First things first: the Lead Without Hiding Challenge starts next week, August 18 through 20, live with me at 12 pm Pacific, and it is three days of exactly the kind of work you are about to read.

Save your seat: leadwithouthiding.com

My podcast guest this week is Josh Zolin, a former Hollywood stuntman who now runs Windy City Equipment, the eight-figure HVAC company his dad founded and the Inc. 5000 company he runs, and the author of Blue Is the New White.

Josh ends every day the same way: with a journal entry built in three parts. A hard question, answered with radical honesty. A sentence that begins “the lie that I’m telling myself is.” And a reframe that begins “the man I want to be is.”

Josh does this to catch himself before his ego does the driving. This week I am setting aside the usual layout and writing the whole issue as one of those entries: my question, my lie, my reframe.  Quotes and Josh’s voice woven through, asking better questions than I was asking myself.

How did I show up today?

For a long stretch of my career, the honest answer was: as the answer man. I thought my value was the problems I solved.  While that made sense on the surface, the painful truth lay just below.  Not every problem was one I could “solve,” and in reality, I needed others to come alongside me so we “all” could find the best solution.

When Josh took over as CEO at 27, he made the same trade. 

“The assumption immediately for a young leader is that your job is to tell people what to do,” he told me, and there he was, leading people twice his age with three times his experience, wondering why they would not do what he said. His verdict on that version of himself is blunt: “I was managing. I wasn’t leading.” Ask him what happened to the first team he led, and he will tell you straight: they all quit.

Nobody quit on me all at once, because I was able to get enough results in enough ways to keep my clients until I couldn't!

It's what I refer to as leadership being “hard.”  Getting new clients, having phenomenal responses to changes made, winning over the staff and other consultants.  Until the pressure and push start to wear them down.  The hard setting in.

Feedback that finally found me said the same thing Josh’s did, in four words: it’s all about you. 

I argued internally because it never felt that way from the inside, but I knew there was something wrong because leading had gotten too hard in too many ways.

Josh hands the diagnosis to every leader in one line: “People resist what they’re told, and they accept what they conclude.” 

Every answer I handed someone was a conclusion I drew from them.

The lie that I’m telling myself is…

…that my value lives in what I know, so if I stop being the one with the answers, I stop mattering.

Josh named his version of the lie without flinching: that if things did not go the way he deemed right, he would not be okay. Not that he would keel over, but that he would not be whole. 

“My okayness was dependent on other people or other things or other circumstances, not on myself.” 

The journal exposed it, including how much of his caretaking, at work and at home, was really about protecting everyone’s feelings so he could feel okay. His warning from the far side of that discovery: “You cannot be responsible for somebody else’s happiness.”

Each of the 4 Walls of Insecurity in The Things We Hide stands on a lie like these. Our reaction to a challenge establishes, in some way, a response from our team that did exactly “what I said” and not one thing more, because I had left them nothing of their own to carry.

The man I want to be is…

…a leader who asks instead of tells, an empowerer rather than a controlling dictator. Josh rebuilt his leadership on two kinds of questions: curious questions that build understanding first (what are you looking at, what have you done, what have you considered), then thought-provoking ones that hand the conclusion back: “What do you think is the best solution? Why don’t you go try that?” He aims there because “the objective of leaders is to breed more leaders.”

…a leader who names what he is feeling instead of performing past it. Walk into the meeting nervous and say so, because “you don’t have an obligation to hide that part of you from whoever is sitting in front of you.” 

It holds even in the hardest of situations like terminating an employee: “This is incredibly difficult for me. We’re going to have a tough conversation.”

I call it authentic vulnerability: cards on the table, where no one can play them against you.

…a man who understands the game. Josh’s line is “if you understand the game, you can’t lose,” because the only part of you that thinks it is a game is your ego. He calls it ego, and I call it insecurity; either way, the moment you see it at play, it loses its power over you.

Your Turn

Tonight, before you sleep, write your own three lines: one hard question answered honestly, one lie you have been telling yourself, and one sentence about who you want to be. 

That is the whole assignment.

And if you want to take those three lines further, that is exactly what we are doing at the Challenge next week, August 18 through 20. Bring your entry; we will put it to work.

Save your seat: leadwithouthiding.com

If The Things We Hide has helped you spot the lie under your own walls, a two-minute review on Amazon helps the next leader find it.

Grab your copy or leave a review: Amazon.com

Did you catch this podcast? If not, listen to it here.