The.

I don't know if you're familiar with, with polarity work at all. That was Barry Johnson's work. But I'm fascinated by it and, and give and take are such wonderful. It's a wonderful polarity model. So traditionally in life, like when we have two things like that give and take as human beings, we put a Vs in the middle. Little bit like it's one versus the other. And my experience of the, of polarity work is about removing the versus and actually learning to be intentional about both so we can create a virtuous cycle between the two. Because in the absence of that, we go full board on one until it gets crappy and then we go the other opposite direction and we just live in this reactive zone. But by being intentional about, I need to give a certain amount and I need to receive a certain amount, whether we call it taking or receiving. And in the when I'm intentional about both of those, I'm in a really solid place. And when I'm not, man, it goes to hell real fast.

Well, my evolved thing now that I've addressed that is like if I'm going to lead a day with a team or give a public workshop or do something like that, and I know that I'm going to be giving and my attention is going to be out on the group all day and I'm going to be struggling to keep it out there and not internally. I'll do a whole variety of like self indulgent things before the day and at the end of the day that sort of take care of me and I come from a place of feeling abundant and taken care of and all that. And I provided all that stuff to myself first. And it might be as simple as like, I'm going to take a walk on the beach and have a great breakfast and I'm going to take a long time to like chill out in the morning before I go tackle the day. But then I come into the day okay, I'm like ready for everyone else now. And then at the end of the day, maybe it's a great glass of wine or a great dinner, like something that makes me feel like, okay, now it's time for me.

I just smiled through all that whole thing, right? Literally I just smiled through that whole thing. I was like, if that felt, that warmed my heart, that felt like such a loving gesture that you do that for yourself so that when you're focused like you can take care of you and then it's entirely on them that period. But bravo. That, that's, that, that's, that's intention. And we don't, we're not trained to do that. Like I think we're trained to put it all in one bucket. Right. And then we just can't.

So to be mindful of the listeners time, let me loop back around now. So we've been talking a lot about vulnerability and the tone of the courage. And this goes to not just to developing yourself as a leader, which is critical as you scale up the company, but then the, everything the leader does is amplified and ripples out to the rest of the organization. So as we start to get real with people, then we have more power and access with them, they with each other and so on. So we create a healthier organization on the whole. And what we didn't say throughout the whole thing but, but is a useful reminder is that this is not normal business. This is not the normal way we communicate in business in typical like western business culture and in many cultures around the world. This is not okay. There's posturing, there's success, there's smiling just so catching the right angle for our Instagram feed. There's being pictured in this car, this private airplane. And I mean it's fun. There's fun things to do. I do a certain amount of that. But if you don't balance it with some reality, with some struggle with something, then, then it's just like a phony facade. Right. And, and there's a shallow kind of a hollow feeling to it.

Yeah. When we try to meet each other both from our pedestal. Right. Like there's just measuring and chatter in our brains and hierarchy and all this stuff that just gets in between us when we meet on the, on the level playing field of our humanity where we are both deficient as human beings and struggling and trying to get better. It's just an entirely place from which we can then solve some really significant challenges in an entirely different way.

So we're going to put a link for folks to get some more information in the show notes for the show here. But I think you said to make it roundtablecompanies.com purpose. Right. And what will folks find there?

So if you're looking for your word, mine especially yours's contribution for people who are looking for what's my driving for force? What's this thing behind the way I view the world and show up. This will lead you to that.

Awesome. So roundtablecompanies.com purpose is the link to go to. I want to thank you again so much for joining us today and if you dug the show like it, subscribe it but but really even maybe more importantly, share it with somebody else. Somebody else that you think, somebody on your team, a peer, somebody that you think would get some value out of it as well. It resonated with you. Pass it along. You'll find us every week with a new podcast. Wherever you get your podcasts on itunes, Stitcher, etc or you can go to scalingcoach.com and not only do we have the weekly podcast and blog posts and things like that, but we've got all sorts of tool downloads, agendas, worksheets, things like that in the world of scaling up. The whole library of stuff there that you can use for free so so you can get yourself started working with us. I only work with about 10 companies at a time and that's not very many and that's about as much as I'm comfortable and enjoy working with. Of course I can recommend coaches. If you're looking for somebody to coach you in your area, I'm happy to suggest somebody that might be a fit for you. So go find us. Contact us@scalingcoach.com and thanks again Corey for joining us on the show today.

Thank you Billy, thank you for showing up. You were wonderfully vulnerable and present with me. That is a true champion of your industry. You're doing it well. Thank you sir.

I want to give special thanks to the original growth guru, Vern Harnish. Our show is produced by Crystal Carson and audio production is done by Podfly Productions, audio editing by Albert Burge and our show notes are compiled by Ein Codena with proofreading by Tim McGowan. Once again, if you got some value out of the show, please share it with somebody else. Pass it along and let us know the parts that you loved at with an email to info scalingcoach.com thanks again for listening and Keep scaling up.

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