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Welcome to the Think in Cursive podcast. I'm Brandon Leonard, and I'm so excited to share with you my circle of interesting people and conversation. Please, like, subscribe and share your comments along the way. It helps our little channel more than you know. All right, here we go.
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What is thinking Cursive? This is our exploration into how we can play as a strategy in life and business, finance and wellness. And it's everything. It's everywhere when you start tuning into that frequency.
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So, joined today by my longtime buddy, Vaughn Wright, Father of four, husband of many, many. I don't remember what you said earlier. Decades, and, longtime workout buddy, business partner, and really just a mentor in my life.
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Huge part of my life. Vaughn, what's your story, buddy? I don't know. Let's just roll with it. You know, everybody feels like at some point in their life that they're weird. They're the person that doesn't seem to fit. So I was always the person that needed to know.
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Why? Like, why that you asked me to do something? Why that you tell me. Well, this is the right way to do it. Why. Why is that the right way of doing it? Right? So most of my life has been spent, like, trying to find the tracks I'm supposed to run on.
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So I've done the corporate thing and consulting. I ran big IT operations, I ran strategy. I've been a partner in Global five consultancy. And now, basically, I spend my time trying to share the gifts of all of my experience and all of my uniqueness with the people that God sends to me.
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So I do that through my second half coaching, and also through Lifters of Men, which is a, men's charitable, endeavor, I call it. It's not a foundation. We hope one day it's going to actually have money enough. I can call it a foundation.
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But basically, we lift up the hearts and souls of men so that they might be inspired to lift the lives of others. So I am very blessed to have survived the wars of getting to a place. My kids are grown. They're out of the house.
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I got my first grandson about a year ago. Love, my wife to death. So, yeah, we've got an amazing life, and I'm surrounded by men, that lift me up, you being one of them.
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So, yeah. And we spent so much time talking. I can't believe we're actually going to record one of our conversations. I thought what happened, in Vegas, stayed in Vegas. So I guess we have no audience so it doesn't really matter. Yeah. For the time being, we'll see how this plays out.
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But, yeah, we've had lots of conversations. They could have been podcasts on their own. They could have been podcasts. Why not formalize it? Let's just share it. I feel like, yeah, if we're gifted an audience, we should be prepared to be prepared to engage.
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And, you've been a big part of my life helping me to, prepare myself for that engagement. Just thinking about what messages that we want to send and that we do send, and subconsciously we're just accepting. And, I got a lot of insight from your coaching, as well as just, sharing life with you and leaning on each other with our various struggles and, you know, things that are universally applicable to everybody out there.
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But also how those struggles and leaning on each other can equip us to just be bold, be fearless, and say no. Why are you stalling on that? Or, you know, just. Just sharpening each other? Well, tell me about, I guess, what stirred in you for this, this Lifters of Men project that we've been kind of working on for a little while.
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Yeah. Love to hear it from your perspective. Yeah. I think. I think it was a little bit accidental, but definitely, this kind of. This thought, you know, a bunch of guys getting together, you know, working out in the CrossFit gym, and, you know, we got to know each other in, like, hour slices at a time.
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And, you know, when you're. You're in the gym, you know, you kind of. Everybody gets broken down to some degree. Right. Your weaknesses get exposed. So there's a certain truth that. That just gets revealed. Right. You get comfortable that other people see sort of, you know, I'm not so good at this, or I'm strong at this, or, you know, so that.
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That kind of dropping of the veil, the dropping of the armor, created openness for connecting in a deeper way. And I see it now in retrospect, but at the time, I just felt like there's a need here that's bigger than the need we're meeting by just working out together.
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You know, people would share little elements about, you know, they say, you know, offhand, something's going on, and you'd kind of go, whoa. You know, I feel like I want to, you know, I want to help if I can. You know, maybe something going on with a kid, you know, something going on at home with their wives could, have been, you know, a job could have been a health thing.
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And so, you know, I think, there was a group of us that decided back in 2019 that we would. Let's get together for coffee. Maybe there's more we can do for each other than just, you know, hang out and, you know, sweat together. The occasional, you know, partner workout.
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And I would have to say, you know, that first session was absolute magic eye opening in the need that men have to just be honest, you know, to drop the veil, you know, put some things on the table that are just part of their lives that they have to hold on to or they feel like they have to hold on to them.
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And to realize that, you know, there were, I think, 12 guys, you know, I don't want to say 12 apostles, but, I mean, we're, But to realize that everybody's going through shit. Yeah. I mean, nobody's got a perfect life. Everybody's got something that is really dragging on them, and they're doing their best to try to keep their chin up, but it's hard.
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And to realize that some of the younger guys looked at some of us older guys thinking, oh, they've got it all together. And then we shared some of the mess that is our lives. I think it just made everybody feel like, oh, wow, okay, maybe I'm not so screwed up.
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Like, maybe I'm okay. And then just the sharing, you know, realizing that everybody's got something to give. And if nothing else, they don't have anything to communicate. They can be present. Right. Which just honors the person to say, you know, your life and your situation matter enough that I'm going to sit here and be present for it and to just realize, like, how important that actually was.
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And that kind of foundation of deep connection is really what's carried us forward. I mean, it's since 2019. We nearly fell apart when the first gym cratered, but we reconstituted it, in a new gym.
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And we've got all manner of different dimensions of things we're doing together, and play is a big part of it. I would say. It's the, like, the freedom to just be who we are without the rules, without, feeling like we have to perform.
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We just get to be who we are and to be accepted by the other guys. You know, we give each other shit. That's kind of the way we know we're being accepted. Right. You know, if nobody's giving you shit, they probably don't really respect you. But, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I think I was thinking this morning about the subject of play and, you know, and how lifters of men.
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I think definitely, you know, a lot of it is about play. Right. When you think about some of the conversations we've had, but also just our relationship, you know, I think that the way we connected is that neither one of us likes constraints.
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Right. We want to draw outside the lines. If you show us lines, we're drawn outside of them, just despite whoever it was that drew the lines. Right. And so I think most of our conversations are kind of unconstrained, and we don't talk about it being unconstrained.
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It's just the wavelength that we tend to operate on. Right. If I was just dipping into this conversation and didn't have, over a decade of being close with you, I would say, well, that doesn't sound like a tech guy. Doesn't sound like somebody who's got, a long, illustrious, career and tech and logistics and finance and consulting or whatever.
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How did you get to this reprioritization of what really matters most in this season of life, in this moment, in this time now? Yeah, well, I would say that, time on the planet. I mean, not to say I am the holder of a lot of wisdom, but I, you know, I've prayed for a long time for, for wisdom.
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And I, I had the opportunity to, like, be on a rocket ship. I mean, technology over the last 35 years has been a rocket ship. I was a liberal arts major, that had never coded anything.
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And I found my way into technology because I, I said, you know what? When I was in school, I. Technology was beginning to creep in. We didn't have PCs really, at the time, that old. But I could see the technology was going to start showing up everywhere.
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And I was, you know, getting my business degree and thinking technology is going to reshape the way business is done. It was, it was in the back office at the time in. It was the raised floor, people smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee.
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They were the people that were the stewards of technology. And I just had the sense that it was going to rewrite basically the rules of business. And so I hopped off my track of marketing and said, I am going to go pursue this because somebody needs to be the bridge between the technology and the people that have problems.
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We need to pull those things together. There was a ton of creativity that was required because you had to speak both languages. Over the years of realizing that the real power of the technology Was the creative thought, the future casting of what could be, and the ability to break the old rules because technology could do things that people said couldn't be done.
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It's still happening today. Every generation of technology is literally destroying paradigms.
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After a long time of playing in that world and realizing that, the world of commerce is really about making money. And if you wanted to do things at scale, you were going to be part of big systems, not technology systems, but big corporations.
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And big corporations, I think in our time, maybe they've always been this way, but we've kind of lost sight of the fact that everything we, have done was supposed to be for people. It was supposed to better the lives of people.
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And I started feeling like we were harvesting and extracting the value, the human capacity from people for the purpose of somebody profiting. And just realizing that as I was running large organizations, I had thousands of people.
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And I think the experience that they're having here in the office, this, you know, this extraction experience, this devaluing of the people as people, each and every one of those individuals going home and having, you know, sharing their misery with their families, they're raising their kids with this cloud of misery.
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This feeling of not being empowered, this feeling of not having a voice, this feeling that they were just a cog, a gear in a wheelchair, and the rules that were being put in front of them and the objectives that they were there to serve were not human.
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And once I kind of reached a breaking point with, which, you know, I would say was precipitated by, you know, a drug addiction, my. My oldest daughter, and then, you know, my wife, having cancer, just, had to reflect on what am I doing.
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These are the most important things in my life. And here I am excelling in some space that's basically just helping very rich people get richer, and corporations that aren't inherently focused on the humans that, again, all of it was created for.
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We were supposed to be serving people better, and circumstances and my decisions spit me out of the machine, thankfully. And then it was probably, it was 15 solid years of wandering in the desert to figure out what am I supposed to do?
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Like, I have all of this experience, and I can make a lot of money, but I have to go back and do I have to be the person that I've chosen? I don't want to be anymore, but I didn't know who I wanted to be because I was really good at being this other person and other person.
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I didn't find particularly attractive at this point in my life. So a lot of personal transformation and humbling, of myself. There's still. I mean, you know me, there's still plenty of humbling left to be done. And just realizing that, God has given me all these gifts to share, they're not here for me to keep profiting from.
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What am I going to do with more that I gain for myself? It's just an empty experience realizing that I'm supposed to humble myself and figure out how do I become a servant of the people that God sends to me.
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And I have very different practices now in terms of. I didn't prepare for this podcast. I didn't write a bunch of notes I used to show up with wanting to control exactly the situation. I wanted to control the narrative.
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I wanted to have the pen in my hand because the guy who has the pen in his hand gets to write the rules. And God says, you're supposed to show up and do the work I put in front of you. So that's what I try to do. And with the people that I coach, I try to just be present, for them.
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And I bring all the experience of knowing what the temptations are, that cause people to get focused on the wrong things, over index on the things that are actually making them miserable, thinking that those are the things that are going to distract them from their misery as opposed to feeding them.
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You know, the temptations that men have about being breadwinners, being, you know, protectors, you know, we're not supposed to make mistakes. We never show our weakness. Never let them see you sweat. I know all that, man. I live by all that. And it's a. It's a terrible burden to carry.
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Took me a long time to get to this place, and I still have so much more to do in front of me. But I'm. I'm blessed to, to be where I am, and have a little clearer path of, where I'm supposed to go in a way that I can totally relate.
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You woke up one day and you realize that I'm not like these people. I'm not willing to keep doing this in perpetuity. Something has to change. This is no longer sustainable in this environment. I remember having that thought of, you know, I'd be willing to make a lot less money to work for people that I believed in.
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And that really expedited my escape from, yeah, publicly traded company. Big, big corporate home builder. And so I've got this warm, soft, I Got a soft spot for everybody that's gone and fought, faced that fear, gone out on their own, try to forge their way.
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And really it seems like the path of somebody that wants to live by these virtues is often a much more humble, much more humble path than we kind of think that we're. Maybe we grow up, thinking, you know, with the American dream of like, hey, you take this job and shove it, I'm gonna do my own thing and I'm gonna get rich.
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And you know, when realistically, as you're saying later in life, the real good stuff, it's not the paycheck. I mean, the paycheck will come if you show up and you work, but it's just money, right? You can always make more of it. I mean, it is a blessing to be here in America.
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Amen. And it might not always be this way, but I'm not going to focus on that. I'm going to focus on the doubt. And that's just something that when we met back in probably 2014, although realistically it was a slow warmup, we were just gym acquaintances for the longest time.
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I think we were competing for a little while. Well, that's just what we did. We were athletes. We both played, sports in college. Both identify as high performance individuals and stewards of our body, of our resources. You know, that's always been a respectable quality, for my, you know, for my seat that it was just the start, you know, and since we, since we pitched this idea with the buddies from the gym, hey, why don't we, get together and have coffee or, maybe do a Bible study or something.
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Even knowing that a lot of those guys weren't even really believers, some of them that still come to lifters of men groups aren't at all. But they show up because there's community and we've got authentic relationships that have spurred, business relationships.
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I mean, one of the guys, I moved into the house next door to him and flipped that house and just all kinds of fruit has grown from this. Just making space. And honestly, when I first met you and we started talking about how, yeah, one of the biggest demographics for people committing suicide were like, people that were freshly retired, like white males that all of a sudden realized their entire life has been wrapped in this identity as this corporate earner type.
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And it's all a fallacy, like there is no real security. And I think the hidden cost of success far outweighs, you know, the perceived value that you get on your paycheck or your. Your little matched 401k or whatever.
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It's a finite game. And Simon Sinek's got this book, the Infinite Game. But, life is an infinite game. Right, but, you know, what we're doing in the office is a finite game. Yeah, right. We score ourselves, we measure ourselves for athletes, we're measuring ourselves.
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And, like, do we make the team and, you know, do we beat the other team? And, you know, and then at work, it's roles. It's like you're pecking order in the hierarchy, how much money you're making. But all that comes to an end. It's eventually going to come to an end, and then you have life, the remainder of life.
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And if you've only ever valued those things, then what happens is when those things have ended for you, you don't even value yourself. You know, it's the false idols, you know, and you don't realize that you've spent all your time worshiping at the altar of, you know, of money, of power, of honor.
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And to realize those things come to an end. You know, what happens when the audience is gone, when the paycheck stops? You know, you lose your job. What next? Even when the kids move out, you know, if you said, hey, you know, it keeps me straight and doing, you know, doing the right things, doing the honorable things. You know, I got kids, right?
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Okay, well, now my kids move out. Now what? Right? There's gotta be something else that you're in it for. You gotta have a longer view of why you're here, and what we're called to do. I gotta say one thing that I do like about you, that you intentionally, did dance lessons with your wife.
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I did. After, you know, no desire to become a dancer yourself, however, it was a real possibility.
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But you knew that there was value in pursuing your bride. And really, that's the big takeaway is when we were doing your coaching. I don't remember the way that you put it, but I knew that it was one of your top priorities is to pursue your bride. Your bride of 39 years, you said, yeah, that's amazing.
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And getting out of your comfort zone. Yes. Yeah. Deathly afraid of the, of the embarrassment, which makes absolutely no sense, but it's total. It's totally a guy thing. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah, I think.
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And, you know, since we are talking about play, I mean, play kind of invites you, provided it's not something that you're already supposed to be good at. Right. I think that's why a lot of people don't want to go play golf. You know, you'll play golf with some people that are, you know, good golfers. Like, oh, no, I'm going to be evaluated next to them.
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But other things that are completely new and everybody's new, we're all at the same level. It doesn't really matter. We can make fools out of ourselves. It doesn't matter. In fact, we probably have more fun, the more incompetent we are at this thing and just realizing that, we relate to each other in this way.
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And, the dancing thing was I just had to tell myself, of course my wife is going to be better. And they're definitely. Maybe that's good because she can lord that over me as though there aren't other things she can lord over me that she's better at.
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But just to say, okay, if I really want to build this relationship in more dimensions, I've got to be willing to just do something that I just deathly do not want to do. And so I just said, okay, you know, I said, hey, let's take dance.
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I was the one who brought it up. I said, let's take dance lessons. And she looked at me like, are you nuts? So, yeah, it was a lot of fun. And, I was less than average, at dancing. Well, wasn't it you that told me that, that's one of the top qualities or easily recognizable qualities in CEOs, that they're willing to jump into something, that they're completely novice or inexperienced in the.
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I would say the innovator leaders, the people that can, like, navigate through, like, really difficult situations that require the ability to see a new way, a new path, they're not afraid, right? They're not afraid to. To actually face something because they.
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They don't have the illusion of control. Right? So when you have this belief that there's certainty and that your knowledge and your experience provides you with certainty, and then you find yourself in a massively uncertain environment, you implode.
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But if you're somebody who actually is really good at connecting, and connecting is, about having a really broad aperture that accepts that you don't really have control. But if you allow yourself to be part of the evolution of things, you allow yourself to be connected into, the energy of a market, that people that sense what's happening in a broader market, and are not afraid to do something completely different, those are the people that can navigate through really difficult times and don't lean back on old ways, but reach for and create new ways.
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We're designed to do that. I mean we're, we're spiritual creatures. And I was telling you the other day about the, you know, some of the research I've been, I've been doing. Just on the different hemispheres of our brain are really wired for different modes of operating. And you know, there's kind of a controlling dimension which is, you know, where most of our focus is in kind of the modern world.
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All the technology tends to drive us in that direction. It makes us feel like there is certainty, like we can know virtually everything. And then there's the right hemisphere which is really this, you know, open aperture, you know, broader connection, 360°, you know.
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You know, the people that you think are kind of woo woo, you know, connected with nature, and the broader, you know, energy of the universe or you know, God. But our brains are actually designed that way. And the more we actually allow for that connectedness, that bigger openness, the more meaning we actually feel we have in life.
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The better our relationships are and the more intuitive we are because we're picking up things that we can't filter out and be specific about them. But there's information nonetheless. There's inspiration, there's stimulation, there's, beckoning, there's messages of resistance, doors opening.
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And I think that's one of the things that again, to bring this back to play. I think it's one of the things at play. That's why people can just escape in a game or doing something, collectively with a group of people that their rhythms begin to, to synchronize and all of the control of the normal world that they're operating in, they let go and allow themselves to be, you know, present in a moment, where they don't exactly know what's going to happen next.
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Right. It's evolving, you know, in front of us and it's okay. And it's okay. In fact, it's, it's the way it's supposed to be. Yeah. And I think that is rejuvenating, you know, and it's where the creativity lives as well. Yeah. It seems like we become so performance oriented that play just gets, you know, mushed and it's just discarded as non essential.
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Yeah. And I think that the, we're grown ups now. Yeah. Yeah. I should ask everybody. When did you stop playing? But the I think it was that. Thank you for being late. I think Friedman, not to put you on the spot, Thomas Friedman, I think, yeah. This concept of our most genius discoveries and observations and conclusions often come at a time of disruption.
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And if every piece of our brain is, or our schedule is allotted to a certain task and there's no white space to just wander or be, then our most prized creative executive.
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Problem solving characteristics, they're just crowded out by tasks. There's no room for them. And to me, you know, before real estate, I was a, touring musician and songwriter. And you know, back in those days, you know, taking time, taking a few.
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This before kids, of course, taking time to, you know, wander the state for a few days and looking for inspiration and writing, that was work. I didn't feel guilty about it. Imagine that. Now I feel so guilty about taking all this time for my selfish pursuits.
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Because I'm in a season of life right now where majority of my bandwidth is serving other people, probably more than I even want to in this season because I got small kids that have a lot of needs. And I like to serve other people. And my job and real estate, I'm serving people all the time, helping problem solve.
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But also the pursuit of my expression and creativity has fallen into a. It's not my highest priority right now, and I know that it'll always be there. But now I also feel creative in the ways that I can encourage people and the ways that we solve problems.
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I feel creative. And the ways that we can just have an open conversation and just ponder things or riff on a subject. Well, I'm going to tell you, you should. You need to be creating. Well, here we are. I know, I know. And we talked about this, we were joking about the whole session we had in my basement.
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But, But you're a creator and you should be creating, right? And it's, it's painful sometimes for me to see that you're like, caught in the schedule of. To do oh my gosh, so many diapers. Well, you know, that's. That's the season of life. But yeah, but yeah, I mean, yeah, I don't want to say that, that not everybody has the capacity to create, but I think there are realms in which, you know, people, you know, have skills to create.
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And, you know, I think, you know, your musical background, you have very expressive language, the way that you capture and communicate things, your visualization of things, you know, having worked with you, you know, and, you know, imagining what a home could be and just all the other riffs I think that, people that are naturally gifted to create, those people need to be creating.
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And I do realize it's like, it doesn't feel very practical in a lot of cases, especially in this world of, you know, as we're moving more and more into AI and we see AI handling, you know, the rote activities, you know, the tasks that can be scheduled, you know, the tasks that are finite in nature, it puts a premium on the uniqueness of human creativity.
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You know, I think, this is an expression of that talent that you have. And I think it's probably going to spawn other things. My hope is that you get some guests that are more interesting than me, that are creative types, and that those interactions are going to blossom into new creative endeavors.
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I don't doubt it. I believe that if we are created in God's image, we are creators, we are creatives. And I feel creativity in so many different ways. And I'm secure enough in it to know that, you know, everybody has multiple outlets of creativity.
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And I feel, I just, I feel blessed that I get to have an audience, of just direct people that I get to interact with and kind of help them maybe see things and I don't know, a rosier color or whatever. But yeah, I do believe this is the start of something.
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It's a new expression. I get to just create more time pondering, more time away from the, constant interruptions and notifications of life. And there's something so sweet and realistically, really to me this whole thing is about chasing the white rabbit of creativity and see where this goes.
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I just have a feeling, and I have a feeling that if I just prioritize connection and listen to human stories, you know, really it's just humanity. We're just sharing life in an authentic way. AI can't compete with that.
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You know, we need this on a fundamental core level. We're so isolated and messed up. It seems like since COVID things have just gotten so weird and not the good kind of weird, you know, when we need some more of the good kind of weird. And I'm okay with being the good kind of weird guy, you know, And I don't know, it feels like play to me to, to do these things and you know, to constantly be able to pivot and go into a different type of investment or a different type of project or a different, you know, like the variety is the spice of life for me.
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And that's what makes me feel playful and really I'm excited to model that for my kids to show them how I'm constantly trying to get outside of my comfort zone. And it's funny, even when I do, jiu jitsu, I feel creative with my combination of movements and problem solving abilities.
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I feel so creative when I'm doing that because it keeps working against certain opponents. You know, not against all of them, but against some of them are like, okay, this guy doesn't know my little, formula here. I'm going to hit him with this and it works. And until it doesn't, and that's okay, then we learn, right?
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But it's a flow just like, just like any kind of sport, like you, if you do it long enough, you find this flow where all of a sudden you start surprising yourself with your unique patterns or sequences of something that just turns out to be surprisingly more effective than everybody else.
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And it's funny how, you know, going from touring musician to real, estate agent to flipper to investor, now podcast guy, the way that I do a real estate transaction, the way that I write an offer stands out.
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Like my, my strategy tends to stand out in the market. And everybody can see, why aren't you doing it like the traditional way? Why, why have you already done this? I'm like, well, it works. It works really well, man. I was, I'm really grateful that I went through that, you know, that grinder of the corporate job selling, you know, 150 houses with the builder to get the confidence to tell people, no, we're gonna do it this way.
[34:39.3]
This is the way that I see that it's best. It's funny because I'm like, yeah, it's just work, but to me, it's another avenue. I get to be creative. And now granted, is that my whole soul edifying, like, expression to my creativity? Of course not. But it's just one flavor where I can say, you know what?
[34:55.0]
I'm grateful. Like, I get to do something that stands out in the marketplace. And every other real estate agent can look at that and say, that's different. That does not. Why doesn't, yeah, why doesn't everybody do it that way? And that's kind of the way I think everybody should do it this way. But that stubbornness is probably what also, is probably a byproduct of my confidence.
[35:14.2]
And just, I think it's also just the, the wiring, I think, because I think I'm wired the same way as I can't, I can't wake up and have today look just like Yesterday. Yeah, like the whole. The whole thought of that. It's just, you know, I don't sleep in.
[35:31.6]
But if that's what my day looked like. Exactly. Like the day before, I'd start pulling the covers over my head. Yeah, yeah. And I just think that, it's your life, right? Why not wake up and do it a little differently today? Right? It's like, It was a story that one, of my business school professors told me about Seymour, Cray.
[35:54.4]
So if you've ever heard of, Cray supercomputers. So people don't talk about supercomputers anymore because, you know, literally we have like a supercomputer on our, you know, in our pockets. But there was a time when you couldn't do, you know, more than just like a handful of really simple computations on a computer.
[36:12.8]
So this guy, Seymour Cray, physicist, mathematician, he created this architecture for a supercomputer. And it, could do things that nothing else could do. And NASA ended up using it because it could do the computations to actually determine the astrophysics of the rocket trajectory.
[36:34.4]
And how do you actually land something on the moon? But Seymour Cray story, Seymour is that, every fall or winter, he would start building a boat.
[36:51.3]
He'd make from scratch a boat, and he would finish it the, beginning of the summer. And he would sail the boat all summer long. And then in the fall, he would burn the boat, and he would burn the boat because he did not want to be constrained by the past.
[37:07.6]
He did not want anything that he had ever done to limit the possibilities of how he might see the world with fresh eyes. And, so every year he would create a brand new one. Didn't use any of the designs, nothing from the previous boat.
[37:22.9]
It just stuck with me because I thought, never do I want to go back. Even if I did really great work. Don't want to go back with the idea that I want to replicate that. But where's the fun in that, right? You want to be a part of inventing, trying, exercising, daring to discover something new or to find a better way.
[37:44.4]
I mean, you know, does anybody doubt that we don't have better ways of doing things than the way we're doing it today? I just think that. I think one of the reasons why we connect is that we both inherently believe the same thing. That feels like the greatest blessing is today is a new day, and we can be whoever we want to be right now, as long as it's okay.
[38:03.1]
With my wife, I can be whoever I want to be. I can be whoever. Yeah. Regardless of what Sherene says. Yeah, I know. I know. Don't tell her that. Yeah. Yeah. It feels like, Well, and that feels like play. And I can remember every single job I ever had once I became proficient.
[38:21.2]
And it was just repetition. I knew that was the beginning of the end. I was like, okay, well, now what? I'm just supposed to repeat this until I retire? I was like, no, this ain't gonna work. I was like, I enjoy learning how to do this, but my time is finite here.
[38:37.1]
It's a luxury. I just want to, you know, want to say, because I know there are people, that their jobs can feel pretty constrained. But I believe that everybody's got a degree of freedom. We all have agency to wake up and be creative.
[38:53.9]
Yeah. Work is optional. If your trust fund is big enough, work is optional. So what would you say to somebody that maybe is trapped in or feels trapped in a job? Right. Because who am I to say they're actually trapped, but feels like there's no.
[39:11.0]
There is no play, and there's no avenue for play in them. In life, first thing I would say is that, who you are inside is not dictated by the job you do. Right. You can show up as a different person inside.
[39:27.8]
Your openness to others, your. Your posture as it relates to, control, versus Being connected. I think there's so many degrees of freedom that each of us has within the constraints that we find ourselves in.
[39:50.2]
So I would first say there's so much room for everybody to transform internally. Virtually every. Every job, every profession involves other people. There's always room to be a better human to the humans that we inhabit our little corner of the earth with.
[40:12.3]
And I know that can feel frightening for people because especially if you spent so much time maintaining a guard and if you have decided people are a threat. And you mentioned the COVID problem. I think that turning more people into threats was the worst thing that happened with COVID as people became kind of hypersensitive to the threat that exists in all these other people.
[40:38.0]
And this isolation has us turning inward. I think if everybody turns a little bit More outward and accepts that whatever concerns you're having, other people are having the same. And sometimes being the one that opens the door first invites other people in, and everything changes.
[41:01.0]
I mean, there's the story of, the Chilean miners that got trapped, I don't know how many hundreds of feet down, and they were there doing A very specific task. It was a mining engineering task. As soon as it became clear that they were trapped together, you might have thought, okay, they're, they're all going to panic and they're going to be at each other's throats, and they're not going to survive.
[41:28.6]
But the exact opposite happened. These miners actually started coming together in very deeply connected ways. The sense that their lives could be very short and realizing that they could either, spend the remaining days of their lives at each other's throats being desperate and afraid, or they could actually give of what they had to each other in this very constrained way.
[41:59.6]
I mean, they barely had any food. There was very little light sources that they could draw upon. They couldn't really go anywhere. But they were busy doing the things that contributed to the survival of the entire group.
[42:17.4]
And the entire group survived. It was a miracle. But they survived because they decided even with all those constraints, all those reasons to not believe the misery that they could have escaped into. They decided that they were going to turn outward and serve basically the greater good of the team.
[42:40.4]
And I think the first they put a microphone like down this, like the shaft to try to see if they could get any kind of connection. The first thing that they heard was. Sounded like song. These guys were singing like it been days trapped down there.
[43:00.4]
And they're down there singing. They're like, what in the world is that? Wow. Yeah, I just think, we change our heart posture, we stop thinking about what the world owes me. But rather what is the world asking of me?
[43:17.0]
It doesn't matter what you're doing. You can experience meaning and you can experience the opportunity to be creative. So yeah, that's what I would say. Now if they really had a miserable situation, I might ask them to believe in themselves that they can live a better situation and help them to imagine that they have a lot of skills, they have people they can connect with, and that the world needs high quality people.
[43:46.9]
If you're a high quality person, you present yourself that way. There's always an opportunity to do that. But I think, a lot of people just need to change who they are inside and what they decide to be to the rest of the world to change their situation.
[44:03.1]
And I'd say too, yeah, high quality people don't start out as high quality people. You know, they change into high quality people. And also you can't be fearful and playful at the same time. Exactly. It's funny because, you know, I married when I was a tour Musician.
[44:19.8]
I married a bartender. The marriage didn't last long. And, when that fell apart, she never wanted to dance. She never wanted to be the center of attention. And I thought, well, you know, a woman's gonna want to be shown off. She's probably gonna want a man learn, you know, knows how to dance and is prepared to show her off on the dance floor.
[44:35.7]
So I took dance lessons, and they told me, like, I need to practice because I like you. I was not a gifted dancer, and I'm still not a gifted dancer, but I did learn something. You start off your day blasting some music and dancing like nobody's watching. You can't do that and be in a bad mood.
[44:51.8]
Like, it will. It will improve your mood. There's something, right. Neurologically, biologically, that happens. You just can't be in a bad mood. And that same concept. You can't be fearful and faithful or playful. And I believe that play is kind of an act of worship too. You know, realistically, to just set everything down and focus on one thing.
[45:10.4]
And, man, I have felt. I have felt worship playing guitar. I felt it playing, well, every instrument, really. Just little glimpses of connection to something that's way bigger than me. And when that hits, there's no drug that can compare to our real connection to God, to something far greater than us.
[45:31.3]
But this whole thing, just fighting fear and realizing how much it shapes our every single day. And I like to ask, what would your day look like? What would your life look like if we had no fear? That's something I ponder regularly. And, it's been cool to riff on this over the years with you.
[45:50.5]
And really, that's kind of led me into this, pursuing this creative space where we can just have conversation with people and feel emboldened to go places we didn't ever expect to go, take risks that we didn't expect to take. I mean, you coach startup CEOs and founders all the time, and I guess, how do you incorporate that element of play or willingness to take risk into your coaching?
[46:16.9]
You know, I would say that I do it by, I make it really clear that I'm. I'm trying to develop the. The people, the person not necessarily focused on the business. So if.
[46:32.1]
If they're, like, hyper focused on, they, you know, they want me to try to, you know, drive home their strategy. I'm like, no, I'm here to actually develop good humans that want to be a part of cultivating environments that are healthy for humans, and helping people to really shed Their fear.
[46:55.0]
Because so much of what causes, interactions at work and really everywhere, to be dysfunctional is fear. So people are afraid of, what someone else is going to think of them, or they're afraid they're going to give something away. Like, like there's some competition, right?
[47:11.5]
That if I show them the play I'm going to run, right, they're going to defend it, is to help them realize that, okay, most of that is just, you know, manifestation of your own fear, right? Because that's actually not what's going to happen. And everybody, Everybody wants to engage, in a lighter, more shared way.
[47:32.1]
Everybody wants to feel like they're on a team. Even people that say, I prefer to play individual sports when they're on a team, that really feels like a team, feels like you're in it together. There's nothing better. I mean, God made us as social creatures, right? We need each other and we want to be, unconditionally accepted by other people.
[47:54.5]
And, we want to feel like we got a shared purpose. So I try to just help them see that they have to let their guard down. And they have to be willing to share, not, advice, but to share a question, the asking of a question that invites people together to think about, you know, what is the question itself.
[48:23.1]
Like, what are we actually asking? And to not be quick to answer the question. That the real magic in getting a group to work well together, to get two individuals to work well together, is not to hurry to the solution, but actually to enjoy the process of pondering.
[48:40.8]
And when you are willing to accept that maybe you don't have the right answer and you don't have to have the right answer, it's not a requirement. It actually doesn't advance the ball. It actually stops the conversation when you pose the solution. Because now you're competing. Now, I got to tell you that I disagree with your solution.
[48:58.8]
And, to try to teach them those basic skills of how do they, how do they engage in play, so to speak. But it's play around. You know, we have real problems to solve. But address it by being open and asking a question.
[49:15.1]
And let the question's intent be to invite the others in. It's not designed to stump anyone. It's not designed to, you know, poke somebody in the eye. It's designed to invite them to come together around something. And I just, I find that if, if people get comfortable with that, they drop that, that, that guard of fear and they understand that conflict, meaning we don't necessarily agree exactly with each other is, is, is really, that's what diversity was supposed to actually produce for us.
[49:49.0]
It wasn't supposed to be about, you know, skin color and gender or whatever. It was supposed to be about people that come from different vantage points to make sure that we were collectively exploring the art of the possible in something. And so if you can engage in this uncomfortable, unsettled sort of a situation, that's when the creativity happens.
[50:15.3]
You start riffing off of what other people are contributing, you know, and they're ask, they're asking then subsequent questions that say, well, I think this is another dimension of this. And it can feel like it's not making any progress, but there's, there's really a lot of progress that's happening.
[50:31.6]
You have to be divergent before you can be convergent. And our culture seems to be so quick to want to converge. Well, AI will give me the answer. I'm just going to converge on the answer. It's, it's the act of being divergent that comes from asking broad questions and participating in the play associated with exploring what could be without feeling the obligation to rush to an answer.
[50:58.0]
That's where the magic happens. It's so funny because that's the exact advice that I got when I hired a professional songwriter to give me lessons on co writing and writing. You know, the secret is to prioritize the session and the relationship, not the song, you know, and be the first one to lay down your idea and go with their idea.
[51:20.0]
Because the most sacred thing is the connection between the people and it being fun. Because great songs don't come out of stressful songwriting sessions. Right. And really so much work is just involved in letting that guard down. And really you have to have authenticity, have to be able to, you have to be pretty healed and be able to love yourself enough to go into an uncomfortable situation where you might not have the right answer or the best idea.
[51:44.8]
I don't often. That's really uncomfortable and it's kind of a universal. And I gotta say that it's, it's always fun riffing on this with you. Your coaching has been huge with me and it has, continue to just fruit, and blossom like things that were planted back then, you know, maybe a couple, few years ago now.
[52:09.7]
And yeah. So if anybody else hears this and is interested in coaching, where can they find you? I actually don't have any kind of formal, presence on social media or anything. If God sends you to me, I am open to coaching you.
[52:28.2]
But you can reach me@vaughnwright65mail.com. I'm out there just trying to. Trying to help the people that, are in my little corner of the world. If I sound like somebody who might be able to help you, I'm happy, happy to talk to you. If it turns out that there's something I can do for you.
[52:48.2]
I believe in the loaves and fishes. My job is to share the loaves and fishes that God, has given me. And if there's magic that happens, that's, for the Holy Spirit to handle. Well. And also, we always invite people out to Lifters of Men groups.
[53:06.4]
We usually get together Saturdays. We'll work out, we'll help somebody move. We look for different types of projects, habitat, for humanity. Or if you have a need, if you're somebody who needs something. And that's liftersofmen.org liftersofmen.org I think you're on LinkedIn too.
[53:24.8]
I'm on LinkedIn? That's right. I am on LinkedIn. And, yeah, well, thanks for coming and making this our official debut, brother man. I'm so, so honored and blessed, that you invited me to do this. Yeah.
[53:39.8]
And your setup is amazing. Your roadies are incredible. This is, like, the most professional setup I've, I've ever seen. So. Yeah, man, congratulations on finally, finally doing this. I feel like we're, like breaking the bottle on the ship here.
[53:56.7]
I know when I get the new table, I wish I still drank. Well, Vaughn, it's always a pleasure, man. Thank you so much. I look forward to probably having you on here a whole bunch of times because we just riff and it's so easy and. Yeah, we haven't even talked about, finance or wellness or health or nutrition.
[54:16.0]
How important picking the person you want to spend the rest of your life with is, which I would say is one of the most important things I ever did. So I think that's a subject that, men. Men need to talk about, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Ain't that the truth.
[54:32.4]
Well, awesome. Well, thank you for being here. We will look, forward to having you on again. Cheers, brother. Thanks, man. Thanks for checking out the Think Incursive podcast. Please give us a, like, subscribe and your comments, like, along the way. They're so important to us.
[54:48.2]
Also, for information about Lifters of Men, check out lifters of men.org for all things podcast or real estate. You can find me@begoodbrandon.com. thanks for checking us out. We'll see you soon.
