Speaking and Communicating Podcast

didn't get an interview. So I circled back to the hiring manager. I said, Hey, just help me understand so I can grow and be better about maybe why I didn't get an interview. She said, well, this is a leadership development position and you were in the military. There is no leadership in the military. Welcome back to the speaking and communicating podcast. I am your host, Roberta and Leila. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally.
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This is the podcast you should be tuning into. Communication and soft skills are crucial in your career growth and leadership development. Whether you're about to speak in public, make presentations at work, pitch to investors or an entrepreneur looking to showcase your innovation to a wider audience, you'd be glad you joined us. By the end of this episode, log on to Apple and Spotify.
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Leave us a rating and a review and what you'd like for us to discuss on this podcast. Let's get communicating.
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Since we focus on communication and leadership so much, my guest today, Walt Morgan, hailing all the way from Colorado, is here today to talk to us about his experience in the Navy, his professorship at the University of Colorado, and most importantly, the work he does now as a leadership coach. And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show. Hi, Walt.
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It's so nice to be here with you today. I'm so grateful for the invitation to be a part of this conversation. And I'm also grateful for this important work that you do around sharing these important ideas, messages, insights, understandings around communication and leadership, so thank you again. My pleasure. Thank you for your kind words. And I appreciate you being here and what you're going to share, as you said, very important.
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work. And before we get into it, please tell us a little bit about yourself. I am retired from the Navy. I was a helicopter pilot there. And I did that for 23 years. It's an important experience that I loved. And I thought that I would probably fly for the rest of my life. If you go back to my childhood bedroom, when I was five, I mean, I'm still hanging like my mom still lives in the same house where I grew up.
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So if you go into my childhood bedroom in that house today in rural Oregon, you will find a picture of a helicopter that I drew when I was five. And it said, when I grow up, I want to be a helicopter pilot. So in kindergarten, I kind of connected with that idea and I always held it sometimes more closely than others. But when the opportunity came to be a helicopter pilot in the Navy, I felt that that was very much my calling. So I did that for 23 years.
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and thought I would do that forever. I loved it. It was so much fun. It was such a powerful experience for me. But when I retired in 2016, I was really at a crossroads because I had been teaching as a professor leadership at the University of Colorado for the four years prior. I was doing that for the Navy. That's what the Navy had asked me to do. And I became just really enchanted with this idea of leadership. I began to understand it in new ways.
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it became a really reflective period of growth for me, where I looked back on my career as myself as a leader. Sometimes that was a painful journey, as I found myself maybe wanting sometimes as a leader. And I also found things to honor that were important to me too. The important thing is I just grew and I really became excited about supporting others in their own leadership journeys. So now I'm retiring after this experience.
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And while many of my squadron mates are flying for the airlines right now, or maybe they're in defense contracting or consulting or somewhere like that, where they kind of know who we are, right? Like, oh, hey, Commander Morgan, welcome. We recognize you and your credentials. I chose a different path and I marketed myself as a leadership development specialist, which initially nobody cared about or were interested in. Actually, this is a true story.
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I didn't get an interview. All my stories are true, by the way. I shouldn't have to qualify it by saying true. I didn't get an interview. So I circled back to the hiring manager. I said, Hey, just help me understand so I can grow and be better about maybe, maybe why I didn't get an interview. And she said to me, she said, well, this is a leadership development position. And you were in the military. There is no leadership in the military because people just do it. What that was explained to me. People just do what they're told. And.
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You're kidding. I've never been to the military and I know that's not true. There is leadership and by the way, in a sense, she brought up an important idea that I connected with later that when I did join the corporate world, corporate leadership was more different than I imagined it would be. I imagined that my military experience and the breadth of leadership that I discovered there would allow me to step readily into corporate and it was a little harder.
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than I would have imagined. Of course, I hope I adapted. You might have to talk to others around me, but I feel like I adapted okay eventually, but it did take some time. It was hard. So anyway, Fortune 200 Healthcare Company eventually did take a chance on me, and I'm really grateful to them. They just had this really beautiful, intentional culture. And that culture was very emotionally forward. It was very heart-centric. I realized quickly...
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that I had for decades neglected the emotional and spiritual side of myself. So that became a really steep period of growth for me also emotionally and spiritually. In fact, I was sometimes would be doing programs and holding space for a group of people in a very emotionally charged space, inviting them to do work that I actually hadn't done myself.
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So not only was I holding space for this work, I was somewhat going through it myself and it was really kind of spitting me out the other side, you know, pretty dramatically. And you know, in time I had done that work and I could hold the space differently. It was a very, very steep and important part of my own development. And it was during that corporate phase of my life that that business sent me to integral coaching training up in Canada. As soon as...
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I began that I knew that when I had felt a nudge from the universe at the time I was retiring, that it was leading to this. This is what I was supposed to be doing. And so I set out my own business independently. And I've been doing that in the four years or so since. Okay, yes, we're not agreeing fully with the fact that there's no leadership in the military, but do some military
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to adapt if they now go back to a corporate culture? You know, something to understand about military veterans, or at least it's important for me to understand, and I share this with others, is that veterans themselves are not kind of a monolithic thing. As veterans, we're certainly influenced by our experiences in the military, but they're such...
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a variety of experiences there that one, we're all shaped differently in our military experience. One, service culture, right? Navy has a very different culture than the Air Force, very different culture than Marine Corps, very different culture than the Army. So one, just the service itself, but also what you do in the service. As a helicopter pilot, but somebody with an infantry background has a very different way of viewing the world or somebody who's in the Air Force.
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maybe in procurement in DC, different, we're all shaped differently and how senior we were in the organization all impacts it. And then finally, we're all unique and complex individuals. So, you know, somebody could have gone through the exact same experience that I had or a very similar experience and still been either more or less prepared for corporate leadership, I would speculate.
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So it really just depends on the individual, the service, the experience. There's a lot. I do invite anybody to give veterans a chance though. One thing I think is pretty consistent across the expanse of veterans looking for jobs is a certain underappreciated adaptability. I think typically veterans adapt very, very well because we're quite accustomed to working in ambiguous and uncertain environments.
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Right. And then when it comes to leadership, you said there were some painful moments. Were those looking back the lessons you hadn't learned yet? Or it's just that there are times when leadership is just tough and therefore feels painful? I don't know if it's possible to even separate those two things. Right? Like when leadership is tough as it is, and it's uncomfortable,
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draws on our energy and forces us to really look deep within, to find our truth, that is when we learn. That is unexplored territory in many ways, because when we experience a similar situation, again, we'll be more ready. But when leadership gets tough, that is when we're growing as leaders. That is the time that it's unexplored and new, and that's where the opportunities
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for growth and merge, I believe. Which then brings the question of self-leadership because they always say it starts with self-leadership. What is your one tip for us being more or being better when it comes to self-leadership? Because it starts there first before you can lead others. Yeah, I think the tip is find yourself alone in preferably in nature if that's available to you without electronic devices.
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Right, there's this beautiful speech by William DeRezowitz, a former Yale scholar and author. He gave this to West Point of all places, but the name of the speech, and you can find it on American Scholar online, I read it at least twice a year. It's called Solitude and Leadership. And the idea is leaders don't get overwhelmed with the busy. Leaders find time and space to intentionally connect.
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with themselves to ask themselves the hard questions. Right? Like any good person in his 50s, I'm alarmed by, you know, new technology. You know, that's been happening for millennia. Like, oh, the kids these days. And one of my fears, though, is that we can't allow ourselves to be bored anymore. You know, I even find myself doing it. Like, if I'm sitting for 23 seconds and the boredom...
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If I'm not being intentional, I'm going to reach for my phone and do something pointless with it, right? I find that I have to be intentional to put down the phone, to put down the computer, to take a hike somewhere on that hike, just to sit on a rock for a while, to breathe, to feel my feet on the ground, to feel my deeper connection with all things to honor that connection, then to breathe again and just to be.
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And it's not necessarily meditative, although I do meditate, but it's really seeking to push the other voices away. So I can hear my voice. What is driving get goosebumps just saying it right now. Just got goosebumps. Right? What is my voice? What is my truth? And then allow myself to feel the discomfort or my truth isn't necessarily aligned with what I'm being told. I'm like, oh,
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All right, because that's the edge of where the leadership lies, is the tension between my voice and my truth in the prevailing narrative. That's where the leadership is. And then stepping into that truth with willingness and discomfort as somebody who invites change, who models change, who does the right thing, who does the uncomfortable thing, that's where the leadership lies. But it starts with intentionally creating space.
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to find our own voice. I'm wondering also back to the, there's no leadership in the military comment. You know how when we watch movies and it's like, as soon as your commander comes, it's almost like we are given the impression that in the military, a junior cannot ask their leader a question, cannot comment, cannot raise their hand and say, I disagree. Is that the reality or is that just Hollywood?
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So there is a little bit, there is a culture of that, right? The military does really impressive things. There's lots of impressive things that happen all across the scope of humanity. But talking about the military, I'll just give an example of the aircraft carrier, for instance. Aircraft carrier, 5,000 people on board. The average age of those people is barely over 20. They're stuffed into a small space. There are multiple...
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nuclear reactors on board. There's also a bunch of really explosive weaponry on board. There's also a bunch of aircraft. And when we're doing a launch and recovery cycle, we're landing a jet on that flight deck about every 17 to 19 seconds. And we're doing this all in an uncertain weather geographic threat environment, right? It's a remarkable thing.
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And every service has that equivalent story, whether it's the Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps, they all have something that looks like that, where you're just minds blown that we're able to accomplish that. And the way we're able to accomplish it, I believe, is by creating very distinct roles, so distinct that we don't even really call each other by our own names. We call each other by the role that we're playing, right? The human becomes the role. Those roles have different authority. And
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that is very much part of what makes it all work. Clarity of role, clarity of authority. And having said that, just like any other human endeavor, we all have unique perspectives that emerge from the roles that we carry. And the best leaders consistently in the military create space to hear all those perspectives from 360 degrees so that they can be
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their most effective leader make their best decisions. So there is a way to invite those perspectives. So when it comes time to move out, yes, it happens very quickly. Lines of authority are clear and it's very, very directive. And kind of in the spaces in between, that's where we have the invitation to talk to the people that report to us and say, hey, what is it that I'm missing? What's important here? And even tactically.
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by flew helicopters, we have crewmen in the back. They don't necessarily have the same organizational authority, but they have tremendous authority. Their lives are on the line, our lives are on the line. So if somebody in the back of the helicopter says, hey, I'm really, really concerned about what you're doing here, I'm gonna listen for sure, right? Like, okay, I value your opinion, what's up? So it depends on the situation.
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And then the work that you do at the University of Colorado, what do you think are some key outcomes that you hope at least your students when you teach them leadership? Yeah, I love that question. I love that. It takes a lot of time, right? And I do this with my spare time. This isn't my job, you know, professionally I'm a coach. That's where I spend the bulk of my time engaged, but there's something just magic, something important to me.
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about being able to sit with these students and hold space for 15 weeks. And I don't tell them about leadership. That's not how I approach the class. I curate the topics and the readings, of course. But what we do is we sit in that space and we explore leadership together. We explore and we expand. Every one of us is in a different place in our leadership journey. And I just honor...
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where they are in their leadership journey. And it's my intent and hope to build a community in which we support each other wherever we are in our growth. So that at the end, to more specifically answer your question, at the end of this semester, the students have expanded how they understand leadership. They view it in a new way. They identify more strongly as leaders, as humans that can make important impact.
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also that they've created a leadership lens so that they begin to see leadership in places where they haven't necessarily seen it before. I don't know if you've heard of the phrase leaders serve. What is your understanding of a service leader? Yeah, servant leadership goes back to this idea of one, the intention of why we serve and I'm deeply connected to this idea of servant leadership.
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Leadership is distinct from management, right? Management tends to be a little bit more transactional. By the way, it's not a judgment. Like management is very, very critical and great leaders can also be great managers. But leadership is about intention. And in my own definition of leadership, which changes about every three years, but currently my definition of leadership for where I am in my own evolution as a leader is the process of
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turning our best intentions into impact, right? So for me, you can kind of see the alignment with servant leadership. Best intentions assumes that our leadership is something bigger than ourselves, which servant leadership acknowledges, that it serves something larger than itself, that it serves others. Servant leadership at its very core would be the place where you don't even know who the leader is. You don't even know in that moment.
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who's creating influence and impact because they're doing it so quietly that the servant leader is supporting others in such a quiet, important way that they can succeed, which I think is a beautiful way to think of leadership. So it's not about them just taking credit for everybody else's work. It's not. In fact, it's quite the opposite. The best leaders, the best leaders we will never know.
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And then when it comes to your coaching business, first of all, please tell us a little bit about how you got started to actually focus on that and then share some of the transformations that you've seen with your clients. Yes. So I mentioned earlier that integral coaching in Canada got me started. And I have to say integral coaching to me is the most beautiful, perfect thing that I have ever, ever found. I have a lifelong habit of learning about something.
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experiencing it and then explaining to the world why it's wrong, right? That's just a little little way of being that I have. In fact, I had been flying helicopters at ships for about two years, you know, way back when I was just a nugget pilot before I explained to the United States Navy that they're flying helicopters at ships wrong, which by the way they are. I stand by that and maybe it didn't need to be said or maybe it did. I don't know, but just...
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to give you and your audience a little sense of how I show up in this world sometimes. But integral coaching, I've been doing integral coaching for five years now, and it's the most perfect thing I've ever found. It's this beautiful coaching methodology that weaves integral theory into how we understand and support people. And it's just beautiful. It's the best thing. Whenever I'm with a client, I feel like we're exactly where we're supposed to be.
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where they're together on this journey. And ultimately it's about really exploring with the client about the thing that's most important to them in their life. What is it that they would like to be able to do better that would be transformational for them? It's that New Year's Eve commitment that's never realized because something truly gets in the way. There's a belief system that prevents them from growing in that way. And so we name the thing that's most important.
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to them. For every client, it's a different topic. To better be able to connect with my voice and express it confidently would be an example. And then we explore belief systems that are limiting their success. And then we transcend those belief systems, create entirely new belief systems that serve them and allow them to do that thing better. So after about six months, it's embodied.
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Right. It's no longer an idea. It's something that lives deeply in their body. And then the behaviors just kind of emerge organically. Can I say something about that in communication also? Oh, please. Yes. Yeah. Communication is why we hear. I knew I could bring it back. It occurs to me that every single topic that my clients have each unique to each client is related to both leadership and to communication. So.
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The thing that we feel limits us also limits our ability to communicate. I can give you some examples. I gave an example of a topic earlier, right? To better be able to connect with my truth so I can express it confidently. Some of my clients struggle to find who they are because of some belief systems, usually around harmony, accommodation, value worthiness, whatever it is, there's different reasons.
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But that's a communication topic, right? Because once they find their voice, once they find it truthfully and honestly, they will communicate fundamentally differently. They'll communicate with confidence. They'll communicate from their body instead of their head. And they'll be more effective and influential and authentic and real and true and connecting in that communication. So that's one topic. Another client, I'm just, her topic was
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being able to honor her own value so that she wouldn't seek it from others. And what was happening with her, she's such a wonderful person and leader, but what was happening was in her workplace, she was constantly trying to bring value to the workplace, right, like in an overbearing way. Like see how competent I am, see how effective I am. I have all these ideas.
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And the result was she would take over meetings. She would communicate, communicate, communicate, and not listen. So once she was able to connect with her own worthiness, she discovered that she didn't have to constantly show how confident and capable she was. She could just sit back and feel her own worthiness, her own confidence. In that way, she was a better communicator because she wasn't taking over things.
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Are you interested in a third example? Oh, please. Yes. We love stories here. I love stories too. His wonderful high performing client, his belief system was about safety. What he discovered through exploration was that he believed if he had consensus, he would feel more safe. He just needed to believe that everybody was on board with him. Right. So basically is if everybody's on board, we'll be safe.
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Which is fine, except it drove his communication. So his communication was all about, are you with me, are you with me? Are you with me, are you with me? So he was conscious. Then you feel pressured on the other side of the equation. You do. And it doesn't invite a deeper conversation. It was a very kind of surface level. You're with me, you're worth me, you're with me, let's go. And if somebody wasn't, if somebody disagreed, that's what this topic was all about. It was crushing for him. It would shut him down.
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because he didn't feel safe and he wanted to get to a place of safety. So once he learned that he could be directive when he needed and engaged at a deeper level, just beyond consensus, he learned one that that would make him more safe. But he also learned to communicate in a more directive way when he had to rather than an acquiescent way. And he also learned to.
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communicate in a more inviting way as well. They seem like they don't belong together, but they do. Both those things can exist at the same time, directive and inviting. And he learned depth in both of those. What is the one belief system that you had to question and eventually change in your leadership? So I hire coaches also. I'm a professional coach. I think effective coaches hire coaches. And there's been several
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Let me go through all three just to name them really quickly. Okay. Um, I love your question, by the way, Roberta, that's such a, such a powerful, beautiful question. Um, the first one really relates to servant leadership. My first journey was to move from kind of creating this big, exciting show wherever I went, which was really about me, right? You know, this is after my military service, which we call service.
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But my military service in many ways was about me more than it was service. So my first coaching journey as a client was to kind of move from that space of creating excitement and a show and fun and all this, wherever I went, actually shifting my intentions to serve, to really be there for others in an honest way.
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And that was, I mean, that changed my life, right? To move from, you know, the excitement of it all to just honest, quiet, being there and allowing others to guide and find their way. So that was the first one. The second one was about my joy in operating and kind of the strategic big picture space. I just have an orientation to the big idea. I get excited about the big idea. And that's great. That serves me.
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And it also limits me because I miss details, right? I want to get to the big idea and then move on to the next big idea. But there's, there's important granularity that lies beneath the big idea that I wouldn't willingly or readily attached to. So my second coaching topic was about holding my client's details in my heart, like slowing down, becoming grounded, truly listening that topic.
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fundamentally altered my ability to be with and to hear, truly hear others in my body and hold their details and honor their details with appreciation in my heart. So that was my second one. And then my third coaching journey was about details as well. And that was about moving into action on details.
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Right. I always move into action on the big idea. And then when the details happens, I kind of shut down and don't. No. And as a business owner, you know, it became obvious to me that being engaged in the details of the work every day was for practical reasons, important, but leaders have to be able to engage in the detail sometimes too, right? I think that good leaders.
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are able to move appropriately between the strategic and tactical or the strategic big picture and the details with choice. And I didn't have a lot of choice, like before coaching at all, I didn't have choice, just big picture. Now I can move from the big picture to the details. I can move from my head into my body and I can move into action more readily, choose to in places where it's more resistant before.
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I can also choose back to think and be. So I just have more choice in my life. Walt, is there anything you were hoping to share with our listeners today that I haven't asked you yet? I would reemphasize that thing that gets in our way in general is also the thing that gets in the way of our communication. So when we do that work on ourselves, when we intentionally lean into the growth, into the development,
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the communication will evolve as we evolve and will become more effective communicators. Effective communicators aren't necessarily polished communicators. And that's something that I share and you share. This idea that communication starts from our truth. And as long as it's our truth aligned with our values and aligned with our best intentions, the delivery doesn't matter so much.
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As long as it's emerging from within us, the communication will be effective. Absolutely. Words of wisdom from Walt Morgan, the leadership coach, professor at the University of Colorado, and retired Navy veteran. Walt, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for being on the show today. Oh, I've really enjoyed it, Roberta. You asked such beautiful, insightful questions. I've enjoyed our time together.
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I appreciate that. Thank you so much. And before you go, where can we find you on the web? Oh, on the web. So I do have a website. It is tliftoaching.com. And then I have a contact form there is probably the easiest way to reach out. I am happy to have a conversation about leadership communication.
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or anything else that might have surfaced with your audience in today's conversation. I would love to hold that conversation. And instead of doing all the talking, I promise I will show up as an engaged listener as well. Absolutely. TLiftcoaching.com. Walt Morgan, thank you so much. Thank you for joining the Speaking and Communicating podcast once again. If you have a guest that you think would be a great fit for the show,
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Please email me and my contact details are on the show notes. The Speaking and Communicating podcast is part of the Be Podcast Network, where there are many other podcasts that support you in being a better leader and becoming the change you want to see. To learn more about the Be Podcast Network, go to BePodcastNetwork.com. Don't forget to subscribe, leave us a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify, and stay tuned!
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for more episodes to come.