Ep 147 - "Intro To Conscious Leadership, With Jim Fallon"

0:00 What's up, dude? Well, I jumped in there and preempted the old word. Yeah, did you notice how I ignored you? I did that on purpose. It didn't even affect me. Well, listen, I want... Doicism. If you're a newcomer, welcome. Welcome to Head, Heart, and Boots. And ignore our... This episode is... We're going to focus on the head and the heart. Yeah. I think it's what you'd say. We get into the body... I don't know. I'm going to let you kind of get into the meat and potatoes of this episode, but this is a really great one. And if this is your first time listening to the show, who are we? Floodlight Consulting Group. This is a passion project of Brandon and I. We run a consulting company that serves restoration companies and construction companies all over the United States. Our clients will do over $250 million in revenue this year. Everything from $3 million as a company to $50, $60 million a year in revenue.

0:42 And we help them with all manner of things from sales to operations, leadership, and HR. helping them optimize their business and be an exit ready company. Well, like GRP.com. Where are we going today, dude? Who is this guy? Yeah. So Jim Fallon, he kept using their three, what was it? I know. I guess I agreed to do the actual intro. Yeah. ILG. What's the... So the Conscious Leadership Institute is run by Diana Chapman and Jim Dethmer. Jim Fallon, a serial entrepreneur, has started, grown, and sold technology companies. And he's now in kind of his second, third career. consultant and coach with Conscious Leadership Institute.

1:24 So he was originally coached by Diana Chapman, one of the founders, and then made his way to actually becoming a coach. He's kind of really interesting story too, that transition point for him. 100%. Yeah. You know, what stood out to me as we were listening to this and participating in this with him is... how applicable this whole entire episode is around our teams right now. So you guys know often we record our shows and it can take several weeks for them to actually get released. And so by the time this episode comes out, we're going to be three, four weeks, maybe five weeks in to a very prolific. Yeah, hurricane's full. heavy hitting hurricane that has just come in and slammed into the Carolinas and Florida and done just a ton of devastation.

2:06 And we're actively talking with lots of teams that are, I should rephrase, lots of superheroes that are out there fucking working their asses off. trying to help and support people all while, like we were talking to one of our North Carolina teams where the vast majority of their own people, their homes are affected by this loss. And so I think the opportunity here, guys, is one, we tip ourselves. our hat to you. We're so respectful to the fact of what you guys all do on a day-to-day basis, what you're actively doing right now in the back of just this really devastating storm. And remembering that as leaders, our people and you yourself ultimately have all these things associated with the real life stressors and the danger and the emotional turmoil and task in front of you is affecting you.

2:54 And I think what's interesting about our conversation today with Jim is these are tools and these are mental models that are effectively things that you and your team can be trying to deploy right now. And they will have a positive impact on you as you guys continue to fight the good fight and try to support people differently. in these spaces. And so it's just so relevant. It's something that you guys can apply to your lives right now. It's stuff that like, if you're listening to this show in the cab of your truck, you're likely on your way to a job site or maybe to the command center of your guys' particular cat or storm loss team. This is going to happen to you and you're going to have plenty of opportunities to try and leverage these models in the benefit of you, your team, and the clients that you're serving.

3:36 So listen up. Don't shy away from the concepts or the content. And if you have an opportunity, please deploy it. It'll only help you. It'll only help your people. Yeah. Okay. And we're going to have him back for a part two. Yeah, for sure. At least a part two. There's going to be a lot more forthcoming with Jim. So check it out. And also, by the way, we'll have it in the show notes. But check out the book, especially if you've got road time to and from. It's a great way to kind of clear your head, zero in on some of these principles. The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Jim Dethmer and Diana Chapman. Let's go. Let's get into it. Wow. How many of you have listened to the Head, Heart & Boots podcast? I can't tell you that reaction, how much that means to us. Welcome back to the Head, Heart & Boots podcast.

4:18 I'm Chris. And I'm Brennan. Join us as we wrestle with what it takes to transform ourselves and the businesses we lead. This new camera angle makes my arms look smaller than yours. I'm noticing that and I really appreciate it. I thought you did that on purpose. No, I don't. I didn't. And I am not happy with it. Hey, y'all. Thanks so much for listening to the show. Hey, if you're not already following, please do so. And ultimately share, right? The coolest currency that we have in terms of supporting this is share it with a friend, share it with somebody, a colleague, a peer, one of your downline team members. Let them be able to take advantage of the information you're already leveraging in your favor. And finally, guys, if you hear a show that really moves you, that really moves the needle, will you please leave us a review?

5:02 Those five-star reviews help Right on. And listen, if you're trying to grow your business, you might consider checking out Floodlight's Business Opportunity Audit. It's free. We provide it at no charge. It's actually what we use to assess new clients as they come in. It's 110 point assessment for your business. And we've now decided to give access to the general public for it. So go and take our business opportunity audit at floodlightgrp.com. It's going to help you identify the biggest gaps and opportunities in your business right now. And at the end, it'll assign you a health score to let you know exactly where your business stands right now. So go check it out, floodlightgrp.com forward slash audit and take the BOA.

5:44 It's a great way to get a pulse on your business. All right. Welcome, everybody. Welcome, Jim, to your first appearance on the Head, Heart, and Boots podcast. Jim Fallon from the Conscious Leadership Institute. Good morning. It looks like it might be more good afternoon to you where you're at. Just turned afternoon. Yeah, excited to be here with you guys. Right on. Yeah, it's a cool topic. I know that it's been something that Chris has been, I want to say, like beating a drum on for many, many years. He's brought you guys up. He's brought the team up and some of these concepts. And so I've been excited to finally get in touch with one of you guys and actually get to the game itself. Yeah. Yeah, tiny bit of stage setting. And then I want to just hand it over to Jim and let you roll, dude.

6:26 You know, where this came from is the Knowledge Project podcast, which our audience has heard me promote before, heard us promote before with Shane Parrish. I had Jim Dethmer, one of the founders of the Conscious Leadership Group, Talking about this concept of leading above the line. And I just, I so latched on in that podcast to some of the frameworks you talked about that we're going to discuss today because I'm drawn to these mental models and just ways of thinking about my own self, my business, my role, my inner kind of... my inner thinking and so forth. It's just really helpful sometimes to have these go-to ways of thinking about certain things. And leading above the line, below the line, feedback-rich environment was another thing I latched onto.

7:09 And we immediately started using these concepts with our clients and found them to be very, very clear ways to explain certain critical areas of their business and behavior. And so I since have been reaching out to Conscious Leadership Group every three or four months, just like, hey, I'd love to get... Jim on the podcast. And then Jim, another Jim, you reached out to me just a couple months ago and was like, hey, let's do this thing. And you and I had a great conversation here pre-show. And I'm just so stoked to have you and learn a little bit. Your background as an entrepreneur and what brought you to consulting and then have you coach us and lead us through some of these commitments that you guys focus a lot of your practice on.

7:50 So give us a little bit of that backstory, Jim. How'd you get to here? Yeah, how did I get to here? And then teach us along the way. Yeah, yeah. Oh, so good to be with you guys. Well, the honest version of my story of getting to what we call conscious leadership is that I was kind of a mess of a leader for decades and didn't really know it. I was a workaholic. I actually have a little bit of a connection to sort of, I think, your market. I grew up in a household where we owned a bunch of apartment buildings on the University of Illinois campus and we're restoring them. And my summer jobs were always like painting and doing those types of things. And then I've owned a handful of apartment buildings and renovated them over the years.

8:31 And, of course, as a workaholic, I was doing that at night while I was doing a day job. Yeah. and ran several companies. And my last company startup, we went from like zero to 20 million over a 10-year period. And during that period of time, I just took on all kinds of things that weren't really mine to do. I'm not really an operational leader, but there I was operating. I was under a ton of stress. I wasn't really aware of it. If you'd asked me at the time, hey, how's everything going? I'd be like, it's great. I'm killing it. This is like the dream. And so there was this kind of paradox of being unaware of the real situation that was happening.

9:13 And then in 2015, I had like a real wake up call. My relationship with my business partner was falling apart. I'm sure anybody who's got a business partner out there can relate to the possible pitfalls that one has. And ours had just gotten into a really bad place. And I was stressed out about that. And then I found out I had cancer. And the next day I found I had Lyme disease. And the next day my left retina detached. And it was like, here's the universe giving me a big wake-up call. Fast forward, just for anybody who's wondering, I'm cancer-free now and I'm healthy. And I sort of view that moment as maybe one of the things I'm most grateful for in my life. I had the very good fortune of being in relationship, a coach of mine, Diana Chapman, who is one of the authors of the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, which we're going to talk about today.

9:59 She was in my field. And so she was kind of along with me while all that was happening. And so by the end of 2015, I was exited from that business. I was committed to taking a year off. I had told my wife, you can go to work now, which is something she'd wanted to do. I'm going to stay at home, be a stay at home dad. And over the course of the next year, I found myself at the end of that year think, oh my God, I could actually do coaching. So Diana really helped me find my way. I realized that although I thought I'd been being a good father, I was not as good a father as I thought I was. And then over the course of the following year, started doing some year-long coaches programs, including one with the Conscious Leadership Group. Then about 2019, joined that organization.

10:41 And I've been doing this work ever since, facilitating teams and doing a lot of one-on-one coaching and helping people on their own journey and hopefully helping some avoid having to go as dark as I went along the way to get there. Yeah. I mean, that's unbelievable. All those things happening simultaneously. I don't want to derail us too much from the kind of the core content, but can you just kind of describe for us like mentally, what was being triggered to where you were like, okay, I am open to the fact that I may not have done this so far to the best of my ability or in the optimal mode. What was that mental kind of recognition or as you're going through that catalyst kind of what was happening for you mentally?

11:24 Yeah. Yeah, I'm kind of like, I appreciate that question. So as I kind of tune back in, I noticed I got a little swirl in my belly over here right now. It was really terrifying. And so what you're pointing at, at least over here at me as I listen to the question is, my whole identity came under fire. Like I'm not the person I thought I was. And so I didn't physically die from cancer, but my ego, there was some ego death along the way, and I'm not sure how much different it feels. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Have that experience. But yeah, I saw my, I sort of saw myself and I saw another path and yeah, and I'm on it and it feels good. And I'm so grateful because I think a lot of people meet those moments and for whatever reason, don't find their way to a place like I found my way to.

12:11 So very grateful for how this has worked out for me. Yeah. Yeah. Love it. Super transparent. Yeah, I have a feeling you'll get into it, but I guess my question was similar is what does... So being conscious or consciousness, I think honestly is a bit of an elusive thing for a lot of people. You hear that and I think maybe some people hear that and there's a bit of a woo-woo. Like, what are we talking about here? You know, kind of action maybe. Yeah, let's break it down. Yeah, yeah. So what did that look like for you as you started to develop this consciousness? You said you started to see yourself in the process of that cancer experience. What does that mean? Can you describe that more? Yeah, I think I'll answer your question against the backdrop of what do we even mean by conscious leadership on the whole term because that's kind of our topic today.

12:57 Yeah. And I'll start with leadership. And the way we like to hold it is leadership is taking responsibility for the influence we have in the world. Mm-hmm. It doesn't necessarily mean you got a bunch of direct reports or you run a company or anything. Everybody has influence. We have relationships. We have community. We have families. We have influence. So the idea is we take responsibility for the influence that we're having wherever we are. So that's the leadership part. And then we marry it up with this concept of consciousness. And yeah, consciousness is all over the place these days. I mean, everybody loves using the term and I get it. It can be kind of woo. Over here, it simply means being here now and being aware of what's happening for me, in me.

13:45 So it's like self-awareness. Mm-hmm. Back to like you, so I could start seeing myself. It's like, I would say that I could summarize what happened during that 2015 and 16 period is like I was growing in self-awareness massively. learning about my behavioral patterns that I probably picked up when I was six years old that are still kind of running my reactivity. We all have reactivity. Stuff happens and we get reactive. We get triggered. Everybody. And so our body of work is really helping people see like, what's your recipe for reactivity? We all have our own. And seeing ourselves and how we are reactive, we can then shift.

14:28 We can grow up from those things. We have more choice. And so if you work with the conscious leadership group and get coached, you're really on a self-awareness journey. Yeah. Super interesting. Yeah, that is interesting, man. Yeah. Well, let's start to dive into some of these commitments. Where did it begin for you? Because you went through that whole experience of sort of coming into the conscious leadership environment. Where should we begin? Yeah. Yeah. Well, the book, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, is sort of the tome of our organization. And there's a bunch of different models in it, in addition to there being 15 commitments. So we'll be pulling out from this throughout the course of our conversation. And the simplest tool we have and the entry-level tool we have is called Align.

15:12 Where are you in any moment? Are you above this line or are you below the line? So something happens in the environment. The employee comes with the same complaint they've been coming with. My kid writes on the wall. I don't get as much chicken on my chicken salad as I wanted. There's some major conflict in my life. We don't make our numbers. The restoration project doesn't get completed on time. The vendor doesn't deliver the stuff. These are just things that happen in our life. And then how we're being with it is what we're looking at here. So we have content and then we have our context. And the way we like to check in, how am I being with life? How am I being with the thing that just happened? Is to use this above and below the line model.

15:54 So, I mean, I still use it every day. And to answer your question, this was really the on-ramp. And for everybody listening out there, I would encourage you, if you're taking anything away from today, is just to start tracking yourself. Am I above the line or below the line at any given moment? So above the line is like, I'm open. I feel curious. I'm basically in a state of trust. I'm trusting what's happening here. And when I'm below the line, I'm in a little bit of reactivity. I'm maybe a little constricted. I'm not trusting all the way what's happening. I might even say I'm experiencing a little bit of a threat. And what I would say is our observation is that 90% of people are below the line 90% of the time. And it's not a problem. We are like evolutionary design of a human being is to scan the environment for threats, find them and react.

16:40 So being below the line is a normal and natural state of living. And we're not in our highest state of creativity when we're below the line. So I like to say, in any given moment, can you just locate yourself? Am I above the line or below the line? So that's where I'd start. And that's where I still play. I've been playing ever since, you know, those early days of meeting Diana Chapman and then finding my way here. Unpack that a little bit for us. I mean, it's definitely something that Chris and I have batted back and forth in previous shows to a certain extent, just like us trying to be aware of this and take stock, if you will. Like, what does that actually look like? One other thing too is I appreciate that recognition of, look, we're designed in such a way that you're not wrong when you're this below the line posture, right?

17:28 Like this isn't right or wrong language per se, but it's just more of a... taking an active role in identifying where you're at so that you can have a choice. I really liked how you labeled that. Like it gives you more solutions to choose from potentially if you're more aware in the moment. But for us mentally, like what does this feel look like? Give me a couple scenarios that someone might be experiencing. And then what does it feel like look like if we're in one of those positions, you know, above or below? Yeah, sure. As we just started our call, my daughter's home's sleeping in, not going to school today. And just as we started our call here, I saw her pop out on the porch and look at me. And I went below the line for a minute. And I thought, oh, darn, what's going on with Nova?

18:10 And then, you know, just came back. So I noticed a little reactivity just as that happened. And then back, I'm in presence again. There's how it happens just subtly. A couple of days ago, I got an email from somebody and I triggered the hell out of myself with the way that they recasted something that had occurred between us. And I'm like, how can you see the situation that way? And so for the next couple of hours, I was kind of aware that I am triggered. And then we use a tool, we make it into called the drama triangle. So I was just sort of being with my trigger and not making it a problem. Because there's something for me to learn about myself as I'm experiencing myself in reactivity. There's a couple of examples of how it might look.

18:52 So, but in terms of that, like below the line, like you've said something about there's a little bit of fear there. There's this or closed off. I'm kind of like thinking to myself, like, where are these situations that when actually we were just having one today? Yeah. So it's not being too descriptive in this scenario. We have one every day. We have one just about every day, right? Probably every day. We have this interaction with an individual. Something happens and that interaction reminds me, right? It affirms a previous experience or maybe a way that I responded or reacted or felt when I ran into this challenge or had this type of conversation that, And so even though we weren't having this conversation at face value, something was referenced.

19:36 And I immediately jumped to, oh, that affirms my thought, my story in my head that you're XYZ or you're being this way. And now I'm starting to act in that. I'm thinking about, okay, how do I prevent this from happening in the future? Is there a way for me to... How do I prepare for if a different decision has to be made and we have to drive towards an uncomfortable outcome? Like I am in it. I am racing around and I'm in this reactive state and I have yet to just slow down and say, you know what? That may actually not actually look and smell like this thing that I've had as a previous experience. Like in that kind of scenario, like what are you hearing? Like what's happening to me in that scenario as it relates to this above or below the line, right? Yeah, sure.

20:17 So can you feel how, when it happened, you got constricted? Did you feel a little bit of constriction? Yeah, there's tension. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we could say you're scanning the environment. We're always scanning the environment for threats. And we like to say they're going to be threats to either your approval, your control, or your security. Oh, okay. Okay. I would ask you, like, just tune in to this moment that you're sharing. And did it feel like mostly a threat to your approval, a threat to your control, or a threat to your security? Control. Yeah. So somehow there's something in you that knows that it's a threat to your control. And like, where in your body do you notice that? Where in your body do you notice whatever...

20:58 Well, definitely like anytime that I begin to feel as if I need to defend against or react to prevent, I would say normally it's like probably gut tension maybe. Like I just, I feel that kind of, it's almost like you get nervous, like nervous stomach. And then I think for me too, I always feel pressure or strain around my shoulders and lower like the base of my neck, base of my head. That's so interesting because I physically observe that in you. Oh, really? Yeah. I feel like when you feel like, I couldn't put words to it, but we've worked together for so long. There's a little bit of like a barreling of the chest. Shoulders come forward. Yeah. Yeah, it's great.

21:38 And are you experiencing that right now? And even if it's only like a smaller percentage than usual as we are kind of tapping into it? Yeah, actually, probably so. Yeah. And it's kind of like, that's what's providing me the intel to give to you. Like I'm kind of doing, yeah, I felt it here. Right. Or I'm, yep. It's right here that I get that response. In your body. Yeah. This is so great. So you're willing to stay with me for another minute or two here on this? For sure. Let's do it. Yeah. Yeah. So you got a little, like, it's a little, what's it, it's like a swirl or a fluttering. What's in the belly? Yeah. I just nodded, right? A little nodding. Constriction. Yeah. Restricting. Yeah, I like to give it ING words to give it freedom to move. Yeah. Yeah, and so I just want you to put your attention on that. So something happens, control's a threat, I go below the line, and there's a body that's having an experience with that.

22:26 And so there's no problem being below the line. We don't even control when we go below the line. The whole name of the game here is to grow in self-awareness and just to recognize when we are. So I'm just inviting you into feeling that little constriction, that swirl, maybe the tightening in the shoulders and just saying, welcome body, here we are. So this moment we just slow down and it's like, okay, I'm below the line. Now we might not like what we see. A lot of times when we see things we don't know about ourselves, catch our blind spots, we don't like it. Mm-hmm. We like to think we know ourselves. It's like egoic. It's like just the way the ego kind of helps us move around the world. So when we do see those things, we want to meet them with acceptance. I got scared.

23:07 My control's a threat. I went into solutions. I started thinking about all the plan B's and C's that I need to come up with. And so I ask you, in this moment, can you just accept yourself for being below the line and having your control of threat and experiencing a little scare? Yeah. Yeah, I think I can because it's an option. I think that if by default, I'm constantly assigning right or wrong, good or bad. Right. So I was going to say, I shouldn't be feeling this way. Exactly. Yeah. I think my knee jerk response is like, and then I take a few seconds to think through it. And I'm like, dude, you got all worked up about nothing. Why'd you get all crazy? Like, right. And I'm judging. That was a response to the situation.

23:47 I'm assigning value almost immediately to it. Hmm. Yeah. So here's the invitation. If you wanted to practice with the tools that we're talking about today, you'd catch yourself the next time the similar situation happens. You'd be like, oh, I'm below the line. Can I just accept myself for being in a threatened state? Just slow down and check in. So as you do that right now and you say yes to the question, give yourself like a breath of acceptance, I like to say. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me what you notice. I would say it almost gives me emotional bandwidth to maybe... I mean, we've thought about this a lot. So this answer is a little... I mean, it's definitely thought through a bit. But it does give me what Chris has labeled in the past as emotional bandwidth to make a different choice or a different selection.

24:34 So like... When I hear you affirm that just because you're below the line in the minute doesn't mean that it's a bad response. It just allows me to sit in that and almost ask the question. So instead of acting or responding out of the good or bad, the assignment that I would have normally gave it, like I'm actually just kind of hanging here in the pocket for a minute and asking myself the question, like, is my response appropriate? Because maybe it is. And maybe right now I'm thinking, well, it may not be the go-to. So I could technically do something different because I've got some emotional bandwidth to process it and think about it before I act. Beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. I love this concept of emotional bandwidth. Yeah. It's like when we're below the line, our field of vision can kind of get narrowed I mean, a state of threat is literally like, let's keep the organism alive.

25:23 Yeah. Amygdala kicks in, you get a chemical cocktail of adrenaline and other chemicals going through the bloodstream. And one of the things is to like the ventral vagal nervous system. We got wanted to get technical starts to shut down a little bit because like, you know, being in a connection with you isn't as important when I'm trying to save myself. Yeah, right. When I'm not in a state of threat, trying like needing to save myself, boom, it starts to open up again. And it takes a few minutes because the chemical cocktail that got put into place has to dissipate. So the amygdala has to stop firing and then there's still chemicals in there doing their thing. So that's why slow down. I can acknowledge that I'm a threat. It's called the three A's. I can acknowledge it.

26:04 I can allow it. Like we were naming it and pointing to it. And you were sort of putting your attention on the belly and the shoulders. And then accept it. Can I just accept myself? Not accepting the situation or the person or anything like that. I want to be clear about that. It has nothing to do with any of that anyway. It's like, we're right now into, oh, right, this is how I trigger myself. What am I learning about how I do it? Like what I hear you saying, you go into solutions and you start solutioning, which gets you out of the experience. And then I hear you label that you got triggered as good or bad. And you don't like that about yourself, but then you move out of it and you're like, okay, at least I got out of it quickly. Yeah. Just the repeating pattern. Yep. We're offering a whole different way here.

26:44 And that's like, hey, scared little one. Hey, sweetheart. It's okay to be scared. I can accept myself for being triggered right now. You had him as sweetheart. Yeah, you had, yeah, yeah, man. Sweetheart, brother. Yeah, I'm just thinking to myself, like our avatar, if you will, like of our average listener, I think we could probably, it's overgeneralization, but we'd classify most of us kind of being in that more driver, hardcore, grit, do the thing, do what it takes, adapt and overcome. Yeah. And I think that when I slow down to think about this kind of stuff, there's a bit of a wrestling match inside me of the value, like the actual material value.

27:24 Is this a woo-woo practice or is this something that I can legitimately leverage in my favor or in the favor of the team's performance or the culture or whatever? Right? Like all these things. And I would say like, just even in this little experience that we just went through is, yeah, I think so. Because I could have, and I would have normally reacted a very specific way. And I've been in that situation enough times that when I did react that way, I didn't necessarily net what I wanted on the other side. Certainly something took place, but I've also audited some of those experiences and I didn't always get what I wanted from it. And so I feel like there's a tangible way now to try something else before it's too late to potentially net a different result that maybe I am able to label later as good or bad or better or worse.

28:16 Here's one of the ways I like to think about this above and below the line. I say to all my clients, it's not better to be above the line than below the line at any given moment. That's just human nature. And you might think, well, that's bullshit because it's obviously better to be above the line. So I would say, yes, wink, it is, but it's an emergent property of the way we're talking about practicing. So I get into devotion to naming when I'm above the line and below the line, and everything As I do that, I grow in self-awareness. And by growing in self-awareness, I catch myself before I go into the triggered states. I catch myself pre-solutioning, pre-shaming myself for being triggered.

28:57 And as I start catching myself, emergent property, I go below the line less often, maybe not as far below. I don't stay there as long. I'm still going. Yeah. But it's so, with so much more awareness and therefore ease. So it is better, but not right now. Right now, it's not better. What's really important is the self-awareness game. That trumps whether it's better to be above or below right now. Because that is a way we can be in the world that sort of, I guess, rewires our nervous system in such a way that, that we move through with more creativity and more ease, more space, more emotional bandwidth is, I got my new term here in the show.

29:37 Yeah. You know what this makes me think of, man, is this whole self-awareness piece is, you know, we work with dozens of CEOs and owners and senior leaders all the time and in all parts of the country, different size companies and so forth. Yeah. And I think every now and then we'll have an experience of that owner and then we'll hear a story from one of their employees about how this owner just lost their shit in a way that we're like, no, no way. Like we almost can't believe it. the behavior. And it's difficult for us to reconcile that. And even as I hear you talking, I just think, I guess it's a reminder of why do we do that? Because I think in my own way, I do that. People have an experience of Chris and it's a partial experience because my kids, my wife, or my business partners, my colleagues, my employees that I've had, they have these other experiences of me reacting in certain situations to where I'm almost not, I'm really not conscious of how I'm being experienced by the other person.

30:37 And of course, I like to think that that's changed a lot over the years, right? As I've become more aware of this. But to me, that's what came up for me as you were sharing that. It's like, I think a lot of times we walk around very unaware of how other people are experiencing us. At different times, we have this concept of who we are and how we act as a leader and all that stuff. But then these moments occur where we're below the line and we're not aware of it. And people have this altogether different experiences with us. Yeah. Well, one of the things I love about playing with this tool is, especially with anybody else who's playing the game with me, I like to call it a game above the line, below the line, is that I can just return to a conversation and say, I was totally below the line.

31:17 I think you know that. Here's what my below the line experience was. I want to take responsibility for that. And there's, you know, common language and dialogue. And also, since we agree, if we're playing the game together, that there's no problem being below the line. line, like with my romantic partner here, like she goes below the line, gets mad at me and it's not a problem. Like people are in reactivity. I don't have to take it personally. Sometimes I do. And then we have a fight and then we come back together and talk it through whatever we, you know, our process. But I don't, I don't take things nearly as personally as I used to all the time. It's okay to be reactive. Yeah. That is interesting. So it was really healthy.

31:58 So what I'm hearing you say is, and you were referencing two people with an agreement that we recognize this, we're acknowledging this phenomenon that takes place. But let's say that it's not mutual. Just the fact that you as a leader is you're leaning into this idea of becoming more self-aware of somehow thinking through in the moment, what's going on with me right now? Why am I potentially responding that way. Like, I differentiate this situation from something that's happened before, whatever, is that there's also now this other layer of, if you're practicing that and you're thinking cognitive above, below the line, then it sounds like you're able to give more grace to the person across the table, whether it be a peer, a partner, a downline employee, where you're going, okay, there's a strong chance this individual is just swept up in an emotional reaction to whatever is going on.

32:49 And I now can give myself some room to react because I'm giving them more grace in the moment that this isn't necessarily a personal attack on me. They are reacting. Yeah, I want to tie it back to the little experience where you and I had together a minute ago where I was asking you, can you just accept yourself for being below the line? So in practicing that way, giving myself grace, practicing what grace looks like inside here, inside me, I become the vessel that has grace available for others. Oh, mm. It's an inside game, always. Yeah, yeah. And then people will feel that. Conversations will go differently. But not because I figured it out in my mind how to give grace to people.

33:33 Because I've been practicing grace in here. And then practicing grace out there too. So both people don't have to be playing the same game for these tools to pay benefits because we're doing our own work in here. Yeah. God, that's such a great way to articulate it, man, because I think all of us have had a lot, most of us have had lots and lots of exposure to the John Maxwell style of leadership 201. Like do these behaviors, do this tactic, this strategy, take this approach in your communications and like all of this kind of stuff. And yet a lot of us still find ourselves in these same reactive cycles. And it's like, God, I've read all the books. Yeah. What's going on with me? You know, like, and what you're describing just feels so essentially true is that how in the world am I supposed to offer any kind of acceptance or compassion for other people after a difficult exchange if I haven't learned how to give that to myself?

34:26 Yeah, I was so guilty of that throughout my career. Yeah. I didn't even know it. That was one of the things more specifically that I was pointing to earlier. Liftify.com forward slash bloodlight. You've heard Brandon and I talk a bunch of times about the importance of Google reviews. Maybe you even heard our episode with Zach Garrett, the CEO and founder. Recency, consistency, two of the most important things when it comes to maximizing the benefit from your Google reviews. Why not use an outside partner? Liftify is targeting 20 to 25% conversion, right? So if you do a thousand jobs a year, you ought to be adding right now, 200 to 250 reviews a year, every single year. If you're not doing that, you owe it to yourself to get a free demo from liftify.com.

35:11 See their system, see how it works, see how affordable it is. I promise you, you'll thank us. Liftify.com forward slash bloodlight. Thank you. You know, we spend a lot of money and a lot of attention trying to get that first call. And one of the things that we do once it happens is sometimes we leave it to chance, right? Who picks up the phone? How do they respond? How do they walk that client into a relationship with us? Well, one of the benefits of partnering with a team like AnswerForce.com is we can systemize that. We can make it more consistent. We can also have backup for when our teams need that help, right? Somebody goes on vacation. Somebody's out sick. Yeah. We get a storm surge. We get cat event. All sorts of things can have an impact on how we receive that client.

35:53 But the most important thing is they need to know that they've chosen the right team. And so AnswerForce.com can support you, be a bolt-on partner to help you consistently produce an awesome onboarding experience with that first call with your client. So AnswerForce.com forward slash... blood light. That's great. CNR Magazine, we're friends with all the folks at CNR. Michelle and her team, they do a great job of keeping their ear to the ground and reporting all the important information from our industry. Right? You want to stay up on all the M&A activity and what the latest best practices are for selling your company successfully. Right? She's got that. Great articles about all the four quadrants of our business. Right?

36:33 CNR is constantly pushing out great material and leveraging great writers and subject matter experts in our industry. Right? It is the water cooler of our industry. So if you're not subscribed, go to cnrmagazine.com. Follow them on LinkedIn. Follow Michelle on LinkedIn. Trust us. If you're trying to stay on top of everything happening in the industry, your best destination is cnrmagazine.com. You guys, many of you have already heard about actionable insights and the training and the technical expertise that they bring to the industry. But how many of you are already leveraging the actionable insights profile for Xactimate? That's the game changer. It's essentially an AI tool that's walking alongside of you as you write your estimate, bringing things to your attention that should be added, that could be considered.

37:20 All of them items that increase our profitability, increase the effectiveness and the consistency of that scope. And it can do anything from helping a new team member assimilate some estimating best practices. And it also helps the grizzled vets add back that few percent that we've just forgot over time. So actionable insights, get insights.org forward slash floodlight and take a look at what the actionable insights exactimate profile could be doing for you and your team. So along those lines, just because again, I'm thinking about, right, business owners, business leaders, I'm wrestling with this idea of, yeah, I think it's great. I want to give my people grace.

38:01 And I'm really frustrated. I'm not getting the results or the level of accountability. I'd like to get my business already, right? So help me understand the differentiation between these two things, right? This leveraging a tool or a mental model of leading above or below the How is that contrasted against a lack of standard or a lack of commitment to accountability? Because obviously you growing a 20 plus million dollar operation and it wasn't your only business endeavor. You've been there. So how do you differentiate between the two and still live out this tool that you believe is relevant and super valuable, right?

38:43 Yeah, it's a great question. So I like to think of my, call it the above and below the line, my consciousness practice. as something that I'm just continuously doing. Growth mindset, I'm an unfolding process. And I really do believe and have experienced in myself and others that this model works. The more I grow in self-awareness, the more spacious I become as a leader, the more creativity I have access to. Now, in any given moment, I may be some degree of triggered or not, and I may have reactivity and I may need to go clean that up. I'm going to hold standards against which I hold people accountable. We might use EOS or some other system to create.

39:24 I mean, we like to say we want to create a culture where people take responsibility. Mm-hmm. rather than I hold them accountable. So it's always an invitation for people to take responsibility. I'll take my responsibility. If somebody's underperforming, I really got to look at how I'm creating an underperformer in my field. You know, I'm on my team. This person seems to keep complaining about the same thing. How am I creating a complainer? What am I doing? So I want to own all my parts first and then ask others to take their 100% responsibility too. So that's the shift. Yeah. And I would also say that you can experience any emotion from above the line and any emotion from below the line, including anger.

40:06 You can say anything and do anything from above the line and below the line. It's more the energetic quality from which it's being transmitted. Can you give an example of that? Because that's, I think, maybe harder for uninitiated to... to understand is because I tend to associate anger with bad. This is old thinking. I kind of know this to not be true inherently, but I think most of us, I get mad, that's bad. Especially if I react or I take action or I behave in a bad way from that anger. I think it's usually connected or we associate the two. I did this bad thing. I said this terrible thing in my anger. That's bad. Yep. Can you give an example maybe of when you've been angry and yet you've been able to stay above the line and what that maybe sounded like or felt like for you?

40:47 Yeah. I mean, where my attention goes first is, of course, we all think that anger is bad. It is really culturalized. I grew up, don't be angry. I grew up getting feedback from my primary caregivers, my parents, that I wasn't sort of smiled upon when I was being angry. I wasn't welcome. Yeah. That's pretty pervasive. And then it accompanies the angry person. So we've got a sort of culturalized and socialized norm that anger is bad, which is I think why you're asking the question. But then when we're angry, we can be below the line, blaming, blaming others, looking to assign blame. We can be, we're pointing it out at others.

41:30 And what I would say is anger is just an emotion that's flowing in and on the body. And it actually, all the emotions have wisdom. And anger specifically is the wisdom of where's there a boundary that needs to be held here that's not being held? What's happening here that's not in service of my people? Now, if I'm below the line and starting to turn that on like, it's your fault, Chris, that this is happening. Now I'm below the line, anger is not friendly, and it gets a bad rap. And rightfully so, it doesn't feel great. But I could also say, you know, in a meeting, it's like as a CEO, I might say, okay, I'm I don't know what's going on here, but customer complaints are up 40% over the last year, and it needs to stop. Now, there's no blame. I'm residing in like a boundary. It's like, we need to get our attention focused here.

42:12 Our business is at risk, and we can't stand for it any longer. So I could say those same words from below the line, but from above the line, over in this consciousness, there's no blame. There's no criticism. It's more like, wake up. Come on, everybody. We need, there's something in the field here that needs to shift. Mm-hmm. And then we could play with fear. Fear says, what am I have not yet directly faced about this situation? What do I need to wake up to? Sadness is asking us what needs to be let go of and grieved. Joy is saying what needs to be celebrated. So sexual creative energy is like what wants to be born? What's the next thing we want to do? You said sexual energy? It's sexual creative energy. That's right. The energy. Yeah. Everybody that was starting to fade out, Jim, they're back.

42:54 They're back, man. They're back in line with them. Yeah, beautiful. So we would say those are the five core emotions. Yeah. Sadness, anger, joy, and sexual creative energy, and that they're all here to teach us something and they can all be expressed from above the line or below the line. Does that help with the anger example? Does that? Yeah, I think it's really great, actually, because, you know, I think especially for owners, I'm just going to key in on them or anybody that's leading a team. We have these situations where there's righteous anger to a certain extent, like principles, You know, whether it be based on a core value, a service promise, a delivery model or level like that's not being met. And there is righteous anger associated with that.

43:35 This is a failure to be what we've said we're going to be. And I think then it's important for us to understand what at least what I'm hearing you say is. No one's telling you to move into a passive state. No one's telling you to move the pendulum from over here all the way to the other side in a blanket allowance or forgiveness. It's just be more conscious to why you're feeling the way you're feeling and asking yourself some questions around that. Is it appropriate? If so, lean in. If it's not, if there's an opportunity to react potentially differently or communicate differently, you've got access to a wider array of tools to deploy in that particular situation.

44:17 Like that's, I'm oversimplifying, but that's what I'm hearing you say. Am I off target? Are we in... Well, I want to say yes, and. And the and is I want to separate out like what's happening right now and then how we are organizing ourselves to rewire for more spaciousness over time. So any given moment... I may or may not have access to greater spaciousness and creativity. And I may be to any degree more feeling more righteous. And sometimes I just want to stay below the line. Like that email I told you about that I got. Yeah. I didn't want to shift. I was like, you know what? It feels pretty good to be right about this because I'm right. And it feels good to be righteous.

44:57 And I'm doing it from some awareness. But I'm just, I wasn't interested in shifting in the moment. And sometimes that's the way it is. And that's okay. Mm-hmm. So we're just practicing. Remember, conscious, being here now. What's happening right now? I don't actually control it as much as I think I might like. So it's just getting practice. Every moment of reactivity is a moment of practice. And in the practice, then over time, what you're pointing to as the benefits or the positive outcomes start to emerge. And so you'll notice that you're being with your reactive child a little differently than you were a couple months ago. Yeah. You might say to you, what have you been up to lately? Because you just seem more of a chill than usual. Yeah.

45:37 So it kind of sneaks up on you in a little way if you stick with the practice. Yeah, that's interesting. This is good, man. Well, we have, I feel like this is probably one of those conversations we could spend three hours together and turn this into a campfire setting. I want to stay conscious of your time. Walk us through a couple of the other important commitments that you'd like to take us through. Yeah, let's see. I guess I think I'd just say something about the book, since a lot of people listening probably haven't even heard of this book, how it's organized and how it might be relevant for them. So it's called The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. There's these 15 commitments that are in there that are all super practical. They're actually all found objects.

46:18 The genius of the book, in my opinion, is how everything's organized. And the book is an invitation to shift from what we would call to me consciousness to by me consciousness. So to me consciousness is the world's happening to me. Like the vendors aren't performing, my kids are doing this and so on. It's like there's a victim consciousness. There's a disempoweredness about it. Most don't realize, I didn't, still don't when I'm doing it, realize that I'm sort of oriented in a way where I feel like it's happening to me. Hmm. I'm kind of a passive bystander in how all this stuff's happening. Yeah. I'm sure everybody can relate to that to some degree. Oh, yeah. The book is all about shifting to like, how can I take responsibility?

46:59 The shift move from to me to by me consciousness is responsibility. I'm the creator of my results. And what are my results? Everything that's happening in my life, even if I'm complaining about it. Do I wake up in the morning and say that I'm committed to being in a crappy relationship with whoever it is? No, I don't wake up doing that. But the fact is, I've been in a crappy relationship with them for years. So over here, taking responsibility, I say I'm committed to being in a crappy relationship with that person because I am. So I own it. So the whole book is about owning our results. I'm saying whatever my results are, that's what I'm committed to. It's a brave step. That's so good. Okay, I think that was a perfect segue into talking about the feedback-rich environment.

47:42 Because that responsibility piece was something that I remember Jim Dethmer hammering on in a very unforeseen way. I hadn't thought about feedback before. in the same way that Jim presented it. Can you walk us into that whole feedback-rich environment and how we ought to be thinking about feedback as a leader? How do we create an environment where we're freely giving and receiving feedback from one another? Yeah, so let's see. Super practical. First of all, for me, I solicit feedback from my colleagues and everybody in my field. And E to creating a feedback-rich environment is to be a being who can receive feedback without taking it personally.

48:23 If an employee or a direct report gives a leader feedback and they become reactive to it, guess who's not going to get more feedback? Yeah. So, and that takes practice because it can be hard to get critical feedback. But yet, if we want to grow, we want to get that feedback. Yeah. So I would say, start with a relationship. Start with one relationship that you want to do this with and say, hey, I want to start practicing getting feedback. Could you give me feedback? We've actually got some documents on our website that you can use as prompts to solicit feedback from one another. You can do this with your teams. You can do this with your... management team. So we're going to start giving each other feedback. And then when you're receiving feedback, somebody might say, Hey, how was that presentation that I did?

49:06 Or how was this job that I did? And you'd say, Oh, I think you did a great job. Then you want to get specific, say, okay, well, what specifically can you give me one thing that you really liked about it? Great. Okay. And then if there was one thing I could do better, like just trust yourself, like what's the one thing you think I could have done that would have made it even better? Like ask those questions to get specific feedback that you're going to be able to be actionable on. And then when you get it, just do your best to say, well, whatever is authentically true for you. You might say, ooh, that one hurts a little bit, but so grateful you're willing to tell me. And I want more of this. First become the being that can receive feedback and then begin giving feedback in a way.

49:46 We like to say feedback is brief, like really short, very specific and authentic. Mm-hmm. So just start following that model. And then if people seem to be triggered, checking in, say, hey, it looks like I might have triggered you a little bit. I want to be in this feedback game with you. So over time, and we do a lot of much deeper work than I'm describing here, I'm kind of like just painting the broad brushstrokes. Like the first six commitments of the 15 commitments are kind of organized around self-awareness, growing in self-awareness, being in relationship with the new self-awareness that I have. Part of what happens in those six commitments as you sort of download those as a practice is that you begin to take things less personally. And then you become a person that actually models taking things less personally, whether it be direct feedback or just generally.

50:32 And when a team does it together and they start taking things less personally, like what I observe, we do these things called conscious culture programs for leadership teams. They last about nine months. It's pretty intensive. At the beginning, everybody's kind of withholding things and not saying their whole truths because they don't want to piss somebody off. And they also don't really want to hear the whole truth because they might, you know, they don't want to look back at one or the other, and like all these like interpersonal dynamics. But what's going on for that team is that all the wisdom and all those brains is not on the table for everybody to work with. It's a massive competitive disadvantage. I think one of the easiest taps of value for an organization is to stop taking shit personally with each other and get it on the table. Let's do this together.

51:13 There's some human behavioral stuff that needs to get sussed out along the way. And that's what our work's all about. Yeah. I remember from this, I'm trying to draw on this conversation that Deathmer was having with Shane Parrish. And I recall him talking about just our default reaction, our default internal language that we tend to have when somebody as a leader comes to us with critical feedback. I remember him talking about how we tend to filter feedback based on the person's perceived worthiness. Yeah. Or I can't remember the exact language, but it was just like, hey, okay, how long has this person been in our industry? How long has this employee been with our company? How much do they know? What kind of was their education level?

51:53 That we're like, our de facto response to feedback as leaders often is we first filter it. does this person deserve for me to listen to them? Like, is their input valuable to me or not? Is like the first pass-through filter? When I heard him say that, am I getting this right? Is this, am I remembering this? Yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of threads we can pull out on how people receive feedback. And this is definitely one of them. Yeah. Yeah. And I think he was talking about that shift in default behavior of instead training ourselves to first think, how is this true versus does this have any truth? Like, how is this feedback true or valuable or important versus is it?

52:37 And you want to talk about that a little bit? Because I just found that so impactful, I guess, in my own head, the way I tend to perceive it. Add it to the other things I was saying is that as you receive feedback, that's just the question to always be asking yourself. If you've heard it only one time from one person ever, still ask, how is it true? But if you hear it a second time or a third time, you better get awake because there's really something that's true. Especially if you don't think it's true. And especially if it kind of pisses you off. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. I mean, we're asking ourselves internally at CLG. We're giving each other feedback all the time. Yeah. Always like, oh, how is that true? How is that true? And it is, it's a trainable move. Yeah.

53:17 You know, it's interesting when you guys talk about this, for me, just with a little bit of military background, like my immediate knee-jerk thought is thinking about special operations groups and small teams and how there's just this extremely high level of accountability to performance. Like period, there just is. Miraculously, what these men and women are capable of doing and accomplishing in these small teams because this just aggressive level of accountability to a high level of performance. And I think that one of the things that you see in those environments commonly as well is there's... Basically, and I wouldn't say that it's right or wrong. I'm just saying it is, that there's also an aggressive calling out of a failure to meet those levels of accountability, those baseline standards or metric.

54:04 Like there's almost an overly aggressive commitment to communicating it. Like that's the badge of honor, right? That you can see. in the bullish, most aggressive way possible. But I think what the outcome is that's really probably is underrated is the fact that, yeah, but at the end of the day, those teams iterate their behaviors or their delivery to meet or exceed the standard period. And because they do it collectively as a group, they're able to achieve really important things. And I think one of the things that you highlighted is that lack of competitive advantage that we're not earning, we're not using and leveraging in our favor because we're unwilling to be honest and we're unwilling to talk about our behavior or our commitment or our deliverable.

54:46 unwilling or afraid to have conflict with a peer or a teammate and call out respectfully, hey, you're behaving like X, but if you did Y, it could potentially change the outcome, right? And we'd all net a positive return. I would say internally as a company... This is one of those things that we've been failing forward on pretty aggressively for a while. And I believe we experience on the regular the outcomes of a team that's willing to call each other out and put our shit on the table and say, hey, man, you keep telling me you're going to do X, but this happens. Or we say as a team, we're committed to drawing this line in the sand, yet we behave this way, which shows that we're... And so we're able to net that return.

55:27 So I guess that was a really long-winded way to say, don't undervalue the power, the opportunity cost associated with the fact that if you've created a culture or a team that's afraid to speak up, that's afraid to call each other out in a professional way, in a respectful way, that you are actually costing your team a great deal. Whether that's coming from you as an individual or you based on your leadership role or where you are in the organization. I just want to put a light on what you just said. There is power in our ability to create this feedback-rich environment. There's something we all net gain out of that commitment, whether it be an increase in our competency or our skill set or whatever our team's.

56:11 Yeah, I love that. I just want to double-click on military teams that maybe do it in an aggressive, I think you said, way. Yeah. Say that can be done from above the line and below the line. Yeah, absolutely. It's just like, this is our culture. The risk is life. And so we're not fucking around. Yeah. And it's not personal. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's a huge point, right? Because we've even talked to certain... Business leaders, we all have our own personality. Right? Period. Right? We're all our own people. And if you attempt to build a team and a company and a culture that's not you, if we're honest, it's just not going to be a good experience. Like it's not going to align with kind of the fundamental things that make you you your core value system, all those things.

56:57 And so inevitably, and I think it's totally appropriate, this is my opinion. that businesses take on the culture of their owners, founders, key leaders. There's nothing wrong with that. Now, we also need to be comfortable with the fact not everyone's going to fit on that bus. That just maybe not everybody aligns with that. But if we're convicted with that, right? And we create a culture of accountability. And maybe like you said, the way that we communicate it is accepted by the broader group. Then there's that. There's that we are being aggressive potentially. are communicating against the facts and holding each other accountable, but we can be doing that above the line. I think we need the freedom to recognize that because I don't think that that's commonplace, right?

57:38 I would say the same thing with maybe a little, I don't know if this is a twist or not, but the consciousness of the organization is a reflection of the consciousness of the leader. If the leader sees anything about the company culture that he or she doesn't like, look in the mirror. Say that again. Say the first phrase again. I think that was good. The consciousness of the company or the organization is a reflection of the consciousness of the leader. If the leader sees something in their organization they don't like, own it. Take responsibility. How is this a reflection of how I'm leading? Don't blame. Yeah, that's huge. Huge. That's awesome.

58:18 Okay. I feel like that was a great sort of note for us to land on. Man, this has been really a great conversation. And I think we're definitely going to want to do part two. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're going to have to... Yeah, there's so much more. We're going to get more into the weeds. Yeah, there's so much more for us to do, man. But I really appreciate you guys. Yeah, no, we appreciate you too. And I think it's also a great opportunity for us to, we're going to put the information on the book, 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership by Jim Dethmer and Diana Chapman, right? Did they co-write? And a woman named Kaylee Clem, she was one of the authors, but she's not part of the CLG team. Excellent, okay, okay. Yeah, so for certain. And then if somebody wants to connect with you, how do they reach you? Find you on LinkedIn or do you have a... Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn.

58:59 And so if you did Jim Fallon Consciousness on LinkedIn, you'd probably find me. I mean, I could send you that. You could put it in show notes if you got that. Absolutely. And jfallon at consciousness.is. Yeah, I love it. Right on, Jim. This has been really great. Thank you again for coming on the show. That was kind of a fun exercise earlier. Yeah, it was. Yeah, but we'll do it again. All right. Appreciate you, brother. Enjoy the space. And we'll see you. Yeah, see you. Ciao. All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode of Head, Heart & Boots. And if you're enjoying the show, but you love this episode, please hit follow, formerly known as subscribe, write us a review, or share this episode with a friend.

59:40 Share it on LinkedIn, share it via text, whatever. It all helps. Thanks for listening.