Speaking and Communicating Podcast

00:00
It's a tough world out there. We have an opportunity every day to miss the mark of who and how we want to be. I think self-compassion is the key to get up and try it again tomorrow, because there's always another shot to do it differently. leaders, be kind to yourselves. Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I'm your host, Roberta Ndlela. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into.

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Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development. By the end of this episode, we'll go to Apple and Spotify and love us a rating and a review. Now let's get communicating with our guests today. Joining us from Iowa, Kurt Busch is a leadership coach, author, speaker, and co-founder of the Brimstone Coaching Group. He's here to talk to us about trauma-informed leadership.

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and the difference between exhaustion performance versus wholeness and authenticity. And before I go any further, please welcome him to the show. Hi Kurt. Nice to be here with you. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Thank you for being here. Welcome to the show. Did you grow up thinking one day I'm going to be the best leadership coach the world has ever seen? No.

01:26
I did not, that was not part of the plan. Even 10 years ago, that wasn't part of the plan, Roberta. Right, and what is it that got you on this path? Yeah, good question. So I'm gonna need about six hours if that's okay. So the short version of this story is I've got a weird career arc. I spent some time in manufacturing. I went to seminary late in life. I was in my 30s, I went to seminary. Then I pastored a couple churches and in...

01:54
December of 2019, I started working for a church. We were going to launch a second campus of a large church and do it in kind of a way that was cutting edge, kind of pioneering some new things in the church world. It was very exciting, very challenging, but very exciting. And then 2020 happened. We launched this campus officially on January 1st of 2020. Roberta, I know you remember 2020 because we were talking about it.

02:21
and COVID happened and completely changed what we were doing. So I had to shift from pastor of a church. I shifted to a leadership coach because I don't know if you know this, most churches in America are volunteer led. You know, they have a staff person or a couple, but the leaders of the church, most of them are just volunteers who are business leaders or like in our case, we get a lot of farmers who run their own farm, run their own business. We get some bankers and

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They're all just trying to do the best they can, but in COVID in 2020, everybody's anxiety was ramped up to 11. It was just through the roof and it became my role to help them navigate their own anxiety so we could still do the work that we had to do. Everything was on fire in 2020 and we still had a job to do. So I shifted into coach to say like, let's figure out how to navigate our own stuff together so that we can do this thing that we all want to do well.

03:19
And then what would happen, short story after that, we as a church got away from 2020, the culture started to take hold, leaders were coaching each other. I was coaching less. I was stepping more into an organizational leader role. And Roberta, I just don't love that kind of leadership for myself. That's not the kind of leadership I want to do every day. So I launched a coaching practice with one of my good friends in 2024, and that's how we got here.

03:43
Yes, 2020 beginning was a crazy time all over the world and it changed a lot of people's trajectory of their lives. One thing I remember about churches as well is they were forced to shut down or were you in a part of the world where you didn't need to do that? Because I remember in Chicago, a church across our street and they couldn't have meetings because there was also this rule of not more than 50 people. That's why people's weddings are not attended and things like that.

04:13
Yeah, that's a good question. Every state was different. I think my trauma of that time has blocked out some of this in my memory, but I don't think Iowa was a state that required any closings. They did have a lot of requirements in terms of how many people could be in a space, social distancing, masks, that kind of stuff. I do remember, like, we did take some time, you know, in the beginning, like,

04:37
We were all just trying to do the best we could. And we did have a, I think it was a couple of months that we did all online where, you know, those of us that were preaching and presenting would be in-person live streaming, but there wouldn't be anybody present physically in the space. Part of that anxiety was just a constant, like, what do we do? Nobody had been there before. None of us had experienced a global pandemic. There was no guidebook. There were no best practices. Nobody's experienced it. And part of the anxiety was

05:04
Every day feels like it's a different situation and it's literally trying to lead in a way that acknowledges every day is a different situation. But then also like we still have this goal that we're driving. We're still trying to launch something. We're still trying to care for our community. We're still trying to do all these things, even though every day feels different. Leading people while you the leader are also uncertain.

05:30
It's a crisis. Like you said, there's no manual. There's no guidebook. How do you then lead? Because you also don't know what's going on. Yeah. Two things. One of my definitions of leadership is being the least anxious person in the room. So I really adopted a posture that said if I'm in a room with anxious leaders who are uncertain about masks or meeting in person or, you know, whatever the case is, if they're uncertain and they're anxious and they're

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they're ramped up emotionally. I felt like my job was to be the calm one in the room. So I did a lot of work to be that calm one. And part of that's curiosity, right? Being able to ask the question of what's so, like what's really so our emotions, our anxiety might tell us one thing, but is that really true? Is that really the case? And if so, now what? The other thing that I tried to focus on in a time of uncertainty is I had a mentor once say,

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how we do things is just as, if not more important than what we do. Like I tried to hold that posture to say how we go about making these decisions is just as important, if not more important than what we actually do. That was huge. I mean, that was a posture shift. I mean, it took a lot of the pressure off. I think so often leaders get stuck into the mental model that says I have to do the right thing, that there's a right and wrong decision. In COVID, just, there wasn't a clear right or wrong decision.

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How do we make decisions the way we want to? How we want to align with our values? Trusting that in a season where there's no right and wrong, the right and wrong probably is found in how we make those decisions. And do people continue to trust you in that time of uncertainty? Like I said, you tried to be the least anxious person in the room. Were they able to trust this, no one knows what's going on, direction you were leading them on, or were they also bringing all this and that and saying, Kurt, what we gonna do?

07:27
It's a great question. A short answer is no, not everybody trusted. Not everybody agreed with the slow posture of making decisions and, you know, trying to align how we make decisions versus what. No, not everybody trusts that. And most leaders even outside of COVID would say the same thing. I would say the same thing today. Most leaders I come into contact with have a hard time getting people to trust the how versus the what. Yeah. So in COVID it was elevated. There were certainly people

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would look at me and other staff's leadership and say, this is bad leadership. We need you to make a decision today. We have to know today, especially, you you hinted at the closures. Again, I don't remember Iowa having any forced closures, but we certainly as a church transitioning from live stream with nobody in the space, transitioning from that to having some people like social distance or with masks.

08:25
That was a decision that we didn't take lightly. That was a decision that took a long time. And there were certainly people that would look at me and other staff and say, you're making the wrong decision or you're too slow and this is bad leadership for sure. So you do get that feedback and even sometimes backlash. You did go to an organization and decided that it wasn't for you before launching your leadership coaching practice. What was it that you didn't find up?

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healing or you felt this is the reason this environment is not for Kurt. Yeah. Yeah. It was really about the type of leadership. So what I learned in that season of COVID, again, I don't want to go back for anything. I do not want to go back. But what I learned in that season is I loved helping those volunteer leaders navigate their own anxiety. I loved having someone walk into my office, kind of emotionally ramped up and then

09:23
Like I loved embracing the challenge of helping them getting curious, helping them maybe walk out of the room more curious than they walked in for the sake of the organization, for the sake of heading towards our goal together. I loved helping people learn how to be the least anxious presence in the room or the calmest presence in the room. I loved it. What happened is when that culture took hold,

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when COVID anxieties came down, when culture anxieties came down, when people started coaching themselves, I got to do less of that. And the same organization needed me to be a visionary leader, needed me to think about things like budget, five, 10 year direction. That kind of leadership really drains me. I have a really hard time being a visionary. I have a really hard time thinking long-term direction. I very much enjoy kind of being in the moment.

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helping people navigate their own stuff, having people get curious in the moment of how they're showing up. It's a different style of leadership. It just drains me. I knew I was getting it to an age in my life where I'm either going to have to do a lot of work to get really good at that kind of leadership, that sort of organizational leadership. I was either going to have to get really good at it, do a lot of work, or I'm going to have to try something different or make a career move. And I decided to make the move. I decided that at the age I was at, I probably...

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didn't have the capacity or the desire to put in the work to embrace a different style of leadership. Sounds like a self-awareness exercise to me, no? Yeah, 100%. Years ago, I had a coach, and this is going to sound so elementary, Roberto, but this coach said to me, you you get to decide how much work you do to pay the bills, you know, the work that we all do that we don't love, the work we do because we have to pay the bills, and the work we do that we love. And he said, you're in control of that ratio.

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If that ratio isn't right, if the role that I'm in, if it's all work that I do because I have to pay the bills and not work that I love, I get to decide what to do about that. And that really was the moment for me is my role had shifted. I love the organization, love the church I work for still to this day, love them. They're some of my favorite people in the world. And that was a moment where I got to decide that I want to do more of the work that I love. I want to do less.

11:44
I want to do less of the work that drains me and less of the work that just pays my bills. I want to do more of what I love. Yes. Which I think basically is most people's dreams. They probably don't know how to start to venture towards that direction because we always think about paying bills. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. And then you've mentioned curiosity more than once. What is it?

12:10
about curiosity that starts to sort of open up these avenues some of us were not even aware of that they existed. Yeah, I will tell you I was not a curious person for a very long time. Many of us are just not curious as a default. Many of us have to practice. Curiosity is a practice we can get good at. We can learn curiosity. One of the things I believe about all of us is that if I could take my brain

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and put it into a pie chart, it would have three sections. Things that I know, things that I don't know, but I know that I don't know them. You know, I don't know how to speak French. I know that. I know that I don't know that. But then the biggest chunk of that pie chart is probably things that I don't know that I don't know. I think curiosity for me is about making that chunk of the pie smaller, decreasing the things that I don't know that I don't know.

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Because if that's the biggest chunk of that pie, that's where transformation and growth and maturity lies. That's where the biggest growth opportunity is, because that's the biggest part of my brain. So curiosity helps me like decrease the things that I don't know that I don't know so that I can start to become more self-aware. I can start to see blind spots in my life and leadership that I didn't know were there before. And the thing about curiosity is here's one of the things my late grandmother used to say.

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She used to say, there is no bigger, much more annoying person than I know at all. Because the thing about not being curious and thinking and not even being aware that you don't know what you don't know is the fact that you're not open to learning or having a new perspective on something that you thought was one way, but it's probably different. And when you have a conversation with somebody like that, when you're communicating with them,

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They are so shut and closed off to a new idea about the subject because they think they know. Yeah. That's right. I had a friend a little over a decade ago. This person is a physicist. One of the smartest people I know. He knows more about the natural world than I know about like my computer sitting in front of me. Like he's a genius. He was telling me and a couple other people, was telling us stories about like how light interacts with the world. And we're like,

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listening to him like children sitting at the feet of a grandfather, you know, we're like, keep talking, keep talking. And he ended his story. He used a French word, if you know what I mean, but he said, if anybody tells you they know something about anything, they don't know anything about anything. Meaning like the world is so big. This is the, yes. yeah. The posture is like, there's so much to know. The world is so big, everything's so complex. There's so much to know. If somebody tells you they know anything, they don't know anything.

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I love it. I that. Yes. Yeah. I'd rather believe that. That's right. And then speaking of self-awareness again. So you say that leaders need to reflect. Yeah. Why is that important?

15:23
Yeah, that's a great question because reflection is a practice that's pretty foreign to most leaders. It was foreign to me too, so there's no shame in that. But reflection, I think reflection is the only place, the only practice, the only time and space that allows us to zoom out and get a real picture of what's so in our lives. Only way to get a real picture of what's so in our leadership. And I think reflection and meditation, these practices, I think I could use them synonymously, interchangeably.

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I could use them interchangeably. These are the only ways to really truly know what's going on with us. Otherwise, without reflection and meditation, one of these practices that allows us to zoom out, we get stuck in just the grind and the flow and the busyness of every day. When it comes to self-awareness, just before we started recording, you said something which I'm starting to think is not true.

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which was you thought you were not a great communicator. So far you're doing pretty good. Back to when we talk about communication, we always find that sometimes a lot of people think they're great communicators, but those who experience them do not agree or do not experience them that way that, he's a great communicator, not the way I received him.

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But you literally sort of, at least the way I've experienced that conversation so far, are the opposite of that. Why do you think we get it so wrong on how well or how not so well we communicate with others? Yeah, that's, I love this question. I think to me, this goes back to my physicist friend. I think there's something in this idea. I mean, I think there's a fine line between humility and self-deprecation.

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I sometimes can self-deprecate. I certainly don't think my comment about communicating was self-deprecation, but I think there is something in communication with humility. I think we as people know the difference between someone who is self-aware enough to know, like, I'm maybe not the best communicator. I think that's endearing. I think there's something that's endearing about self-awareness versus sort of a lack of self-awareness that doesn't see blind spots.

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we work in the kind of anxiety world. I can think of people in my head who say, I'm the least anxious person you know, which is similar to someone saying, I'm the best communicator you know. Or those people who say, I'm very proud of my humility. Well, they're often also the most anxious people I know. You know, so when someone tells me that I immediately think to myself, okay, you're super anxious. I think the same is true when someone tells me I'm a great communicator. I'm going to say what I assume and what I wonder is,

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Is that person growing? Is that person uncovering what they don't know they don't know? Are they getting better at communicating? Are they growing? Are they learning? Are they teaching themselves? That statement to me, I'm a great communicator, makes me wonder if they're closed off to improvement. So I think that posture mixed with something about humility that endears us to people, I think those two things together make a difference between somebody who says, I'm really good, but I might not be really good, versus someone

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who says I'm not really good, but might be good. I'd rather listen to someone who says I'm not perfect, but is growing, learning, trying. I'd much rather follow that person. And your leadership clients then, do they come to you with this perspective of, Kurt, I thought I was a great leader, but somehow my team is not responding well. What's going on? Yeah, some of them, some of them do. Often the posture is I don't,

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love the results I'm getting or I'm not content with the results I'm getting, whether that's life or leadership, home or work, one of those areas, I'm not content with those results, but I just don't know what to do. And one of the things we believe is there's no accidental results in life. My background has some manufacturing. I worked with a European engineer in Iowa. He came to Iowa. He was a brilliant process engineer and he would look at processes and he and I got to try to improve them, make them more efficient.

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And he would always say, we get the results our life and our rhythms produce. There's no accident. So people come to us and say, I don't love the results, but I don't know what rhythms or practices to try to get different results. At least the, yes, that's a beginning of an exercise in self-awareness. And what do you mean when you say sometimes leaders, you help them get unstuck? When do they get stuck and do they realize that they are stuck?

20:08
I do think most of them realize they're stuck. I think most of us know when we feel stuck. What we mean by that is they get stuck in a cycle of doing the things they've always done, which produces the results they've always gotten. Again, back to no accidental results. We as humans, right? None of us wake up in the morning, maybe some of us do, but most of us wake up in the morning and say, I'm going to do the best I can today. Nobody wakes up and says, man, I'm really going to fail today.

20:36
Yeah, don't think anybody gets up and says, I'm going to go to work and do the same thing I've always done and get the same results I've always done. We do what we know, which again falls into that like part of our brain. We do what we know. We can't do the things we don't know. So leaders often come and say, I feel stuck. I just don't know what to do. Like I don't know what's getting me these results and I don't know what to try different.

21:02
Not because they're bad leaders. I actually think realizing it makes them some of the best leaders. I think some of the best leaders have humility to say, I'm stuck. I don't know what to try. Help me try something on. That sounds like self-awareness. They're curious as to how they can do things differently. All the stuff that you've spoken about today. Yeah. Now, how do you then help them?

21:30
lead in a way that you say is life-giving. There's a lot of leadership coaches and lot of leadership resources out there that tell leaders what to do, right? How do you handle a difficult employee? How do you run an efficient meeting? Right? There's a lot of those resources. What my coaching partner and I believe is that under all of that are internal barriers and struggles that might keep us from doing them well. This is the trauma.

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informed peace. We believe that every one of us, you and me, everybody listening, has experiences from younger times in our lives, younger versions of ourselves, that impact the way we show up and impact the way we lead. And we then help people identify those and maybe live into different ways of being, maybe replace old ways of thinking, those old ways of showing up.

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so that they can do those practical and tactical things more fully in a way that aligns with both who they wanna be and how they wanna lead. That's so true because speaking of self-awareness again and knowing why you do what you do, why you communicate a certain way, what makes you get triggered, a lot of it stems from childhood. When you go to therapy, everything goes back to childhood.

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Everything goes back to the job. So yes, once you understand why you do what you do and why you do, that's when you can start to make amends and see how do I do things differently and be curious as we were talking about earlier. Now, please talk to us about your book, Live Fully, Lead Authentically. We love our book. Chris and I, which is good, right? Right, of course.

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A little background, Chris and I just really love to write. This is my coaching partner, Chris. He and I have been friends for over a decade at this point today. And we sat down and we said, we love to write. Let's write something together. And it really started as a project that we just wanted to do together. And we wanted to capture honestly, just the heart, the values that we bring into our coaching. The book really is a picture. I mean, there's some practical frameworks.

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in it, there's some practical strategies. But really what we wanted to capture is why do we do what we do and why is it so important? Why does this work? Not just Kurt and Chris, not just our frameworks, not just Brimstone Coaching Group, but why does self-awareness and how does self-awareness literally change the world one person at a time? That's our heart. That's our desire. That's what we hope for.

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And the book is just a picture of why we think that's And we look forward to learning more about those frameworks. Do we find it on your website, on Amazon? You can find it anywhere, Roberta. Website, yes. Amazon, yes. Walmart, Target, all the places you find books, you can find it there. Barnes and Noble, the works. Okay. Any last words of wisdom, Anything I haven't asked you, we're hoping to share with our audience today.

24:45
Yeah, I always love the chance to tell leaders to be kind to themselves. It's a tough world out there. We have an opportunity every day to miss the mark of who and how we want to be. I think self-compassion is the key to get up and try it again tomorrow, because there's always another shot to do it differently. So leaders, be kind to yourselves. Be kind to yourselves. Words of wisdom from Kurt Busch, the leadership coach, author, speaker.

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Co-founder of the Brimstone Coaching Group, talking to us about leading with authenticity and wholeness. Thank you so much, Kurt, for such a wonderful conversation. I appreciate you being here today. Yeah, thank you. It was great. My pleasure. And before you go, where can our listeners find you? Yeah, they can find us on our website. It's brimstonecoachinggroup.com.

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We have a podcast, they can find our book, they can find all the information they need to know about what we do and how we do it and book a free call to see if our philosophy matches their needs. No cost, no obligation, they can find that on there. Also, I'm on LinkedIn as Kurt Busch. That's probably the best place to find more about me and the work that we do and how we're thinking about things. Brimstonecoachinggroup.com, Kurt Busch on LinkedIn and you can get a free call as he mentioned.

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we can go to the website and is the podcast link on the website or do you want to tell us the name of the podcast if you want to tune in and listen? Podcast is on the website, but it's also called Live Fully Lead Authentically, just like the book. Find that anywhere podcasts are found. Live Fully Lead Authentically podcast. Thank you so much, Kurt. Thank you. My pleasure. Don't forget to subscribe, leave a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify. Stay tuned for more episodes to come.