The 5 Hidden Constraints Destroying Your Leadership (And How to Break Free)

I'm inviting you to be called higher, called higher. Rising does not rise if it's sitting still or sitting in a chair. You've got to get up and you've got to take a step. You are where the rubber meets the road. You are the ones out there putting the hard work in. Yes, you're having to go through self-doubts and all the insecurities and all the things. We're going to get into that today, but guess what? You're still freaking doing it because you are leaders and you have the capacity to change the world. Through collaboration and autonomy simultaneously. The greatest purpose in life you'll ever have is serving the person you used to be. And when you understand that, you begin to shape an identity of worth that cannot be stolen. Hey guys, welcome back to One Part Lion, One Part Lamb. I'm super excited to be with you.

Under normal circumstances, we have a guest interview, but for now, I want to take you inside the RISE Project by the Safe House Project. So RISE was the conference held in 2026 in Charlotte, North Carolina, not too far from Safe Haven in Lake Norman. And I was invited to be a keynote presenter specifically to help these different leaders who step into the gap each and every day on the element of sex trafficking prevention, education, and empowerment, helping people get restored, helping people get rejuvenated, more importantly, helping them live the life they were actually created to live. One of the things I want you to take away from this episode is what does it mean to carry the weight, carry the unspoken weight of something heavy because the calling is large. When you go and look at your own business, your own endeavor, your own organization, and more importantly, your own story, what have you also been asked to carry? So much of our development is actually creating the muscle memory that happens when we carry heavy loads that ultimately build strength within. I hope you enjoy this episode because this episode is going to give you insights into how to carry your own load in a way that's constructive and conducive to your own spirit.

I hope you enjoy it. God bless. Ah, gosh. You guys ready?

Yeah.

All right. So I was asked a few minutes ago before we go on. So I'm going to share a lot of really cool stuff with you guys today. At least I hope it is. Most of everything I'm going to share with you, I learned through pain, which means there's truth in it. Sometimes, as you guys know, pain is the best teacher. So one of the things I was asked this morning when I first got here was, during your practice, and I'll explain what this practice is before we get done, did the creator share anything with you? And I was like, yeah, he did. Specifically for this room? I'm like, yeah, he did. And the first thing he shared with me, if I can get you guys just to rise for a minute, I promise you're not growling and all the things, right? By the way, I love Jason. He's a rockstar individual. He does a lot of things. But the first thing he asked me to do is to hold space for just a moment for you who hold so much space for other people, for the unbroken weight and the unburdened weight that you guys carry day in and day out as founders, creators, and people who are stepping into the gap. You're stepping into a gap that terrify other people and you're still doing it. The second thing he asked me to share with you guys specifically is to let you know he loves you so much. He's so effing proud of you guys for standing in the gap and doing the right thing at the right time for the right people who need it. The greatest purpose in life you'll ever have is serving the person you used to be. And when you understand that, you begin to shape an identity of worth that cannot be stolen, no matter what you face or what comes at you. So normally as speakers, we get the applause when we step on stage.

Whoop-de-doo.

I want to applaud you guys. Seriously.

You're doing the real work.

And the real work is what actually matters. So as we enter into the next few minutes, I want you to just— whatever your belief is, I'd like you to invite that creator, if you will, to talk specifically to you about a specific thing specifically to you. I'll share with you as much as I possibly can with as much time as I have, and I'm here the rest of the day. If you want to talk about business and strategy and scaling and You want to talk about team development and delegation and all the widgets? Great, I'm here for it. You want to talk about what it means to lead from the inside out? I'm here for that too. 'Cause the third thing I was invited to is that I'm inviting you to be called higher. Come on. Called higher. Rising does not rise if it's sitting still or sitting in a chair. You got to get up and you got to take a step. You are where the rubber meets the road. You are the ones out there putting the hard work in. Yes, you're having to go through self-doubts and all the insecurities and all the things, and we're gonna get into that today, but guess what? You're still freaking doing it because you are leaders and you have the capacity to change the world through collaboration and autonomy simultaneously. I was telling you guys to sit down. I apologize.

I don't make you—

I forget sometimes. Sometimes my country man comes out and I just talkin' 'cause y'all are from North Carolina in the Raleigh area, and I don't know how, but my mom and daddy unfortunately missed a good chunk of my life, but maybe that's how I didn't end up with my accent. My brother, he got an accent just like this. It's crazy. My mom, when she calls me, she refers to me as son. I'm her son. I'm like, thanks, Mom. She'll also tell you if you call me Stephen with a V, that that is not acceptable. She gave me with a PH for a reason. She never told me what that reason was, but that's beside the point. So the only way I know to communicate to you guys is to tell you truth. Okay, so on paper, I've quote unquote achieved a lot. As Jason would tell you guys, no one cares. Listen, he's— it's real. Like, if I can't give you value somehow, then it's irrelevant about what achievement has happened. And honestly, one of the things we get wrong as leaders is we like to celebrate successes, but we don't celebrate the sacrifices. And it's the sacrifices that lay the foundation and the footing for the skyscraper to form. I was 9 years old when my grandmother came to me. My parents, I mentioned briefly, that were chasing their own stories. It's not uncommon for most people to get lost in their own stories. And that story, that spiraling, that narrative, what you believe about you, will always be more important than what others believe about you. I also learned that, interestingly enough, that you don't have to believe in Jesus for him to believe in you. So I'll take you on a brief journey. 9 years old, I'm in this little ranch home, about 750 square foot, brick on the front, Wendell, North Carolina, 110 South Buffalo Street. If you guys ever want to go visit the home, obviously I don't live there. So, make sure you tell them why you're there. And 9 years old, my grandmother comes to me, and at the time she had been diagnosed with cancer. So this is the late '80s. I just turned 50, y'all, about 3 weeks, 3 or 4 weeks ago, January 26th, so thank you. I'm a 3-time father and a 4-time grandfather, go figure, which they're not allowed to call me granddad, by the way. They call me pops, 'cause the other one's too close to home right now, so. Anyway, as I'm sitting there minding my own business, if you will, I had a battle royale going with Snake Eyes and Bumblebee, straight up G.I. Joe meets Transformers. Like, duh, let's go, right? In my childhood, my grandmother walks in and she is wrecked, tears in her eyes. And one of the things you realize very quickly when you love somebody deeply, you You intuitively know or empathically know of sorts that something's wrong. She proceeded to say in the shortest form, just for the sake of time, that she was gonna need my help around the home with my little brother Ryan, who was 3 years younger than me at the time. Can you guys remember when you were 9 years old? What was your mental acuity like? What was your focus like? What types of things did you have in your hand?

Toys.

So what do you do? You got someone that you love saying, "Please help me." I didn't know then, obviously it happened later, that cancer would eventually take her life 2 years later. But what I did do is she taught me to make pretty much any kind of food you could think of with water or milk. So boiled hot dogs, what— this is like ramen noodles. I don't remember being ramen noodles per se. Oatmeal. Gosh, pretty much any cereal you can think of. I probably ate my weight in Lucky Charms for probably close to a year and a half. Get my little brother up. Like with an alarm clock, physically get him up. We walked to school. Fortunately, the school was less than about half a mile from the house while going through getting bullied really bad at the time. And then in basically 1987, she passes away from cancer. My parents out of the blue come back from nowhere. All of a sudden they're back. All I could think about was how much I missed my nanny. What I didn't realize is there's an anchor point there. So as you guys, especially those of you who are now on the healing journey of your own circumstances, you don't realize that sometimes certain anchors are anchored here and they're really far deep, right? So as this is transpiring, my mother and my father each come and get one of the children. I go to live with my dad in a place called Fuquay, North Carolina, which ain't too far from here. It's like 3 hours. And my brother went to Orlando, Florida, or Winter Haven specifically. I later found out that my mother stole my inheritance that my nanny had left to me and my brother. So like trust issues, I have a few, right? As I'm kind of going through this entire scenario, I essentially go to work for the first time. Literally, I think I was picked up on a Thursday. And as I was picked up on a Thursday, my father put me in his beat-up work van and I started carrying studs the following Saturday. And that was my life for the next, gosh, I don't know, 30 years in many respects. What I mean by that is I go on the job site, I start working on summers, nights, weekends, all this kind of stuff. If I was not at school, we were on a job site. We didn't have much. It was not uncommon for the lights to get cut off on a regular basis. It was not uncommon to have the water shut off. It was not uncommon to take some really cold, stinking baths and showers. We had hand-me-down clothes, all this kind of stuff. And eventually at around 14 years old, I got really frustrated with the whole scenario. So I just began working extra hard, earning my own money to basically begin to take care of myself. And the crazy part was, is my father, he was working as hard as he possibly could. Like one thing about us, my family specifically, is there's this element of, Extreme levels of work ethic. But then I had to ask, where did that extreme level of work ethic come from? And where that extreme level of work ethic came from was scarcity. I did. I was telling the guys in the back, by the way, the AV team, can you guys give them a round of applause? They're doing awesome. It's always the unsung heroes to put it all together. So I like to recognize them when I can. But in this scenario, I meet this man. His name is— I call him Old Man Myrick. I meant to put a picture of him on the screen so you could see his— he was a bit of a bulldog of a man, big pearly white dentures. And the first time I met him, his first name is Stephen with a V. And of course, I was probably 13 or 14 when I met him the first time. Sometimes it's a little blurry. I get above 50 and I'm like, I don't remember everything perfectly. And I remember the first time I met him, he smiled at me and he just had an essence to him. Have you guys ever been around people that have an essence to them?

Woo.

Yeah. You get in their presence and you just want to sit down and kneel. I'm like, let the wisdom flow, dude. My grandfather was that way. Silver Fox. Steve took a liking to me, and to this day, I didn't really truly know why until my first book came out in 2014, a long time ago, where I got to have— I had a ghostwriter because of my dyslexia. I got extreme levels of dyslexia as well, ADHD. That's why you see me chasing a few squirrels and having to come back. It's okay. I'll pull it all together. Just be patient with me. And I remember having this essence of this piece, this— almost like this authority. It was a quiet authority. It wasn't power and control, it was just a presence. And I remember, your name's Steve? My name's Steve. You know, I'm like, I'm 13 or 14. I'm like, we should be friends, right? Over the next decade, this man, while I was working on job sites nights, weekends, holidays, would pull me off the various crews like the cruise I was working on and put me in his Jeep Grand Cherokee and proceed to drive me around the community. And he talked about financial independence. He talked about wealth. He talked about real estate. He talked about not getting involved in alcohol because he used to work for my grandfather. My grandfather, my Scoggins side of the family historically had a problem with alcohol. And from what I can tell, it started hardcore from my grandfather. My grandfather survived Pearl Harbor, and that's when it began. So he would like plead with me, "Hey, pay attention to what I'm saying." Fast forward a number of years, and my father has a business, and this business is essentially a framing company. He was doing really well with it for a while, And get to the end of the year, this is like the kind of later '90s, like '94, '95, '96, that kind of time frame. And he loses his business. Economy starts to shift. He didn't plan really well. Turns out you probably should pay quarterly taxes before it bites you in the hind end. That is a lesson that I carry through my own business. I was like, I'm making sure I'm paying you. You leave me alone. And I'll never forget this for as long as I live, because I want to invite you when I say this, I want to invite you to consider if and when there's been someone who has spoken something over you that is not true and whether or not you grabbed hold of it as a truth. My father with tears in his eyes thinking he's mentoring his son, he's loving his son with no challenges, with tears in his eyes, says, "Son, I always want you to remember, Scoggins don't get ahead, they get by." What's interesting about that moment is there was a part of me, if you guys do Family Systems, I love Family Systems by the way, I love the layers. My girlfriend and I actually joke around. She's like, "Well, what's coming up for you?" "Well, my layer is this, this layer's coming up." Hey, it changes the world as far as conversations go. But what came up for me in that moment was this, "Well, that's not true." And then another part of me was like, "Well, it has to be true. My dad said it." When you look at creating an organization and building a business, and essentially even if you're a nonprofit, it's still a business. Let's just be real. You still have a client you're trying to serve. You still have a product you're trying to offer. You're still trying to monetize it to make the organization healthy and allow you to get the resources together to continue building up momentum, right? So you can quote unquote scale it. So when I'm talking scaling from time to time, I'm referring to the ability to take something of nothing and turn it into something of greatness.

Amen.

OK? That also means that you have to understand this one principle because this one principle will shift you if you understand this. If you will do well with the little and focus there, you'll be made master over much. It's a biblical principle. It's seed, sow, and harvest. It doesn't mess around. It's predictable, it's reliable. And whether you are a person of faith or you're not a person of— well, I say faith. Most of us are people of faith. We may not share the same faith background, so let me clarify that. But it's a principle of life that is true. Everything I'm going to share with you today especially when we get into the constraints, have to do with the fact that this is true. But first I want to try to shift you, help you shift gears in your mind. The biggest one of these anchor points. So if I had an anchor point where my father's saying, Scoggins, don't get ahead, they get by. I had this other anchor point way over here where Steve pulls me to the side on a whim and says, I got 2 questions for you. Of course it's like hot. So I'm like, put me inside the Jeep Grand Cherokee. I don't care about the mothball smells. I want the air condition. And he looks at me and he, again, he has this presence about him. So it's like sometimes he says stuff. It was funny, I was joking around last night. We were having the reception and I think someone said a couple of times, I was like, I feel like I'm on Shark Tank. Like, oh, don't sell this. I'm not trying to do that. Trying to be of service. And it comes from Steve probably. But in these two questions, he shifted the entire game and I want you to invite you to shift your own paradigm. I've heard a lot of conversations since I've been here and there's a lot of shifting of paradigms that would rock your world in a positive way of what is possible. Stephen Scoggins, first thing he said, he said, what is the difference between a rich man and a poor man? I already heard the right answer. I was an idiot, honestly. I said, well, duh, it's money. Rich man got money. Poor man don't got money. He said, absolutely. You would've thought he was gonna slap me in the back of the head. Like he popped his head. Absolutely not. He said, it's the way they think. I was like, that has truth to it. The next one stabbed me in the heart. Stephen, do you want to learn to think like me or do you want to continue thinking like your father? It was the first moment in my entire life that I realized I had a choice, that I had a choice. And I wish I could tell you that I got it right and I— that was the moral of the story and I was able to climb the ladder and do all the things. I'm one of God's more stubborn children. Or have been historically, he has to hit me with a 4x4 to get my attention. So now I just surrender to him first. I'm like, I'm just— you just tell me what to do because I'm, you know. He says, well, first of all, you have to clarify your agency with your true identity. What is your agency-driven identity? And guess what? Once you find it, it can't be stolen. It cannot be taken. Cannot be taken. In that moment, I had this new shift. That man would go on to give me my first business. I would go on to be very successful with that first business. I would go on to lose that entire first business out of pride and out of arrogance and found myself sleeping under the stars, couch surfing. And the company that I get recognized for when they say homeless to whatever, I tell you guys, I'll just be honest with you, it was really freaking hard. It was really stinking hard, but it was worth it. I can say that now. It was really hard for me to say that in the storm. This moment of shifting Had me come to a moment. I've been about 4 and a half, 5, 6 months, because I can't remember, because that whole homeless season was a bit of a blur. It wasn't substance abuse. It was more of an identity abuse. I was abusing my own identity. I didn't know who I was. And most of us rely on other people to tell us who we are. And if we rely on other people to tell us who we are, we never discover who we really are, and therefore we never really get to walk out what we're really created to walk out. Everything's connected. Seed, sow, harvest. It's all connected. I worked my butt off. He gives me a second chance. I'm sorry, let me tell you what happened. I had bought a 1-year membership at World's Gym when I had money, lost it all, and I had been showering at a World's Gym to let my— because I didn't want my family, my friends, or anybody to know that I had been less than honest with them about my circumstances.

Pride.

Shame, guilt. 3 emotions that should never control your life, but often do. Hey there. I hope you're enjoying the episode.

Look, I love making great content for you, but more importantly, we like creating great resources. So before we get you back in the episode, I wanna make you aware of the Aligned Leader Index, which you can find at stephenscoggins.com/leadership. This is a one of a kind tool that I wish I had when I was actually building and scaling my own organizations. Why? Because a lot of times the bottlenecks that we think are actually in our way are not really the bottlenecks that are actually in our way. And what the cool thing about this specific thing is, it's going to let you know what the number one constraint is internally, the number one driver that's actually in your way or being disrupted, or chaos and dysfunction are showing up. And number three, probably most important, where your leadership blind spot likely is. So if you're tired of your business actually running you and you want to take operational control over your organization, make sure you take complete advantage of the Align Leader Index. It takes 5 to 7 minutes and it'll give you instant clarification on the thing that's holding you back right now.

Let's get back to the show. And I finally lock eyes with my— I was just literally, you know, in the movies, because I know we were talking movies yesterday. Where's he at? I love, I love this presentation. Yeah, it was awesome. These movies, in this, in this— all right, imagine this for yourself just for a moment. I get out of the shower, I still have hair. This is before then. I used to have a hell of a mullet. I'm just telling you. I get out of the shower and I literally have my hands on the sink. I raise my eyes and the vapor on the mirror kind of dissipates. You ever sit in a hot shower, dissipates slowly, right? And I lock eyes with myself for the first time in 6, 7 months. And I'm like, dude, what the hell are you doing? You had access to a multimillionaire with a heart. Which is why I'm so crazy about creating multimillionaires with hearts, because multimillionaires with hearts can change the world, right? Those that aren't so involved in themselves. Side note, there was a study done in late 2018, early 2019, just before the COVID thing obviously shut us all down and caused us all to reshape our lives, where they discovered that there was about $7 trillion of annual need to satisfy the vast majority of the world's need. So all the funding you guys need to be successful in your organization is included in that, right? Homeless, homeless, um, foster care system, uh, recidivism, hunger. All of this is wrapped up in that $7 trillion. Would you know that there's $37 trillion in the hands of would-be believers or people that profess faith? And then we still go to God and we're like, God, why aren't you doing something about this? He's like, I gave you everything you needed. Take action. Let's go. Let's go.

Right.

What I want you to— I'm trying to help you shift the needle because the— one of the biggest problems I ever had in building a business was not building myself while building the business. These problems became anchors of dysfunction. I was sharing with you guys, well, I've been sharing publicly recently 'cause it seems to resonate. I want you to hear this, this is really important. If you don't, literally, if you don't hear anything else I say the rest of the day or like you tune your off, which is, you do you, boo, right? But I want you to hear this. I want you to hear it clearly. Because this is where leadership has to make a choice. You can't scale dysfunction. It cannot be done. I wasted millions of dollars and decades of my life trying. It cannot be done. Alignment can scale. And it can scale quickly. OK? So the other truth that you need to fully appreciate about this one circumstance is this. OK, so if we know we can't scale dysfunction and we identify with that, now we have to say, where is dysfunction showing up? There's your action item right there. Where is dysfunction showing up? There's lots of ways it shows up. I'm gonna cover some of that today. The other truth is you need to understand that your organization is always a representation of your inner world.

That's good.

The leadership lid. So as you kind of walk through this next little bit, I hope to have a little fun with you guys because I've discovered this principle, if you will. As a person of faith, there's two characters in the Bible, right? So historical figures. And while my grandfather was passing away, he was a bit of my spiritual mentor. He loved me. It's funny, he kept— I remember I was over 5 years as a very dedicated atheist. Okay. And he had just, you know, from the time I was born to the time he passed away in 2016, He always referred to me as his little soul winner. He introduced me to everybody. This is my little soul winner. I'm like, it used to make me so stinking mad. I'm like, there's no God. If God existed, then why would this happen? He said two things that really caused me to go, hmm. The first one he said is, why do you judge God on mankind's behavior? Why are you assigning blame where blame is not? And then he said, you have to be willing to dig past the answers that you want. Whether we want to admit it or not, we all have biases, biases, biases, biases, however you want to pronounce it. We all have a lens. And that lens is— here's the crazy part is the lens is not really your— it's not necessarily your fault. It's by choices and experiences and things of that nature that shape the lens., but at some point in time you get to choose whether or not you take ownership of shaping that lens, and that lens becomes a tool that you can now use to magnify or destroy, right? And this transition, there, these two biblical characters, I got to see what I refer to as high-quality leadership versus low-quality leadership, and it gave me a line of sight on who I wanted to be when I grew up. But it actually started with my grandfather. We were— I was over at his house. I'd been building this business that I exited for the better part of 20 years. I was tired, I was exhausted, and no matter how much success we had on paper, I was empty, I was depleted. I was like, there has to be more to life than this, okay? So as you can tell, I've been kind of waging war for a long time. The people that bought my company, even the CEO of the company was like, he's been really, not dumbfounded is probably not the right word, but, respectful in that he's like, I don't know how you did this by yourself for 20-some years because there's 4 of them now, leaders, trying to grow and scale the company. And part of this is the shift. So I'm with my grandfather. It is Clayton, North Carolina, which ain't too far from Fuquay. And my grandfather had a masonry company in Florida that kind of went belly up. And he obviously moved back to the Carolinas. My mother was living with him, kind of taking care of him. And about the time he was diagnosed with his own cancer, I began just intentionally going to spend time with him. In fact, I would go and film him on my iPhone. I could show you guys video of my grandfather. And that was my version of trying to capture him before I couldn't have access to him. Right? And of course, it's funny because he would say something really profound and wise. Next thing you know, he would talk about something that's on Fox News. I'm like, stop it. It's enough. Like, you know, world's going to hell in a handbasket. Well, not if we change it. We can work together. Whatever. Anyway, so I'm sitting there talking to him, and I'm like, you know, at this time, the first book's come out. I'm starting to have some credibility. I started having some rise, if you will. Starting getting back into my own head, just like the first business I lost. The business that I ended up building was Stephen Meyer giving me a second chance I didn't deserve. But all he gave me was the chance. No money, no credit, ADHD, dyslexic, GED, nothing at my disposal except a trash pile of construction debris. Built the equipment, had it Monday. He gave me a second chance I didn't deserve. Started from there and kept building. Again, so when people tell me they don't have what they need to build, I'm like, bullshit. Pardon my French. You just got to be resourceful. You really do. You can create anything you want to create with a choice. That's just truth. So anyway, my grandfather's telling me the story, and actually I'm telling him a story. I'm like, this is why I can't do what I want to do, and this is how I can't get to where I'm going to get. And I know I've just been doing all this for so long. I'm so exhausted. I'm so tired. He says, stop. I'm like, he says, "Son, do you want to speak for a living?" I said, "I think I do. Yeah." He goes, "All right. Well, is it about you or is it about them?" Okay. 2 years ago, I wasn't even sure if I'd ever grace the stage again, to be honest with you guys. November of this past year was the first time I was on stage in 2 years. And God had to shift me in a big way. And then this shifting came, this transition. But my grandfather said something after that that really, that stuck with me. He said, son, what is a great leader? I'm like, you know, it's like Braveheart. Like, rah, you know, you saw Jason Williams, there's a growling and stuff, right? There's elements of that. And there's also elements of David in the field with sheep playing an instrument. In this moment, he says, well, if you're going to do anything worth having, if you're going to do anything that's going to be a transition moment like this, really going to shape lives around you, you're going to have to become one part lion and one part lamb. The crazy part was I had to sit with that for about 5 years. So I can show you guys video feedback, right? Because I used to do, or still do in many cases, 3.5-day events, seminars if you will, where I walk people step by step on changing themselves, shifting their business, and scaling their organization. Like it's a— right? And it takes that long to put down 30 years of history and hopefully learned experience into something that's digestible. And Transform U Live 2021, Unstoppable Startup 2022, We now do 5 Critical Shifts. Anyway, these different programs, they all had one thing in common. I would unknowingly, at some point in time during the presentation, say, "You have to become one part lion and one part lamb." And then I would be like, "What does that even mean? It's a little confusing." So then I went on a bit of a deep dive. In this deep dive, I started looking at— this is after my grandfather passed away— I started looking at two very easy to describe leaders. One guy is known as King Saul, and then there was the boy who would become King David. King Saul was given his throne based on the request of the people. David earned his throne by serving the people. David became known as the man after God's own heart. Saul did not. And there, if you go back and just look, and again, you can borrow my faith. This is just biblical story that represents the point, because I'm going to contrast this for you. But in the grand scheme of things, you've got Saul over here, who's what I refer to as the immature lion and the immature lamb. Over here you've got David, who ends up becoming the mature lion and the mature lamb. 'Cause whether you like it or not, we all have lion and lamb inside of us. And whether you like it or not, lions and lambs both roar, they just do it in different frequencies. And when you can learn to tap into the frequency that's needed at the calling at the time, now you can show up and be an integrated, grounded leader, regulated, ready to rock and roll. Every dumb decision I ever made in building organizations, businesses, leading teams, et cetera, hurting people by accident, All of it came from emotional dysregulation. I was reacting. I wasn't responding. And we all freaking do it until we stop doing it and we start leaning in and we start getting stronger and we start getting better and we start growing. An immature lion is controlling, domineering, egocentric, and cannot be taught anything. An immature lamb is over-functioning, self-abandoning, and will let people run all over top of them. The mature lion, on the other hand, is bold, protective, courageous, firm, set boundaries. That's good. The mature lamb on over here is calm, regulated, compassionate, loving, full of grace. And you can see masculine energies and feminine energies in both. But here's the crazy part. The best leaders in the world balance both. They became bold, courageous leaders who were protective while simultaneously holding firm boundaries and remaining connected through compassion and empathy and trust. This is what it means to be one part lion and one part lamb, to focus on the inward you to mature the inward you to have an external expression of you that's greater than you can imagine. So if it's true that we can't scale dysfunction, then we also need to understand that dysfunction shows up in many ways. And the first place we wanna stamp out dysfunction is inside ourselves. I have this principle I call the 5 constraints. So when I went back and looked at my history, 'cause a lot of, and I've heard a lot of this since I've been here, a lot of you, I say a lot of, I'm gonna say, I'm sorry, I'm gonna not say I'm gonna say a lot of us, 'cause I am exactly everything I'm gonna share with you today, I have been. I have been all of it and I have been it poorly and I have now been better. But when I discovered it, the statistics would say that businesses, organizations fail for a variety of reasons, but the top 5 tend to rotate, right? So I'm gonna, lack of capital is like number 1. How many of you guys have said, well yeah, if I had more money, I could do more? Yep.

OK?

All right? Lack of marketing fit. If I could somehow get myself in front of more people, I could make a bigger difference, because then I would be able to generate the revenue that I need to execute. Agreed? Lack of leadership. Having a leadership team to feel like I'm not so isolated, I'm not so misunderstood, I'm not by myself. Like, I feel like I have a team that I can focus on. OK? Yes?

All right.

Other ones include actual scalable frameworks, like literally your leadership Some people call it cap tables or whatever, but the grand scheme of things is these are symptoms. These are not root causes, which is why when we pursue the symptom, we never get a result. If we go to the root, we start changing the root. When we change the root, we change the fruit. It's that simple.

That's good.

So then I began thinking, okay, well, Stephen, what did it take for you to build an organization from zero to X. And if I'm honest with myself, I could have done it better and faster. Amen. I really could have if I got out of my own stinking way. And I knew that, and I knew that, and I knew that, and I knew that. And I had to go sit on my, my closet floor many times. Please change me. I don't know. I don't know what I don't know. I'm 48 freaking years old. I had sold a company, exited a company, and found myself in an identity crisis overlooking the mountains in Utah in the most beautiful home you could ever think of. Of, and completely empty, completely empty. So the truths I'm gonna share with you, one, you can't scale dysfunction, two, you are the embodiment of your organization. Your organization resembles you, kinda like a pet does.

Right?

Those are truths outside of space, time, and eternity. Those are two truths, okay? When I went back and looked at it, remember I told you dysregulation was like a major issue for me? Like, okay, I would react 'cause I was insecure. I had people who had CPAs and MBAs and ABCs and EFGs after their names and here I was the high school dropout and I'm the leader of the company, I'm the founder. I operated from all kinds of different things. So then I really started thinking about it. In that same journaling session, which I'll explain more in a few minutes, but I heard 5 specific things. There are 5 major constraints that must be identified and transitioned: arrogance, ignorance, impatience, fear, and insecurity. They are all emotional behavior patterns that dictate your action patterns. So if your well is full of dirty water, you're going to always sprinkle dirty water on your grass. And your grass is gonna grow at different levels. Some with a little more weeds over here, a little more of that over there. So it's like, if we're gonna be leaders, leadership takes the first step. Leadership always takes the first step. So let me, I'm gonna try to break this down. Just a quick show of hands, how many of you guys think you should be further ahead than you actually are? Are y'all, some of y'all fibbin'? Are y'all just like, I'm not raising my hand, Jason made me growl yesterday, I feel really uncomfortable. Right.

Okay. All right.

Because 9 times out of 10, pretty much every hand that I've said that phrase has always gone up because it's human nature. What if the— all right, let me give you the Paul Robbins, because I need to speed this up so I can get you to something I really want you guys to do on your own. The opposite of arrogance is humility, but not humility while sacrificing self-identity. Right. The true humility does not sacrifice self while prioritizing others. It finds the balance. Hence the tension. Okay? Arrogance, humility. All right. Ignorance, teachability. Here I was learning from a multimillionaire and I completely let it go in one ear and out the other, or at least it got stopped over here and got clogged in my earwax for a while. Made it a little bit easier to kind of stay put. A lot of us won't let ourselves be taught because we're told if we do that, then somehow we are being less than. And if we're being less than, then I can't listen. Impatience. The opposite of impatience is not patience. It's presence. Presence.

Thank you.

How much time are you spending being present? I'm gonna give you a presence practice before we get off the stage. Sound good?

Awesome.

The opposite of fear is truth. The opposite of insecurity is compounded confidence, which comes via time and experience. There's also— I'm going to give you guys a few truths. Feel free to get your cameras out. I'm going to go through these quickly because we're running out of time. But arrogance— look at this. Let this sink in for just a second. Arrogance is what confidence looks like when it's disconnected from truth. If you have a low sense of self-worth and a high sense of self-proving, you are going to develop arrogance. Arrogance comes in a couple different phrases. Sometimes arrogance just sounds like, "I'll do it myself." Sometimes arrogance sounds like, "Well, if it wasn't for me, then blank." Sometimes arrogance recognizes learning and pushes it away.

All right.

Ignorance protects comfort, not results. I'm actually gonna show you exactly how this ties directly into an organization in a second. What you need to understand about ignorance is most of us are either running from what we need to know or not even pursuing what we need to know. There's a difference between having access to learning and education. The fact that you guys are here already says a lot about you guys. It really does. It sounds, you're amazing. This means you're hungry. You want to do better. You want your thing to work. You want it to grow. You want it to prosper. You want to make impact, which is why you carved out 2 days of your own time to come here and spend time with Christy and Brittany, which, by the way, started from nothing. There's no reason that you guys can't or won't do the same thing, if not even bigger or better. Nothing stops you if you don't let it. All right, impatience. If stillness feels unsafe, speed becomes an addiction. There's a— so how many of you guys— some of you probably heard the verse, "Be still and know that I am God." Yes. Okay. I'm going to rock your world because it rocked mine. I went back. I had a good friend of mine, Doug Elks, came to my house at Safe Haven up in Lake Norman, and he was sharing about his journey. He's an evangelist. He travels the country. The world really at this stage in the game, and he evangelizes. And I said, Doug, have you ever— and I was doing this spot in the moment. You have these moments where you just do something because you feel called to do it and you do it. I said, Doug, what does be still mean translated back to Hebrew, paleo-Hebrew? You know what it means in its simplest form? Because I would go down that rabbit hole if I was y'all. It's fun. Okay. It means to dwell within. Dwell within. All right, I got to speed up. Okay. Fear isn't weakness, it's misaligned identity. If you find yourself constantly fear, constantly in fear, it's because you don't know how to trust yourself yet or the one that created yourself. When you find trust, you eliminate fear. All right? Insecurity turns leadership into theater, not effectiveness. It's one thing calling yourself a leader. It's another thing to embody leadership. Leaders aren't because they walk into the room and they have an answer for every question. And what we really find when we really dig into that is that these leaders need, need to be wanted. There's a subconscious undercurrent of worth or chasing worth. I need to be wanted, so therefore I'm not releasing control of a thing. 'Cause one, I can do it better than you can, which is not true, by the way. I did every role in my company at least once, and every time I hired somebody to do it better than I did, the company got to scale and I got to like have some peace. A lot of us are creating our own burnout and overwhelm. Just being honest. Okay?

All right.

Here's how it affects your leadership. So if you wanna snap this photo really fast, arrogance creates leadership bottlenecks, ignorance creates fragile systems, impatience creates unstable execution, Fear creates inconsistent delivery. Insecurity creates misaligned growth or the lack of growth. Everybody got the picture?

Yep, all right.

Integrated leadership. Integrated leadership is power with, excuse me, let me say this first. Power without peace creates destruction. So that's the over lion, the immature lion. And peace without power creates stagnation. That's the immature lamb. This one phrase, if you get right here, You'll understand that presence removes power but creates authority. Authority is felt and doesn't have to be spoken. Power has to be exhibited. And we live in a country full of power-hungry people. What if we could change the game and create authority-driven people?

Okay.

All right. Integration doesn't remove pressure, but it does give the pressure a safe place to land. Why? Because when you're so deeply rooted within yourself and you have so much self-truth in yourself and it's rooted and it's grounded and it's pure and it's beautiful, nothing externally can shake you. You can breathe your way through it. You can family systems your way through it. You can really get in there.

All right.

Oh, I'm going to go back to that one. You cannot be fragmented or integrated at the same time. That's an easy preference. Yes, ma'am. What is an alignment? So there's been a lot of talk recently, last 6 months, about alignment. I think ChatGPT had a lot to do with that because we're like, what's wrong with humanity? Because y'all are misaligned, bro. Like, I'm looking at the data, y'all are ignoring the data. All right, so let me tell you what my mentality behind alignment is. First, clear mind. Clear mind. No baggage back here that's projecting up here. Clear of mind, clear of being, clear of presentness, okay? Followed by an open heart. One of the things I wanted to do while I was here is just be of service, just to be of service. And I'll be of service the entire time I'm here. I want nothing from you. I wanna serve you and give you what you've been searching for if possible and make a difference in your own life 'cause I had someone give me that. I had someone give me chances I didn't deserve and give me literally insights I didn't know how to understand, and I had to go back to the well a few times to fully appreciate it. The third thing is actions that are aligned. You see, when you're leading people, one of the things that happens is you judge yourself by your intentions, but they judge you by your actions. And until your actions and your intentions align, you are going to be misunderstood.

That's good.

You see what I'm saying? So what if we could get your intentions to actually align with your actions, which requires regulation? It requires presence.

All right.

And then your soul is at peace with reality. I live in peace. I want you to live in peace too.

Okay.

I'm going to give you one final story. Starts with daily presence. So I mentioned before I was on the mountaintop of Utah, and I went through a radical life shift. I was 48 years old. It's about 2 years ago. And I'm not sure if you guys ever had this moment where you just, there's so much you don't understand that you just want the aching to stop. You just want it to stop. And as I'm sitting there, I just pull out my computer and I start typing and I just pour my heart out, pour my heart out. Lord, I don't understand why this has happened because this has happened again. I'm 48 years old. Why does this keep happening? It was a specific area of my life that I didn't fully appreciate. I couldn't fully understand, and I just poured my heart out. And then for the— I don't know what caused me to do this, but I changed the font color to blue at the bottom of the document, and I said, if there's anything you would share with me, will you please share it with me now? Guys, I could not freaking type fast enough. It was next level. I actually, at the last conference that I saw Brittany, I'd actually read part of this document. There's just not enough time to read it. Otherwise I will or would, because I'm not fearful of it. But there's some key concepts in there. First of all, there's a key concept that says despise not the day of small beginnings or painful transitions.

Thank you, Lord.

So we always get the first part, but we forget to get the last part. We forget that we get focused on the lion. We get focused on the lamb, but we seldom focus on both. Both. And then he says, I'm always talking, but they're never listening.

Wow.

For the next 6 months, every single morning I woke up before I did anything, I would run through a mantra. I am healthy. I am wealthy. I'm wise. I'm a steward of the Most High, and I love you, Stephen. You can steal it. I'd say it 4 times with a breath in the middle. I am healthy. I am wealthy. I am wise. I'm a steward of the Most High, and I love you, Stephen. And then I would grab my journal. I'd grab my pen. I would walk out to my living room at the time, and I would open the journal, and I would write, what I hear you say is— would you guys do me a favor and pull out whatever note-taking device you want and put it in front of you for just a second? Yes, ma'am. I want to invite you to let the divine creator talk to you. We got about 60 seconds, maybe 90 tops. Guys, will you go ahead and start the thing? Would you guys please take a moment with yourself, close your eyes, be present with yourself, and invite the communication. And again, it doesn't have to be what I believe, but I want you to understand how important presence is, because if you can start your day with presence, you'll end every day in presence. If you start your day in anxiety, you'll end the day in anxiety. I love you. Thank you so much.