White Knuckling It

Before we dive in: the next Lead Without Hiding Challenge runs October 27 through 29, three days live with me on naming what you've been gripping too tightly and leading from who you actually are. If this issue lands anywhere close to home, that is where we do the work.

Save your seat: leadwithouthiding.com

Hand someone an egg, ask them to carry it across the room, and watch how they hold it.

There are only three ways to do it.

Palm wide open, and the first bump sends it to the floor.

Squeeze as hard as you can, and if you're strong enough, you crush it.

Or wrap your fingers around it, loose enough that it doesn't crack and firm enough that it doesn't fall.

That third grip is how you lead people, and for a long stretch of my life I held everything like the second one.

Clients, projects, the people on my team: if it mattered, it was in my fist, and if it wasn't working, I squeezed harder. 

Some seasons felt like a ball of clay pushing out between my fingers, where the harder I squeezed, the less I had left, until God had to pry my hand open.

Intensity is one of the four walls I write about in The Things We Hide, and from the inside it never looks like a wall. It looks like caring enough to hold on.

Drive and Passion.

The belief underneath my grip was simple: whatever I loosened, I would lose, and whatever I lost would prove I wasn't enough.

So I burned through people. It wasn't that I would stand over them demanding.  Instead it was the urgency with which I raced that always made other feel less than or as if I was trying too hard.

Somewhere along the way I learned that every leader is either an incubator or an incinerator.

An incinerator turns up the flame and expects results by morning, while an incubator gives steady warmth and the patience to let something grow on its own schedule.

Put an egg in the first, and you get ash. Put it in the second, and you get a chicken.

The people who come through an incubator often leave to do something bigger somewhere else, and you get to be glad for them instead of relieved they're gone.

I thought my grip was protecting what I had built, but it was the very thing keeping it from growing.

Podcast

Sean Conlon grew up in central Indiana, sold his Pokémon card binder on eBay in seventh grade, and never stopped building: raising millions in capital, scaling companies, selling them, and doing it again. In March 2020, he owned seven wedding venues from San Diego to Nashville, and every door closed at once. Today he is the founder and CEO of 2529 Ventures, a holding company that buys businesses to own for thirty years, and he raises Longhorns on a ranch in Montana.

Here are three takeaways from my conversation with Sean.

1. Your Greatest Strength Is Where You Strong-Arm

Until Notre Dame turned him down for undergrad, Sean had never really been told no, so he wrote his own check for the MBA and carried that certainty into business: "You can strong-arm your way through a lot of things." 

It worked until a pandemic shut seven venues and no amount of grind could reopen them, so take an honest look this week at where your strength has become the reason you never ask for help.

2. Someone Else Might Make the Better Call

Months before 2020, Sean and his partner brought in an outside CEO, and as she made early layoffs and steered the company through that spring, he told his wife he never would have made those calls, until he saw hers were better than his would have been. 

That is where he discovered he was built to be a multiplier, and his warning for anyone ready to delegate is to hand off only what fits the other person's unique ability, because otherwise "you're just like moving stuff around the table and it's gonna blow up at some point."

3. Margin Is Where Joy Comes Back

Letting go takes courage, Sean says, and on the other side of it "you create margin, time margin, mental margin, heart margin," which is where he finally found what years of hustle never gave him. 

"There's a reason the word joy is in the word enjoy," so name one thing you're holding that someone else is ready to carry, and hand it over before Friday.

Hold It Like an Egg

Sean gripped his business so tightly for so long that his family got what his wife calls table scraps, and it took a season, with every door closed, to pry his fingers loose.

Everyone reading this is holding something too tightly right now. If you're ready to find out what grows when you loosen it, join me at the Lead Without Hiding Challenge, October 27 through 29.

Save your seat: leadwithouthiding.com

Can you share a review?

One more thing. If The Things We Hide has helped you name something you have been carrying alone, would you take two minutes and leave a review on Amazon? A review helps the next leader who needs this book find it, and if you haven't picked up a copy yet, consider this your nudge.

Grab your copy or leave a review: Amazon.com

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