3 Dark Leadership Traits You Need (But Don’t Want to Admit)

What if I told you that the leaders who have shaped human history, the men who are the most effective, the most influential within business, within relationships, the people that have built empires, who have really, as Steve Jobs would say, left their dent in the universe, right? Left their mark on the world. They weren't just disciplined, they weren't just visionary or inspiring. They didn't just possess all of these wonderful traits and characteristics that we should all embody. They also carried dark traits. They also possessed three very specific dark traits and characteristics that sometimes we demonize as a culture but are actually essential for a great leader, right? Without these three traits that I'm going to talk about, the men throughout human history would have never succeeded. So, so let's dive straight in, let's talk about what these three traits are. Because the truth is that too much of them, too much of these dark traits and you dissolve and devolve into a kind of chaos. You can't get anything done, people don't trust you and your, your life, your business, your finances, probably your relationships will really start to erode. And the none of these, right. If you don't have the ability to really curate these three traits, you are going to struggle to create direction, to be a good leader of yourself or other people in your life. So the first trait that is so important, and this is almost counterintuitive to a lot of people, because when you think about leading yourself as a man, when you think about leading in a relationship, when you think about leading within a work environment, what's usually drilled into us as men is be really stable, be really consistent, right? Be really reliable. But the truth is that the very first and arguably one of the most important leadership skills that you can start to develop is unpredictability. It's unpredictability. Predictability is predictable. People will know what you're doing. It is safe, it is comfortable, but there is also an inherent risk, weakness in it. It depolarizes things. And so the more predictable you are, let's say, in your relationship, and you've probably seen this, you probably know couples that have gone through this, the man starts to get into this hyper predictable routine. He never steps out of this sort of well organized, very methodical, but also somewhat complacent way of being. And because of this, the woman that he's with starts to see him as a kind of entity or a person that she has all figured out. And when there's no mystery, and for right now, we're talking about leadership in a relationship, but when there's no mystery within the context of the relationship. And a woman feels like, oh, I know exactly how you'll respond every single time, there's a kind of boredom there that sets in. There's a kind of depolarization sexually that begins to set in. And I have seen this all the time. Maybe you have seen this. Maybe you've been in one of those relationships where you've kind of just got each other completely figured out, or she's like, oh, I know exactly what you're going to do and what you're going to say, and you can never surprise me. So in that the, the game of I'm getting to know you and there's parts of you that I'm trying to figure out is over, and a kind of malaise and complacency and boredom starts to set in. Now, within a leadership context, in your own life and in your own business, whether it's political, whether it's an entrepreneur, whether you're within a corporate environment or whatever it is, yes, predictability, yes, being stable and being able to commit to a process can be very important. But that, but there's also a very valuable asset of being unpredictable in those spaces. Now, why is that? It is because in leadership, if you are too predictive, if you are too predictable and people are able to figure you out exactly what you're going to say, exactly what you're going to do, you are much more manipulable, you are much more easy to understand. So your competition, whether it's a colleague or a coworker, they know your next move, maybe that that's a business competitor, they know your next move, they know what you're going to do. And those people, those sort of opposing forces or opposing teams, they won't respect you because they can anticipate exactly what you're going to do. And that makes you prey. That turns you into a type of prey. So if you start to sprinkle in some unpredictability, whether you are a leader of a team and you shake things up, you make a different decision, you start to operate in a little bit of a different, different way, it actually forces people out of their homeostasis of how they view you. Because for all of us, for pretty much every single person, whether you're in a relationship with your girlfriend or your wife or your partner, whether it's your boss, your co workers, we have a kind of homeostatic way of relating to one another. What our brain is trying to do is predict what the other person is going to say, do choose, act what behavior they're going to deploy. And the that we can predict how people are going to operate the more that we have them figured out. And so being unpredictable will actually brings in a kind of strength where people don't know what your next move is going to be. Now, the cautionary note on this is that obviously, if you are too unpredictable, you are very hard to hire and employ. You are very challenging to have an ongoing relationship with, right? It's very challenging to have any type of stability. So it's not that we want to be wildly sporadic and spontaneous and unpredictable. It's that we want to choose strategic times and places to be a little. Not erratic, but we want to be a little bit sort of not secretive, but mysterious, right? Like, I joke around with my wife all the time, you'll never know all of me. And it's a little bit of a game, right? It's a little bit of a jest. And for her, it's like, oh, what do you mean? Like, of course I do. I know how you are. I know you're going to choose. But every once in a while, I operate in different ways because, you know, one, I enjoy that. I like spontaneity. I like being able to mix things up once in a while. But in relationships, that type of spontaneity, that type of unpredictability actually maintains a certain level of charge. Now, we don't want to be unpredictable in damaging or distressing ways, especially in our relationship, right? We want to still maintain our word. We want to still be able to create stability and reliability. Those things are incredibly important. But where we can start to bring in this unpredictable nature is into things like creating a date or how you're acting with yourself. If you would normally, you know, do very specific things, mixing those up once in a while, then being unpredictable in your routine, in your structure, can actually support in your partner being curious and developing a little bit of that polarity and this sort of juxtaposition. Because again, for especially the feminine psyche, for a lot of women, when they feel like they have you figured out, it's when the charge of eroticism starts to diminish. And yes, safety, yes, trust, yes, all of those things are vital and important. But there's also a level of excitement that comes along with, I don't exactly know how you're going to operate. So unpredictability is one of the most important leadership skills and traits that you can start to develop. And you can begin to do this by choosing small places in your life where you can be unpredictable. And an example for this at work is if you're the man that just never speaks up at work. You never really give your advice. You never really give your insight. You never really say, actually, I don't think that's a good idea. Or, you know, I think we should probably try doing it this way. Unpredictability for you could actually just be speaking up. It could be sharing your opinion, sharing your thoughts on what you think should happen. You know, giving some, some advice. Maybe not advice, but being able to say, you know what I think with this project, that's maybe not going to work. Have we thought about doing it this way? If you are the man who always is giving his opinion, always saying what he should do, the unpredictability is to reduce the amount of that, to create some mystery in the moments where you would normally speak up, to allow things to play out. So these are just some examples of how you can begin to embody this unpredictability again in a way that is tempered. It's not about being wildly unpredictable in a way that erodes your level of reliance and trustability, but it's unpredictable in the way that other people can't formulate a very specific, not guess, but prediction of exactly what you're going to do. And many of you in your relationships specifically are operating in that way where you have. You've sort of eradicated any type of unpredictability, or you're so unpredictable. On the other end of the spectrum, you're so unpredictable that there's nothing really to hold onto. So when we're in a relationship, we have to be somewhat predictable in the sense that we can be stable and a little bit unpredictable in the sense that people don't have us entirely figured out. So the second thing that is the sort of dark trait of leadership is the ability to have a high stress tolerance. High stress tolerance. Now, for many people, what we've seen in the sort of younger generations, and a lot of the research shows this, is that the capacity to hold stress for some people has really started to erode. And this is a hard truth that people need to come into contact with. The world respects a man who stays calm when everyone else is falling apart. Right? We all kind of know that it might be, you know, I might get hate for saying that online. Some people might say, like, oh, that's patriotism, patriarchal, that's misogynistic. But you as a man likely have experienced this, that in moments of extreme duress, in moments of extreme chaos or confusion, in moments of extreme danger, what do people respect? They respect the men who have an extremely high level of stress tolerance and can make a decision, can keep people safe, can create a direction for other people to move in when they're frozen, when they're afraid, when they don't know what to do, when they're extremely disoriented and confused. The men who have the ability to weather that high stress tolerance are the ones that are often revered, looked to. They are the ones that have the sort of final decision making power and a lot of influence starts to move towards those men. Nietzsche once said, he who has a why to live can bear almost any how. This is sort of aversion and take on it this idea that if you have a reason for being that you can weather any how. And that's kind of what high stress tolerance is. It is the bearing the chaos without flinching. Bearing the chaos without flinching. I'll give you an example. At the men's weekends that we run, I just ran one with 40 plus guys at it. One of the men asked me, how do you tolerate working with a man when maybe rage is coming up and he's sort of in the thick of, you know, processing trauma or he's got a lot of anger that's coming up towards his dad or whatever it is? And it's like, well, I have conditioned myself to have a high level of stress tolerance, to not be as affected in those moments that for most people is going to completely disrupt their nervous system. And this is what, you know, Navy SEALs do, Marines, that type of vein is that they are trained and some of some people just have a naturally high level of stress tolerance, but they are trained to have a high level of being able to navigate through extreme situations without buckling. And an example of this is Winston Churchill during World War II, right? Bombs are dropping all over London every single night throughout the night. And yet his speeches carried a kind of calm ferocity. We shall never surrender, right? We shall never surrender. That type of steadiness became the backbone of the nation. It actually helped the nation survive when they were on the verge of collapse. Now in psychology, we actually call this stress inoculation. Stress inoculation. The more chaos you are able to endure and the less reactive you become, the more competent you can feel and the more reliability people will have on you, right? This is about expanding your capacity to endure stressful situations. Because in modern times, right now what we're really being told is the antithesis of this, right? Take mental health days, take stress days. Right. If you're just overwhelmed, just don't bother working and don't do anything. And we are actually encouraging people to be quite fragile. Now, I'm not saying there isn't merit in any of those things. I'm not knocking them or shitting on them or, you know, shaming people. You know, if you're one of those people that takes mental health days or stress days or whatever it is, I'm not shaming you for those things. I'm simply saying that in our modern society it has become much more acceptable to have this idea, that being what Nassim Taleb would say, antifragile psychologically, there's many different forms, as he talks about in his book and in his work. But being antifragile, being able to have a high level of stress tolerance is something to be looked down on. Now why is that? Let's talk about why that is. Because this is very, very important at the extreme end of having a high level of stress tolerance, where nothing phases you, nothing gets through to you. This is the realm of psychopathic. This is the realm of the, the, the, the psychopathic identity. Cold, unflinching, when everything is on fire, nothing phases them. And there's a kind of emotional decapitation, right, where the person has subjected themselves. Either they've been subjected to such strenuous, such traumatic experiences that they are completely devoid of the ability to be phased by stressful hardship, by real emotional challenge. So we don't want the pendulum to swing so far that we become very rigid and psychopathic in nature, that we are, you know, disconnected from any type of compassion, and we're disconnected from any type of being able to grieve and connect. That isn't healthy either. But on the other end of the spectrum is really what a lot of people are being indoctrinated in today. In order to be a good leader, you have to show all your weaknesses, you have to express all your vulnerabilities continually and in an ongoing way. And it's okay for you to constantly feel bombarded by every little stressor and collapsed by any stressful situation in your life. And this has happened, this narrative has perpetuated through many, many different circles, social circles, and in our culture. It's become quite pervasive in our culture to the degree that so many people have really been stunted in their ability to manage stress, navigate high stress situations. And this begins to erode your level of leadership. It begins to erode your level of reliability. Right? So again, who does society, who do families who do cultures and communities and corporations, who do people turn to when things get extremely challenging? Right. We all know the answer. They turn to men who have the capacity to get through high stress situations. So you can begin to develop this, you can begin to say, I'm going to actually move towards situations that are challenging for me and develop a robust set of tools, breath, work, meditation, journaling, support network that are going to allow me to expand my tolerance for high stress situations so that I am a man.

Who is leading families, you know, your kids, companies, teams, friends, through extreme duress. The world needs more men who are able to lead through high stress and duress. The last thing, number three, and this is a tough one for some people to hear, but it's still true. And we'll talk about the caveats with it, is a lack of empathy. It's a lack of empathy. It is a kind of goal oriented ruthlessness. Right. When you look at some of the greatest athletes in the world, Kobe Bryant, there is a goal oriented ruthlessness. He's not letting himself off the hook just because he went out for, you know, a big dinner and some drinks on a Friday night from training the next morning, right? It's, that's not it. So there's a lack of, kind of empathy because he's got a goal that he needs to attack and there's a bit of a relentless quality in moving towards that goal. Now we can talk about how controversial it is because of course it is. Empathy is good. Empathy is not the enemy. It's not bad. But as we're seeing in our culture today, too much empathy will absolutely kill leadership. Too much empathy can actually be corrosive and it can actually erode the, your ability to lead yourself, to lead others. And it can actually just erode social leadership or leadership within entrepreneur, within an entrepreneurial environment. And Freud said that unexpressed emotions will never die, right? These things that are within you, unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways. So the same is true with unexpressed goals. If you have an ambition, if there's something that you want to do, those things that live inside of you need some form of expression. But for many of you, what ends up happening is you fall into this trap of being hyper empathetic, hyper compassionate towards.

Your plight, your situation, the challenges that you're going through, letting yourself off the hook from really testing yourself and pushing yourself towards a goal and being a bit ruthless and relentless in saying, I'm going to achieve X, Y and Z, no matter what, it doesn't matter what it takes. And it's not about being empathetic to oh, I didn't get much sleep last night. You know, like example, last night my daughter, she wakes up at 5:30, she was up at 3:30 in the morning with my wife. My wife drops her off. You know, I tweaked my neck doing bench yesterday. I'm in pain. I could give myself all the empathy to not work today. I could let myself off the, you know what, I, my neck is sore and I didn't get much sleep and you know, and I could complain about all those things and I could use empathy in a way that actually erodes my level of self trust. I can leverage empathy in an unhealthy, diminishing, returns oriented manner that actually has a net negative impact on me. And this is what is happening to many people in our culture. They are empathying and compassioning themselves to death. They have so much empathy for other people that they are frozen in their life. They are so focused on what other people are going through that they lose a sense of self. They have so much compassion and empathy for the plight of other groups or cultures or whatever it is that their sense of identity and their own goals, their own aims in life become completely eradicated for the goal of an ideology, for the goal of somebody else's aim, somebody else's goal, somebody else's pre prescribed direction. So for you, one of the things that you can start to take on is really looking at just genuinely and again, this isn't about moving into this psychopathic way of being of lacking any type of empathy. But it is looking at where do I care too much about what other people think? Because part of how empathy has been weaponized in our culture is to be overly empathetic for another for yourself in a way that is actually crippling, it's actually debilitating, it actually prevents you from taking the type of action that you want to take and know you are capable of taking. So look at your life and ask yourself genuinely, where am I leveraging empathy to? Where am I leveraging empathy in a way that's preventing me from moving towards my goals? Where am I not allowing myself to be a little bit more ambitious? Where am I not allowing myself to be a little bit more relentless? And how am I using empathy as a block from moving towards what I want? Now for some of you, you will be operating actually in the other lane, right? So there's a whole camp of people that have so Much empathy, so much compassion, and they're sort of stuck because of it. There's another group, which is how I used to be, which is completely devoid of any type of self compassion or self empathy. I tried to punish myself to goals, I tried to punish myself towards ambition and it was actually crippling. So I'm not saying cut yourself off from empathy entirely. I'm saying we have to be able to moderate that level of empathy. And first, if you have zero empathy for yourself, if you have zero compassion for yourself, you actually need to develop that trait first to be able to find some type of balance with it and to be able to find some type of place where you can once in a while you can definitely have compassion. I'm not going to talk to myself that way. I'm not going to allow myself to beat myself up, I'm not going to tear myself down. That actually doesn't work. And it's a form of the shadow of empathy. When you refuse to have any type of compassion whatsoever, that compassion starts, that lack of compassion starts to come out in this sort of self violence, self vicious way. And that isn't healthy either. So we have to start to develop it just a little bit so that we know what that feels like in order to move, move forward. Because for some people, again, they have so much compassion that they can't take action. And for others, they've literally never developed empathy and compassion in any type of real way. And that's the block. So you have to be able to develop it in order to find a balance or reduce it to a place where you can continue to go. So lacking empathy, and again, this one can be tricky for a lot of people because it's like, well, why would I lack an empathy? But when you look at people who achieve greatness in the world, what we constitute as greatness. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk. I mean take Steve Jobs as an example. He was renowned for being ruthless. He was renowned for being focused in on a mission. He didn't really care if people liked him, right? And for a lot of people, for a lot of you as mental, you care more about what people think about you than getting results in your life. You care more about whether somebody likes you than getting some type of result in your life, than having an impact, than being influential, than achieving any type of goal or aim or result. And so that over empathizing, and this has been, again, I can't say it enough, but this has been weaponized in our culture. Social media has amplified this. I care so much about what other people think that I'm not. I'm gonna be. I'm gonna be frozen in my willingness to pursue what is deeply meaningful to me. So if you want to achieve a sense of purpose, if you want to achieve a sense of mission, there is a certain level of lacking empathy for other people's opinion and perspective of you that is actually necessary. You need to be able to weather the storm of people disliking your mission, your opinion, your life, how you're operating. Right. There are many. I remember when I started Man Talks. I got so much hate for just starting this event for men to come and share their stories and their greatest lessons in life. I got so much hate and I was like, what the hell? But eventually I moved into this place of like, you know what? This doesn't matter. I'm going to do this mission anyways. I'm going to pursue this goal anyway. And not from a place of like, I'm going to prove you wrong or vindictiveness or anything like that, but from a place of my mission and my aim and my goal matters more than the opinions of some random people on Internet that I do not know. So we have to start to move into that space of being able to be empathetic, be leveraging empathy for ourselves, but not in a way that is diminishing, not in a way that is letting us off the hook, and certainly not in a way where we are prioritizing other people's opinions over our own. So in closing, to sort of bring this all together, here's the paradox, right? These three dark traits, unpredictability, high stress tolerance, and a lack of empathy. They can make or break you. They can make or break you as a man in your relationship. They can make or break you as a man, as a leader in a work environment, and make or break you in your self leadership. Too much unpredictability. You are completely chaotic. People cannot rely on you. And that is where some of you are struggling. Too much stress tolerance. You are a cold, unfeeling machine and people can't plug into you in sort of an emotional, psychological way. Too little empathy. You are a raging tyrant and you are cut off from the reality of your impact. But if you have none of these traits, you can't lead. If you are only predictable. If you have very low stress tolerance, and if you have so much empathy that is going to cripple you in your ability to lead yourself, it's going to cripple you in your ability to lead in your relationship. In a work environment with friends, you will bend, you will break constantly, and you will fold at the first sight of any resistance. And Carl Jung, I think said it best. He said, the man who does not wrestle with with the dark side of his nature will be overrun by it. The man who does not wrestle with the dark side of his nature will be overrun by it. So the real question is, are you willing to wrestle with these dark traits not to be consumed by them, not to be overrun by them, not to over leverage them, but to wield them intentionally? Because the man who owns his darkness doesn't become the evil, he becomes whole. This is what Carl Jung talked about when he said integration and a whole man can lead. And I'll leave you with one more Carl Jung quote. He said, to confront a man with his shadow is to show him his own light. To confront a man with his shadow is to show him his own light. Light. So enjoy this man it forward. Don't forget to like and subscribe. Share with somebody that you know will enjoy it. And as always, until next week, Connor Beaton signing off.