Episode 92: Why Leaders Stay Stuck in Reaction Mode

Episode Summary 

Most leaders aren’t failing because they lack skill—they’re stuck reacting instead of thinking ahead.

In this episode, Coach Mo and executive coach Chip Scholz break down the hidden gap between reacting in the moment and building true strategic capacity. Drawing on 30 years of coaching experience, Chip reveals why leaders get trapped in “doing mode” and how that mindset quietly limits decision-making, clarity, and long-term impact.

The conversation dives into the shift from control-based leadership to self-led leadership, where awareness, curiosity, and intentional thinking drive better outcomes. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed, second-guessed your decisions, or found yourself constantly putting out fires, this episode will challenge how you lead—and how you think.

This is about moving from reacting… to leading with intention.

Key Takeaways

• Stop Reacting, Start Thinking Ahead
  Strategic capacity begins when you pause long enough to choose—not just respond. 
• Doing vs Being Is the Leadership Divide
  Checking boxes creates managers. Self-awareness creates leaders. 
• Frameworks Create Clarity Under Pressure
  Without a framework, you drift into reaction mode and decision fatigue. 
• Curiosity Kills Bias and Bad Decisions
  Better questions lead to better data—and better leadership choices. 
• Self-Leadership Is the Real Bottleneck
  Leaders don’t lack answers—they lack awareness in the moment.

Transcript

Meet Coach Chip Schultz

SPEAKER_02 0:13

Welcome to the Let's Take a Munich podcast, where high achievers start performing and start transforming. I'm Coach Mo, certified core energy leadership coach, founder of the inner arena, and creator of the Twin Eye Framework. Self alert, my power, mind action, and grit. When I'm here, retrain your mindset, challenge your limits, and turn pressure into purpose. Subscribe now and join me on YouTube at Twin X Coaching. So let's get your reps in. Welcome to another episode of the Let's Think About It podcast. I'm your host, Coach Mo, and I'm here with another amazing guest. And his name is Chip Schultz. Chip, Coach Chip.

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Coach Moe. Yeah, God. It's nice to be able to use the honorific, right? That's right. What part of the country are you checking in from? I'm just outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, on the west side of Lake Norman.

SPEAKER_02 1:22

North Carolina, North Carolina, the South. Welcome. West Coast me South.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

See, so I have a little experience out where you are too. I was in California for 13 years, and the sentence was finally up, and so I was allowed to leave. But yeah, I spent a good amount of time up in Sacramento. I I did some lobbying for a company and too much time in Sacramento.

SPEAKER_02 1:47

Yeah, I bet you there's a huge difference when it comes to the heat. We get that dry heat, and I'm assuming you guys get that humidity type heat.

How Executive Coaching Started

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Yeah, not today. Today it's fairly cool, but uh, once we key into summer, it's pretty humid.

SPEAKER_02 2:03

So, Coach Chip, tell us who you are, what you do, and the type of value that you bring.

SPEAKER_01 2:11

That's a big question, you know, and there's a lot of different ways that I could answer that. I don't think identity really gets wound up in roles, but I'm an executive coach. I have been for about 30 years. Got an author, I'm an author as well, and a speaker and a wood turner. I've spent a lot of time. In fact, I spent yesterday afternoon, all day Saturday, teaching people how to how to turn. And I just have a good time. I um I've done a lot of work with a lot of country companies, I have clients all over the world, but who I am is a whole different thing. It's I like to think of myself as a thinker, as a speaker, as a writer.

SPEAKER_02 2:51

Yeah, so 30 years, you're like the Yoda of coaching, man. You got all of this wisdom, I'm assuming that you're just carrying.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

Did anybody hear of coaching 30 years ago? Nobody really knew what it was. Maybe a few Fortune 500 CEOs did, but beyond that, coaching didn't have much of a realm in those days. In fact, I I was just talking to an old friend of mine, and I've known him for almost the whole time we've been here, and he's the head of the Lake Norman Chamber, the local chamber of commerce. And he and I are doing a radio show on Friday. And we remember, and he said, he said, I remember the first time we met, and you said you were a business coach. And he said, No, what kind of coach are you? Do you coach football? Or I said, No, I'm I coach executives, that's what I do. And he said, No, that isn't a thing. So nobody had a frame of reference for that back in the day.

SPEAKER_02 3:48

How did you pivot into this? Because I'm thinking like 30 years ago, just like you said, this industry was just not even scratching the surface yet. And you pivoted into this role. How did that come about? Why?

SPEAKER_01 4:04

It was blind dumb luck more than anything else. I I got involved with a company back in the day that was called Resource Associates, it's now trusted advisors, and they were a purveyor of materials, coaching materials, or not really coaching materials. It was more like uh you run classes on leadership development or strategic thinking or things like that. And I I bought into their system yesterday. I couldn't spell consult, and today I are one. And and all of a sudden, I've got to make a living, I've got to, I've got to sell this stuff. And I teamed up with a guy that had graduated from their academy a little bit before I did, and he became my first coach. And he had gone and learned about this whole thing called coaching. Back in the day, called there was a place called Coach You, Tom Leonard that was involved in a few other people. And so he got me involved and he talked about this business model where you could sit and talk to people all over the country every day and never have to move from your couch. And and I thought that was wonderful because I traveled a good bit and and I still do, I still travel way too much. But he made the business model and it was coaching. And I struggled with it for the first few years. I'm a pretty outgoing guy, and and so sitting and talking to people on the phone all day was really difficult. But then you get into it. And from my perspective, this kind of goes lifting the veil on coaching, but from my perspective, I wanted to talk to about 20 people that were paying me 500 bucks a month to talk to me. And I knew that if I had that, I would have a good base to go from and I could do other things. So here's the dirty little secret of coaching is most people who say they are coaches don't coach full time. And okay, so I think at the height I had 45 coaching clients. That's full time, but that's only 45 hours a month that I was talking to people. So, what do you do for the other 160 or 120 hours a month? I do assessments, I do classes, I started this thing called leadership series at a company that I work with. I did a whole heck of a lot else that bolstered the income, but my base was having the coaching class.

The Dirty Secret Of Coaching Work

SPEAKER_02 6:31

I think about when I got into this industry or when I wanted to get my certification to really consider myself being legit as a coach, my mindset was a little bit different because where most of my peers were going into coaching to start their own businesses, their own coaching practices. I took the route of I'm going to build an internal coaching program where I currently work. So I can do this full time. So I'm not chasing clients. So that's exactly what I did. I created a coaching unit in the Department of Justice. And just like you said, people call themselves coaches, but they're only doing it like five part-time. I created a framework and a platform for myself where I'm doing it full-time and I'm getting compensated for it. And I'm the boss, I'm the manager, because it's my vision of how I can support leaders and executives while having my coaching business too. So I'm indulged in this. And here's where I'm going to start to pivot because you've been in this, you've seen the shifts of leadership styles going from the 90s to the early 2000s to 2010s, and now here we are in the 2020s. And there was one point where leadership was all about control. And now there's been a huge pivot in where people want to be heard, people want to be listened to, people actually need us as coaches because the new leaders coming up aren't responding to this control style of leadership. Take me through your viewpoint of how this pivot has been happening as a result of different identities when it comes to leadership.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

It is happening, but there are still a lot of people that haven't made that shift. But here's the background: there was a guy named Frederick Winslow Taylor, who in 1910 wrote a book called Scientific Management. And in the book, aside from a bunch of other stuff, but in the book, he actually said, don't think, just do. Do things the way that I tell you, at the method I ask you to employ, at the speed I suggest, and we'll get along handsomely, just don't think. So, so think about that. What that basically said is the manager or the leader was the person that did all the thinking, that made all the decisions. And that stayed the management paradigm. So if you think of the difference between management and leadership, management is about managing resources, leadership is about people.

SPEAKER_02 9:22

Right.

SPEAKER_01 9:23

So up until I don't know, maybe till the 70s, maybe till the 80s, people saw other people as objects. And we thought we could apply scientific principles to humans. Let's face it, humans don't really react well to that. Because if you're kept down too long, pretty well, pretty soon you start pushing back. And here's the other thing: if the rate of human knowledge is doubling every two years, can anybody know everything?

SPEAKER_02 10:00

Absolutely not. But yet leaders carry this weight in today's time that they're supposed to know everything. Yeah. And they bottleneck the whole process.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

I I agree. See, here's the thing, and this is what I teach. And in fact, it was in the book that came out in October, is that we gotta move from a way of doing to a way of being. Your whole life as a kid growing up, what are you? It's you, what have you done in school? What have you done in sports? What have you done in in your extracurricular activities? You're judged by what you do. And you get into your first job and you're judged by what you do. And so somewhere along the line, somebody says, Hey Mo, I really think that you should be a manager. Well, the reason they say that is because you've been a good whatever. So if I'm a great salesman, gee, I should be a great sales manager. Where's the logic in that? You don't know me at all. And to say that I'm a great engineer, so gee, I should start leading engineers. Well, so we move that way of doing into a position where it's all about people and we still think it's about doing. And to be fair, a lot of a lot of leadership positions are actually leader-doer positions, but then you get promoted the next time, and now you're leading theaters.

SPEAKER_02 11:42

That's right. Let's break that down in a layer deeper. When I say doing versus being, doing is in my vision, in my eyes, is the chore of a role, being is the connection to the passion of doing the role. Doing is work, being is effortless. When you can be a coach, when you're being a coach, I'm present, I'm there with you. When I'm doing coaching, it's more of a chore.

SPEAKER_01 12:22

Well, if I'm sitting across from you, am I gonna tell that you're doing coaching? Yeah, it's gonna stick out like a sort of thought.

SPEAKER_02 12:31

When I'm being a coach, I'm present. I'm feeling your energy, I'm watching your synergy, I'm connected, I'm actively listening. Doing coaching, it's the act of doing it, but then I may not necessarily be present doing coaching because I can be multitasking while doing coaching. That's how I see the doing frame versus being. When you have leadership, and let's take it to there, lead somebody that's doing leadership and being leadership, they're authentically connected with leading self first to lead people. That's being leadership.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

That's that's the only way you can be authentic, is if you learn how to lead yourself. That's right. Because if you are, you're right, if you're doing leadership, it's gonna feel hollow, it's gonna be feel phony.

SPEAKER_02 13:27

When you're doing leadership as well, your main focus is checking the boxes, doing which is really management. Yeah, true. But what I teach is how do you be a leader? How do you lead self first? Let's start there. And that's where I develop my swag framework: self-awareness, white power, aligned action, and grit. And that's where it begins with self-awareness. How are you showing up to be the best version of yourself? How are you able to tame the doubts, the critic, when those things come up for you that's limiting you from being the best version of yourself before actually leading others? How do you navigate that? So I know you do a lot of work around helping leaders lead self. What's your methodological approach and how you support leaders and leading self first?

From Command And Control To Trust

SPEAKER_01 14:28

It's interesting that you have a framework, and I have a framework as well. I call my framework the five C's, which is context, clarity, conditioning, choice, and character. Context is knowing where you are, it's being self-aware, if you will. So we we have a lot of similarities there. Clarity is understanding what you want, and not many people really know what they want. They know what they don't want, but they have a hard time saying what they want. Conditioning is getting your mind right and and getting it positioned. So I'll give you a great example is I lost 110 pounds after a stroke 14 years ago, and all of a sudden I had to get my mind around being a thinner person. And so it's you've got to change your mind. And then choice is I've got this thing, I've always had some heartburn around goals. I just don't like the term and the thought behind smart goals because for me that that sounds a little finite. That sounds detached from the reality of who you are. It's like having a quarterly goal or whatever. I use this term called weight points, and I use a document called weight points, and it helps you to align and helps you, helps you find the behaviors that align with the thought patterns. And then character is about personal accountability, it's about it's about doing what you're saying you're gonna do. And so that's my framework. And we all have a framework that we operate within. Some of us adopt frameworks, some of us think of them, but that's my framework of self-leadership.

SPEAKER_02 16:07

How do you help a person become more aware in real time when they're limiting themselves and how to apply your framework that you teach them?

SPEAKER_01 16:17

That's the other part, is helping them develop that self-awareness. And listen, one of the best things about coaching is our ability to point things out, our ability to notice. I always like the definition of mindfulness, and as coaches, we have to be extremely mindful. But the definition of mindfulness is just the ability to notice things.

SPEAKER_02 16:41

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 16:42

And so think about it, is so back in the day, and not really too far, before 2020, we didn't have Zoom. So all of my coaching interactions were on the phone by voice. I couldn't see my coaching clients. And so you become especially tuned to hearing inflection. You hear when things are on and where things are off. And actually, I thought it was easier to coach then because all of us focuses on one thing instead of all of the visual stuff. Coaching in person is a whole different thing. And you can pick up body language, you can pick up a lot of other stuff, you can pick up some of the nervous ticks and that kind of thing. But it's just the ability to notice. And as a coach, you get to call that out. As a coach, you get to say, hey, here's what I'm feeling from you, or here's what I'm getting from you. So why don't you tell me about that?

Doing Versus Being In Leadership

SPEAKER_02 17:41

I think also, whether it's my framework, your framework, whoever, I think you need to operate under some sort of framework because this the framework, the purpose of frameworks, in my opinion, is the self-awareness piece. When you don't know what you don't know, you're drifting. And you're in this space where you're consistently reacting. I really help create awareness with people through their energy and their emotions as well. When you feel this internal barrier that feels like it's draining, overwhelmed. Maybe there's a little frustration, maybe there's some doubt, maybe there's some imposter syndrome, all of those things. When that's present, judgment is typically present. And that's draining your energy. And when you're an autopilot in that, you're naturally reacting to everything because the driver is the judgment that's present within. And when you have a framework that you're operating from, it reminds us what's my purpose in this moment right now. That's the self-awareness piece that's really important. How do we align certain actions so that we're getting to the outcomes that's truly important to us? And when you don't have any type of framework, you're drifting, not that it's drifting can always be bad because you can drift into a positive outcome, but at least with the framework, you're creating certain direction for yourself because you understand what your why is. And that why can help you identify when you're off, when you're triggered. And this self-awareness piece like really keeps you grounded and reminded that you know what? That's not true. That's not my true thought right now. Why am I feeling so worried right now? You know what? I'm starting to feel exhausted. Let me, this is the time I need to take a reset. And see, that's having some sort of framework that you operate in. And I found through my experience working with leaders, most don't have a framework that they're operating on, and they're in this react mode. Yeah, then that's where the overwhelm burnout is starting to leak. And burnout doesn't happen just like that. It can, but it typically just leaking energy over time that magnitudes itself into stress, into overwhelm, into quiet quitting, all because you don't have a framework that you're operating in.

SPEAKER_01 20:31

Yeah.

unknown 20:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:32

It there's a couple things come to mind as you were talking. First of all, I've learned over the years that all models are broken, some are useful. And having a framework that's useful is better than having a framework that's perfect. Second of all, I love what you said about judgment. And are you a fan of Ted Lasso? Oh, yeah. So you do you remember the dart game that he played against Rupert? And he's standing there and he's playing darts, and they're uh they're getting to the end of the game, and he turns to May and he says, Hey, how much do I need to win? And May says, Two triple twenties and a and a bullseye. And he looks at Rupert, he says, All my life people have underestimated me. He said, I used it used to really bother me. Then I saw this saying up on a uh school wall as I was driving away from dropping my kid off, and it said, Be curious, not judgmental. Yep, which is Walt Whitman. And I love that. I love that line, be curious, not judgmental. Somebody asked me the other day what what keeps people young? And what keeps people young is curiosity.

SPEAKER_02 21:45

Yeah, I agree.

SPEAKER_01 21:47

And so being judgmental just doesn't get you anywhere.

SPEAKER_02 21:52

It never does. And here's another thing I like teaching leaders because in real time, right, when you're in a corporate America. America, wherever organization, bias exists. And we get these biases from the way that we were brought up, culture, social media, all of this contributes to certain biases that we carry. And being curious is the number one thing, in my opinion, that you can do to remove biases. Because in certain dynamics, certain situations, difficult conversations, cultural change within the organization. If you don't have information, what do we do? We assume and we default to biases.

SPEAKER_01 22:41

We get all our information from MSU. You've heard of MSU? Yeah, making stuff up.

Frameworks That Build Self Awareness

SPEAKER_02 22:46

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right? And then that's what you're navigating off of. Without knowledge, guess what you're doing? You're assuming. You're tapping into memory bank based on certain previous experiences or certain judgments that you project that will be a particular outcome. That's not even true. A lot of times, us as leaders or leaders, period, that's what they're carrying, these judgments. And they're making decisions off of these judgments instead of being curious. And when you can be curious in real time by asking a powerful, open-ended question, empathic question, empowering question, clarifying question, you get knowledge. And guess what? When you receive that knowledge, you can pivot and make whatever decision you need to make. That's based on fact. Whether they lied or not, you're going off of detailed information that was received into your consciousness, and you navigate from that. And when you can navigate from that, you naturally feel better.

SPEAKER_01 23:53

Absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:55

So what you're thinking right now, you just did a hard pause, like you got this thought.

SPEAKER_01 24:00

No, I'm thinking just how much I enjoy the conversation. It's not too often that you get to talk to another coach and talk about this kind of stuff because it is so basic. It is, and when I say basic, it's something that's necessary for human thriving.

SPEAKER_02 24:15

Chip, you helped contribute toward thinking about it. That's what we do here. We think about it. And we took it a layer deeper on a couple of topics. But you also mentioned you had a book, a couple of books. You want to tell us about that and how we can find it?

SPEAKER_01 24:33

Yeah, yeah. I had one that came out in October. It's it's my coaching philosophy. It's called Small Decisions, Big Shifts. It's on Amazon and several audiobook platforms as well. The audiobook was really cool to do. I've got another one that came out about a month ago called Every Dog Has Its Day, Reflections on Life, Love, and the Lathe, which you don't often hear life, love, and lathe all in the same sentence. And then I've got another one that I'm working on. It'll be out in October called Handoffs, which is a family fable about family businesses. And so I'm looking forward to it. It's I'm having a good time with it, and all of them are available on Amazon and the podcast platforms.

SPEAKER_02 25:16

That's great. That's awesome. What's your motivation behind you know consistently writing these different books?

Curiosity Beats Judgment In Real Time

SPEAKER_01 25:23

It's weird. 2009, I wrote Selling for Geniuses, which is with seven other people. We each took a chapter and wrote, and that was more about credibility and having a big calling card. I wrote Do Eagles Just Wing It in 2011. And then in 2012, I had a stroke. And so I always wanted to write a book on my own without partners. And the Do Eagles Just Wing It had a couple other partners with me. And I stopped and started over the years and put the manuscript away for about five years. My kids for Father's Day a couple years ago gave me Story Worth. Have you ever heard of Story Worth? No. So Story Worth is a platform that sends you a question a week, and at the end of a year, it it takes all those stories that you've told and puts them into a book and sends them to you. Wow. Yeah, it's a really cool thing. And they the questions are like, What was your dad like when you were a kid? What's important to you? What are your religious beliefs? What who'd you take to prom? And so I wrote 60 stories. The book ended up being 411 pages. It got me back in the writing mindset. So I went and took the manuscript for small decisions out of the drawer and finished that off. Took me about a year to do that. And I had so much fun with it that I wrote every dog has his day. Took me a month and a half to write that one. And then the handoff follows it. I'm working on another one for 27.

SPEAKER_02 26:56

That's great. I got to check that out. I did write a book in 2018. It's called the What If Effect, Changing Habits to Make a Better You. That was my first authored book. It was something that I was like, I want to do this, I want to do this. I was on my bucket list to be become an author. So I knocked that out and I did that. My next goal is to write book number two. And it's going to really focus more on my swag framework. So looking forward to putting that together. But yeah, you're an inspiration. 30 years in the game. You are the Yoda in coaching.

SPEAKER_01 27:31

Thank God I don't look like him.

SPEAKER_02 27:33

It's all good. Any lasting thoughts you would like to leave the audience before we check out?

SPEAKER_01 27:38

No, it's interesting. I get a lot of people who have asked me over the years, how can I be a coach? And the first thing I say to do is to get a coach. And it is so important to know how to be coached, to be able to coach, because you just don't know what it's like to share and open up. And it's it's a struggle with all my clients. Some people are fairly forthcoming, but it takes a while to build the trust to do that. And that's what I really love about the whole situation. If you want to be a coach, get a coach. And I know two of them that are really good.

SPEAKER_02 28:15

So thank you, sir. I appreciate you. Great wisdom today. Thank you, Chip. Thank you. That's another rep in the inner arena. You didn't just listen, you leveled up your swag. Self-awareness, why power, aligned action, and grit. If this hit home, share it, subscribe to the Let's Think About It podcast, and log in with me on YouTube at Swag Coaching. Until next time, stay aware, lead with your why, act in alignment, and keep your grid strong.