RHS 194 - MM: Navigating Personal Growth and Emotional Leadership Challenges

in a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show.
Today, we have a tremendous episode for you of the Monday Mindset. This is actually a talk that I gave a little over a month ago at the University of Albany's MBA alumni program.
They had an alumni program. There's about 75 people there.
It was at a really nice place in downtown Albany. And if you want to see the talk, you can head over to YouTube and watch it.
But for those who just enjoy the audio, I'm going to have that included. And when I was asked to do this presentation, really the topic was community and why community was important as they tried to grow their alumni community.
And the tack that I wanted to take with this was really the emotional struggle that is leadership and any type of leadership, regardless if it's business leadership of our family, of a community organization, et cetera. When we take on a leadership position, we oftentimes don't know what we're getting into when we do it for the first time.
And it could take several

iterations of being in different leadership positions to really, truly get a feel for how to navigate all the various challenges that come up. But the tactics can be learned.
You can read books, talk to mentors, et cetera. What I've found the most difficult and where I've found the most blind spots or obstacles or corners that I couldn't see around was in the emotional side, the internal struggle that you go through as a leader, as you try to work through these things, right? People look to you for answers and the buck stops with you.
Now, crappy leaders will push off and blame, etc.

But those individuals are cut out of the herd fairly quickly. If you want to be a true leader of a company, someone who drives that company forward and grows that company, you're going to have a lot of crap dumped on you.
And we oftentimes don't have enough discussions around how to handle that struggle and the toil that comes with it and all the emotions and feelings that we must deal with. That's a large part of what I do, what I talk about and what I've seen and the work that I've done, outside of my day-to-day work at Rogue Risk, being a leader, the CEO and founder of Rogue Risk, and trying to help drive to a certain capacity in my leadership role with SIA, I've tried to share the lessons, the beats, the wins, the insights that I developed through that work with you guys both here on the podcast.
And if you follow along on Instagram, I put a lot of stuff out on Instagram just because I found it to be a very convenient way of sharing small ideas and communicating with you guys. So if we're not connected there, head over to Instagram.
It's Ryan underscore Hanley or just search my name. You'll probably find me.
I think you're going to enjoy this. It's 18 minutes long, so it's short.
Would love your comments. Would love your thoughts on this topic because if you have resources, if you have best practices, if you have strategies, if you have experiences, I would love for you to share that.
You can, if you want, you can find one of these posts on social media. Best place to probably collect comments on this would be the YouTube channel.
So if you go to youtube.com slash Ryan M, M as in Michael Hanley, or just search my name, you'll probably find the show, and leave a comment on the video. That way we can collect the comments and maybe address them on future episodes.
This is such an important topic that I would love your feedback. So guys, if you're not subscribed to the YouTube channel, do that.
If you enjoy the Monday mindset, if you enjoy these kind of heady topics and diving into these things, I would love for you. And you're not already subscribed to the show, share the show.
That's how we continue to grow the audience, continue to build and share these ideas with more people. But I love you for listening to this show.
I hope that if you are in a leadership position, you are thinking through some of these things. And if you do need help, if you do hit a point in your career as a leader, regardless of what level that is, or reach out to someone.
Reach out to me if you want. Reach out to someone who you.
And as the video will share, find a community, engage with them, and continue to build on your own success. You're not going to be able to do it alone.
I promise you that. So let's get on to the Monday mindset.
Here we go. If I see something completely off the wall, call me on it.
That's what makes this more interesting for me.

That being said, when Don asked me to come and present,

I looked at the past speakers and heads of major corporations in the area,

incredibly well-established and thoughtful individuals,

and I've been fired through the last four jobs that I've had.

I don't have an MBA.

I feel like I've gotten one through the School of Hard Knocks.

Maybe if I had gotten an MBA, I wouldn't have been fired so often. Or maybe just I'm a terrible person to work with.
I'm not really sure. So when I sat down with them and started talking about what this was and how I could potentially add some value to you guys, he said he wanted a conversation to focus on community, and I think it was a wonderful topic.
And when I asked him if it would be okay with his permission, was to talk through why I think community is so important through something that I think is often not talked about when we are in leadership positions or we own businesses. And it is the emotional struggle internally that you deal with every single day when you have to lead people, when you have to make decisions, when you're putting $40,000 on your credit card and hoping that you make enough that month to pay it off before the bank comes and takes your business, right? When you clear out everything you have and seven days after you launch, COVID hits and the entire state's shut down and you have absolutely no idea what to do and you don't sell your first product for eight months.
As leaders, as managers, as entrepreneurs, as business owners, as people who care about what we don't talk enough about what goes on in here. And the journey that my career is at, I'm going to share some highlights with you.
And what I hope you take away from this is that one, when you have these feelings you are not alone.

You will feel alone.

Many of you are probably experiencing them right now, right?

Something in your business, your employee decided to lose their mind, right?

Which they all do.

As much as I don't understand why that happens, they just lose their minds.

A vendor just cancels a contract.

A program that you invested in doesn't deliver the revenue results that you expected or projected. A board member or an investor comes to you with a tough question that you have an answer for.
These things create emotional turmoil inside of us. And we don't talk about it enough as a business community.
We gloss over this piece. We talk about sales and marketing and strategy.
We talk about culture and people now. It's not HR anymore.
I actually offended my HR person because I referred to it as personnel the other day. She was aghast.
And I saw the look on her face and I was like, I did not mean this. I'm sorry.
I was like, I'm sorry. Yeah, his talent.

I said, well, all the words. Just tell me the words.
I'll use those from now on. I don't know.

We talk about these functions, these verticals inside of our business and what we, I don't know

if it's our ego, if we're uncomfortable, it's probably with that. If it's our own insecurities

that we don't have these solutions, we feel oftentimes because we're uncomfortable. It's probably with that.
If it's our own insecurities, that we don't have these solutions,

we feel oftentimes because we're at the top of a chart that somehow we're supposed to have all the answers. And people look to us as if we do.
And we know that we're completely full of it. I told Don I won't curse.
What community does, and there's many different circles of community, many different rings is the way I think about it. Our family unit is a community.
Our extended family, as much as we mostly dislike most of them, is also a little mini community. We have our neighborhood.
We have our larger community. We might have a sports team that our kids play on or a function that our kids, that's a little mini community, right? Maybe we're in a bowling league or we like to play golf.
That's a little mini community. We have our college and the network that we developed from there where we went to school.
Maybe you're part of a professional organization. Maybe you're a hobbyist of some sort.
And too often we do not leverage these communities for what they're really there for. It's to complain about all the terrible things that are happening and the feelings that are happening associated with those things.
Because I can tell you almost every day, being the leader of a company that writes commercial insurance in 50 states, I have 21 people. We had 7 at this time last year.
Growing like crazy. I've

had to fire 7 people this year despite hiring a net. Let's do that math real quick.
14. I was a math major, but I definitely have a 3.5, so I would not be allowed in that program.
So we netted 14, but had to fire seven for cultural reasons.

I don't care what book you read on culture.

There is no way to manage culture anything other than by white-knuckling it the entire time doing the absolute best you can. Now I know this is distracting.
Some of you are probably consultants looking at me and you're going, no Ryan, there is an absolute way to do this. And I can tell you that no matter how good the program is, it's Six Sigma certified, or there's been 10 books written on it, how many reviews those books have, when the rubber meets the road and people look to you, and you have no idea what the right thing to do is, you turn inside and you start to question your own abilities.
And for me, what that has looked like in the past is maybe having a few too many cocktails.

A few too often.

It's the end of the night, it's 8 o'clock, brain won't shut down.

So we have a few drinks, or maybe it's some sort of drug.

Or we watch too much TV.

Pot is legal in New York.

We feel like that's supposed to narrow our brain. It doesn't.
Curbs our creativity. Not that I'm against it.
It's legal now, I can say that. But we turn to these crutches because we feel alone.
And really, the absolute best way to get past these terrible things are to talk about in groups like this. When I see this, I'm envious of what we have.
I screwed around a lot in college. I went to college to be a mechanical engineer.
I went to the University of Rochester. I grew up way out in Renzer County and I never wanted to go back to that town again as soon as I got out of there.
900 people used to say that we didn't have to lock our doors because the criminals lived there. They didn't steal from there.
So I never wanted to go back. And the only way that I could see to get out of that world was to go to college.
And I was decent at math and science. I'm a mechanical engineer.
Whatever. And I also wanted to play baseball.
University of Rochester, where I went. And I got a semester, a year and a half in.
I had a 1.2 GPA, and things were not going real well for Ryan. What no one tells you in any admissions is, if you're going to be a mechanical engineer, you have to make a choice between playing baseball, drinking booze, and chasing women, or whoever you're attracted to, or being a mechanical engineer.
You can't do both those things. And I had obviously made my decision, and it was a snap in the face.
For someone who thought of themselves as intelligent, hardworking, ambitious, thoughtful, I was making a lot of bad decisions because I was unwilling to talk about what was going on and the struggles I was having and how thermodynamics made absolutely no sense to me at all, despite the fact that I understood that it was English, but beyond that, putting the pieces together and making them fit on a test that got me a grade that was passing, I couldn't figure it out. And it was the first time in my life that I'd ever come up against a challenge like that.
And I had no idea what to do other than to become much, much more degenerate. Because that was the only thing I was good at.
I wasn't good at thermodynamics. And I had no idea how to communicate these feelings.
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I love you for listening to this show. And I hope you enjoy listening as much as I do creating the show for you.
All right, I'm out of here. Peace.
Let's get back to the episode. Fast forward 2014.
I put in about eight years in a local independent insurance agency, the Murray Group. My ex-wife and her family run that agency.
It's a tremendous agency. If you need home and on insurance, it's a great place to go.
Don't come to me for that. I put in eight years there, and I got a job offer to be the CMO of a national insurance technology company.
I thought this was one of the, this was like, what an honor to be asked to do this thing, to be part of this company. I made this great leap from being an insurance advisor to a CMO.
I didn't even really know what that meant or the responsibilities were, but I knew when you had three capital letters in your job title, you were doing something right. That's what I knew.
So I took that job. And the first day that

I showed up, the CEO called all the executive leadership team into this conference room. And this is the very first day that I was there.
And I don't even know half the people I'm in the room with. There's about seven of us.
There's 47 people in the company. and he says, guys and gals,

we need to cut 17 people this week.

17. There's 47 people in the company.
And he says, guys and gals, we need to cut 17 people this week. 17 people.
I hadn't even met my team yet. The next week, I would look four people I had never met in the face and tell them that they no longer had a job here.
One of the women immediately collapsed and started crying on the table. She was devastated.
Right in the middle, she was blindsided. I didn't know what to do.
I had no idea what to do. I pulled out my phone and I started playing Tetris.
I didn't actually do that. No, I had no idea what to do, right? So now I start crying.
I'm crying. I'm firing this person and crying at the same time because she's crying, and I don't know what to do.
And the woman in people, talent, culture, she starts crying while she's also giving me the look of death because I don't think we're supposed to cry when we fire people. And I don't even know this woman's name.
Today I couldn't even tell you. I met her for 25 minutes.
Well, I told her she no longer worked here,

and then we cried together.

And then how do you go home, and what do you do with that?

How do you handle that stress?

I didn't know how to handle it, so I started drinking.

I needed my brain to shut down.

I needed it to calm down.

I needed to not have all these thoughts

ricocheting off the inside of my head,

telling me, did you do it wrong? Maybe she could have stayed. She seemed to really care.
Maybe she was a good employee. I had never seen her work.
I had no idea. I was told to do something by someone who had literally just hired me.
I thought I was doing the right thing. And I made this poor woman cry.
It was absolutely devastating. To these days, even thinking about it makes me a little emotional.
I hated it. I don't even know who she is.
It was awful. I didn't talk about it.
I didn't bring it to anyone and say, how do you deal with this? How do you talk about this thing? I had no clue. Four years later, I was CMO of that company.
We've done tremendous things, amazing things, things that I thought were revolutionary in the insurance industry. We built an entire media platform to go along with our product, and it brought customers

that we had never thought possible.

We had put on a fence, 300, 800 people.

We had built this national brand inside the insurance industry that I was incredibly proud

of, and I got fired three days after I put on the second largest insurance conference

in the history of the industry.

Fire on the spot. Here's your hat.
Don't come back. I had no idea how to process that.
None. I had given everything I had.
All the slacking off, all the broke culture, degenerate nonsense I had done earlier in my life, I had changed that. I had fixed, I thought I had fixed myself.
I thought I had become this ambitious, hard working, put together, maybe a bit of a workaholic, but that's okay. I thought I had given everything I had, and they didn't like a comment I made in the Slack channel.

Didn't come to me and say,

granted, it wasn't the nicest comment I ever made in my life.

But at that time, I thought I had deserved more than that.

I thought that I deserved someone to come to me and say,

you know what, this wasn't really your best effort.

Maybe we could, let's slap your hand,

let's have a kumbaya, apologize to some people, and let's get back to work. Nope, I was gone.
And this thing that had become my identity, my life, it was who I was. At that time, I was Ryan Hanley, president of Agency Nation.
That was my life, that was my identity. That was who I was.
I traveled 50 times a year. I left my family.
My two young sons, I left them week after week and dedicated myself to this business. I managed a 32-person team.
I had 32 people on an evening. We had done more sales, brought in more business, every year consistently blowing away targets.
And for one day, basically the CEO was an idiot and kept complaining about something. and I, get the, out of my way, I'll just fix this problem.
That's what I said. I didn't think it was worth being fired.
I also thought you laughed. But you didn't.
But that is what I said. And that means, I'm so glad.
Did I do the right thing? No. Was I maybe a little too aggressive? Did I let my ego maybe get a little out of control? Sure.
But I thought I deserved more of that. I had absolutely no idea how to handle it and I spiraled into myself again.

I started staying up late watching TV.

I started doing things that just slacking off, not being corrupted, getting back into drinking and stuff like that. I have no problem with drinking.

My hope for you. Sacking off, not being corrupted, getting back into drinking and stuff like that.
I have no problem with drinks.

My hope for you is that we're all going to have these days.

We're all going to have these moments in our life.

These continue to happen.

The point is, when you put yourself out there 100%,

I know some of you are nodding.

I think you probably feel some of this or experience it

or have someone who care about it experience these things. When you give 110%, you're going to get wrecked.
That's the trade you make. And my hope for you is that you don't make the same mistake that I did.
The mistake was not getting out over my skis and pushing as hard as I can and demanding that people follow along at that level of effort.

My mistake wasn't trying to be the best that I could, trying to get the most out of my team, defending them.

My mistakes were ambitious, sure.

Did I rub some people the wrong way?

Fine, that's who I am.

You can either like it or not like it. I will never be upset for who I am and the way that I operate.

However, I regret allowing myself. I'm not engaging.
I'm not sitting down with people, right? I go to counseling every other week now. Not because, partially because I've got to know, but just talking, just having someone that I know is there for me, right? I now have a group of local guys, business people, and every other Friday we meet at a diner and we just talk.
And sometimes we're talking about sports for an hour. And sometimes we talk about spouses.
Sometimes we talk about business. Sometimes we talk about how to deal with someone.
We just talk and just get it out of your system. And you walk away from that meeting some days and you're like, geez, I'm good.
I'm all right. I'm going to be fine.
I was frustrated. I was upset when I came in here.
And I do not understand why people take sales positions and they get upset when you hold them accountable to sales. That mentality is not, I don't understand that.
I don't know how to talk to those people. So it's things like that where you go in and you go, hey man, don't get upset with her.
Here's. Position it this way.
Maybe give her this goal. Or have you tried to just have you send her to a training? I hadn't done that.
I didn't think. And now I had a solution.
Instead of spiraling, instead of going into a dark place that made me negative, that wasted life, that wasted energy, I now had a solution. And I walked out feeling good, and I felt like I had I didn't have to go into that place.
I didn't have to become the worst version of myself because I was able to talk about it and share. So my pitch to you is that this feels like a pretty wonderful community to me.
This feels like a special thing. I got to meet a few of you.
A few of you I know from past lives. I know Don pretty well.
This feels like a very special thing to me. And my hope for you is that you embrace it.
Not just the education. The education is great.
The paper is great, right? That's wonderful. That's going to open doors.
But you're going to have really shitty days. Really.
People are going to look at you like you're supposed to have the answer and you're going to be sitting in your chair going, I have no clue what to do. And your heart's going to race and you're going to tense up and your mind's going to go nuts and all you're going to want to do is bury your face in a bowl of ice cream with crappy TV, right? And waste away the night or waste away the day.

And instead, my ask, the mistake I would like you to step past or avoid that I made is to

call somebody here.

Just call somebody.

They're seemingly all, you all seem like pretty nice people, right?

Or find another community.

Find a community.

And just say, hey, how would you handle this?

I'm struggling with this.

I'm really struggling.

I don't know how to do this.

I'm worried I'm going to make a bad decision.

I'm worried I'm going to take this employee that I really like and I'm going to offend her or him or I'm going to disenfranchise her from this business or him or whatever.

I'm worried I'm going to

do something that I don't want to do because

I don't know how to do this thing.

And that friend is going to, you know what

they're going to do? If they're really there,

they're going to help you with a solution. What they're really

going to do is just going to listen to you.

And you're going to get to bitch.

And when we get a good bitch out, man, we feel

better, right?

Find a community of people who

are willing to let you vent on them.

And I promise,

Thank you. get a good bitch out, man, we feel better, right? Find a community of people who are willing to let you vent on them.
And I promise, this leadership, management, entrepreneur, whatever you classify

yourself as, this thing is a whole lot easier. It's been my absolute pleasure to talk to you today.

I wish you nothing but the best. Thank you for listening to this nonsense for however long it was.

And I hope to meet all of you here in the remainder of the program.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

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