Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the speaking and communicating podcast. I am your host, Roberta. If you are looking to improve your communication skills and leadership skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into. And by the end of this episode, please remember to subscribe, give a rating, and a review. We focus so much on leadership and executive leadership cast. My guest today, Jeffrey Deckman, is a conscious leadership expert. He is an 2021 award winning innovator of the year when it comes to leadership. And today we're going to discuss how leaders can transform and keep up with where leadership is going in this century. And before I go any further, please help me welcome Jeffrey. Hello.
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00:54
Hello. How are you?
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00:56
I'm great. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.
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00:59
Thanks. I'm looking forward to our discussion.
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01:02
Me too. And before we get started, where in the US are you based?
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01:08
Nashville, Tennessee. Oh, the spicy. Know, most people think music, and music is huge here, but that spicy chicken is unbelievable.
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01:20
Oh, yes, definitely for the music as well. So tell us a little bit about yourself.
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01:25
I'm a guy who barely got out of high school. I wanted nothing to do with college. My father was involved in a cable television industry back in 1951. So I was raised around linemen and tower workers and field engineers, and they were like cowboys to me. I moved around a lot when I was a kid. My academics suffered. So I got out of high school and I thought, there's no way I'm going another four years of prison. So I wasn't doing the college. I wanted to be a lineman. So that's what I did. I started in that field and worked my way up to become a field engineer. Started my first business in 1981, and that was a cable tv construction firm. We built the systems, and then that business crashed in 87. Or I was either going to get a job.
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02:13
But I just had this feeling that I wasn't done being an entrepreneur, controlling my own life. So after a lot of thinking, I realized that if I took a job, I'd probably never start another business. But if I started a business, it could work. Or if it failed, I could just go get a job. So the one choice allowed me to have both choices available. So I started that business. That was just as the telecommunications industry was starting, computer networks, phone systems, that type of stuff. So I converted the business into that and I sold it a week before its 21st birthday to my management team. And that was in 2005. The reason I did that was because I started getting bored with my industry, stopped changing. Technology was still shifting, but I did a lot of wiring, and that pretty much had stabilized.
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03:01
And I'm an entrepreneur, so my real passion was in helping other people to build their businesses easier than I built mine. So I decided that was the career I wanted to go into. So I left a 30 year career in telecommunications to become a consultant. And I didn't know anything about consulting. I didn't know how to self thinking. I didn't know what I was doing. I just knew what I didn't want to do anymore. A lot of times in my life I don't know what my next step is, but I know what my next step can't be. I know what it is I have to stop doing. I have a tendency to kind of push myself off the cliff and build my wings on the way down.
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03:39
I left the company, and over the last 17 years, I've been going in and helping small to medium sized business people work through the personal challenges, the professional challenges an entrepreneur has to go through to be able to survive and thrive in business and build their business to the next level. So that's what I do. I get to work with phenomenal people. They're inspired, they're courageous, and I admire them and I do everything I can to support their growth.
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04:07
That is excellent. Speaking of knowing that you don't want this, usually when you go through, whether it's a life coach or the motivational speakers, they always say a lot of people might not know what they want looks like and what it feels like, but they know they don't know exactly what they don't want.
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04:26
I told my partners in a meeting that I had to go. I just basically said, I can't do this anymore. And it was really the first time said it to anybody and I kind of felt like, uhoh, I just let something out of the bag. I don't know if I can back this up. Like, what do I do now? But I knew I spoke a truth. Over the next three weeks, I was really in a tough spot. Like, what am I going to do? I mean, my whole career was in this one space and now I'm leaving it and I can't build another company like that. And I remembered a question a spiritual teacher of mine gave me once, or a statement, and he said, never live your life based upon questions of fear, live it based upon questions of love.
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05:05
And I realized that I had a scarcity mindset in that moment where I was like, oh, I can't do this and I can't do that. When I remembered that, I asked myself, what would I love to do forget, what can I do and how can I do it? But what would I love to do and just opened the floodgates? I want to help people. I want to help entrepreneurs get to the next level. That's my passion. And then once I saw that, I was like, okay, now how I get there, who knows? At least I found my north Star. I found it. I felt it, I found it. My mind got in and said, well, we've never done this. We don't know how to do that. And my heart and my intuition and my soul just went tough.
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05:45
We'll figure it out like we've done everything else. It was hard. I almost had to pack it up a couple of times, but I purposefully didn't have a plan b. It kind of burned my ships on the shore because there was no going back.
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05:58
Because you knew you had to make this work and nothing to fall back on.
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06:02
Yeah, because I wouldn't be happy doing anything else. Even though I really struggled in the beginning years, I was amazed at how much I loved it. And I just said, I'm not going to give up what I love, and I can hang in there. Nobody can ever make me give up. I can choose to stop doing something, but nobody can ever make me give up. I may have to delay something. I may have to go around. It may take me longer, but who cares? I'm going to go where I want to go. I had cancer, stage four cancer, in 2016. And that was my mindset through that is I win. I don't know how I win, but there's no way I don't win.
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06:40
You were going to beat it.
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06:41
Oh, yeah, absolutely. And the only way it was going to win was I would know it when I took my last breath. Up until then, I'm winning no matter what. I wouldn't let a negative thought in my head. As soon as it came in, I'd get rid of it, because that's another cancer cell. I had another spiritual teacher. I did traditional treatments, chemo, radiation, et cetera. But I also worked with a woman who is an integrative natural healer, an oncologist. She was a cherokee medicine woman, and we worked through the spirituality of the cancer. She said, you have to learn to love the cancer. And she said, don't fight it. Don't go to war with it. You have to learn to love the cancer, because anything other than love is another cancer cell in your body, and you have enough of that already.
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07:28
And I thought, wow, how can I do that?
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07:30
Never heard of it. Put like that.
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07:33
Yeah, she was my teacher. So I said, okay, I have to figure this out. What I chose to do with it was I saw cancer as my teacher and that life delivered me one of the most powerful teachers I will ever experience in my life because it taught me how to acknowledge death and engage death and the fear that comes around, the ultimate fear. So I looked at that and I said, okay, well, the pain, the suffering, the stresses, the fear that I have to go through is my tuition. So if I'm going to pay a tuition that high, I am going to ace the class.
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08:10
What a perspective.
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08:11
And I am going to learn everything I could. I lost about 40% of my hearing, so I'm able to relate to people who have hearing disabilities. I was incredibly sick and weak and achy and painful. So I could relate to 80 and 90 year old people who walk around like that every day. I lived that life. I got chemo brain, which is where you really get spacey. So I was able to relate to what early stage dementia is like, so I can relate to that. So this experience gave me all of these life experiences that I didn't just read about or hear about or know somebody who had them. I had them. And the best part was I knew they were going to go away.
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08:51
So I was going to come out on the other side of this with this whole other perspective and this deeper wisdom and compassion and love for life and people that I never would have had without the gift of that experience that we call cancer. Yeah. And it's really inspired my work. I was already on the conscious leadership path to begin with, which is about leading with compassion and empathy. And you still need discipline and there still needs to be consequences, but just to always see the human and the human to be the type of a leader who creates an environment that feeds people and doesn't drain them. We have an absolute responsibility if we're managing people or leading people to create an environment that's healthy. If not, we're like a doctor that makes people sick.
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09:38
And I think one of the first roles of anybody who's in any level of management, whether you're overseeing a team of three people or 3000 people, is to adopt a version of the hippocratic oath, which is first, do no harm. As a leader, you have incredible power over people. You determine what they do during the day, you determine whether they have their jobs or not. You determine what type of culture they work in. Are there a bunch of people in there that are making it toxic that you're not dealing with? It's a very important position that whatever level you're in, you have to take it seriously. It just can't be about controlling things and telling people what to do and measuring what they're doing. We have to get away from that industrial age, mechanized version. Organizations aren't departments. They're tribes.
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10:25
They're a tribe of tribes. And within the overall organization, you have the finance tribe, you have the marketing tribe, you have the engineering, you have the construction. They all have their own cultures, all their own tribes. And as a leader, I'm a member of the overall tribe, but I'm not a member of their subtribe. So I need to engage them respectfully. I need to understand who their tribal leaders are who may not even show up on the chart, who are the elders within there that they listen to. And I need to build relationships with them. And this conscious leadership methodology that I've been working on and developing with other people in the world, for sure, but my particular version is all about being in the center of the organization, not at the top of it, which is accustomed to.
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11:12
Yeah, at the top, yeah.
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11:15
And there's times when you need to take a strong leadership role and make the decision and move forward. Absolutely. But until that time, it should be collaborative. You should be tapping into what I call the bigger no of the organization. And the bigger no is just another word for the collective genius. It stands for, you know what you know. They know what they know. And together you have a bigger no. So break down those false barriers that so many companies have between the frontline workers and the front office people. Break that down. We're a tribe. Talk to one another, communicate with one another, collaborate. As a leader, you need to be a master facilitator of talent, of genius, of energy. That's your job. We're in a knowledge economy. We need to be able to maximize the human capital.
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12:06
If you maximize the human capital in your organization, the financial capital is going to take care of itself. Financial capital is a lagging indicator that's telling you how well you're dealing with your human capital. And we have to shift from praying to the altar of finance.
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12:24
That's what capitalism requires, at least in our mind.
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12:27
Yeah, in our mind. But every time I've done this, companies make more money. They make more money because when you engage people, they engage you. Employee engagement is at a paltry 30%. Year after year. Three out of ten people are highly engaged at work. Well, about another 55 are moderately engaged. They show up and do their stuff. And about 15% are actively working against the company. And that costs american companies $500 billion a year in lost profits, because engagement equals performance and productivity. The more people you have engaged, the higher the productivity and performance. The higher the productivity and performance, the higher the profits. It can't not happen. So, smart capitalism is conscious capitalism. It's going in and doing things that get people excited and they feel valued.
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13:26
Not everybody has a job that they love, but you can certainly create an environment that they really like, right? As they become more productive, the company becomes more profitable, and because they like the environment, they stay. So your churn reduces your retention numbers. Stay up. Those are other things that cost companies tons of money. Churn, people leaving?
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13:49
Yeah. Give hiring the time, the cost.
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13:52
Once again, Gallup basically says that it costs 100% of a person's annual salary to replace them. By the time you look at your loss of investment in training them, the fact that you've lost their productivity when they leave, you have to spend money to hire. You have to spend money to train. So churn is really expensive, but people don't realize it because it doesn't show up on the balance sheet. If you want to build a really successful company, focus on the human capital side of it. Come at it at a different level of consciousness. Instead of it being about authority and power and a little bit of dose of ego in there, come in and treat it like an elder, like a tribal elder. And it's not that you act wiser than everybody. The tribal elder doesn't act wiser. Everybody just knows they are.
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14:41
No. And they're not driven by ego, either.
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14:43
No.
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14:44
Speaking of that, you have now these generational differences between the elder, and you have these newcomers with a very different mindset, a different skill set. But remember, the leaders who've been there for decades have a very different way of doing things because they've been doing for a long time. How do you bridge that gap and say, let's collaborate and create magic, and not just saying, oh, there's millennials. What do they know?
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15:14
This is where, I guess, maybe fate's hand has come in and helps us with this. Before the technology revolution, for generations and generations, the older people knew more than the younger people. And the younger people, you know, you're there, you don't have much to offer, so you just listen to them, et cetera. Well, now, all of a sudden, with the advent of technology, I'm a boomer. I'm 66. My generation didn't grow up with that. This new generation has, and the world is run by technology now. So what I do when I look to bridge that gap is I go in, and in various ways of conversations, basically what I tell the gray hairs, I tell them, I say, look, you guys have a problem. Technology rules everything. You're not that good at it. It's not your first language. It's your second or third language.
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16:06
So you have a problem because that's affecting your ability to compete and to stay abreast of things, right? These young people, they own that. I was conducting a meeting that had a mix from the CEO to a woman who was probably 25 years old. They had a question about something. They were trying to sort it out. And the CEO looks, and this young woman's on her phone. The CEO, she yells at the young woman. She's like, put the phone down. And the young woman said, I was googling. And this is your answer. Oh. And I went, boom, there it is, ladies and gentlemen. That's the opportunity we get to take advantage of. Then I go to the young people and I go, look, man, you're like every other generation of young people. You think you know more than you know.
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16:56
Your education exceeds your experience and your wisdom, right? Those people up there, they know how things work. They know diplomatic skills. They've been experienced. So they have a lot of wisdom. So why don't you partner with them? Don't you like talking with your grandparents? Why? Because they can tell you some stories and they can save you some heartbreak. So respect them as the elders and what they have and go in and pick their brains. Ask them for advice. And the older people, forget the ego. You're not supposed to know the technology. But look, you have these people here. So ask them. And then what happens is once they see the value in each other, the differences fade away. And then they start to talk with one another. And when they talk with one another, they become intrinsically motivated. We are valued trading partners.
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17:48
And if you look at how the human civilization has evolved over the years, it evolves best when two cultures, they don't even speak the same language. They don't know anything about each other, but they have stuff that the other wants. It creates a collaboration. It's what the Silk Road was thousand years ago from China to the Middle east. Once we see the value in this other person and we create a trading system, now, all of a sudden, we build relationships, we build bridges, and we're intrinsically motivated to keep them reasonably healthy.
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18:21
Speaking of relationship building, you know this quote, people like working with people they like. It's the kind of relationship I have. Whenever I work with that person. Talk to us about that.
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18:35
I've had a couple of mentors. I've been fortunate to have a couple really solid ones. I started out not liking them. They hit me wrong. They weren't talking to me the way I wanted to be talked to. What was happening was I was projecting all my insecurities and all that type of stuff on them. I wanted them to feed that for me. Thankfully, I came to the realization of, wait a minute. If you want to know new stuff, you need to get out of your comfort zone. And what do you want more? Do you want to protect your ego and your feelings, or do you want knowledge? Do you want wisdom that you can then take and build a life that you want? So what are you willing to pay to keep your ego?
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19:14
Are you willing to limit yourself and limit your capacity? And then ultimately, because you're not succeeding, you start to build a belief system that says you won't or you can't, and now you've just put a ceiling on yourself. Or are you going to suck it up, grow up and step into that and take what they have to offer? And if it doesn't come to you in the package that you like, tough life doesn't show up in packages that we always like, but life works to support us and to be able to grow, have some resiliency and those people that might treat you the way you don't like. It's just an opportunity for you to self define where you can cross over into that space. And you need some of those challenging interactions that make you feel uncomfortable to be able to build that muscle.
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20:03
But then once you build the muscle, you have it. Until then, you're vulnerable to it and you'll always be weak. And until you can do that, don't lead people, because a weak person is leading people to be weak. It's not going to work. There's a saying in my head that, watch what you say you want to do because life's going to show up teaching or coaching people. Well, my experience is life shows up and just beats the daylights out of me in certain areas to make sure that the agent that consciousness is using to help lead other people is of the right quality. We have to hold ourselves to a higher level of expectation. And it's not easy. I don't always do it, but I do it a lot. And when I don't, I call myself out on it.
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20:52
I go, okay, well, I'm human and I'll do better next time, which we.
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20:57
Should all say so you have what is called a seal method. When it comes to leadership. What is the seal method?
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21:05
The seal method. And you can go on my website, jeffreydeckman.com, and go in under resources. And it's a white paper. And what it is a five step process to building effective collaborations. In 2005, the governor of Rhode island asked me to take over a struggling nonprofit that's mission was to bring higher education, government and business leaders together to build an economy around the technology sector. And the challenge was those three groups don't like each other. Business doesn't respect higher ed. They don't like government. Higher ed looks at business and thinks that they're all about money and type of stuff. So I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, I've just made the chairman of the board of this thing that was struggling to turn it around.
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21:54
And I realized that what I was a facilitator of this collaboration of these three groups that don't like one another. We became successful. We ended up bringing in, I think it was $15 million worth of Department of Labor innovation funds for a training and implementation program that we put together. And the organization I left after five years, that was long enough for me, and it went for another 15. What I learned was how to deal and build collaborations so that they're effective and sustainable. Collaborations are really powerful because you're bringing three forces that normally don't come together and you're getting those resources. But they're different cultures. They don't like one another. So how do you figure out who should be in, and how can you give them tools to figure out? Do they really want to be in it?
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22:44
One of the things you have to define is how does somebody join the collaboration? You have to clearly define what their roles and expectations are. They have to willingly accept them and commit to them. It's very much a two sided thing. Collaborations aren't top down. How is each group empowered? What is the governance? How do you make decisions when they get to a point where they realize it no longer works for them for whatever reason? What are the agreements made on how they gracefully leave so the thing doesn't collapse? So it is a very detailed, I think it's about seven or eight pages. It's got a lot of information in that, and it's designed for a large, complex collaboration like I was working with.
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23:24
I mean, I had governors and senators and college presidents and stuff in there, and I'm the guy who didn't go to college. Right. But I may not have been the smartest one in there, but I was the one who could best lead without the ego and that's what allowed that to come in and that scales down very nicely. I just picked up a coaching client the other day. She's a company of one and she's looking to bring in one other employee who may become a partner at some point. And she just read that document to figure out what are the basic steps I need to put together to make sure that when we come together, we can stay together.
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24:01
So to hire the right person, if she has that long term plan for her company, yes.
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24:07
It's really a good guide to designing effective agreements. That's all collaboration is. It's an agreement that we're going to do something, and when I agree, I commit and I depend on you depend on me. Now we have an obligation to one another. Collaborations can't be self centered. There has to be a cause. S in the seal is smart. Is it smart to do this? A lot of times we'll get an idea and everybody gets excited about it. And I talk about this in the white paper, and that emotion of excitement is, let's go do this. Like, wait a minute, that emotion, it's helpful, but it's also dangerous because the more emotional I am, the dumber I am.
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24:53
You're not looking at all the other angles.
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24:55
You got to look. So it's good that surge that comes through you. Like, this is a good idea. Okay, it may be, but now you want to bring some intellect in, and if it is a really good idea and you're really excited about it and passionate, great. But all the more reason to bring some discipline, some intellect, some thinking, and do the hard work. So that the vehicle that you're building, which is the collaboration, that's the vehicle that's going to take you to that, achieve that goal that means so much to you, make sure you design it right before you launch it off the Runway.
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25:30
And collaborations are challenging because if people who have the idea and then they want to pull people in to help them, a lot of times they don't want to share on the idea, they don't want to give up the power of control, et cetera. And I tell people, if you're not willing to share in the decision making and governance and power, then you don't want a collaboration, you want a collection. You want a collection of people come in that will do what you tell them. That's fine, but tell them that's what this is. Don't tell them it's a collaboration because they're going to come in thinking that they're going to get to be heard and participate, et cetera. You're going to be shutting them down and you're never going to meet your goal. It'll fall apart before you even get started.
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26:08
Conscious leadership is about really maintaining a level of conscious and being conscious of what the person's actually doing, whether they know it or not. And through that, it teaches you conflict resolution.
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26:19
Yes.
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26:20
Right. Not many people like conflict. If you do, I don't want to be around you. Right.
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26:25
Is it liking conflict or saying, I'm comfortable enough for us to talk through it, to resolve it, and then get back to focusing on our collaboration and what we're working towards.
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26:38
I'm in conflict with myself half the day, so you bring somebody else. That conflict is not bad, it's just what's so. And I struggled with it quite a bit because I was really averse to that. I'm pretty low key guy in many ways. What I realized through an insight, shift it from a confrontation to a conversation. So what's the difference? Conflict is this energy. There's this competitiveness. There's fear. My amygdala, my reptilian mind is in fight or flight mode. My nervous system is wired up. Okay, well, that's just the mindset. What if, as I project what it is I'm going into, instead of saying, oh, this is going to be a problem and they're not going to like this, and they're mad at me and all that type of stuff?
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27:26
What if I just center myself and say, I am going to look to see if we can have a productive conversation? And I've come up with some. I call them pillow statements, because it kind of fluffs it up. Before you go into the tough spot, one of them is, I've got something I would like to talk to you about that's important, but I don't know if it will come out right. Can I have a clearing so that.
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27:49
The other person is prepared?
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27:51
Is prepared. And when I say, I'm struggling with this, can I have a clearing? That has a tendency to activate the empathy part of our brains, which is so powerful and so ingrained in all of us. So all of a sudden the person's coming to me and saying, will you help me with this? Well, yeah, sure. What do you got? You're showing up with your vulnerability. So it kind of makes me want to lean in a little bit. And then I tell them, look, I don't know if this is going to come out right. But if it doesn't, just let me know. We'll rework it, because I don't want to offend you, but I just got this thing that's happening between us, and we need to find a way to work it out, and I really want your help in it.
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28:28
And that goes confrontation, conversation, and there's still some fear and some energy and that type of stuff, but right away you lower it. And when I get myself in that space, I have to prepare myself for the other person may not be able to get there. So I just put a little Kevlar vest around me so I'm not overly sensitive. I kind of tell myself, expect them to bite and be a little bit snippy, but just do the best you can and we'll see how it is, and it'll probably better than what it is now, so it's worth it.
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29:00
It does sound like it. And both in a workspace and personally as well. Would you say that self awareness is.
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29:07
Also part of that essential in my book, developing the conscious leadership mindset for the 21st century? One of the first sentences in that is the first step on the path to leadership is an inward one, and so are all the rest. If I can't lead myself, if I can't manage my emotions, I surely should not be going out trying to lead people and manage them. I have to hold myself to a level of accountability without being ridiculously strict. We don't want to weaponize things. We don't want to self flagellate. We want to have empathy with ourselves. I mean, if we're going to give empathy to the world, we have to give it to ourselves first. Otherwise we can't give it out. So, self awareness, there's a whole section in there on blind spots.
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29:55
There were things that I was doing that I had no idea were working against me. Everybody else could see them. They were offensive, they were egotistical. I had no idea. So I just kept doing them and kept irritating people and wondering why. I had a period with my partners where they really didn't like me. I was really offended. I had given them part of my company, and there's all this stuff, and I had to realize that there were some ways of being, ways I was conducting myself. Where am I at? The cause of what's happening? Where am I at? The cause? It really took a lot of work, and the spiritual path that I was on really helped me with that. Honor yourself, love yourself, give yourself a break. See that you're a good person.
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30:38
Doing the best you can to try to do it right. Have compassion and empathy with yourself, but hold yourself accountable, probably even more accountable than you'd hold others. If you can't master self awareness, you can't and shouldn't be in a leadership position. I mean, if someone tells you're doing something, instead of saying, no, I'm not, the minute I say, no, I'm not, that's a clue that I probably am.
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31:03
Look further.
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31:04
Yeah, look further.
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31:05
You've mentioned spirituality since the beginning of our conversation, and one, usually people confuse that with religion, which it's not. And then if I'm a leader and I'm listening to you, do I think to myself, wait a minute, I don't see how spirituality and intuition and the subconscious mind applies here. We just do numbers and stats and what finance requires. Then when I go home, I can practice the spiritual. What can you say to somebody who's wondering, how does this apply to my.
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31:36
Leadership without offending anyone but being direct? It is ridiculous to think that who we are is not who we are. So when I go to work, I am who I am. I am just at work. When I'm home, I am who I am. I'm just at home. So the question is, who am I? What do I want to bring in business? We are challenged to hit the metrics, move the numbers, hit the profitability, et cetera. That's an industrial age model. Worked really well for that period in history and that level of human consciousness where people would come in and they would work for somebody for 40 years. And the goal was stay at one job and get a gold watch and get a retirement and go. Those days are gone. We've had four ages in civilization, nomadic, agricultural, industrial, and now this technology.
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32:31
Everything completely shifts. So the people that we're dealing with now have a higher level of consciousness. And organizations are not machines. We treat them like machines, and as a result, we treat people like tools. And as a result, we have 30% engagement instead of 70%. As a result, we have low productivity. But we've been doing that model for so long that we don't even know another model is possible or doesn't exist. So you don't know what you don't know. However, when we look and we say, wait a minute, organizations are living, breathing organisms. We take a mechanical approach to an organism when we should be taking a biological and a natural approach to the organism.
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33:15
And the minute you do that and the minute you start doing it, you see the wisdom in it, because you see how well it works and how people respond to it, and then how you respond to it, how they respond to it, and then you see the productivity going up. I started out on my path, looking and saying, okay, there's religion. Not for me. Spirituality. Okay, that feels better. I studied Taoism, which I consider more of a philosophy. I studied that for years. And now what I am a student of is consciousness. And consciousness is actually the next evolution of spirituality. Spirituality gets you into that space where you're starting to tie into consciousness. But spirituality also has whiffs of ego in that. Consciousness. Doesn't have any ego in it. Religion and spirituality is good. No reason to say anything bad about them.
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34:07
But there are different levels of things. Consciousness, that's the goal, because consciousness comes from the creator. And the creator, however you view it in your mind, at its essence, is love. There's two fundamental forces that drive the universe. Creation, destruction. The question I had was, which is the most powerful source? And I was like, well, wait a minute. If it was destruction, universe would never be created, okay? So, boom. Destruction is number two. Creation is number one. Okay, what does creation do? Creation gives life. It supports life. Okay, what's another word for something that says that love. So love is the primary force of the universe. And I look to tap into that because that's the primary force. Do I engage in destruction at times? Sure.
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34:58
Because our egos are something that we need as physical beings as we're walking around here on this planet. And I've learned to recognize when the two are at work, I have a training program I do. The second principle of the training program is domesticate the dog, and the dog is our ego. Because our egos are like dogs. A dog, if it's not trained, it barks, it bites, it's sniffing inappropriate places. And one barking dog activates other dogs to bark others.
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35:29
Yes.
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35:30
Just like an untrained ego. And I don't say kill the ego. It has value, but we need to domesticate it. The mind is a great servant and a terrible master. We have to tie into that inner elder that we all have, that wise that does not argue with the ego. And that's what religion spirituality is trying to do, is to get us tied back into that understanding of our consciousness at that level. Once I started experiencing consciousness at that level, and I saw the peace and I saw the wisdom, I was then able to recognize when my ego was coming in and taking something over. I couldn't always control it, but I knew that wasn't my highest self awareness. I didn't demonize the ego. But I was like, oh, man, this is something I need to deal with every day.
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36:19
But at least now I win more than I lose. And I'll do a sit stay and I'll muzzle it just like I would a dog. And the ego doesn't recognize itself any more than a dog recognizes itself. When it looks in the mirror, it doesn't know it's there. It denies it's there. It's like in the wizard of Oz when they show up and the guy's behind the curtain and Toto goes over and he's like, hey, that's not the big. And the guy's going, there's nothing behind the curtain. I am the great. That's the ego. And the little dog's pulling the curtain back. I learned quite a bit while I was going and still am, through my transformation.
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37:02
And I got to a point where I started looking back at some of the things that I did and the ways that I was being from this other level of consciousness. And I just went like, oh, my gosh. I started to kind of berate myself and get down on myself. And my teacher said, it is not fair, nor is it productive to judge your old level of consciousness from your new level. Do not. Because then what you're doing is you're dropping to that old level, being a criticizer, and you need to be able to congratulate yourself for doing the hard work to get to the spot where you can see the transformation and then accept responsibility for it.
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37:46
Don't completely forget it, but don't weaponize it, because every now and then, you need to look at it to remind yourself what you don't want to be anymore. So no fair judging yesterday's consciousness from today's. And it's made it easier. I can talk about that stuff, and I can also help people learn from my experience because I don't hide that stuff. I go, oh, yeah, I did that. Absolutely. I was a knucklehead. Yes. And I'll tell you how it didn't work out for me, and I'll tell you why I changed, and I'll tell you why I like being where I'm at now.
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Speaker 1
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38:18
And it's so much better.
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38:19
It's so much better.
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38:21
What can you say? Are your last tips on how to become a conscious leader today?
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38:26
Engage in some form of spiritual exploration. Anything that interests you, anything that has teachings in it that transcend the ego mind. Spend as much time as you can in that. That will improve your life as a whole and as your life improves. You will be able to help other people. If you're in management leadership, always see the human in the human. Nobody's a tool, nobody doesn't matter. And we're all challenged and we're all having a tough time of it. So if you're going to lead them anywhere, lead them to a healthier place. Create an environment that may be the only safe environment they have, but maintain consistency. We have to have rules. A culture without consequences is chaos. So don't go too far on that. Maintain stability and find your inner elder. It's in there.
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39:18
It's the voice that told you not to hit send on that email that you're going to flame somebody. It's the little whisper that came in and went, oh, I wouldn't do that. We all have the inner Elder go and search. And that inner elder is who we really are. Our ego is what we do. Our elder is who we are. Find that, you will never regret it. Then help other people find their words of wisdom.
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Speaker 1
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39:42
From Jack Free Deckman, the 2021 Innovator of the year award winner and bestselling author of the conscious leadership mindset. Thank you so much for being on our show today. But before you go, please give us your website again so we know where to find you.
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Speaker 2
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39:57
It is Jeffreydeckman.com and you can go in there. I've got a lot of information. I've written a lot. I'm on Forbes. You can go into Forbes and Google. Jeffrey Decman, I've got some really interesting articles on next generation leadership and organizational design. You can go to my YouTube channel that is in my website or just go to YouTube and Jeffrey Deckman, J-F-R-E-Y-I just try to get as much content out there as possible because once you start getting tied into these concepts, they're not quantum physics. They're very natural. They'll make sense to you and you'll be able to adopt them pretty quickly. And I hope you do. I just want to help as many people as I can.
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40:37
It's important that we have a different style of leadership in today's world than what we've had up to this point because it got in a bad spot and we need to do something different to get in the right spot.
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Speaker 1
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40:47
We certainly welcome that. Thank you so much, Jeffrey, for being on our show today. This has been an amazing conversation and you've been delightful.
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Speaker 2
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40:54
Thank you very much for inviting me on and happy to come on any other time if you would like that.
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Speaker 1
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41:00
Oh, certainly you're welcome in the future because I think there's so much we could have covered. It's just that we're out of time. But. Yes, sure. You're most welcome in the future. Thank you for listening. And don't forget to subscribe, give a rating and a review, and we'll be with you next time.