In this enlightening episode of “Becoming Bridge Builders,” host Keith Haney sits down with leadership coach and author Eric Pfeiffer to delve into the intricacies of leadership and personal development. They explore the transformative power of taking personal responsibility for change, the profound impact of mentors and role models, and the essential role of coaching in personal growth. Eric shares his unique coaching philosophy and introduces the concept of a leadership operating system.

Listeners will gain insights into whether leaders are made or born, as Eric discusses the 12 essential skills from his book “Leadership Gravitas.” The conversation also highlights the importance of emotional intelligence (EQ) in leadership, drawing parallels to Jesus as an exemplary leadership coach. Eric emphasizes the need for leaders to cultivate self-awareness, humility, and self-love, and underscores the importance of creating a culture of great leadership to pass on to future generations.

Tune in to learn how to identify and address tension points in leadership, and discover the power of forgiveness and self-acceptance. Eric Pfeiffer’s legacy is centered on raising his children well and empowering leaders to build a better world.:

Join us for this inspiring conversation and take the first step towards becoming a better leader. Subscribe to “Becoming Bridge Builders” on your favorite podcast platform, and don’t forget to leave a review and share this episode with your network. Let’s build bridges together and create a legacy of great leadership!

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Well, Eric, it's so good to have you on. Welcome to the podcast today.

Thank you, Keith. I am excited to be here with you.

Well, that makes two of us. It should be a fun conversation.

Hahaha

So let's start out with this question. What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

well, I've received a lot of great advice. Thankfully, I've had a lot of great mentors in my life, some of them who did not know they were mentors at the time. Probably one of the best pieces of advice that I often share is that the changes that we want to see in the relationships around us, in the world around us, always start in the changes that we have to make in ourselves.

It's so easy to blame the world and to project responsibility onto the world for why things aren't working. And yet oftentimes we've heard the old saying, when you point a finger, there are four fingers pointing right back at you. And, and I think that's true. So that's always been really helpful to remind me that at the end of the day, I have to take personal responsibility for my attitudes, my behaviors, my decisions. And I have the power within me to make change in the world.

Exactly.

And so am I going to use that power from a perspective of selfishness and self -centeredness, self -service, or am I going to use it from a perspective of wanting to help the people around me?

I love that. As I have guests on my podcast, I love to ask the question of having you kind of reflect on the people in your life who have served as role models and mentors, because we don't get where we are without some people walking alongside us. Some we've thanked, some we haven't. So this gives you a chance for the guests to come in and kind of tell us what made those people special in your life, but also kind of give them a shout out and say thank you for the impact they've had in your life.

Yeah, well, there are a lot because I learned at a young age in my early twenties, the importance of not just waiting for a mentor to show up, but to proactively seek out people that are further down the road in some area of life, marriage, parenting, finances, physical health, business, whatever. And then to do everything I can to be around them. Part of me, I've heard it referred to as the proximity principle.

You know, if you want what somebody else has, then do everything you can to be in the same space with them. And it's amazing how much of it actually does transfer. I would say my parents to begin with, you know, in my, in my mid twenties, I went through a season of really resenting my parents as I was kind of taking stock of where I was at in life. And, you know, you wake up at some point in your, in your early to mid twenties and realize my parents weren't perfect. And there was a lot of.

dysfunction that was passed on from generation to generation that landed on my doorstep. But it was a really powerful season as well because actually my first official mentor helped me to recognize that my parents did their best to filter out a lot of that dysfunction. But some of it was gonna pass through. And to not let what passed through rob me of the appreciation.

season as well because I'm actually not first.

And some of it was going to pass through to not let what passed through rob you.

of all of the good that my parents did for myself and my siblings, in the midst of some of the stuff that was unhelpful. So I'm really grateful to my parents for all that they invested. As a parent of a 21 and 19 year old, I am today now more acutely aware of how much of an investment it is to raise children and to try and raise them healthily and in a way that's going to set them on the right path.

I'm really grateful to my parents for all that they invest in. As a parent of a 21 and 19 year old, I am today now more completely aware of how much of an investment it is to raise children and to try and raise them healthily.

in a way that's gonna set them on a life trajectory. So I'm thankful for them. My older brother was my first mentor who took me under his wing at a young stage where I was in my early 20s going through what I call the second puberty. I think the first one is physiological in our teens and then the second one is in my early 20s, especially for young men. We're gonna ask them the big questions. Who am I? Where do I fit in the world?

trajectory. So I'm grateful for them. My older brother was my first kind of mentor who took me under his wing at a young stage where I was in my early 20s, you know, going through what I call kind of the second puberty. I think the first one is physiological in our teens. And then the second one is in our early 20s, especially for young men where we're kind of asking the big questions. Who am I? Where do I fit in the world? What's my purpose here? How do I

How do I understand who I am, my core values, what I'm gonna spend my life doing? And he played a really significant role in having those conversations and making room for me to explore those questions in a way that was never judgmental, but always very encouraging and permission giving. I would say another significant mentor in my, right around my 30th.

You know, year of life, I met an older gentleman about 25 years down the road from me, you know, in terms of age. And he's one of those people that when I was in the room with him, I thought, man, I would, I would love to be more like this man. He seems to operate with a level of confidence and personal security that was relatively foreign to me. And, and so I spent 13 years apprenticing, under his leadership.

first in Arizona and then all the way to South Carolina. and, and as a matter of fact, that's where I discovered the world of coaching because he was launching a coaching business and I just wanted to be with him and learn from him how to become the kind of leader person, husband, father that I desperately wanted to be. And, in the midst of that, I also discovered a passion for coaching and that it really is.

personal development, helping people grow up mature, become a better version of themselves. And so I'm so grateful to that man, not just for what he invested in me personally, and really helped me to grow up in a lot of ways that I was struggling to grow up, but also introducing me into this world that I am now so passionate about.

I love that. I actually became a coach too and done a lot of coaching in my career. But what led me to coaching was actually having a bad coach.

Ha ha ha!

I was assigned a coach when I was at a congregation in Milwaukee and they assigned all of us to coach to kind of help us to move on from where we were kind of stuck at. And I remember walking into the office and oftentimes our coaching became a counseling session where I was counseling him and I'd walk out and I go, I didn't get any coaching at all. I'm glad he feels better, but I'm still stuck in the same place. So I'm like, it's gotta be better than this. So.

I appreciate coach. Yeah. So I appreciate those two coach. So I'm curious, tell us about your coachings operation and it's called MPWR. Tell us what that stands for and tell us what led you to go find your coaching company.

That's how it works a lot of times, right?

Yeah, great question. MPWR is, is the word empower without the vowels and yeah, just a way of shortening it out, making a little more distinct. but the name says it all. The coaching business really is predicated on a passion to empower people with the tools and skills and confidence to be able to participate in their own development. I think a lot of times we feel,

Okay.

You know, like we're waiting around, we're bystanders in our own journey and we forget that we actually, if we know how can significantly and proactively participate in our own personal transformation. And so, that is stemming from that 13 year journey of apprenticing under this mentor. I learned so much from him. And, as I was working with that coaching business with him, I began to discover.

kind of the nuanced passion that I have for coaching, which is very much in the field of, and I'll say it like this, I really do believe the engine of any organization is the people that run that organization. And it's not the product or the service, it's the people. And over the years working with hundreds, if not thousands of organizations across the country now, I find that to be absolutely true no matter how big or small the company is.

that the people are what make that company successful. And therefore, if the people individually and collectively are operating well, then that business is going to thrive and flourish even in the midst of great challenges. And when those individuals or teams are not operating well, that's usually where leaders experience the greatest tensions and frustrations. I mean, we can be frustrated with the market. We can be frustrated with, you know, cultural dynamics, political dynamics.

Right.

But at the end of the day, the greatest challenge that any organization I've ever worked with is facing is the challenge of not knowing how to get people to operate well together. And which is, you know, that's an age old human predicament, right? Since the beginning of my people have been fighting and squabbling and not knowing how to, how to partner well together to accomplish great things. And so that became my particular passion was to help leaders, teams, organizations.

with what we call a leadership operating system, because one of the things I learned early on was that all human beings over our years, from our childhood to the present day, we've developed a quote unquote operating system. In other words, kind of like our smartphones, we love all the apps that we get to use that help us solve individual problems. But the genius of these devices is that there is an operating system that is kind of the parental or governing software.

right.

that determines how the apps can operate and how much memory and how much power is given to these different applications. And I think as we go through life, we've developed an operating system, some of which works and is functional and is helpful. And I think some of which is dysfunctional and unhelpful. And so all we do is come alongside of leaders and introduce them to some simple tools that make up a leadership operating system. So if you want to be the best leader of yourself,

and of the people around you, then you need to ensure that your operating system is actually going to empower those activities. Because if you don't have that operating system, then you can read all the books, go to all the seminars, watch all the YouTube videos, listen to all the podcasts on the tips and tricks of leadership. Those are apps. But the problem is,

People blame the books they read and the conferences they go to and they say, this stuff doesn't work. And I have to tell them, maybe those apps aren't the most helpful, but I think if you look a little deeper, you'll discover that there's something inside of you that's not working. And for those leaders that are willing to do the work and download this leadership operating system, what they discover is that it liberates them. It frees them up to operate in a way that allows them now.

Hehehe.

the ability to do the things that are actually most helpful for themselves and for the people around them. And when people discover that it's, it is literally it's, it's life transforming because like I said earlier on, most people blame their colleagues, blame their bosses, blame their customers, clients blame their coworkers blame whatever, and you know, HR, the bureaucracy of their organization for why things aren't working well.

And once they realize actually, I'm the problem, I'm the issue. And if I would do the work on myself to become a better leader of myself, then that will translate into my ability to actually transform culture within any context.

I love that. You know, as I studied leadership for the last, well, for the last 30 years, but particularly the last three, there's always that age old question. And you had it, I read it in your bio and I found it fascinating. So I'm going to ask you this because that's, I'd ask another leader this question too. Are leaders made or are leaders born? It's always been a controversy. You know, if you're not a natural born leader, can you train someone to be a better leader or are all just great leaders just.

birthed that way and it's like they had this Michael Jordan talent that you'll never be able to jump as high, run as fast, do as much, but you could be someone else who's much less a virgin. So as you think about that, how do you answer the question, are leaders made or are they born?

I'm going to say this, Keith. I know it's going to be a bit controversial, but I'm going to say it anyway. I think unequivocally leaders are made and not born. I do believe all human beings are leaders because leaders are people who have influence in the life of other people. So whether it's parenting, if you're a sibling, if you have friends, if you, if you engage with any other human being on planet earth at any time in your life, you have influence for better and for worse.

which makes you a leader. Now I understand most people think like, you know, from a hierarchical position in an organization, do you have a title or a position? But I think we've, we've, we've gotten past that misnomer that that actually means you're a leader. You may have leadership responsibility, but that does not make a personal leader. As a matter of fact, in all of my studies over the years, all the biographies I've read, all the autobiographies, I've read all the studies on leadership going back millennia.

Right? I mean, you're, you're a student of the Bible. You go back and read, you know, some of the ancient literature and what you discover is that all people who become what we would consider effective, helpful, great leaders are people who have to do the hard work of developing their sense of self -awareness to become aware of what they do well, what they do not do well, what they, the goal they bring to any situation, the dirt they also bring.

their willingness to come through that dirt, to discover new goals, right? To develop the character qualities, to develop their skillset, to be able to bring whatever superpower, I do believe all human beings come loaded with all kinds of, you know, latent superpowers, whether we call those personality types, preferences, whether we call them natural abilities, natural wiring, whatever the case is. And we accumulate lots of this over the years. But,

to develop a character quality.

Mm -hmm.

What I tell people is, we all have superpowers. In our best moments, we use those as superheroes. In our worst moments, we become super villains. And so I believe the journey of becoming better leaders is learning to leverage our superpowers as superheroes instead of super villains.

I love that. I want to dive into your book. You have a book called Leadership Gravitas, 12 Essential Skills to Expand Your Impact and Influence. Now, as I looked at the title, I'm going, are there only 12? Or did you just go, okay, I'm at 12, I'm going to stop now because it's getting too big. I mean, why did you go to 12 or stop at 12?

Okay.

That's a great question. Yes, there's a lot more that we could have talked about in that book, but I think, you know, too often we try to resolve complexity with greater complexity. And we think that life is simple. We think leadership can be really simple. Not simple, easy. If I could just figure these two or three things out, I would be, it's easy. And I would suggest that everything in life,

is actually really simple when you understand the basic components of it, but it's really hard. And we are in a current era of culture where we want to think everything is easy and very complex. That only a few people really understand, you know, the components of leadership. But for those people, it seems easy. The people we see on social media, on the stages of life. And I would suggest, no, actually, I think it's very simple.

but it's so difficult to practice these very simple principles and components of life or leadership. And so it becomes easier to make it complex. And so in developing that book, I actually borrowed from a gentleman named Daniel Goldman, who's kind of the person who coined the phrase emotional intelligence. And I borrowed from a framework that he had developed where he talked about the importance of these four quadrants, self -awareness,

Mm.

self leadership, he uses different language, others awareness and other leadership. So basically what is our conscious ability to pay attention to our thoughts, emotions and physical reality and the impact we're having on our environment. And then what is our ability to actually lead ourselves, to coach ourselves, to manage ourselves, right? And in all those three areas so that we're able to bring a sober, healthy,

clear -minded focused version of ourselves to any situation that we find ourselves in, which we all know is difficult because life is constantly throwing curve balls at us, different challenges. We're constantly getting triggered and hijacked. And so what is our ability to recover from those experiences? And what I say, to put the best version of us back in the driver's seat. And so the title, Leadership Gravitas, was developed because...

I don't know why I remember this, but I remember learning about planetary orbits and the laws of physics in planetary orbits suggest that the planets of lesser mass would orbit around the planets of larger mass. And that became this powerful image. How do we as people develop our mass, our gravitas, because the larger bodies of mass have a greater gravitational pull. So how can we become the kind of people that other people

Mm.

Right.

feel safe to orbit around, to follow, in other words. So how do we become leaders worth following, essentially? And so the question, or I should say that the quest for myself for many years, and it continues to this day, is how do I continually increase my leadership gravitas so that I can more and more become a leader who is trustworthy, that other people can follow?

that other people believe I have their best interests, not just my own, that I'm concerned about their development, their trajectory, not just my own. I'm concerned about their wellbeing, not just my own. And so I borrowed this framework from Daniel Goleman and in working with clients many, many years ago, I realized we need to provide some simple practical handles about what does it mean to practice self -awareness? And there are countless books and articles and podcasts on self -awareness.

But if I had to break it down, just don't make it really simple. What would those skills be? And I was able together with my team and through a lot of research and trial and error to isolate and identify for each of those three quadrants, what are the three core skills that if we could actually cultivate those skills would radically transform our ability to practice those quadrants, self -awareness, self -awareness in the top two. But would also.

allow for space so that you can introduce other concepts, right? So the, the matrix, we call it the EQ matrix. It serves us in that it provides a simple framework so that we have a blueprint in our minds at all times of who is, what kind of person do I want to be in any given situation and how do I want to handle other people in any given situation? And then there's plenty of room to add in all of the other amazing content that has been developed by amazing people over the years.

I love that. You know, I was reading, I can't remember what the study was, maybe in Harvard Business Review, but they said that as leaders go higher up the hierarchy in leadership, the less their emotional intelligence is, the lower the emotional intelligence is. So they, you know, as you interact less with people, the less you have to worry about your emotional intelligence. So, but as a coach, how do you help?

those leaders who that really is the key because I think emotionally it's really critical to being a great leader. If you don't understand the people around you and how your leadership is impacting them, you're just not aware about what influence either positive or negative you're having. So how critical is it as you try to help people to really hone that skill of EQ?

Yeah, it's, it's, I mean, I would say from our perspective, it is absolutely paramount. As a matter of fact, I think you might appreciate this. The reason I fell in love with it, with the concept of emotional intelligence is because I spent 20 years as a pastor, trying to help people understand the core message of Jesus, which everyone would say, if you believe in Jesus, trust in him.

receive him as your savior, you will be saved. And people tend to think, okay, that means that when I die, I'm going to go to a good place. Great. But what people miss out on is I actually don't see that in his message. I'm not suggesting that's not part of his overall message, but what, when you really look at the work of Jesus with his disciples or his core team, the work with them was actually him shaping them.

Right.

training them in what we now call the core skills of emotional intelligence. The questions he would ask them, the way he challenged them, the way he pushed them, the way he encouraged them was really training them to take over his leadership responsibility. If he presumably knew he only had a few years in his work to prepare a team to take over that work, then the message wasn't just about, hey, believe in Jesus and you'll be saved. It was training these young men.

to become the kind of people that could lead a global movement. And whether people believe in Christianity or Jesus and who he says he was and all that stuff, what I tell people is what we miss out more than anything else when we read the gospel narratives is we miss out on the fact that Jesus was an incredible leadership coach. And that in a very short period of time, he was able to train 12 people.

to take over a movement that went through considerable hardship and were able to persevere through that hardship, retain their core values and sense of identity and continue to pass that on to future generations. And so that became for me a model of this is the kind of leader I want to be. I want to be the kind of leader who is able to operate in a way that other people want to follow, but then able to pass on the leadership that I've learned.

in a way that sets those leaders up to be able to be successful and then to pass that leadership on to another generation who can pass it on to another generation. And I think that's one of the major gaps in any organization, especially in corporate America where I predominantly operate now, which is leaders who have lost sight of their responsibility, not just to lead well in their position.

to be successful and to pass that leadership on in terms of generation. And I think that's one of the major gaps in any organization, especially in corporate America where I predominantly operate now, which is leaders who have lost sight of their responsibility, not just to lead well in their position.

but how do they multiply great leadership into their teams and into the other teams and into the next layer down so that we're creating a culture of great leadership rather than just having one great leader. I think we are enamored with the idea of the one great leader, the one personality, the one person, and we celebrate that individual because it's very American, right? But what we forget is,

Right.

the responsibility to create a culture of great leadership where other people can train and become, you know, and develop their own leadership gravitas. And so the way we do it is very simple. We help leaders by giving them an opportunity to identify all of the key tension points that they're experiencing within their leadership responsibility in the workplace and their teams.

And so what they do is they point at all of these tension points, which we'll call symptoms. So when you go to the doctor, the doctor asks what, what hurts, what's wrong? What are you experiencing? What are you feeling? What's not working? And you're going to tell him all or her all the symptoms. And then you trust that the doctor understands that those symptoms are connected to what's going on inside of your body where you and I cannot see, but they have studied the internal workings of the body.

maybe an MRI, an x -ray, some blood tests to help us connect the symptoms that we're experiencing to the systemic realities that are going on inside of our body. In the same way, with this leadership toolkit, we train leaders to first identify the symptoms because that's where the tension points are. Those are easier to see. Think of like a cross -section of a tree and above the ground, you can see the tree. That's what we all see when I'm looking out my window, I see trees.

But the reality is there's a lot of that tree that's actually happening below the surface in what we would call the invisible realm. And so what I learned over the years was we have to develop our ability to see what's happening beneath the surface in our own lives, our leadership and in the team or the culture and the company around us. And if we can do that, and that's what these tools empower people to do.

It's actually happening below the surface in what we call the invisible realm. Right.

if we can learn to connect the symptoms to the systemic issues, then we can make the changes at the systemic level that are actually going to lead to long -term sustainable change and transformation rather than, as most people do, we just keep dealing with the symptoms and nothing ever really changes.

I love that. As you wrote this book and as you've coached people, what have you discovered to be the most difficult of the 12 skills for leaders to master?

Unequivocally in the first quadrant self -awareness, the three core skills are honesty, humility, and self -love. And then we define them in a very simple, practical way because they're skills, right? So we need to know that all of us can develop these skills, but without question, the most difficult is self -love. And what I mean by that, we define self -love as giving ourselves permission.

to become a better version of ourselves. And it is, and I would imagine with your experience in ministry, you would appreciate this. It is unbelievable how often we get stuck in holding onto hurts, frustrations, failures, shortcomings, both those who have perpetrated against us and...

the places where we've been the perpetrator. And so what happens is we end up holding onto unforgiveness. In other words, we hold others and ourselves indebted to the past. And so the first key to self -love is you not only have to forgive other people in your life who have stepped on your toes, and I'm saying that lightly, but we also have to forgive ourselves.

Right.

for the times when we've stepped on other people's toes, for our failures, for our struggles, the time that I missed that project deadline, the time when I blew up that speech and I didn't do it well, that time when I didn't handle a team member well and they quit, the time when I lost my business and had to shut it down and went bankrupt for two years. Whatever the failures in our life, what I find is that people are not equipped with a simple mechanism for setting themselves free from the past.

and they don't realize how much that is inhibiting their ability to take appropriate risks in the present. And so the first order of business in self -love is recognizing where we are not loving ourselves, where we are not giving ourselves permission to be human beings, that we all stumble, fumble, bumble our way into growth. We forget very quickly that little kids learn to walk.

by failing and failing and failing and failing and failing and failing until they eventually learn to walk. And even when they learn to walk, they do it very poorly for a while before they become any good at it. Right? And so we forget that's a beautiful picture of how human beings in any area of life grow. That's how we develop. That's how we learn new skills and new areas of life is we stumble and fumble and fail our way into becoming better. There's a great quote that I heard.

Right.

I think it's GK Chesterton who said, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly. And I added, until you get better. The goal is to get better. We don't want to accept that we're just constantly failing in every area of our life. But anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until we get better and we struggle. The older we get, the more we expect that we can just figure it out, that we're gonna be great at stuff, that we should be able to try something for the first time and not get out of the park and be superheroes.

Right. Exactly.

And I have to remind people, this is part of the human journey that you will fail often before you succeed. And the moment we choose to accept that, embrace that, and to set ourselves and others free from those past deaths, it is a form of liberation that literally catapults people into an incredibly more fruitful future.

I love that. I thought you were going to say humility because when I was at seminary, they kept saying I wasn't humble enough. And my response was, people who are humble, humble for a reason. They didn't like that one. But what I really meant was that it wasn't about a humility thing for me. For me, it was about confidence and what God's abilities for me were. And it came off as arrogant, but it really wasn't. I was very grounded in -

and what I knew my abilities were. But a lot of times people get stuck in, like you say, the self -love and humility all kind of go together. Once you learn to love yourself and realize that you do have the skills, the gifts and abilities to do whatever it is you've been placed in a position to do, you just got to soar and trust that God will give you the rest of the tools you need. So I love that as a reminder for us.

Well, here's, here's what's interesting, Keith. Let me just show this to you because I know you'll love this and I'm sure some of your listeners will appreciate this. If I tell people, if, if we grew up in a religious context or spent any amount of time in a religion, any religious context, I think humility has been so poorly defined in those contexts. We've defined him. We've defined humility as number one, think less of yourself.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah, it has.

Right. So don't, don't, don't get too high and mighty. Don't don't become proud and arrogant out of fear, which most religious contexts are more than they realize deeply rooted in fear because of the fear of being proud and arrogant and thinking too highly. What happens? We go the opposite direction. Think lowly of yourself, put yourself down, diminish your skillset, diminish your value, right? Undervalue what you bring to the table. And secondly,

They've defined humility as thinking of yourself less often. You're too preoccupied with yourself. You're too self -centered. You're too, okay, I understand both of those. But here's what I tell people. Humility in our definition is, it begins with honesty, which is having a very honest and sober assessment of what's going on inside of us and how we're impacting the world.

humility is recognizing that all human beings have gold and dirt. And humility, I think is about embracing and accepting our best qualities, our superpowers and our not so great qualities and having a very, very sober acceptance of those two so that we can practice this simple thing in any situation we play our cards.

and let the chips fall where they may. People ask me all the time, what's the secret to true confidence? And I said, it's humility. Because humility is not about thinking lowly of yourself. Humility is about understanding what you do and do not bring to the table. And the more we practice self -awareness, the more aware we become of the superpowers that we have to offer any environment. And the times when we don't have something to offer and that's okay.

But that's where true confidence comes from. And so people right now, everybody's talking about the imposter syndrome and how do we overcome it? And I tell people, I promise you in a very short time, you can overcome the imposter syndrome, which is really insecurity by simply practicing the way we define honesty, humility, and self -love. And you will become the most confident human being on earth. Why? Because it's not, your confidence is not rooted in what you wish you were.

talking about the imposter syndrome. How do we overcome it? I promise you, in a very short time, you can overcome the imposter syndrome, which is really insecurity, by simply practicing the way we define honesty and humility in self -love. And you will become the most confident person.

And it's not rooted in what other people wish you were. And it's not rooted in who you are not. It is rooted in who you actually are today. Who you are today. We can't be who we want to be six months from now. We can only be who we are today for better and for worse. And when we wake up to that and when we embrace it, it literally gives us this incredible confidence to say for better and for worse, this is who I am today. I'm going to become somebody better tomorrow.

but today this is who I am, so I'm gonna just play my cards. I'm gonna give you what I've got. And it just sets people free so that they don't feel like they're having to, you know, over swing through life or so terrified to fail, they don't step up to the batter's box. If we would just be content to say, I think I can hit a single. And if it's a double, great. But if it's just a single, I'm okay with that. Cause I'm just gonna bring, and I tell people, you know, I work with a lot of athletes.

Right.

And I'm an avid golfer myself and I tell them over and over and over again Every day when I show up to the golf course to play around a golf. I Have what I have that day and I can think of all of the swing changes and the things that I wish I could do that day in the shot I wish I could hit that day but all I can do is play with the game that I showed up with that day and that's what sets me free to play within myself and I tell people that's a beautiful analogy as human beings and

the more we learn to play life within ourself with what we have today, there's an incredible confidence that comes from that.

That's amazing. I'm always curious, what are you excited about in this season of your life?

well, I'll give you a couple of things right off the top of my head. Number one, my wife and I are learning. We're in the process of learning to raise two young adults who are close to leaving the household. We have a 21 year old daughter and a 19 year old son. And, you know, we've never done this before. So it's, it's a, it's, it's different to raising teen early teenagers is different to raising small children. It's a, it's a different phase season. And so we are.

Right.

you know, chest deep in our learning journey of trying to figure out how do we, how do we launch them? Well, how do we prepare them as they leave the household? They're both in college. And so what does that look like in the transition out of college? And so that's, that's something that I'm really, we're really excited about. I'm excited about. And the other thing is, you know, as, as a coach, I've been coaching leaders for almost 20 years and I love it.

It is life -giving. I'm passionate about it. I want to do it till the day I die. But building a coaching business is a very different endeavor. And I think a lot of people get into the work of coaching thinking, I would love to work with clients. And then they suddenly realize, but there's a business side to all of this that comes with it. And so, you know, I'm really excited in this season as we're in a kind of new season of

focused on some new areas of building the coaching business so that we can hopefully serve as many people as possible.

This is one of my favorite questions I ask my guests. What do you want your legacy to be?

man, I'm going to pick a part one and a part two. My legacy and my wife and I agree on this. We want our legacy to be our children. That, you know, your kids don't lie as parents, as leaders, your kids don't lie. And you've, you've spent more time with them than any other person you work with in your life.

Yeah.

probably, and therefore there is no greater context of leadership development and testing of leadership, I think, than the work of parenting. And so, you know, our kids and then their families and their families, generation after generation, we want that to be our legacy that we passed on a better legacy than our parents passed to us. And then secondly,

I really hope my legacy as a professional is that people would say Eric leveraged everything, not to make more money, not to build his acclaim and his reputation, but Eric leveraged everything to empower.

leaders who could build a better world.

I love that. As we wrap up our conversation, what key takeaways do you want the audience to gain from our conversation?

I would say first of all, part of me, leadership is really hard. And most of us did not get a lot of training over the years. Most people cannot think back to one leadership course they took in high school, college, graduate studies. And I think just accepting the fact that the responsibility of influencing other people in whatever role we have,

is very difficult, but again, I want to say anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you get better. And so I just encourage people, stay the course, be a continual lifelong learner, keep fighting to become a, give yourself permission to become a better leader tomorrow than you are today. Because I think that's the best any of us can do is just commit to that, to that mission.

That's great. Where can people find your book, Leadership Gravitas, 12 Essential Skills to Expand Your Impact and Influence and learn more about you and your coaching business?

Yeah, thank you, Keith. Everything can be found at our website, which is mpwrcoaching .com. And there's links from there to go everywhere. Obviously all of our content is found on Amazon and other platforms that people want to get audible versions. We actually just released a new book called Transform Your Trajectory. And the subtitle is How to Turn Your Most Challenging Moments into Life.

changing breakthroughs and my one promise to people, I tell people they may not be the best books in the world, but I can tell you they were written out of the overflow of my journey and my work with other clients. So it's very raw, it's very real. These are real stories that I share in the books. I wrote these books, they were not ghostwritten and I have nothing against ghost writing. I'm sure I'll do that at some point in the future, but I just, I tell people.

If you're looking for something that really works, because I am passionate about the proof in the pudding, it's got to work for me and it's got to work for anybody. If they want to take their leadership to a new level, then I would highly recommend that they check out some of this content.

Well, Eric, thanks so much for providing awesome content for my podcast and enjoyed our conversation and you're welcome to come on again and talk to more leadership. Really enjoyed this time together.

Well, Keith, thank you. I had a blast. I love your background and anything I can do for you, buddy. I'm all in and would love to come back in your podcast at some point in the future.

Well, thanks. You enjoy that wonderful sun shining in San Diego there.

Okay, thank you, Keith.