Let me tell you who you’d be sitting across from

Lead Your Power started with my own empty cup

I’ll begin with the part most people leave off an About page. Lead Your Power is me. I came up with it because I was a leader struggling with the exact same things I help people with now.

Everybody pulled at me, and I was glad to give. But I gave out to everybody, and my own cup was empty. I gave so much that I started wondering who was going to fill me back up. I’ve described it like this: “I liken myself to being a barber where I’m cutting other people’s hair and I haven’t had time to cut my own, but now I’m doing it for me.”

Everybody pulls at you, but you need somebody to help you. That’s the whole reason this exists. I wanted to become the person I needed back then: someone with no reason to flatter you, who’s walked the same road, and who’ll stay beside you through the hardest stretch of it.

It started at a stranger’s door

I started knocking on strangers’ doors in 1993. A door gives you a few seconds, and the person behind it owes you nothing. It teaches you early that people want one thing from you: an easier day.

There’s an old parable I like to tell about it. You can’t sell ice to a man standing on a mountain of it. Colder, cleaner, cheaper, he’d only smile. So the seller sets the ice aside and asks one question: what’s the hardest part of your day?

What that means for you: you already have a mountain of advice. The first thing I’ll ask is what feels hardest for you right now. Then I’ll wait, patiently, for the true answer, which often isn’t the first one you give.

The Marine Corps showed me how people grow

I joined the Marine Corps in 1995. What stayed with me most was a process. I watched it take people who couldn’t do the job yet and help them become able to do it, one piece at a time, with nobody handed the next piece until the last one held.

“In the Marine Corps, we make Marines, period. There’s a proven repeatable process…” Fred Smith

In 1996 the Corps trained me in public affairs at the Defense Information School. It’s a discipline where words are chosen with care, because the wrong ones get repeated. An instructor warned us the training would be a curse: once you learn how messages are built, you can’t stop noticing how they’re built.

“It was a curse, but I looked at it as a blessing in the respect that I was able to take those powers and actually use them for good.” Fred Smith

I’m a combat veteran. More than 30 days of my service were spent out in the desert, and that’s on my record. I won’t tell war stories here. What I carried home is simple: when people are counting on you, steady matters more than loud.

What that means for you: nobody’s born the leader the next season of their life needs. That person grows, the same way everyone who led before you grew. You don’t have to be that person already to begin. That’s where “We make leaders” comes from.

Inside real companies, done the right way

After the uniform came years in automotive sales and finance, where one sentence can make or lose a deal. I worked inside multinational corporations, in someone else’s seat, never the founder’s. In those seats I helped scale automotive businesses from zero to hundreds of millions in annual sales, and the companies I worked on went on to be multibillion-dollar companies that are still in existence.

I’m prouder of how it was done than of how big it got. I did it “without filleting people, without miscommunicating.” Plenty of companies grow by burning through people. That was never the way I’d do it.

For a lot of those years I worked behind other people’s names, building the systems that made them bigger than me. I saw how easily those same tools could be pointed at things that weren’t true. So I drew a line, and I still hold it.

“I won’t be illegal, dishonest, deceptive, unethical, because all money ain’t good money.” Fred Smith

What that means for you: once people depend on you, most of them have a reason to agree with you. I don’t. I won’t flatter you to keep you, and I won’t promise you an outcome nobody can promise. If I don’t think I’m the right person to help, I’ll tell you so, kindly and right away.

Why I do this in the open now

What I’m really after is simple. I want to see people come together, once and for all, and leaders are the backbone of that. A leader who’s running on empty drains everyone around them. A leader who’s clear and steady lifts them.

Leaders need an ecosystem. They need a place to gather, with people who carry what they carry, and get top-level information that just isn’t out there. The best of those conversations happen around a long table, among people who trust each other. So that’s what we’re building, online first and then in person, and I’m leading it from the front, under my own name, on camera. I ask leaders to set the mask down, so I go first.

Whatever you believe, or don’t, you’re welcome at this table, and nothing here asks you to change it.