How Unconquerable Leaders Achieve Success and Resilience

Why are some leaders unconquerable?

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Highlights: 📍

🗣️❤️ Mastering the Internal Game of Leadership: Discover how successful leaders manage their thoughts, feelings, and motives to influence their leadership style effectively.

🧠💪 Overcoming Personal Challenges: Nathan Tanner shares his journey through a major life event that reshaped his approach to leadership and personal well-being.

🔄🌟 Setting a Personal Vision: Learn the importance of having a clear vision and how it helps in overcoming challenges and maintaining focus.

🧩 Intentional Underperformance: Understand when and why it's okay to intentionally underperform in certain areas to excel in others.

➡️ Tune in if you're looking to understand the secrets behind the resilience and success of unconquerable leaders.

Our guest today, Nathan Tanner, an executive coach with extensive experience helping CEOs, founders, and high-impact leaders scale themselves and their companies. Nathan, former VP of People at Naber and Head of HR at DoorDash, shares insights from his journey and his latest book, The Unconquerable Leader.

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Transcript

Why are some leaders unconquerable? I'm Chester Elton and this is my co-author and dear friend Adrian Gostick. Yeah, thanks Ches. You know, I think we all know that some leaders have mastered more than the tactics of management. They've mastered that internal game. Their thoughts, feelings, and motives that impact their leadership style That's what we're going to talk about today as always We hope the time you spend with us will help reduce the stigma of anxiety at work and in your personal life And with us is our new friend Nathan Tanner He's an executive coach who helps CEOs founders and high-impact leaders scale themselves and their companies prior to becoming a coach Nathan was the VP of People at Naber and before that Nathan spent half a decade at DoorDash where he was hired as the head of HR and helped grow that company from 250 to 5,000 plus employees. He started his career on Wall Street at Lehman Brothers where he had a front row seat to the largest bankruptcy in history. Nathan is the author of two books, Not Your Parents Workplace and his recently published book The Unconquerable Leader. Nathan we're delighted to have you on the podcast. Thanks for finding the time. Thank you so much. Good to be here, Chester. Good to be here, Adrian. But before we jump in with our wonderful guests, we just want to give a shout out to our wonderful sponsor, Magic Mind. It's a product that I love. It helps you manage your anxiety. It helps you get in the flow. And if you look in the show notes, you can click on there and get a 20% discount by just putting in Gostick and Elton 20. And if you have an annual subscription, it can save you up to 48%. We're delighted to have him on the show and we're delighted to jump in with our guests. Hey, we're thrilled to have you. And boy, Lehman Brothers, that brings back memories. I remember sitting in New York launching a book that day when Lehman went through its troubles and of course, much past that. You witnessed one of the largest bankruptcies in US history. Then as you say, you were at the head of HR at DoorDash. But you say during this time, being very vulnerable, very open for all of us, that you had a panic attack and it helped you re-evaluate aspects of your life. Can you walk us in a minute or two through your personal journey to set the stage for where you are today? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so I was a 2008 graduate from college. So Lehman, first job out of school, I've networked, I'd worked like crazy to get this internship, which turned into a full-time job. And I'm so excited. And about a month later, Lehman implodes, triggering the financial crisis. And I'm now out of work, you know, confused around what to do next. And so it was very, very challenging period. I stayed in the finance world for about five years and just ultimately didn't feel like it was the best fit for my strengths and made a drastic pivot to the HR world. I was at LinkedIn for a couple of years and then I had the opportunity to join DoorDash in the very, very early days and it was just a wild ride. I mean, I was there for four or five rounds of funding. The valuation went from $600 million to $70 billion during the IPO and in over my head. I knew when taking the job that it was a stretch role and we'd ultimately hire someone more senior than me, but that took a really long time to happen. And so I just found myself, I talk about this in the book, this panic attack that I had of I was trying to do everything, you know, be a good husband and father, do well at work. work, I had responsibilities outside of that, I just felt stretched and stretched. One day, everything just fell apart and I found myself on the floor of my room crying uncontrollably. It was a wake-up call for me of just realizing I needed help, I needed more guidance. What was funny is I was actually in the process of becoming an executive coach when this took place. And here I am thinking, okay, I'm gonna show up for leaders and help them thrive and I can't take care of myself. And in order to fill up other people's buckets, I'm gonna have to have my bucket full of myself. And so it was a wake up call in a lot of different ways. How long, if I may interject, how long did it take to sort of come back from that? And what was the process? Yeah, it was like we sometimes do. This was on a Sunday. I went back to work on Monday as if nothing happened. You know, I never told my team. I think I barely told my wife about it. And it scared me and it kind of shocked me into rethinking things. I was really fortunate that a couple of months after this, my wife and I, we had our fourth child. And those who have had children obviously know that that's no vacation or relaxation period, but I took two months completely off of work, just focused on family. And that period helped in so many ways. Yes, I was tired, exhausted, but it was a different kind of work that I was doing. And it helped me put everything into perspective that by the time I went back to work, I had clarity around how I was going to show up. I had some more non-negotiables of, you know, what I was going to do and maybe maybe ways that I would that I would push back and that I could find a better balance, if you will Well, thanks for sharing that story. That is a moment in time that you'll never forget That's for sure and isn't it interesting the way you know life happens like a baby's born and you get to kind of recalibrate and reboot and so on that Was that was that was fortunate. Well, listen talk to us about the new book You say vision is important. How do you set a personal vision? Yes. Yeah So a lot of the book comes from this experience I had. And then as I'm in the process of becoming a coach, I thought my work was going to be focused on, as a coach, helping people learn leadership skills of setting expectations, giving difficult feedback, all of these leadership skills we hear about as being important, and they are. But as I found that I started working with people, the real challenges they were facing were less on what I call the external game, how we show up with others, and more on the internal game, the challenges that impact how we lead, but other people don't see. The stories that we tell ourselves, mental and emotional resilience, you know, all of those things. And one of the key things that I found is important is setting a clear vision. You know, I found out that if we have a clear why, we can overcome any how. And often when we feel anxious or when we experience burnout, which I've certainly felt at times, that comes from a lack of purpose or a lack of clarity around what we're doing. And that purpose can come in a lot of different ways, providing for loved ones, meaningful work, whatever it may be. And I found when we have that clarity of vision, we can offset all of these negative things that are going on around us. But we need to focus on the positive things. And so one of the things I love talking about is having daily reminders, things that we know to be true, but maybe we just forget. And so one of the things I've done myself and I've worked on with the leaders I coach is like, what are these things that you know that you need to remind yourself of continually? And this isn't fake positivity or being overly rosy, this is filling our minds with good things that we know to be true, and that can help propel us to accomplish that vision that you said. Yeah, I love that idea. It's so much more positive. When we have this purpose, this vision in mind, we're, as you say, we're going to be less likely to burn out. One of the other things that you talk about in the book, which I really like, is this idea of there's times where we intentionally underperform. In the old days, your dad would tell you, if the job's worth doing, it's worth doing well. Well, we've learned actually that's not true. There's times where, no, some things we just get through. Other things that we put all of our effort into. So how do you do this, especially maybe if your boss or team members are saying, no, we give 100% with everything, and you can't. Yes, yeah, there's a quote I think about regularly, and we've all heard it. How we do anything is how we do everything. And I just think that it's that it's garbage. Like there is a never ending list of to-dos or things that we should be doing. This is true at work. This is true outside of work. But it's impossible to do all of those things perfectly and exceptionally. And when we fall short, which we inevitably are going to do, we feel guilt, we feel like we're not enough. And so one of the things that I've focused on, but for myself, as well as for my clients, is identifying things that we are going to intentionally underperform at. And an example of this, one CEO client I worked on, like she was just overcome with all of the things that she needed to do to the point where she froze and was immobile. And so we worked together and we created a list of things she was going to deprioritize for the coming months. And this included the first, meetings with potential investors, didn't need to focus on that. The second was networking events. You have given her focus, that was going to be a big drainer. And then the third was these team strategy sessions that would just take hours and hours. And by identifying these things she was going to deprioritize, it allowed her more energy and more focus on the things that were most important. And so, you know, when we do that, we have clarity. We're able to eliminate shame and guilt because we're making an intentional decision around the things that we're letting go. Like there's always trade-offs that we're going to have. We can ignore these trade-offs, try to do it all and burn out, or we can acknowledge these trade-offs and then be intentional. We can't always do everything, but I found that we can always do the most important things. Yeah, you know, it is about getting stuff done, but what is the most important stuff to get done? Isn't it interesting with high achievers is that they want to do everything all the time. You say, what you really should put on your list is sleep. That's one of the things you should probably make your list, to remind yourself every day to get some sleep. Talk about managing your emotions. You just did a good job with your example of coaching there. Mastering the art, I love this by the way, mastering the art of the unsent angry letter. This is something I actually went through a couple of times in my personal life. I would run the letters by my wife before I would send them off. It's a little bit of a sounding board but this idea of writing out this angry letter and then not sending it. Walk us through that. Yes. So most of the principles that I talk about in the book come from mistakes that I have made. And so I have not mastered this before. I've written the angry letter and sent it. And then the next day I thought, oh my goodness, why did I do that? And I've had to deal with the repercussions of it. And so I actually learned about this from Abraham Lincoln when he would feel the urge to tell someone off or say something out of emotion. He'd write what he called a hot letter. And he'd put all of his anger and emotion into it. And then he would slide it into his desk and he'd write never signed, never sent. And many great leaders throughout history have done this, Winston Churchill, Benjamin Franklin, and there's this great power in writing this unsent angry letter that helps us avoid acting on pure emotion. Because, like, we need to feel our feelings. We need to experience that. Often we try to bury that and ignore what's going on inside of us and hope that goes away. And sometimes it may, but often it just festers and it's this raw, unprocessed emotion. If it does come out and if it does surface, it's gonna be in an unproductive or even destructive way. And so I have clients write me an email, like, okay, before you send this out, just send it to me. And then the next day, this is what I love about this, is that after you've done this, when you've had a separation between that stimulus and response, then you can come back to it. If you still feel that way in a few hours of the next day, great, send it. But often, cooler heads prevail, we've been able to process what we're experiencing, and then with less emotion, you know, we can have that conversation or we can send that communication. Well, I mean, Chester and I don't know what you're talking about, but I'm sure other people have done this. Of course. Yeah, yeah. Hey, how do people learn more about your work, Nathan? I can just imagine not only wanting to check out the book, but also learn more about you. Yes, so the book is available on Amazon, ebook, hard copy, Audible. I'm very active on LinkedIn. And so, you know, love meeting new people on LinkedIn. Come say hi there. And then my landing page is nathantanner.net so you can check out my work there. Well, great. One of the things I wanted to talk to you about, and Richard Sennett has talked about the fall of public man and how we used to have these different personas that were actually important to us because our masks were part of our identity. But you talk about leveraging the power of character creation, and maybe we need these unique personas to thrive in aspects of our lives. So help us understand, this is a really cool, interesting concept, so help us understand this. Yeah. So I have found that there are different aspects of ourselves or different versions of ourselves that are required to be successful. And this, yeah, this does go against common thinking of, you know, we should show up the same in all places. But I found that like what's required for us at work is probably different than what's required of us to be a loving partner or to be a good friend or parent. And we need to show up differently depending on the role that we're playing. And like, how do we do it? And so there's this idea of character creation. And the first step is identifying these characters, these personas, these roles that we play. I recommend three of them, identifying three of these. And then the next is defining for each one of these how you need to show up. So, what does success look like for you in this role? And then the third step is defining when it's time to step into that character, step into that persona. And so, an example of this, I have this client named Tyler. He's the CEO of a startup, and he works harder than anyone I know. Like, he can just go heads down and, you know, unrelenting work, but the cost is personal relationships, and the cost also is his ability to lead his team. Like, it's not just him anymore. Like, he's built a team of 100 people, and so we work together to identify these characters. So, like, okay, the first was the relentless machine. Like you have this down, the ability to go heads down and just crank out work. But these two other ones that are really important for you, you need to focus on one of them, he called the loving partner. What is required of him to be the loving partner and show up with his parents, with his significant other the way he wanted. And the third, he called the unicorn CEO. And this is how he shows up as a leader and how he wants to lead his team. And we even took the next step of identifying time periods that he was going to play each of these roles. And the power I've found in doing this character creation exercise is context switching. That's the challenge we face today. It's not just moving between these roles, it's we have to do this so quickly. And so I found character creation is a great exercise to help us think, okay, I'm about to go home. What's needed of me at home? Okay, I'm stepping into this meeting. What's required of me to be successful. So it's about being deliberate and helping with that context. That is such a fascinating exercise. You know, it is kind of funny. I've actually got a persona that I use from time to time. It's the devil may care British chimney sweep. I haven't quite got the accent down yet. Terrible Cockney accent that you use here. Hey governor, make your chimney cleaned. Yeah, but anyway, but you're right. You know, you need to show up differently at home than you do at work. And so often that blurs, you know, we're the CEO everywhere we go, right? And sometimes our kids don't need a CEO, they just need a dad, right? Interesting. So you talk about that anxiety is about avoiding discomfort, right? But then you say you need to intentionally seek out discomfort and to do hard things. It doesn't seem to kind of fit. So why is that? Yeah, this also comes from a personal experience as many of these do. I've had this experience at an airport of, very briefly, flight delay. I wasn't going to be able to see my family, I had to run between terminals, I'm all sweaty, and there's a 30-minute delay, and I remember thinking, this is the absolute worst thing that has ever happened to me. And then I catch myself in this moment, I'm like, okay, I'm about to get in this airplane that's going to carry me 30,000 feet in the air. Like, if this is the worst thing going on in your life, you know, things are pretty good. And so as I started studying this, like, how did I get to this point? A couple lessons that I've learned is that fewer problems in our lives. And when a new comfort is introduced to us, that we adapt to it. And then the old comforts that we had, they become unacceptable. And so today's comfort ultimately is going to become tomorrow's discomfort. And so I found that we regularly need to seek out discomfort, seek out things that are difficult and do hard things in order for us to be more satisfied and to have a have a better baseline. And so one of the things I started doing, actually this led to me doing an Ironman triathlon, which I'm not saying everybody needs to do, but I felt compelled to do. And there's this regular need for seeking out discomfort and that ultimately will help us to grapple with anxiety and stress that we're feeling. Yeah, you know, my dad had a great expression when stuff would go wrong like that and he'd say, if this is the worst thing that happens to me today, I'm way ahead of the game. You know, put it in perspective, right? Yeah, that perspective is critical. Hey, as we wrap up, this has been such a great conversation. Those of you joining us later, it's Nathan Tanner, who is the author of The Unconquerable Leader. It's been such a great discussion, Nathan. I wish we had more time, but give us one or two last thoughts as we send you on the way. What have you learned from the beginning of writing this book to the end here? Give us something new that maybe this has struck you. Yeah, one of my favorite quotes, and I think about this quote all the time, comes from Kwame Anthony Appiah, and he says, in life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game. The challenge is to figure out what game you're playing. And I found that the biggest missteps I have made in my career are when I've tried to play someone else's game. I've made this mistake too many times to count. I didn't find my way until I looked internally, learned to play my own game, and matched personal values with inherent strengths. And then when I did that, I was able to make meaningful progress. And so that's one of the big takeaways that I hope people have. Excellent. Hey, really appreciate you finding the time. This has been a great discussion. Buy the book, look him up on LinkedIn, stop in and say hi, as he says. Our guest has been Nathan Tanner. Nathan, this has been a delight. Thank you so much. Thanks, Nathan. Thank you so much. Thanks, Nathan. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. So, Adrian, what an interesting story, right? I'm curious, what are some of your takeaways? Well, first off, yeah, kind of recounting Nathan's story. How many times have we heard this? Somebody trying to do everything, right? Taking on just too much and accepting too much, trying to get above and beyond, or whatever you want to call it, and then what it leads to, it leads to a panic attack. And so, what do we tell the people we coach is that you can only do as much as you can, you can only run as fast as you can run, you have strength to, how many people burn themselves out. You go. Can you hear me? You froze on me. Oh, okay. Yeah, I finished my thoughts, so I think it'll catch it. So you add to that, did you hear it all night or not? Not much, but that's okay. Okay, yeah, I just talked about getting burned out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it is interesting too, where there are those moments, right? Where you just go, look, I can't have it all. I can't do everything. I've got to set my priorities. And he talks about, you know, your vision is so important. What is it that you really want? Are you gonna follow that vision? And are you gonna stick to it? Or do you get caught up, you know, with all the hype of the day, the hype of the job, you know, Lehman Brothers and the big money and the prestige and all that, and then it all comes crashing down, right? That's what we've really gotta be aware of. What do you really want in life? What is your vision? And get that straight and go after it. Yeah, well said. As he said, a clear why can overcome any how. And what he talked about too was the stress that comes from a lack of purpose. You know, we see that as we coach people. It's amazing how many people get ahead and even rise to executive levels and they really don't know what their purpose is other than just to sort of get through the day. One of the other things I thought was really interesting, he talked about, you know, there are times where you intentionally underperform, that not everything has to be perfect. You know, as I was saying, the old mentality of the job's worth doing, it's worth doing well. Well, no, it's worth doing okay sometimes. You focus on what your priorities are, right? Yeah, you know, it reminded me of the old report card, you know, where you say, hey, I've got seven classes and I got six A's and one C plus. And what do we focus on? The C plus, right? And yeah, look, sometimes they aren't your strengths and sometimes you just don't have time. And sometimes, and we've said this many times sometimes good is good enough don't beat yourself up about it this perfectionism that we talk so much about that causes so much anxiety at work right can really drive you to I was going to say drive you to drink that's not um drive you crazy and drive to that point where you do burn out and it was so good of him to finally step back and say look I'm going to recalibrate what's really important to me, and I'm going to go after that. And the last thing for me, too, I love that you talked about this idea of character creation, that we have different personas, and that's okay. You don't have to fight it. It's not like you're a master criminal at one place and then a nice person elsewhere. No, he's saying, look, we have these personas. We may be this machine at work. We may be a loving partner. We may be a unicorn CEO, as he said, that it's okay for us to put on these different personas that don't feel like you're not being your unique self if you are. And sometimes we do hear from leaders who say, these young people coming in, they wanna share too much, and there's such a thing as being professional. Right. Yeah, it's okay to have to put on a work hat sometimes. Well, and it's interesting too, because we do say often, look, it's really important to be the same person everywhere you go. And I think that is true when it comes to your core values. But there are those times when you say, today I need to be Superman. Today I need to take a nap. You can be different personas. Today I need to be extra kind and sensitive. And today I need to be a bit of a taskmaster. Your core values and everything, yes, those should be the same everywhere. But we do have different personalities and in a way we psych ourselves up for that too. I was thinking in sports when I played a lot of sports as a kid, there would be days when I'd say, hey, come on, this is the moment where you really shine. I'll never forget I was in a company tennis tournament, it was so silly, you get the little plexiglass trophy. But I remember telling myself, you always play better when you've got a cold. I was channeling my inner Michael Jordan. You always play better when you've got a cold. And so you do. You take those different personas, you have to meet different people in different places. You know, for you, like on the weekend, and for you on the weekend when you cosplay, you know, some weeks you're the Mandalorian. That week when you were a bat, you know, bat girl or a bat, you know, that was a little weird. I was Robin. Yeah, oh, that's right. I was Robin, yeah. But anyway, you know who's the guy that never lets us down though? And I think you know who I'm talking about. Our world-class producer, Brent Klein. Are we grateful for him or what, eh? We really are. And to Christy Lawrence, who helps us find amazing guests, to all of you who listen in. If you like the podcast, please share it. We'd love you also to visit thecultureworks.com. There's some free resources there, including some information on our new training about anxiety at work, which is very exciting. So yeah, go there and learn how you and your team can thrive. Excellent. We love to speak. Invite us to speak virtually or in person. We travel all around the world to do that. And please give us a call. We'd love to speak at your event. And don't forget to buy the book. We also have wonderful online training for anxiety at work. Visit thecoachworks.com to find out more about that. As always, Adrian, I like to give you the last word. Well, thanks everybody again for joining us. Until next time, we wish you the best of mental health. You know, this is really weird. Thank you.