Within our marriage I realized that I was again a protector in every sense of the word. My husband has a demanding people-oriented job and even though my job is no less important, for some reason I’ve always felt compelled to bear most of the burden at home. I wanted to “protect” Jason from feeling too much stress and strain within our marriage, with the kids and our home maintenance so I adopted an “It’s Fine” attitude. No matter what, I just dealt with it and said, “it’s fine.” Over time this developed over into a lack of any expectation for him to do anything at home and he began to abdicate simply because I was doing it all. I was resentful that he wasn’t spontaneously helping me or proactively fixing things around the house. He’s always been really involved with the kids, but as far as schoolwork, activities, transportation, etc., I had kept him out of the loop thinking I was protecting him from the stress of it all. Liberating leadership in my home has meant communicating much more clearly and establishing expectations and offering both support and challenge when things go undone. Simply giving my husband a blanket “pass” for not engaging in our household was very isolating to him and he actually developed resentment toward me because of it. Once we applied the Support-Challenge Matrix to this area of our lives and began to intentionally take steps to move in that direction our family life got so much better. We are going on regular dates together, taking weekends away, spending more time at family dinners and meaningful experiences with our kids, sharing the load of household responsibilities and really working as a team more effectively. It’s been, in a word . . . liberating!”
This is the transformation that we desire for you. We want you to become someone worth following. We want you to build leaders worth following as you learn to multiply what you have learned, and we want you to lead teams and organizations that stand for liberation. We believe you can because we have seen so many people become 100X leaders and experience the liberation that we speak of here.
Why You’re Never Quite Done Growing
Self-awareness, like climbing, is difficult.
Learning to hold up the mirror in front of ourselves and be brutally honest with what we see does not come naturally to most people. It is a necessary path however.
It will take time to walk through the process of self-discovery and self-awareness to help you see the potholes in your leadership and life that need to be addressed. We all have these issues—tendencies that lead to patterns of action that we face over and over again. We find ourselves saying things like, “Why do I always react that way?” and, “Why can’t I ever seem to handle those situations better?”
Venturing into territory that we’re not accustomed to is a new process of learning and trail blazing. We’re not sure exactly where we are headed, or the precise path that will take us there, but we are determined to push through, nonetheless.
As we work through our tendencies and keep returning to the healthier path, a trail begins to appear under our feet, wearing a path that others around us can begin to see. Those ruts that we create over time are the tendencies that affect who we are and how we lead, for good or ill. Our lives are the sum total of the actions we take, most of which are based on the tendencies within us. Where we ultimately find ourselves can be traced back to the steps we took along the way.
Wouldn’t it be great to be able to spot those tendencies ahead of time and catch and correct them before they result in negative actions? It’s not a one-and-done exercise. Those tendencies/patterns are engrained in us due to who we are and the lives we’ve lived up to this point. Our paths as leaders are less about eliminating tendencies as much as recognizing and accounting for them.
We are never quite done with growing. This process of knowing and leading ourselves is a lifelong pursuit. We don’t wake up one morning to finally realize, “I’m there! I don’t have anything left to learn.” There is always room for growth and improvement.
The journey is worth it, and the destination of a life-long pursuit of intentional growth is better than a life of accidental wandering. Every person who summits Mount Everest starts from base camp with an intentional goal. If you’re not already walking, step onto the trail today and begin walking the path of becoming someone worth following.
The next and final chapter allows you to do a deep dive into who you really are. We lay out a step-by-step process that you can use consistently as you begin the process that can get you to 100X.
Notes
1Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air (Pan, 1997).
2Kate O’Keefe, “The Mental Strategies of Elite Climbing Sherpas” (Master’s thesis, University of Jyväskylä, 2016).
3Everest, movie directed by Baltasar Kormákur (2015).
11
The Sherpa Challenge
It’s always further than it looks. It’s always taller than it looks. And it’s always harder than it looks.
—The three rules of mountaineering
The climb is always hard. The journey always long. In one moment you feel like you are on top of the world and then the headwinds hit you. This is just the way it is. We have never met a significant leader who hasn’t missed a step or fallen down at one point or another. And that’s just climbing on your own—it’s even harder leading others up a mountain.
This quote from Mark Horrell puts the journey into perspective:
For the first 29 years of Everest’s climbing history the death rate was 100%. Then Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary climbed it in 1953 and came back down again. Suddenly the death rate was down to 50%, and it’s been going down ever since.1
For some of you, the building of people while climbing yourself, feels daunting, tiring, and useless. People are just messy, work is hard, and expectations go unmet at times. Leading can feel like dying and to some degree it is. However, the more you experience the more realistic your expectations become.
Here is my (Jeremie’s) story of dying and of starting to become a Sherpa:
It was 2012 and I was done. Since 2007 I had been leading the John Maxwell companies that we had bought and merged into GiANT. We had grown the Catalyst conferences into a national brand and successfully created a brand called Leadercast to become one of the largest leadership events in the world. We also had partnerships with significant thought leaders with the goal of changing the leadership landscape.
The problem was that as the leader, I was just dying. I was leading in what was my learned behavior, but not in my sweet spot. I was drained from work that was not life giving or energizing and drowning in detail. I was working on good projects that weren’t satisfying my purpose or skills and so my mind was on the work more than on growing the people.
Steve and I decided that we would help coach each other as we were both dealing with some difficult things in each of our own worlds. During that time period I realized that my personality and my wiring were not designed to be as effective in the current role. We wrote more about this in our book 5 Voices to help others understand how they are truly wired with their personality and how to become liberated and function more effectively.
Steve acted as a Sherpa to me and I realized that I was sinking under the weight of activities that were not in my natural strengths. He fought for my highest possible good in my job as I fought for his highest possible good in moving from the nonprofit world to being confident to leading in the business world.
Through that period of time I then began the arduous task of learning how to multiply my skills and expertise into others. The ongoing process of mastering multiplication does not come naturally to many, but it can be learned. Though I carry some scars along with stories of climbing and helping others climb to higher levels, I am still going after the higher levels myself.
All the tools we have created and shared in this book are from our experiences, and sometimes, our failures. What we have written comes directly from our real-life stories of climbing and multiplying. We want the highest good for you and can’t wait to help you along the way.
Here is Steve’s climbing story
as it relates to becoming a 100X leader:
Just over a decade ago, my long-suffering wife and daughters moved with me from Yorkshire, England to Phoenix in Arizona. In total we were to spend five incredible years in the United States, two in Phoenix and three in a wonderful place called Pawleys Island in South Carolina.
Looking back, I realize that I had traded on talent, charisma and (debatable) charm for most of my life and never truly disciplined the talents I’d been given. This all changed when I arrived in the United States and started working for a highly charismatic leader. This leader constantly challenged me to become more intentional in every area of my life. He taught me how much could be achieved when natural talent was aligned with consistent discipline over an extended period of time. For some this boot camp experience would have finished them, for me it was exactly what I needed. I needed to be pushed.
I remember vividly a conversation at Starbucks that was particularly formative. I had become a healthier leader in every area of my life since arriving in the United States and had worked incredibly hard to master the content and methodology that underpinned our consulting business. The leader, acting as my Sherpa, told me that the next stage of my development was to decide what I wanted to be known for in 10 years’ time. The natural answer for my personality type, who likes maximum influence with minimum responsibility, was to say, “world class communicator”! But deep down I knew that I would rather be known as someone who developed and apprenticed others. I didn’t have the 100X leader vocabulary then but looking back this was instinctively what I wanted.
I remember inviting five leaders into a weekly coaching group with me after that Starbucks conversation and beginning to intentionally transfer what I knew into these five people. I think I learned more than they did but it was the start of what is now a foundational part of who I am.
Multiplication is far from glamorous. It’s costly in terms of your time, talent, and treasure. It is an unseen commitment to support and challenge over an extended period of time, and there are no guarantees. Those we love and invest most in have the greatest potential to cause us joy and pain.
However, the fruits of multiplication are more rewarding than any public applause from a stage or dollars in your bank account. There is nothing like the pride of seeing someone you’ve invested in go on to do incredible things he or she didn’t believe were possible. And, the fruit of multiplication lasts longer than you would imagine. People credit you over time with far more than you deserve. It’s an investment that only grows over time as they forget how much challenge you had to bring to help them grow.
Ready to Climb
As you stand at base camp staring at a summit thousands of feet above, you can get spooked. Is this really worth it, you ask? The wind hits you as you step out of your tent. You are dressed and equipped. Your guides are rounding up the team, calling you up to steeper heights. It is time to climb.
Some of you will spend years climbing before you can lead others up the mountain. That is okay. The journey of 100X is actually the journey of being intentional—to wake you up from the accidental leadership that tends to lull people across the globe to sleep. You only get better when you practice, and we want you to start practicing climbing to 100% and once you are there, to start to practice the X—to multiply what you know to others.
There are great leaders who people want to follow, but the leaders’ inability to multiply limits their influence and often frustrates those trying to follow them. Many well-known “gurus” fit these criteria as they have great wisdom and appear hugely influential through their writings and speaking, but they are not prepared for the incredibly hard, unglamorous yards of devoting their time, talent, and treasure to helping others climb. You want to follow the leader who is creating an atmosphere where people want to be, not where they’re forced to be. The test is to look at the team and culture around them rather than their bank balance or possessions.
If you have made it this far in the book, we believe you want to become one of the servant heroes—a Sherpa, who liberates those they lead. Some of you have been longing to be a 100X leader, but you didn’t have the resources or know how to start or even if you had it within you to do the hard work. It always takes longer than you think and is much more difficult to become a leader that someone actually wants to follow. It’s time.
We have provided the tools and equipment you will need to climb, as well as given you a vision to be the best leader possible, while remaining healthy yourself in the process.
Plotting Your Course
It is important to understand the best way up the mountain. Do you really want to meander through life without a sense of purpose or direction? By bringing our unconscious tendencies, struggles, and frustrations to light, we can begin to address our underlying issues with intentionality and make tomorrow’s version of ourselves a better one than today’s. That is the mountain we must climb.
So how can you lead yourself better today in order to become the person you want to be tomorrow?
Whatever you expect of others, you must first expect of yourself. This cuts to the heart of leadership and influence. Leading yourself means having expectations for yourself, which means that all that you have learned from this book must begin in you first.
Why is this so difficult for leaders today? Most likely it’s because we rarely talk about the need for leader consistency, nor do we often experience others who model the concept for us. Here are some areas you can apply to become a 100X leader:
Go deeper—They say a tree grows up in direct proportion to the depths of its roots. If you want to truly climb to the top, then you must go to the core and build from the inside out.
Maintain inner health—To get to 100% you must improve your spiritual, mental, and emotional maturity. If you are not healthy on the inside nothing can be healthy on the outside. Take time to recharge, rest, and center yourself each day, whatever that may mean for you. Many people have used our book, 5 Gears, to help with how to be present and productive when there is never enough time. Remember, liberation begins with self.
Stay focused on the vision—Remind yourself what you want and what your summit is because we all have different ones. Begin with the end in mind and create your map to the higher levels.
Live self-aware—Be self-reflective in the morning, after lunch, and after dinner. To lead yourself means you must know yourself first. If others know you better than you know yourself, you are not ready for the top.
Leverage language—Language sets culture. Leverage the positive by using the 100X tools you have learned to lead those in your world. Once they learn the objective language, they will begin to experience the same levels of growth they have seen in you.
Ask others to join you—Make leadership a daily process. Get others involved. If you have focused on the preceding steps, you will see your leadership capacity and influence improve on a daily basis.
Fight for others best—Let people know that you are for them by calibrating high support and high challenge for their best and begin to act like a Sherpa.
Becoming someone worth following is the 100%. There are plenty of leaders worth following who never choose to function as a Sherpa for others. This is the distinction between a 100 leader and a 100X leader, and 100 leaders often disappoint those they lead because for some reason they never multiply in the way they could. Their legacy is sadly less than it should have been.
100X leaders are incredibly rare. We want to help raise an army of them; leaders who have the capacity and desire to change the cultures of families, teams, organizations, and communities.
Choosing Your Guides
Getting healthy yourself is the first part of the climb. If you want to become a 100X leader, you need to be connected to leaders who are living that kind of life. That is what we do. We have multiplied GiANTs into Sherpas who are helping leaders summit.
We have laid out much for you to follow here, but the nuances of your real life need to be addressed for you
to have the best chance of climbing the mountains ahead. We have also given you a path to climb at www.giant.tv to set out a clear process for your 100X leader journey.
We still believe the relationship with a coach, guide, consultant, or friend is most crucial to hold you accountable and get the best out of your leadership. We at GiANT are a resource, but there are also thousands of others who are qualified to help you in your journey to liberate yourself and others. The key is to find someone you trust, with credibility and integrity, whether a GiANT or another resource.
In the end, we simply hope that you will go for it—that you will climb the highest levels for your benefit and for those you lead in every circle of influence.
The Why
This book is not just leadership jargon but also a manifesto of what we truly believe the best leaders in the world to be. We became passionate about 100X leaders for personal reasons.
I (Steve) hadn’t experienced much healthy multiplication, usually due to the insecurity of “legacy leaders” who always made it about themselves. True 100X leaders are humble. They don’t seek the publicity or adulation of the crowds because their true reward will always be over a dinner with the individuals whose lives they changed forever, not holding them up as trophies but, rather, enjoying the quiet satisfaction of seeing others liberated.
This is the filter for those who are really ready to climb. For many leaders the lure of the spotlight is too great! We still struggle like everyone else with our own tendencies and insecurities, but we have set ourselves on a path and function as a group of Sherpas constantly encouraging and challenging each other to keep going.
The 100X Leader Page 16