Chad Silverstein names Brett Kaufman and Jeff Wilkins as leaders he looks up to, and explains how the team uses movie clips about the hero's journey to inspire deliberate personal growth. He invites people to see themselves as authors of their own stories.
Chapters
Whenever we had practice, Chet would always unpractice, and he would always make the team ask me a curious question before we would end practice. I always used to love this. It gave all of us an opportunity to kind of be real and raw. And I got to really get an inside peek at what people were thinking and what they were curious about. And one question that I probably got more than any over the years was, who do I look up to as a leader? You know, who do I strive to be like or who do I, you know, admire? And it always kind of stumped me because I never really had people in my life that I could look to, to try to emulate, to try to, you know, that I could look up to that was doing what I either was pursuing myself. And at the time, you know, I mean, I have a lot of respect for Chet, but Chet was a leadership coach, and he was my coach. He wasn't trying to grow a big company. He didn't have lots of employees. So I. I didn't have him as an example of. Of being able to, like, learn from him on how to run a company. I didn't have anyone, actually. I was where I could learn from other entrepreneurs, but I didn't see any examples of individuals doing what I was doing. My close friend and client, Brett Kaufman, is probably the closest that I have in my life to look at and really admire what I see him doing and how he's done it. I mean, it really inspires me. And I'd say, like, if I had to put someone down on paper, it's going to be Brett, you know, another client, Jeff Wilkins. He's just so smart, and he's just. He's got. He's funny, he's got a sense of humor, but he's a leader, and. And I've seen him transition and go after an opus, and I look up to him. So I have a few examples. But movies, the hero's journey that we see that Hollywood puts in front of us and gets us hooked into for a couple hours when we try to get some downtime, gives us plenty of examples of things that we can use to inspire us, that we can learn from. And because it's scripted in the way that it's scripted, it's designed to emulate real life, even though a lot of times it's not. But there are plenty of examples that you can find using movies. And that's why in Built to Leap practice, we pull out movie clips all the time. You know, like, you always hear about the Matrix and Here today, in this day, you'll hear, you know, Chet talking about a couples that you probably have never heard of or have no desire to learn from. But if you take time to actually find the melody line within what he's talking about and you see it, you can get inspired and it can make you think about things that you normally wouldn't think about. You can see yourself in that story. And that's why we do what we do in build to lead practice. And that's why we use movie clips and these examples to try to stir the brain, stir your thinking, see yourself in these stories, and to really, at the end of the day, understand and believe that you are your story. You're authoring your own story every single day, and every single person has a story, and you're living yours right now. And the question is, is how are you living it? What are you deliberately doing or purposely ignoring? And is it what you want? And if not, go find some examples. Even on Netflix, you could find them something that will inspire you, something that will give you, you know, that catalyst that you need to kind of get off your high horse and get busy working towards something that you want in your life. And Hollywood has made it so possible that you can find examples of it everywhere. In any type of industry, any type of position, any type of role, there's always a hero story where someone gets knocked down, they have to come back up and go, and it's the story of our lives, and everyone's got one. So again, keep on your builder's journey. Keep building. Use inspiring stories and movies to incentivize you, to keep the momentum.
