Dane, welcome to the Resilient Entrepreneurs podcast.
Who are you and what mission are you on?
Yeah, so my first name is Dane, like a Great Dane dog. And most people just call me coach because I'm still a professional gymnastics coach. But I just retired from a university teaching cyber technology ethics. This is my 42nd year in IT after having had and been an entrepreneur starting from scratch, a cyber tech company. But still that cyber tech ethics class was really character ethics, not philosophy.
And so today I'm retired from that, retired from the Air Force, and now I just coach gymnastics at night. And we do leadership during the day, primarily for entrepreneurs and C-level execs to help them be able to forge their way, building their business, growing themselves personally, as well as their teams.
Hmm, thank you for that, Dane. Why is this mission important for you?
The most important part of the mission is that, honestly most people that are out there teaching leadership teach leadership as its own entity instead of focusing on character, character development and character growth as the foundation of leadership. I love it when John Maxwell in his, originally I was involved with John Maxwell back in 2002 when he had his Developing a Leader Within You book and chapter three was titled Integrity. And the subtitle was, An Essential Ingredient in Leadership.
Now, when he went to his version two, so Developing Leader Within You version 2.0, he changed the title in chapter three to Character, and then he changed the subtitle to Character as the Foundation of Leadership.
So even someone like John Maxwell, who has all these years of experience in leadership, right, is still growing. And you can see that in how he even titled his chapters in that book.
So talk about character. Is that something we inherently have or is that something that can be changed, developed, grown over time?
Yeah, that's a great question. So I created this image of a tricycle in my Tricycle Effect that I call it the very first book that I wrote, because we as adults are just big kids, right? Our personality is the same as we had when we were three to five years old. Yes, we can hide it better, we can put on a facade, we can make it look any way we want now that we're adults, but that same big kid is still inside us, right?
So I use the tricycle because most of us rode trikes or big wheels when we were little. So it's somewhat an image that you can actually fit in your mind and you can actually remember it very easily. So once I imprint that character of the tricycle, it's easy to remember.
And my big focus there is the front wheel on a tricycle is the big wheel, right? So it has all of the spokes on that wheel, things like trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, oh my goodness, empathy these days and loyalty, integrity and so forth, right? But you know, the spokes on a wheel are supposed to give it the trueness to it so it doesn't wobble, right? So it's true, it's round so you don't get a bumpy ride and all that kind of thing and it gives it it’s sturdiness. So I call that the Character Skills wheel because that little us as just big kids, when we were kids, our personality was set.
Character is not the same as personality. To answer your question directly, personality is something we already had, but character is something we can grow.
Think about it with the character skills. If I want to be more respectful, I need to practice respect. If I want to be more caring, I need to practice care. And by practicing, just like in gymnastics, we can actually get better at caring for others, being more respectful, more trustworthy, more fair, all of the different character skills that are on that front wheel of the tricycle.
Gosh, the way you say it makes it sound so plain ……. Well, I want to be courageous, I'm going to practice being courageous. I want to be empathetic, so I'm going to practice empathy. And it makes a lot of sense. And there will still be a question in some people's minds. Well, if I'm not already it, how can I do it?
Right. Yeah. So if I can, I'll go back and explain the rest of the Tricycle Effect. If you think about that front wheel is the big wheel, the back two wheels on a tricycle are much smaller, but they're still balanced, right? So they're about the same size. One I call the Technical wheel and the other one is the People Skill wheel, like teamwork, communications, relationships, right? Critical thinking, problem solving. And then the seat, just like you were saying, Vicki, the seat is the seat of courage.
So if you think about the tricycle, the handlebars are connected to the front wheel and the pedals are connected to the front wheel. So I like to say you get your direction and your momentum in life from your character skill wheel. The problem that we challenge that we face today is that most people are riding around a tricycle with a huge technical wheel, right? A smaller people skill wheel. So the back of the two wheels, which I call the competence wheels together, is not a very balanced ride and the front character wheel is even smaller yet.
So what we're trying to do is get out there and encourage people, be courageous, to make the right decision at the right time for the right reason, to grow your character skills, to get that big wheel in the front to be able to handle that moral compass that allows us to be able to really trike towards our true north.
So is it also important for the back wheels, like you were saying, the people versus the technical to also be equal so people work on them together? Because definitely I've known people in my life that were really good technically and really bad with people or really great with people and terrible technically, and they become challenging in a workforce. And as an entrepreneur that maybe has staff, these type of people can cause, yeah, a lot of chaos.
Yeah, that's exactly right. So that's why there has to be a balance between those two wheels, right? I have 42 years in IT. I still have to pull myself back from chasing after the shiny object, right? So I want to go after the technical wheel, but it's the people skill wheel that actually, along with the technical wheel, combine to give you that competence across the board. I've had engineers before that couldn't talk to the customers. They could fix any computer or network but they can't get along with the cust omer, right? And vice versa. I’ve had some people great with the customers, they couldn't fix a thing, right? They had to, had to put them in a different role in our company. So that does have to have a balance. Yeah, absolutely.
And I call those the competence wheels, now, the interesting thing is people are like, Hey, like, Simon Sinek says, you got to find your why, right? And I call that character skill wheel on the front the Why. Because everything we do should be about helping other people move ahead, our growth mindset, all of that kind of thing, especially when it comes to character development, character skills development.
The back two wheels, I call the How. So the technical and the people skills, how you get along with people, how you do your technical.
And then if you think of the seat of courage, that's the What. What's the decision I made to be able to lead with character and make sure I stay focused on my why while I'm using the how and the back wheels in order to be able to accomplish that why.
This is amazing. I'm so enjoying this conversation because I can see it. Yeah. And I love the innovative way you've brought all these things together and layered different aspects of leadership together in a way that's visually appealing and memorable. And as you're talking, I'm thinking, yeah, we're talking about an individual and the same model will be applied to teams. So your whole organization that has its why, its mission, or its vision and mission. It has its how, strategy, tactics. It has its what. What is that? Yeah, operations. objectives. Objectives is the seat. It expands however a leadership team might choose to use it.
Well, if you look at a lot of leadership training that's out there, they mix a lot of the relationship, people skills with the character skills. And this helps to separate them so I can really focus on how do I develop my character in particular, Especially when it comes to technology. I mean the students I had at the university before I retired came in thinking it was gonna be a philosophy class on ethics, right? Instead, it was a practical class on character ethics and applying it to the dilemmas, the struggles, the vulnerabilities, the risks, you know, those, all of those things that combined are part of the IT world, right? Our smartphones, are you addicted, not addicted? Every time you scroll, you're getting a dopamine hit. There's even connections between that and drug addiction, overdose and suicide. So making sure that you're leading with character first in everything you do really helps to be able to not only solidify your own personal growth, your mindset, your attitude, all of that, but also gives you the opportunity to be able to coach others to be character-driven or character-first leaders as well. And that elevates the whole culture of the organization. So you have better engagement, right? You have healthier culture. Just like Stephen Covey, when the speed of trust goes up, costs go down. How does trust go up? You got to practice trust. So that character skill, trustworthiness, is really, really important for all the things that you just said.
Where do you find people, especially entrepreneurs, struggle the most when it comes to their character development?
That's a great question, Laura. You know, that's why I did that imposter syndrome podcast and vlog because there are so many out there that just, they want to escape where they're at right now because there's this, this creativity inside this, this, this person that, that wants to be able to create their own business and feel like they can control what's going on. Even though we all know that the reality is it's a lot more struggle than it is necessarily, you know, the dream.
But still, to get to the dream, you have to go through those struggles, don't you? And so I think mostly many of them just don't take the first step. And I think that they don't want to do that primarily because they're afraid of failure. Now, we've had this idea of failure being a bad thing infused into our culture and into our society for a long time.
Let me stand up here for a second. I just want to demo something, OK, since I'm a gymnastics coach, is that all right?
Sure, sure.
Let’s do it.
OK, all right. So let me just teach you what I teach my kids in the gym. What's the first thing you do to take a step to walk? You know?
Think about it?
Nope. First thing you do, physically do.
Move your feet.
Lift your foot?
Nope. So, so think about this. And when we get off the air, you're going to go and try this and you can ask lots of people. This is a fun trick question. Gymnastics coach, you got to have trick questions. So watch.
Have to fall forward.
Ahhhhh, Lean forward.
Ahhh okayy.
So I love what John Maxwell says about failing forward in his book titled by the same name, Failing Forward. You have to fall forward. That means you have to be ready and able to take some method of risk, right? Some amount of risk in order to be able to fail forward so you can actually grow.
And too often we see students come into our gym anywhere from the time they're, you know, six or seven till they're 18 when they leave high school. They're afraid to try new things because they might fail. And that prevents them from taking the first step. So this week in our gym, we had a little chalk talk. I do chalk talks all the time. In fact, my podcasts are chalk talks, kind of. The idea is, what is that one more thing? Right? Don't just say, I got to do this whole thing. Just do one more step. Fall forward, fail forward, take one more step. And if we can get the entrepreneurs out there to be more courageous to take that extra one more step, we're going to have more entrepreneurs and more successful businesses.
That's so good. I love how simple that illustration of the failing, falling forward is. You can call it fail, calling it fall. It's the same thing, but it's that movement. It’s what starts the momentum. And a lot of entrepreneurs we've talked to on this podcast all have a failure story of some sort. Some bump in the road, hit. Yeah, we all have them. And tell us yours, actually, before I say anything else. Give us a good story, because I think it helps to illustrate that it is normal, it's a normal part of this journey.
So when we left the military after five years in Turkey, we had no idea. We knew we wanted to come home and start a gymnastics training center because that's what really where our hearts were. My wife is the director at the gym. People go, I don't get how you can work for your wife all the time. I say, you know what? I don't. We just go to the gym on a date every night and we're just dating. She's all the brains, I'm the brain . She does, I flip the kids. She does all the smart stuff. So we get along just fine. Right? And we've been doing this now for 35 years and it works really well. Well, when we first came home, I was so excited to start this gym, but I was scared. We didn't have any money. We had no bank account. We had no house. We had, we didn't know where we were going to settle down. Nothing because we'd been overseas for five years. So we just flew home and all of a sudden, here we are. I was scared to death, really seriously. And, but yet that dream was in our heart and we had to find a way to make it come out.
My mom and dad were in this little town of Rice Lake, Wisconsin, and that's where they ended up settling down. And they were both entrepreneurs, even though my dad had a career in the Air Force. He let my mom start a business called the Elf Shelf in Brainerd, Minnesota, gave her $1,000, said, when that's gone, you're done. It never got done. It just kept growing and growing and growing, right? So I wanted to follow in my mom and dad's footsteps, and they were here to help me coach me and my wife to get our business started. So we started the gym. Well, the gym could not function on its own because we're in a little town of 9,000. All our colleagues are in big cities like Milwaukee, Chicago, Madison, Minneapolis, St. Paul, all friends of ours, many of them, but they can start their gym with a thousand kids in a week. We weren't able to do that. So how do you do that? Well, I had to start another company to be able to fund that one. So I took my IT background in the Air Force and we started a cybersecurity company.
And we had that for 30 years until just five years ago, because now the gym can stand on its own. The failure part is that we have failed along the way many times. But the first time I had any kind of pushback that your business is not going to succeed was probably my first fear of failure, real fear of failure.
Now, instead of just talking about failure, I just want to go back to this whole idea of fear of failure, because that is the thing that keeps people from moving ahead, right? So I go to the businessman's luncheon thinking they're going to be very excited to see this new business in town, right? We're just opening. I got there, I was the second person there. Another person walks in, happens to be a leader from our city. He says, Hey, are you the speaker for the day? I said, Yeah. He said, Well, what are you going to be speaking on? I said, We're starting a new business here in town, Gymnastics Training Center, without blinking or even taking another breath he says ‘You won't last six months.’
So now this last summer, I saw him on Main Street and I went by, I said, hi. And he said, hey, do you remember when I told you you wouldn't last six months? How many years has it been now, Dane? I said, 35. He just started chuckling. Yeah. So in that case, instead of accepting that negativity as a point of failure for me, and that I might not make it, it made me all the more hungry to try harder going forward. Right. And, and knowing that we were going to first teach the kids character skills in the gym, then the leadership skills, but we're going to use the vehicle of gymnastics that when they're under pressure to perform or to try something new or something even a little bit more like scary, I tell them they can't use that word in the gym, but something that's a little bit more, they might be more fearful of, they've got to overcome it. And that's going to carry through on all their life skills later on. Does that help?
Yeah, absolutely. And I think the fear of failure is just such a common one. And I think, as you said earlier, it really stops a lot of people from starting and from taking the risk. It’s just a very normal fear. And I don't think people should sort of make that the reason why they don't do something. I think you have to accept that that is it. And I like that you had a solution. Like, you knew the gym wasn't going to be able to be self-sufficient right from the beginning. So you just started another business that could pay your bills because we all need to pay our bills at end of the day but you can still do your dream and your passion and build the gymnastics until it was able to. So that's just like a shift in mindset for anyone out there who's like, it's a huge risk to do this new business. Well, what's your fallback? Can you have something else that might balance? And because you were doing it in a partnership with your life partner, you had to really think like one of you has to be able to pay the bills, right? So you're really taking on risk and you balance, mitigated that risk really in a smart, smart way.
It sounds so simple, but when you're walking through it, you're in the forest. You can't see the forest through the trees. You don't see the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. You just have to keep trusting that this is my dream. This is what I'm doing from my heart. If I can share one more thing, I think it's really important. A lot of people, have you ever heard anyone say that person really speaks from their heart? You heard that? Do you know how true that really is?
It isn't just because they like it in their heart, but there's this thing called HeartMath, like mathematics, heart math. So when we're an embryo and we start to develop, one half of us becomes the upper part of our body. The other half becomes the lower part of our body. And you all have heard of acupuncture and acupressure, right? One part of the body is connected to another, but most people don't realize that we actually have brain cells in our heart and we have heart cells in our brain. So our brain and our heart are more connected than we realize.
Sometimes people who have had a transplanted heart from someone else, they wake up from the operation and then in ensuing months or weeks, they find out, I've got a memory of something I never went through. Because they're bringing the memories from the heart that came and was implanted in their body.
So I just encourage people to be more trusting of their dream that if your heart is pulling you to start your own business, you can do it. You don't have to do this big jump off the cliff. You could do it slowly. But the key is to have some people around you, mentors and others, and my mom and dad were our mentors, to find other people. It doesn't have to be family, right? Sometimes family is the most negativity that you get, right? But just find people that you can surround yourself with to keep that heart and dream motion going forward. And it's not that hard, but I think sometimes we forget that we need boundaries for those that are negative, but we need to accept and bring in those that are positive. So those five people or more around you are who you're going to become.
It's the truth. It's the truth. Experience will tell us all that if we look back at, you know, the best times of our life, who was around and the most successful, however we choose to define that, who was around us, who were we hanging with, what material were we feeding our brain with, what were we learning, loving, listening to.
Yeah, I love that learning, loving, and listening. That's exactly right,
So Dane, you come from an AI background. The question is begging to be asked, especially as we're talking about fear of, well, fears, fear of new stuff, fear of change, embracing uncertainty. We weren't quite, but we're about to. AI, let's just put AI into this conversation and help me place AI on the Trike.
Well, that's a really interesting point there. You know, AI is just, it's not just growing exponentially, but it's growing double exponentially and triple exponentially in reality, okay? Now, just to give you a little background on where I came from, I was actually handpicked by President Reagan's Communication Director out of the White House to actually run all of the IT for the country of Turkey in the 1980s. So the interesting part about that is that we were 30 years ahead technologically from where we just have become here in the last five to eight years. Okay. There are organizations out there like for instance, DARPA in the DOD, Defense Advanced Research Project Agency that we did projects for in the eighties and in Turkey, we were all wireless in the eighties, unheard of until just what, the last 10 years. I can't drive in northern, northwestern Wisconsin and keep a cell phone signal today. But in the 80s, I could go from Turkey to Germany and never lose a cell phone signal. It was pretty crazy. It was just night and day difference. But people think, well, Turkey, it must be really antiquated. Well, we were way ahead, because my people put in the first email server in all of Europe. We put in the first digital telephone switch. We're talking about military units now. We had ARPANET, which was the predecessor to the internet. And all of that was done in the 80s and all wireless, because you couldn't use copper because copper was a black market item in Turkey. It'd be gone in the morning. Right? So it was amazing how all that came together.
Well, that gave me a vision for where we need to go in the future. When I got home and we started our other little IT company, we started from scratch. I mean, from scratch on a one little table, which I still have in the gym, because I was using the gym as a platform. So I didn't have to rent another place, save money, you know, all that kind of thing to the day when we built our own business. For instance, we had a contract, we sold all of the firewalls to Hillary Clinton when she first became Secretary of State. And we did a lot of business with firewalls and cybersecurity. With all that said, there's a character piece to this. And that is why I was teaching cyber technology ethics at the university. I lobbied for 12 years with my IT company, sitting on their board of advisors telling them you need an ethics class. There are so many dilemmas with technology.
Just this morning, I was speaking to a law enforcement academy. And of course, law enforcement uses surveillance. How far do you go with that surveillance? What kind of personal freedoms and/or privacy and/or anonymity do you give up? Remember, I put, my people put the ARPANET in, which was a predecessor to the internet. So we had complete privacy, complete anonymity back in the 80s. Now that has flipped. Right? And now we're in a point where almost every surveillance camera that's put up, almost anything has some type of ethical dilemma associated with it that people have to make a decision on. Well, how do you make that decision?
You've got to do it with character skills first. Is this technology respectful? Is it trustworthy? Is it fair? Is it kind? Right? All of those things are critical. And some of the things that have not come yet, because if we were 30 years ahead with the military back in the 80s, where is the military today? Generally what happens, do you have iPhones? Okay, do you use Siri?
Of course, Yeah, sometimes, yeah.
Siri was actually basically created by DARPA. DARPA, ARPA, ARPANET. DARPA created ARPANET. And then after the military was done with it, pushed it out to the commercial sector, that's what we have internet for today. But I have a video of the DARPA, one of the DARPA chiefs saying, you know what Siri is? And the lady says yes. And he says, well, we created that and we gave it to Apple. They could develop that afterwards. So, very interesting that a lot of the technology comes out of the military and then the commercial sector when they're done with it and they've moved on already then they give it to the commercial sector who knows where they're at today right but something that doesn't change is the character thing.
Yeah let's explore, come on - who knows where they are today - you know. You may not know the nitty gritty details but you have a pretty good idea where they are today, 30 years on what do you, share with us, share with us what 30 years hence might look like.
Dane Deutsch (26:21.218)
So I think right now there are some dark sides to the technology that I'm very concerned about. One of those is called transhumanism. So my next book is going to cover some of this. But basically, they're taking humanity and moving it closer to cyber. So our uniqueness as humanity will be merged with cyber, and that's transhumanism. So if we lose our uniqueness in terms of being part of humanity, then what do we become? Is cyber really capable of being sentient if it doesn't have a heart? Remember the HeartMath thing? So can it really, yes, it can talk about it, but can it feel that? It might be able to show something that appears to be sentient, but it really doesn't have a conscience to tell it this is right or wrong, right? Like we do with our heart. So I think that transhumanism is a big part of what we're going to see. And right now, Elon is talking a lot about it. He uses the word singularity, but it's the same thing.
And so what we're going to see with AI is a lot of constraints and concerns and challenges around freedom, personal privacy, autonomy, all of that kind of thing.
Just to give you a kind of a glimpse of that, in the United States, we don't have a social credit system yet but it's all set up. There are nine other, maybe I think it's 11 countries now that have social credit system. For those that are not familiar with that out there, it's like a financial credit system. You get a score. So if you wanna go buy a car, they look up your financial credit. Do you have enough credit to be able to buy it? What's your history and all that?
Social credit is the same way, but it includes your financial score, but it also includes your behavior in your society and they give you a score on that. So in Saudi Arabia today, but in particular China, if you want to buy a bus ticket to go across the country to see your mom and dad in a different city, the first thing they'll look up is your social credit score to see if it's in the green range so they can sell you a ticket. If it's not, no ticket.
So digital surveillance and digital currencies, I think, are the next two big frontiers that we have to watch carefully, that we're still leading with character and that we don't violate our personal freedoms, privacy, and autonomy.
Yeah. I think the biggest challenge is going to be like, who's going to govern this? You know, who is going to say what is okay and what isn't and how far we can go with it? Because I believe that you're right, it's exponential, the growth. And it's getting to the point where it feels faster than humans can even keep up with. And we're talking about just humans and smart people like you who understand these things in depth, but then you've got to have entire governments figure out how they're going to navigate this, educational systems, how are they going to navigate these changes? So many other systems that are really slow to move and hard to get everybody on board to make decisions for at a basic level. How are we going to keep up with this? How are we going to govern it? How are we going to make sure that we don't lose humanity in this, in this new age?
Yep. Well, you know, one of the people who left Google, but was their ethicist, now has the Humane Technology Center, and Tristan Harris, I think is his last name. And he's doing what you just described is, how do we navigate this properly. First is awareness, right, that this is actually happening. Almost every single technology company has had people that developed their technology based on a Stanford class, according to him, in which they went to learn how to addict humans. It was by design. So if they can get you to stay on there longer, scroll longer, whatever, you know, those are all part of that. Think about your iPhones right now. Have you ever had a conversation with one of your friends or hubby or whoever, and all of a sudden you start getting ads on your iPhone about that very same thing? Yeah.
So it's listening all the time. Some of my students, because they had a research paper in my ethics class, character ethics class, and they would go and discover that not only is it listening all the time, but it's also recording all the time. And if you look on the back of your phone right now, you have no ability to take the battery out. So even if you shut your phone off, it's still not truly off. OK, that's by design as well. So what's the tracking, the surveillance, all of that combined going to do to us in the future in terms of our freedoms and our personal privacy and so forth, right? Those are the things I'm really mostly concerned about. And Tristan is trying to blow the whistle on that too. And they've done that with AI to help us understand that AI has the capability of thinking. Right now, your phone, now I ask some audiences that I speak to, I said, okay, so you know that if you're talking to someone, all of a sudden you get ads on there.
But I said, have you ever been holding your phone and you're not saying anything and you were just thinking about something and an ad comes on? And I get yeses in the audience. I don't know if you've ever experienced that, but that is really spooky. So the question is, do they have technology already that is capable of reading our minds that because we're looking at screens or we're near our phone that actually is being picked up on? Interesting concept.
Reading our minds, Dane, or predicting our thoughts?
Who knows? I don't know exactly. I can only speculate on some of these things, but some of them are very deep and they can go either one or two ways. And that's why I'm really, after all these 42 years in IT, I'm really focused on character because I want my athletes in the gym to be able to grow up as, you know, really healthy character built kids into adults, right? But at the same token, I know that they're having a difficult time with their challenges of trying to navigate with the technology. So are moms and dads. How do we let those families have the kind of knowledge and wisdom to be able to navigate? And that's why I like the Tricycle Effect because how do you steer? Do you go forward? Do you go backwards? Do you sit still right now? I mean, all those things are the decisions we're making in the seat of courage, right? And there is no necessarily one correct answer. Everyone. Everyone's on their own little journey. We all are experiencing things differently.
So we have to be able to journey by leading with character first so that we can make sure we're using the technology for good things based on our mindset, growth mindset, as well as our character. And that growth mindset has to be on purpose, right? It has to be purposeful, but it has to be intentional as well.
Yeah, I agree. And it's going to be so important for leaders because they're going to be the ones that set the standards and start to create the things that these AI are going to be able to do. So it's going to be the demand, right? The AI can do anything for good or evil. So we're going to have to be able to set the standards of what are those things going to be, put the boundaries around what we don't want. It's a tough, yeah, it's going to be a tough few years to navigate through this because it's all moving so quickly, we're all playing catch up with it.
There's tons of people who haven't even tried out Chat GPT yet. They're just like scared to even open the app. But when you can see what it's able to do, it's kind of, and that's just, this is the infancy.
It’s just scratching the surface. Yeah, absolutely. There are some things that I can't tell my wife because I can be, being that I had a top-secret security clearance and you're in the military, in IT, I can connect some dots that a lot of times other people can't. And there's a very dark side to a lot of this right now that I'm really concerned about. And that's why I'm trying to get the Tricycle Effect out there in a big way so that for humanity, we can go back to a reason for why we need to lead with character first and make sure that that is the growth mindset. So many leaders in their companies, entrepreneurs or C level or mid-level managers and leaders do not really coach other leaders in their organizations on character. They should all be coaching their people on character. I'll give you an example of that. In Turkey, since I'm responsible for the whole country, 1200 to 1500 people at 16 different locations. The first day I was on the job, my chief came in my office and he said, are you gonna be like the last Chief of Maintenance or are you gonna let us do our job?
That was a big question. And I had an answer right away because my dad was an NCO and he told me, son, your people are your backbone. Your job is to take care of them. So I looked at the chief and I said, look, chief, your job is to take care of the mission, technically. My job is to take care of our people. So when I go visit the sites, sometimes I go east, it'd take me a week on a C-130 to make all the sites, visit them all, come home for a week, get caught up with my inbox and all that. And we didn't have email except at the end of the second, the third tour that I had there. And then I’d go to the West. Well, the bottom line was they thought I was coming out to head hunt and I wasn't. I want to know, is the food any good? You're locked up on top of this mountain top for months at a time. Do you have pool cues that aren't broken? Do you have ping pong balls? Does your sauna work? Right? All these things. And if they didn't, I made a list when I went home, I ordered all that stuff and I didn't even ask them. They didn't even know it was coming. I would just ship it to them. And all of a sudden, guess what happened to the morale? Just increased. I never once had an outage the whole time I was there.
The chief took care of the mission, I took care of the people. And that's the key. So we've got to get back to coaching leaders. And most leaders that are in prominent positions get all focused on their quota and their bottom line dollar and cash flow and all these KPIs and so forth. But I seldom see anyone with a KPI that says we need to care for our people by coaching them with leadership that is character driven or character first. Totally transformational, not transactional.
So beautiful. It's bringing humanity back into everything we do in business and everything we're talking about here leads to I think what our definition of resilience is, to bring us back to the title of the podcast and that is how to embrace uncertainty. Do you know and having that strong character and at least familiarity with how to develop character even if we haven't yet achieved where we want to be in that. It's an experience. It’s a journey. Even with AI, don't view it as something that we have to get through this period. What period? AI is AI. It's like breathing. We have to get through learning to breathe. It's always going to be there in some way, shape, or form, in some variation. So it's about adapting and embracing uncertainty. And I think your conversation about showing people how to develop character is showing them how to embrace uncertainty, how to be more flexible - physically from the gym analogy and also emotionally and spiritually if we're talking about the heart as well.
Yeah. And I'll share one more thing to add right onto that, Vicki, because you are so spot on with that. One of the things that's really hard for the kids in the gym, and we go through this quite often, even if I tell them, don't take it so seriously, they still take it seriously. They want to do well, right? We hold ourselves, we judge other p ople by their behavior, but we judge ourselves by our intention. So if we don't get it done, we feel bad, right? We sometimes, I mean, internalize that, right?
So in the gym, we have to have this concept of we must play. When you talk about resilience, the trike brings you back to your childhood days where we played. We weren't worried about falling. We'd fall and get back up and not think a thing about it, didn't we? We just kept going and we enjoyed it. And we never thought about what are the implications of failing or whatever. It didn't occur to us. But now as we got older, all those things put a damper on the ability to play as adults or big kids.
And so if we just add that into what you said, if businesses learn to play more with their people, and especially if they're leading with character first in that play, there will be a transformation in the culture. And by the way, there is a way to measure that. I already mentioned behavior. You have to measure character by behavior. You can't see what's in their heart, right, or in their mind until there's an action, right?
And so it's interesting that there's a company out of Minneapolis St. Paul called KRW International that has been measuring character for over 25 years, I think now. And I'm certified by them. They actually went out and offer CEOs to measure their character. How do they do that? They get people above them or colleagues that are on their same level or they're people below them, including family and friends to actually fill out the report, the actual assessment along with them. But you know, we go do these personality assessments and we do it ourselves. No one else. We could say anything we want on it, right? But what happens when your supervisors or your colleagues or those that work for you fill that out? What are they going to say when they're anonymous and they will never know who filled it out, right? That's when you find out what the real character of the leader in that organization is all about. And so at one end of the spectrum, you have virtuous CEOs at the other end of the spectrum, have psychopaths, right?
So we have to play to keep growing and moving ourselves up that ladder, if you will, or up the scale to be able to become one of those virtuoso CEOs that transforms their business, transforms their organization, and creates that culture of engagement and play that are just totally transformational.
So is there an action that somebody could do right now to learn more about what their actual character is when it comes across to other people? Because I think it's such a good point there. Like, we can take those assessment tests, but we might be saying what we hope we will be or the best version of ourselves in our mind is, but not necessarily how others perceive us. Because I think that's a key point there. Others' perception is more important than we think we are. So is there an action that somebody could take that could get them to have a greater understanding of how they are perceived by others?
That's a great question, Laura, and here's the answer to that. It comes back to a character skill we haven't mentioned yet, and that's humility. If they're humble enough to ask them, what do you think of me? Am I supporting you properly? Do you need anything that I can help you with? Those questions open the door for them to let you take off the disguise and let them just be authentic and genuine and give you the feedback that you need to be able to grow to that character-driven or character-first leadership.
And of course, and this is my definition of leadership, it's influence, nothing more, nothing less. It's not the position of power or authority. It's your ability to influence. And so many people think, if I don't have the position, I can't influence, right? And that's not true. That colonel that hired me from the White House to manage the entire country at Turkey's IT, it was all about my people, first of all. But secondly, I was a two-year captain, only two years as a captain, then you had major and lieutenant colonel and then full colonel. Well, a lieutenant colonel with over 20 years of experience or at least 20 years of experience usually sat in that seat. He didn't care about my rank. He's like, Dane, we need to take care of our people and we can get the job done. And we were the best unit in the Air Force in 1989 and we didn't even fly planes. We flew technology, you know? So it can happen because if you're humble enough to ask for that feedback and then do something with it, right? Be authentic and genuine about trying to create a change, make that mindset of growth through change, happen you can make that transformation very easily. Humility.
Yeah. Humility. Yes. That's it. That's the magic. That's the magic right there. Dane, I want to thank you so much. The mission that you are on is so important for this time that we are all in, think more than ever. People out there are struggling in lots of different ways and with, you know, politics or with whatever's going on with the AI, with whatever fears they may have, with, you know, worries over redundancy or economic change and all the things that sort of cycle around all the time anyway. There's a lot of worry, there's a lot of fear.
And I truly believe that this is the time for entrepreneurs to take the risks, take the chances, start a side hustle. You know, you don't have to jump off the cliff completely, you know, but maybe give yourself a backup, give yourself a chance, right? If times get tough, you need something there. It's really important. So conversations like this, I think really help entrepreneurs to see the bigger picture and give them that push to just keep going. And I love this. It's such a different perspective that you bring to the table today on character first and how we can develop character and how we can put it as the forefront of leadership. Whether you're a solo entrepreneur, your character matters to your clients and customers as much as any employees you may have in the future. When you're an entrepreneur, you're a leader. It just comes with the territory, so it's really important to focus on things like character. And I thank you. Thank you for so much insight and such a fantastic conversation around such an interesting, different topic. Thank you very much for your time today.
Yeah, you're very welcome. I'm happy to share all that. And I can't do it by myself, you know, so being on these podcasts, like with you, you become an extension of me, you now know how to ride your tricycle. And I just hope that you'll keep triking on and let other people know about it so we can change the world.
