How to Lead from the Inside Out with Barrett Brooks

Deep self-awareness combined with intentional leadership creates a powerful foundation for personal and professional growth.

In this episode, we speak with Barrett Brooks, an Executive Coach and host of his podcast, Good Work, whose approach to personal growth and leadership has transformed how he works and how he impacts others. Barrett’s journey has taken him from the fast-paced world of corporate leadership to embracing the calling of coaching, where he helps individuals align their inner gifts with their leadership purpose. He’s passionate about helping leaders break free from the armor of societal expectations and truly connect with their authentic selves.

We explore how Barrett discovered his true calling, the importance of knowing yourself before leading others, and the pivotal role surrender plays in effective leadership. Barrett shares his journey from burnout to purpose-driven work, and how embracing both the joys and the griefs of life can unlock peace and authenticity in leadership. He also discusses the concept of “Good Work,” focusing on how leadership that is rooted in self-awareness and inner peace leads to sustainable success. This conversation offers invaluable insights into leadership, personal growth, and the journey to leading with authenticity and intention.

What you’ll learn:

• How self-awareness and surrender can unlock your unique gifts and enhance leadership
• Why embracing both joy and grief leads to better decision-making in leadership
• How Barrett Brooks moved to purpose-driven work by aligning his gifts with his calling

Jump into the conversation:

(00:00) Introduction

(03:09) Barrett’s definition of "Good Work" and the role of gifts

(04:26) The challenge of surrendering and the armor people build

(08:02) Barrett’s transition from executive to coaching and personal reinvention

(13:08) Overcoming fear and embracing the entrepreneurial path again

(17:16) The mental shift from career success to personal purpose

(23:32) Exploring the relationship between grief and joy in leadership

(28:32) The concept of self-actualization in leadership and finding peace

(32:35) The importance of knowing your story to transform your leadership

(36:05) Creating space for reflection and the power of silence

(41:11) Barrett’s new venture: Presence-Based® Coaching and its future potential

Connect with Barrett Brooks: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barrettabrooks/
Barrett’s website: https://barrettbrooks.com/ 

Check out Presence-Based Coaching: https://presencebasedcoaching.com/ 

Check out Good Work with Barrett Brooks: https://www.youtube.com/@BarrettABrooks 

Check out Arcadia: https://www.BeArcadia.com  

Connect with Sam Yarborough: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-yarborough/ 

Connect with Jason Yarborough: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yarby/ 

Produced in partnership with Share Your Genius

https://www.shareyourgenius.com 

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 3:09 Barrett’s definition of "good work" and the role of gifts
• 4:26 The challenge of surrendering and the armor people build
• 8:02 Barrett’s transition from executive to coaching and personal reinvention
• 15:00 Overcoming fear and embracing the entrepreneurial path again
• 19:08 The mental shift from career success to personal purpose
• 26:52 Exploring the relationship between grief and joy in leadership
• 31:52 The concept of self-actualization in leadership and finding peace
• 35:55 The importance of knowing your story to transform your leadership
• 39:25 Creating space for reflection and the power of silence
• 44:31 Barrett’s new venture: Presence Based Coaching and its future potential

Transcript

[00:00:00] Barrett Brooks: the simplest definition I can come up with is getting in touch with your unique gifts. And really getting to know them and sit in them, and I call it surrender to them over time and then find the best outlets for those gifts in the world. And I think anyone who's really been able to get in touch with their true gifts and what they feel called to in the world in terms of expressing them, that that looks like Good Work to me.

[00:00:24] Barrett Brooks: And that's what I'm always looking for and guests on the show, and also people that I surround myself with.

[00:00:54] Jason Yarborough: ​ Hello and welcome to a new episode in the new year of 2026. I'm pretty excited of how we're kicking off this new year with this podcast. So. Hello, love. 

[00:01:04] Sam Yarborough: Hello. Happy, happy New Year. Be great. 

[00:01:08] Jason Yarborough: We, we, we've done it. Happy New Year. So, so today, listen guys, this guest is fantastic. About four or five weeks ago, maybe, I don't remember right when, uh, Sam sent me a podcast, as she often does, you're avid consumer of podcast, uh, and a host pretty good at that.

[00:01:24] Jason Yarborough: Uh, sent me a podcast, listened to with, with today's guest, Mr. Barrett Brooks, and she's like, this was really good. You should listen to it. I listened to it. I think I've listened to it twice now. Uh, at one point I actually stopped mid run to take some notes while I was listening to it. It was that good. 

[00:01:38] Sam Yarborough: I also did that 

[00:01:39] Jason Yarborough: and then we were talking back and forth like, we should really get Barrett on the podcast.

[00:01:45] Jason Yarborough: Uh, so we did. That's what that's what we did today. We got beard on the podcast and. 

[00:01:51] Sam Yarborough: It was just, it was better than I could have expected. 

[00:01:53] Jason Yarborough: It's not uncommon for me to take notes during the podcast. And I've got a full page of, of notes here, uh, around some of this. His maj, his major stages of development that he goes through with as his coaching practice.

[00:02:05] Jason Yarborough: Uh, he's a coach to, to. World class creators, athletes, entrepreneurs, et cetera. Uh, former CEO of a company called ConvertKit, which I'm very well aware of from back in the day. But, uh, we talked a lot about kinda the inner workings, the inner journey that it takes as people get to, uh, different stages of their life.

[00:02:25] Jason Yarborough: And I think it's just a really valuable conversation and approach for anyone listening, especially for those that are in leadership or aspiring to a leadership position. 

[00:02:35] Sam Yarborough: But also just leadership in your life, in your family, and your community. I think it's just good for everybody. So, um, enough about us.

[00:02:45] Sam Yarborough: Go, listen, thanks for joining Barrett. 

[00:02:47] Jason Yarborough: Get out there, y'all. See you.

[00:02:49] Sam Yarborough: Friends, I am stoked to be coming back to you today, live from the uh, in-home office studio with my lovely co-host. Uh, and today I'm particularly excited about today's guest 'cause uh, we've got a new friend who's doing some Good Work out there.

[00:03:07] Jason Yarborough: Baird. Welcome to the show, my friend.

[00:03:09] Barrett Brooks: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I love, I love starting off with a good dad joke.

[00:03:12] Barrett Brooks: I'm a big fan.

[00:03:15] Sam Yarborough: You're in the right place, then Jason's them.

[00:03:17] Jason Yarborough: So let's, let's just jump in with a, with a quick softball and kind of give a little peek behind the curtain of that Dad joke. Your podcast is called Good Work, hence, you know, doing the Good Work.

[00:03:27] Jason Yarborough: So, in your eyes, what makes for what makes work good? What makes for Good Work beyond impact or income?

[00:03:34] Barrett Brooks: Uh, the simplest definition I can come up with is getting in touch with your unique gifts. And really getting to know them and sit in them, and I call it surrender to them over time and then find the best outlets for those gifts in the world. And I think anyone who's really been able to get in touch with their true gifts and what they feel called to in the world in terms of expressing them, that that looks like Good Work to me.

[00:03:58] Barrett Brooks: And that's what I'm always looking for and guests on the show, and also people that I surround myself with.

[00:04:03] Sam Yarborough: I love you started that with like, it's a simple answer because in execution that is so not simple.

[00:04:12] Jason Yarborough: mean, just the getting in touch part alone is, is not simple, I don't know how you find it, but is it, how are you finding it to be received as far as like talking to leaders, like to get in touch? Do you feel like received or people are like, whoa, what's kind of weirdo kind of stuff?

[00:04:26] Jason Yarborough: Is this.

[00:04:26] Barrett Brooks: Yes, I definitely find that there's a default defensiveness to a lot of the topics that I talk about pretty commonly in my work. I try and use my background being in, you know, real business roles and running sizable companies To break that down a little bit, to say, look, I have a practical side.

[00:04:44] Barrett Brooks: I have a strategic side. I get why all these things matter. But if you can just join me and kind of set your armor off to the side here for a few minutes, I think maybe. We can tap into something a little bit deeper in this conversation, whatever the context is, a workshop at a conference, a podcast like this, a guest coming on the show, someone wanting to work together in my coaching and if people are willing to kind of proverbially set the the armor aside for a little while, I find that most people really crave it.

[00:05:09] Barrett Brooks: It's just kind of scary to enter into those conversations 'cause you're not sure if you'll be judged or laughed at or whatever. All of those stories are you have from the past. You gotta kinda let, let that go for a little while. And unfortunately in a lot of cultures of communities and companies and organizations in the world, we just don't welcome that level of, of knowing one another.

[00:05:29] Barrett Brooks: And so, um, there is some defensiveness to it. I don't think the world is built, built for it, and I think almost all of us crave it.

[00:05:36] Sam Yarborough: 

[00:05:36] Jason Yarborough: I feel like we should have had like six hours of conversation before this podcast, but, uh, yeah, definitely that, that knowing themself, but I, I'm very curious just to know like what you see as that armor that, that you're talking about there. Like what most people come to the table with

[00:05:52] Jason Yarborough: you know, suited up on.

[00:05:54] Barrett Brooks: I mean one of the simplest ways to think about it is just the concept of hierarchy of needs, uh, that Maslow put out and everyone's familiar with. Um, I think we build a lot of armor just to get a lot of our basic needs met. And in some ways it takes a certain level of stability and okayness to even have the capacity and awareness to tap into, the conversation about your own gifts and about what you're here for and what you want from your life.

[00:06:20] Barrett Brooks: And so I recognize that and I also recognize that my audience has most of their basic needs met. So it's not that I don't acknowledge. There are kind of lower levels of, um, functional or biological needs that need to get met as well. And so I, I just tend to operate more on the upper ends of that. So the point of that statement being that I think a lot of our armor gets built as we try and get our needs met over time.

[00:06:42] Barrett Brooks: And increasingly, as we move up that hierarchy of needs and those needs are progressively met. I think there's kind of two paths you can end up taking. One is to continue optimizing for things like. Financial wealth and success markers, status markers, that kind of the world is built to reward and the other is to go inward and to ask yourself what you are gonna measure your success based on and kind of form your own definition around that.

[00:07:08] Barrett Brooks: And that provides an alternative path. Um, and so I think so much of the armor is built to withstand the harshness of the systems we operate in and to still get our needs met in the face of that.

[00:07:20] Sam Yarborough: Man, I mean, there's so much to say around this. You said the world isn't built for this, which I I agree completely. Um, and you know, we're all taught to like, do these things that equal success. But I think so many leaders, we talk to them daily. I know you probably do too, but so many leaders have done that.

[00:07:38] Sam Yarborough: They've, they've followed the playbook and they get to the end and they're like, wait a minute, this is it. 

[00:07:45] Jason Yarborough: It's not what I thought I was 

[00:07:48] Sam Yarborough: So I'd be curious to ask you personally, 'cause um, you know, I hope people will go follow you and learn a little bit about your journey, and we're certainly gonna talk about it today.

[00:07:56] Sam Yarborough: But in this season of your life, how are you defining success for yourself and what does that like?

[00:08:02] Barrett Brooks: Yeah, it's been a period of probably five going on five years of real reinvention of how I think about that. Um, I was on a path for a long time of, uh, I was a executive at a software company called Kit. They make email marketing software, kind of like the backbone for a creative entrepreneurial business online.

[00:08:20] Barrett Brooks: And, um, I adored that company. I viewed it as a way to. Put elements of building culture and taking care of people at work into play. It was like my lab for trying out experiments based on the best thinking out there in the world for what it's like to build a great organization. Um, but I was also in it for wealth building and for growth and for a lot of the other metrics that are more traditionally associated with what we think about as success.

[00:08:47] Barrett Brooks: what I found ultimately was that because I wasn't the owner of that business. Although one of my best friends is, um, and I acted like an owner, that there was this dissonance for me internally that I was living in day in and day out, and it was an external reflection of an internal experience of having an inner and outer misalignment for me between what I want for myself, how I wanna show up in the world, and what was being asked of me, and an external expression of a realization I had internally.

[00:09:19] Barrett Brooks: The realization was that I tended to carry burdens that weren't mine, and I tended to want to serve people in a way that wasn't totally natural to me, to relieve suffering, to create better outcomes for people, to take care of people. That I was doing that in my work every day. And in fact, I had found myself into a role that created the perfect system of existence for me to continue living in that way.

[00:09:42] Barrett Brooks: And it was breaking me, I, I got to this state of burnout and. Opted out of that by quitting that job, even though there were millions of dollars of equity on the line for me over the coming years. And so if I fast forward through, you know, I'm not gonna go through that full five year thing right now, but if I come to now what I think it's the process has been as a progressive.

[00:10:04] Barrett Brooks: Growth of understanding of my internal world, what it is that I really, truly care about for myself, where my gifts lie, and then trying to find ways to express them in a way that I can still earn a living and take care of my family and, and all of that. So now I see that in my coaching work, I see that very much as a calling, as a natural expression of what I'm good at.

[00:10:25] Barrett Brooks: It almost feels easy to me in some ways, very hard in others, of course, 'cause there's always a growth edge. and then just this week I announced, uh, acquisition of a company that I'll be kind of taking over the CEO role and owner role of starting in January called Presence Based Coaching. And it's a.

[00:10:41] Barrett Brooks: Organization with a 20 year legacy of coach certification training and leadership development training. And this feels like an outlet for me to serve a lot more people than I can serve one-on-one and a place where the day I walked in the door, it felt like home. It felt like a place where I could operate as me, and that that, uh, the people on the other side would benefit from that, um, through that work.

[00:11:02] Barrett Brooks: So that's really exciting and that's kind of the next chapter here for me. 

[00:11:06] Jason Yarborough: Congratulations to that. As soon as I saw the, your post go up yesterday, I sent it to Sam and I was like, oh, check this out. And then I went deep down the, uh, the PBC uh, I told Sam, I was well, following this podcast, I'm gonna be talking to Baird about this because I'm very interested in what you've got going there.

[00:11:22] Barrett Brooks: Yeah.

[00:11:23] Jason Yarborough: Also from North Carolina. You guys are based, it's based in Nashville.

[00:11:26] Jason Yarborough: know, a bit of home for me. But I wanna go back to, uh, a little bit, uh, something you just said. you left the company, entered into coaching, now you're doing this PBC, uh, performance based coaching. Sorry if I'm abbreviating it, but I shouldn't be.

[00:11:38] Jason Yarborough: Um, but one of the things you mentioned in the podcast that I literally. I was running, I was just on that street over there from my window. I remember you mentioned that you were, uh, running from your calling of coaching, running from the calling of like whatever, what it was you were truly supposed to be doing it like to be a lot of things for a lot of different people, but for you it was this coaching thing and I stopped on that corner right there next to my friend John's house and I was like, ah, shoot.

[00:12:02] Jason Yarborough: I felt that because like sometimes I feel the same way and like what I'm supposed to be doing. Sam, and I've been having this conversation. We've been together for 10 years, so at least 10 years Having this conversation, what was it like for you, uh, to kind of come to that realization that, man, I'm running from something, and then what it looked like to run towards that.

[00:12:22] Barrett Brooks: there were a lot of moments in that journey, so I'll try and kind of abbreviate it, but. There were actually two things I think I was running from, I started my first business back in 2011 and that business ended up failing, uh, about three years later. failing financially, it was a huge success in terms of the education it gave me and the catapulted gave me into my career.

[00:12:42] Barrett Brooks: But I think from the time that that business failed to the time I started my coaching business, I was looking away from my true nature as an entrepreneur and. And it was because of the fear of ongoing financial failure and having to really own every dollar that comes in the door. So there was a real element to all of this that was me running from being an entrepreneur again, not wanting, not being ready to embrace that role again, even though it was what I most deeply wanted for myself.

[00:13:08] Barrett Brooks: I think I'm by default a high agency person. I embrace leadership. I embrace making hard decisions. And when I'm not in the kind of like CEO seat, even though in my current company, it's just me, um. I find that I chafe at just the process of watching decisions get made when I feel that I might have a different viewpoint, or that I might have the courage to make the more difficult decision, even if it's painful now, if it has payoff later.

[00:13:36] Barrett Brooks: And so that was the first piece, was really accepting that the key to becoming an entrepreneur again, was owning every dollar that was gonna come in and saying to my wife and my kids, I will take care of you even though I'm gonna go take a risk, uh, again in my career. And that was a big piece. And so then that opened the question of, well, what kind of entrepreneurship?

[00:13:57] Barrett Brooks: You know, what am I gonna do here? And for some combination of reasons, I think I had probably the harshest judgments towards coaching as a profession of any profession. And I'm not totally sure why. I think that there's a lot of factors that go into it. I think that there are a lot of people who, don't treat it with the respect that it deserves the profession of coaching.

[00:14:19] Barrett Brooks: They don't. Take it seriously. They don't honor the role that they're playing in someone's life. And so there is a reality to that. But one of the breakthrough moments I had that kind of turned that thinking on its head was I was talking to another friend who's been in the productivity niche for a, a long time, over a decade, and I was telling him this story about how I had these judgments toward coaching and coaches, and how could I own that for myself if I don't like hearing it from others?

[00:14:44] Barrett Brooks: And he said, oh, I have that. But with productivity. There's all of these charlatans and people selling crappy stuff online related to productivity, and I hate productivity for that reason. I was like, yeah, but you've been in it for a decade. And he said, yes. My work is like an answer to all those people that I feel like aren't doing it right. And it was this moment of having something reflected back to me where the realization we both came to in the conversation was every industry has that. Every industry has a full spectrum of people operating in it What I was doing was I was protecting myself from leaning into it by saying, this is not a legitimate career path.

[00:15:21] Barrett Brooks: It's not a legitimate career. And what I was able to flip it on its head to realize is, but then there's the other end of the spectrum too. Like I had had a coach for five years at that point and my role as COO of a company and every executive on our team did as well, and they were pivotal people in our growth. So how could I possibly engage in that process and believe in it so much while not believing in the profession, quote unquote. And what I realized was I just needed to hold those people who are really great at it as the role models and say, well, I'm gonna be like that, not like this other group. And then it becomes a useful tool for calibrating how do I want to be in this profession?

[00:16:01] Barrett Brooks: And so the mental model I adopted was. I enjoy sports. And so, you know, any professional athlete has a whole host of things they do to train for their profession, and the great ones are rigorous about it, and that's the big part of the difference between them and the average people. I said, well, if. Why don't I just train just like a pro athlete would, but for coaching and take it with that level of seriousness.

[00:16:25] Barrett Brooks: And that was a huge part of seeing a path forward where I could pursue excellence, but also be in a field where I feel that it reflects my natural gifts and that it could be both, not just one or the other.

[00:16:38] Sam Yarborough: I have a few questions to follow up, but I think the first one that most people are going to be hearing in their heads, assumptive on my part, but, um, we hear a lot of people like, follow your gifts and you'll never work another day in your life kind of conversation. Um, going back to that, like you said, you worked with a coach for five years.

[00:16:58] Sam Yarborough: Um, talk to us about like. Following that process and understanding your gifts versus just like tolerating a version of yourself. Because I think we can all get in roles where we're effective and we're good and we're quote unquote successful, yet our gifts aren't necessarily the first thing that we put forth.

[00:17:16] Sam Yarborough: So how do you help people kind of work through that, and how do, how do you know you are in your gifts?

[00:17:22] Barrett Brooks: well, let me start with, since I started coaching and even continuing on into this next chapter, I don't think I've ever worked harder in my life. Um, this past year I probably worked harder than in any other year of my life, but the difference was that it felt like it was from a place of choice that I was actively engaged in every step of the process, and that it was for a purpose that I believe is the best choice for my life and my family, and my work, and my expression of what I wanna do in the world.

[00:17:54] Barrett Brooks: And so the difference between that level of work and maybe the hard work I used to do where I'd put in very long hours to run a company is that that version of work felt painful to me. It felt like suffering a lot of the time.

[00:18:08] Barrett Brooks: I believe life is full of suffering. And so I don't think that suffering ever goes away.

[00:18:13] Barrett Brooks: But I do think that there are ways of working and ways of living where the suffering feels like something we're actively choosing versus something we're being sub, uh, subjected to. I think that I kind of signed up for a system of, or a constellation of things that was leading me to believe I was trapped.

[00:18:32] Barrett Brooks: And these things were, a COO role requires certain things of me. Um, I was a studied finance and accounting in college, and that studying path came from my mom saying, study something useful so you'll never be unemployed. That was how I got there. If I could go back and assign myself a course of study, it would have nothing to do with those fields, even though numbers have always come natural to me.

[00:18:57] Sam Yarborough: And that's probably a helpful skill to have.

[00:18:59] Jason Yarborough: Yeah,

[00:18:59] Barrett Brooks: it is a helpful skill. I'm very glad I know, you know, financial statements and you know, budgeting and all of this. It is helpful in that way and I'm grateful for it now. if I trace it back, like how I ended up on that path, had nothing to do with anything inside of me. It had something to do with the story I was being told about what would allow me to be employable, and I carried that story forward all the way into a role that I was performing where a lot of the work day to day was.

[00:19:26] Barrett Brooks: Do these things that inherently suck for you, that you hate? And a lot of people would say, you know, you hear all these messages online of, uh, stop trading your time for money. And many online teachers would say to a person like me, well, why are you coaching one-on-one? That seems like an inefficient way to go about what you're doing.

[00:19:47] Barrett Brooks: And my answer to them is, but this is the whole point. If I stopped doing one-on-one work, I would literally not be doing the very thing that I enjoy and that I believe creates the most change for people.

[00:19:59] Barrett Brooks: So why would I stop trading my time for money when this is the thing that I believe I am built for? And there's an inherent difference in that sensation where it is hard, it is challenging to schedule these things. It is challenging to make all the time work, but it's challenging in a different way because. I'm choosing it, number one and number two, it reflects what I believe I'm gifted at versus what I have forced myself into becoming good at through necessity or through stories that I've been fed.

[00:20:29] Sam Yarborough: I love what you just said about this is the point, and I think that that's a huge realization that a lot of people. Are on the edge of, I was talking to somebody the other day about building a lifestyle business and how even that has like some ick around it. Like, why would you do that?

[00:20:48] Sam Yarborough: Why aren't you out there to scale and get 10 x and all the things? And it's like, I think we all need to take a step back and have enough grace with ourself to define what success looks like for who we are, where we're at in our life. Be okay with that. Like if it is one-on-one coaching and that's where your gifts fall in the world, then great.

[00:21:06] Sam Yarborough: If it's scaling 10 x, good, like more power to you. But I think we've all fallen into this trap of there's one version success 

[00:21:15] Barrett Brooks: My question for anyone who thinks in those terms would be, how many people have you ever spoken to who are leading a company that's growing a hundred percent, 500%, a thousand percent a year, and had them seem fulfilled or whole inside? My observation is that every person I think I've ever spoken to. Who is going through that cannot wait to get off that path.

[00:21:38] Barrett Brooks: And they're hoping for the day when they get a paycheck or permission slip or some opportunity to stop having to work in that way. And that is why they are doing it. And there are some people who believe in the mission for short. Like I think a lot of founders believe in the core of the mission of why they got started, but the system they end up a part of, I see causing suffering in a way that they do not want to continue to be a part of.

[00:22:03] Barrett Brooks: I think there's a reason that most founders don't go back to the well again and build in the same way, even if they have a runaway success. The first time

[00:22:11] Jason Yarborough: Sam and I run a company called Arcadia. And Arcadia at its core means harmony. And so like what we're trying to do is help people find that harmony between themselves and the work that they do. Right. It sounds a lot like what you're talking about here, and I even noticed like on your LinkedIn that you talk about like, uh, helping, 

[00:22:28] Jason Yarborough: entrepreneurs find the real journey to outward success,

[00:22:32] Barrett Brooks: Yeah, the in in inward journey of outward success and what does it look like to be whole and at peace with yourself on that journey and let the outside be what it will be. You might end up with lots of wealth or lots of followers or lots of influence, but if that. Leads you to still feel broken inside, then you've achieved nothing, in my opinion.

[00:22:54] Barrett Brooks: And um, to your point earlier, Sam, I think you mentioned how people can end up on the other side of these great journeys and say, well, this doesn't feel how I hoped it would. I had this wonderful conversation with Mark Manson, the author of several books, one of which is The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F.

[00:23:10] Barrett Brooks: And now the host of one of our, my favorite, one of my favorite new podcasts solved. We had to go mark.

[00:23:14] Barrett Brooks: Yes, he's great. And we, I interviewed him at, uh, a conference that I started a long time ago, and it was about this very thing. He got on the other side of the subtle art, selling more copies than any book in decades and found himself depressed, sitting in his underwear, playing video games every day

[00:23:32] Jason Yarborough: 

[00:23:32] Barrett Brooks: because 

[00:23:32] Barrett Brooks: everything he had organized his life around, he had achieved by his mid thirties.

[00:23:38] Barrett Brooks: What he realized was he had this organizing force, which was, I want to be a bestselling author someday. And then once that thing came to pass, he no longer had an organizing force for his life, but he had 50, 60, 70 years ahead of him, and he had to work through the process of what does one do. When you get everything you say you wanted and it feels nothing like what you thought it would, and I know this sounds like champagne problems, but I think if you don't have a compass leading into it, then you've gotta find it on the back end because you lose the thing you were putting all your time and energy into.

[00:24:10] Jason Yarborough: You find it's harder to find it on the back end or easier to find it

[00:24:15] Barrett Brooks: Yeah, I think it feels much more like an acute crisis if you have to do it on the backend. Whereas if you can proactively engage in the process along the way, it doesn't need to be this big kind of like break in your life. There may be a moment that feels like you've changed in a way you'll never go back to the way you were.

[00:24:32] Barrett Brooks: but I don't think it ends up feeling like this pressure cooker of, I have to figure this out. Because the moment you start telling your, you know, soul, the inner part of you, I have to figure you out. It's immediately on the defensive and it's much more difficult in those circumstances, in my opinion.

[00:24:51] Sam Yarborough: Okay, so talk to us about this process. Like obviously it's not a PDF playbook and a one size fits all, but like for somebody who's like, okay, I I want that, I need that. I, I feel that, like, what are, how do they engage with this? What does that look like?

[00:25:07] Barrett Brooks: I've been thinking a lot about this and I'm glad you asked me, Sam, 'cause I think I'm starting to arrive at a little bit of a framework that people can maybe apply and so we'll see how your audience does with it. Um,

[00:25:18] Sam Yarborough: Heard it first here.

[00:25:19] Barrett Brooks: yeah, there you go. And I'll test it out here. I think there's kind of three major stages of the process.

[00:25:26] Barrett Brooks: And the first one is mapping the experience of your life or telling the story of your life as another way of thinking about it. And so I'll come back to that in just a minute. The second stage is becoming aware of how that story shapes how you show up in your world today, your behaviors, your patterns, your relationships, your job, um, all of that.

[00:25:49] Barrett Brooks: And then there is a process of choice. Now that you know what the story is and how that shaped the way you show up, are you going to choose to remain that way? And what are your options available to you to reshape your patterns and your habits and your behaviors in a way that matches who it is that you believe you're meant to be from here and there, obviously each stage has a lot involved with it.

[00:26:14] Barrett Brooks: But if I were gonna break down the first one, that kind of mapping your life and telling the story of your life into a process or an exercise, I would have people do it on a wall sized canvas and there would be two axes to it. And the first axis, uh, on the horizontal line is the years of your life.

[00:26:32] Sam Yarborough: Mm-hmm.

[00:26:33] Barrett Brooks: And you can imagine just making a tick for every year that you've lived on the line. And the reason it's on the wall, I'll get to in just a minute. Uh, and then the. Y axis or the vertical one would be, uh, emotional valence from highly positive to highly negative. Okay. So it's like how, let's say joy might be on one end of the spectrum and grief might be all the way on the other as one example of what positive and negative, uh, emotional valence would be.

[00:27:01] Barrett Brooks: And. The first job would be to, maybe it's a sticky note. Maybe it's a little like colored, uh, like little sticker or whatever your artful mind has, like enjoys putting a sticky at each place on the graph that represents a key moment, turning point or event of your life. Anything that comes to mind, even if it seems silly or insignificant, and just writing enough of a phrase on it so that it jogs your memory for what it represents.

[00:27:34] Barrett Brooks: And you can imagine that what you end up with is an emotional map of the experience of your life over time that you can stare at. And the next part of this exercise, and it's, it would take some time doing it with your life. I sometimes talk about this in terms of your past year. So you could also do it just with 2025, for example.

[00:27:54] Barrett Brooks: Uh, take a walk and use, uh, one of our friendly AI tools like Whisper Flow or any of these tools that allow you to. Speak and it translates for you very well into writing, because it removes the barrier of judgment in terms of sitting at the keyboard and writing. And so you can imagine taking a photo of this wall of your life and then taking a walk and speaking to whisper flow and narrating the story of these things.

[00:28:19] Barrett Brooks: In 1987, I was born to two parents who repeatedly told me throughout my life that they didn't plan to have children, and that I was an accident. It's a real example from my life and the impact that that had on me. I know that my parents loved me. I know that they did everything they could for me, and yet here was the story that I was not wanted and I was not intentional.

[00:28:39] Barrett Brooks: And what does that do to a person's psyche to know that throughout your life? And just talking a little bit about each dot, and I would imagine if you do it well, this would, it would take several walks. It might even take 10 or 12 or 15. But in the process of doing this, it's it, the goal isn't to get to the end of the process.

[00:28:57] Barrett Brooks: The goal is to explore the richness of your life. And to really see the fabric and how it's been woven together, of how you've become who you are on this day as you're listening to this. And it's okay if it takes a long time, like let it take a long time. What if you embraced that this should be slow, that this should be intentional, that every dot on the graph represents something important that you may not fully understand yet?

[00:29:23] Barrett Brooks: And what if you just let it be that? What if every single dot was a full walk for five miles around your neighborhood? 

[00:29:30] Jason Yarborough: I think that's pretty incredible. I, I've, I've often thought. Not quite in as much detail about that, around like those moments that shaped because like I feel like, you know, my career if we're looking at that part of the story is a, is a wild arc and it's truly brought me to where I'm at now. And I think if more people did that, I think they would find a lot of who they are that's been buried and hidden over the years. But I think a lot of people also, like, there's some parts of my story that are just like, ugh, I don't, I don't wanna go back visit that again. try to run and hide from it. Like we're afraid of it. And I think a lot of people, you know, kind of run from the past instead of truly embracing it.

[00:30:10] Jason Yarborough: what have you seen as far as like getting people to kind of walk through that, uh, that experience with themself?

[00:30:17] Barrett Brooks: So number one, uh, there are scary parts of many people's stories. Statistically, we know that many more people than ever acknowledge it publicly have experienced some form of abuse, for example, um, or assault of some kind. Just statistically, we know that, I th I can't remember the exact stat, something like one in four men, one in three women.

[00:30:39] Barrett Brooks: I. That means for every three people you know in your life, one of them has experienced some form of abuse or assault,

[00:30:48] Sam Yarborough: Hmm.

[00:30:49] Jason Yarborough: Wow.

[00:30:50] Barrett Brooks: which means that of the people listening to this, maybe hundreds or thousands. Have had that kind of experience and those are inherently difficult things to revisit, and that's an extreme version.

[00:31:00] Barrett Brooks: Obviously, like there are many different versions of this and regardless of whether you've experienced trauma as it's been labeled in the world and now has been almost like become a divided topic. The point is we've all been through things that shape us and so if we acknowledge that anything that sticks out in our memory has shaped us in some way, then we can get rid of this trauma word and simply say, this shaped me in some way.

[00:31:23] Barrett Brooks: And some things are so deeply painful that they remain buried. We can't even acknowledge them. Maybe it's just a dot. Something happened there and I'm not quite sure what, and this is where I think professionals and community play a huge role in helping us work through these stories because there is what we acknowledge to ourselves and then there is knowing that despite the things that we've gone through, we can still belong and be accepted for those things.

[00:31:48] Barrett Brooks: And I think that acceptance and that sense of belonging despite whatever we've been through, or maybe an embrace of what we've been through, to put it in an affirmative way is so much of what we long for and so much of what we fear when we don't go back and own it and confront it.

[00:32:04] Jason Yarborough: So true.

[00:32:05] Barrett Brooks: And so having a strong community, having a few friends around you who you can share these stories with, I think can be really powerful, first of all.

[00:32:12] Barrett Brooks: And secondly, I think a good therapist. I think therapy is another one of these things that's been bifurcated in the world in terms of how we talk about it. I think really good therapy can be extraordinarily useful for. Working through each of these things. And if you had this map of your life and you say, maybe a red.is for every really painful one, you're a little bit scared to go back and own, you could think of that as an agenda for really good therapy.

[00:32:35] Barrett Brooks: And you go to a therapist and you say, I've got some things I wanna work through, and here's the list. And I think most therapists would be thrilled with that because a lot of times their job is to help you find the list. That's a very difficult job. So a, a therapist I think can help as well. And then once you start getting to the affirmative side, I think that's a place where coaching can really come in and, and support you and saying, okay, now how do I want to choose to live going forward?

[00:32:59] Sam Yarborough: Oh, interesting. Okay, so you're saying coaching is, once we understand this, once we have a blueprint per se, now what are we gonna do with it? Like an action next steps. 

[00:33:10] Barrett Brooks: Yeah, I think there's a certain amount of kind of understanding the story that's really useful to get the most out of something like coaching. The thing I say to all of my potential clients is that if I could have all of my wishes, every client would have a world class therapist and they'd work with me at the same time.

[00:33:25] Barrett Brooks: Because there's a ping pong effect. It's what has happened. I think of it like accounting and finance. To go back to that whole analogy, accounting looks backwards. You know, you look into the past, you look at what the numbers say and what they've set up to this point, what is true? And finance says, well, here's what we think might happen in the future.

[00:33:42] Barrett Brooks: And we project out and we use variables. And we think about how, where to go from here. And I think of therapy as. You process what you've been through and how it's showing up for you. And coaching says, here's how it's showing up for you, and now what do you want to do with that? And in my context, it's in the context of leadership and entrepreneurship.

[00:34:00] Sam Yarborough: I love that differentiation. 'cause I do think that the two can get conflated. Um, and so I think that's a really helpful line in the sand if we'll say 

[00:34:09] Barrett Brooks: Mm-hmm. 

[00:34:10] Sam Yarborough: The other thing I liked about what you were talking about on your walks, a. You're getting your steps in. B you're doing heavy emotional work.

[00:34:18] Sam Yarborough: Um, but like what if that's it? What if that's the process and I'm speaking for a friend here, IE myself. 'cause this happens often where we find ourselves in these moments of life of like, I need a change now and I need to understand my emotional backlog today in order to make the best decision forward.

[00:34:37] Sam Yarborough: And so. how do you help leaders through that? Like you talked about the ones who want like this immediate movement. What do you say to that?

[00:34:47] Barrett Brooks: And many of the people who come to me for what I do, that's exactly what they want. I'm experiencing some deep form of pain or I want this thing now and I need your help getting it. And,

[00:34:58] Sam Yarborough: What's the ROI in a quarter?

[00:35:00] Barrett Brooks: exactly right. Am I gonna get 10 x my return now? And the way I think about it is just based on what I've seen so far, I think really deep in our transformation takes 18 to 24 months.

[00:35:12] Barrett Brooks: And that's if you, it's really a priority for you. And I'm not saying that, I think that's what you wanna hear if you're listening to this. I'm just saying that's what I've observed so far. And, to your question, Sam, I think that one of the things that you can do if you're in a period where you feel this acute pain, you want to, you wanna move beyond, is.

[00:35:32] Barrett Brooks: Create some boundaries in your life that. Establish some space for the processing time. 'cause a lot of time when there's suffering happening, it's all consuming and you feel like this is pressing on me and I have to get out of this situation right now. And usually if we react to that, we end up back in a similar situation in a relatively short period of time.

[00:35:55] Barrett Brooks: Because when we're running from something, we tend to make decisions based on reactive habits as opposed to proactive beliefs and gifts and some of these other things we've been talking about. And so to me part of it is how can you contain the suffering in a part of your life so that you have just enough of a sliver to be reflecting and going inward long enough to figure out how do I wanna move forward here?

[00:36:18] Barrett Brooks: And this can be things like, okay, I really am gonna stop work at four every night, uh, or every afternoon. I really am gonna put my phone in the other room. At night and turn it off of wifi and I'm not gonna look at it until at least 9:00 AM in the morning. It, it can be little things like this that create just enough brain space to be with our own experience long enough to figure out what's going on for us.

[00:36:44] Barrett Brooks: And sometimes you have to deal with the acute before you can really dig into the past, and there may be real circumstances you're going through that won't allow you the space to work through the backlog as you put it. And if that's true, maybe there is a change that you make, but you make that change knowing the goal of this change is to create more stability so that I can find out what's really going on here and what my stories are, and how they're contributing to this pattern that I'm living in so that I never have to live it again.

[00:37:13] Sam Yarborough: Okay. One more quick question on this space. So just giving yourself space, and maybe that's the first step I think that freaks a lot of people out.

[00:37:21] Barrett Brooks: Definitely.

[00:37:23] Sam Yarborough: okay, well what do I do with this space? Like, how do I be productive with this space? So talk about that. I.

[00:37:31] Barrett Brooks: Yeah. Yeah. Silence is scary. Being alone is scary for most of us. Uh, I know I have a version of that for myself as well. It's not like I'm immune to it. I think one of the questions I would ask anyone is what stories do you have about silence and what have you lived through that makes it scary for you? What examples do you have of people in your life being silent and still, and what happened in those moments? what happened to you in those moments? And I think in many cases people just don't have examples of good stillness.

[00:38:03] Jason Yarborough: Yeah.

[00:38:04] Barrett Brooks: I know like for me, my mom is high achiever. I had her on my show at at for an episode and it was a wonderful conversation.

[00:38:10] Barrett Brooks: But God bless that woman. She will not stop for three seconds to process her own emotions. She's gotten better about it as she's aged and we have a kind of beautiful adult relationship now that I think is generative for that. But for my whole childhood, she just literally didn't sit down from the time she got up to the time she went to bed.

[00:38:29] Barrett Brooks: And I adopted that way of being

[00:38:32] Sam Yarborough: I feel attacked.

[00:38:33] Barrett Brooks: yeah.

[00:38:33] Jason Yarborough: I was gonna say is, sounds very familiar. quite place a pen on, but yeah.

[00:38:41] Barrett Brooks: Um, and. You know what I, what I see in my mom is that silence would mean that she has to sit with some of the things that have been hard for her in her

[00:38:52] Barrett Brooks: life. And it might be painful, it might actually be painful to sit down and think like, man, I'm really tired. Or I'm scared of my family's financial future.

[00:39:03] Barrett Brooks: Or My parents getting divorced when I was younger was really hard on me. Uh, or any of the things that she had to carry for herself and. I believe that many of us fear if we sit with those things, that they'll break us in some way. Somehow we won't be able to come back from it. We won't be able to recover, and my experience is that we actually won't be able to fully experience joy.

[00:39:26] Barrett Brooks: We, we won't be able to fully experience. Being all the way alive. Being whole and peaceful inside. Unless we sit with all of those things. And the way I describe this is if you imagine like the full spectrum of emotion, like we talked about on that graph earlier, if you cut off grief, then you're also cutting off joy.

[00:39:50] Jason Yarborough: Absolutely.

[00:39:50] Barrett Brooks: You cut off both ends of the spectrum at the same time because anything that makes you feel joy in your life is something that can be lost and likely will be lost at some point. And what comes in those moments is grief. And so we think if we just don't allow joy, then we'll never have to be in pain with grief.

[00:40:13] Barrett Brooks: But what I've experienced is if you flip that and you say, if I can embrace grief. I will get so much more access to joy and if I embrace kind of impermanence and that I will lose all of the things I love in this world, including my life, then we're in a place where we can really fully be alive in any given moment.

[00:40:31] Barrett Brooks: 'cause that's all there is, you know, not to get like too far off into existentialism, but, 

[00:40:35] Sam Yarborough: But that's a fact.

[00:40:37] Barrett Brooks: yeah, we will, we will all lose our lives at some point. And. You know, there's different belief systems on what happens then, but my number one most recommended book in my coaching practice, most people would never guess, and it's called The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller.

[00:40:56] Jason Yarborough: edge of sorrow.

[00:40:57] Barrett Brooks: It's a book about how to be in grief, how to be with grief in your life, and how to acknowledge, you know, we think of, uh, death equals grief, but there are so many different forms of things that we lose in life. We lose jobs, we lose friendships, we lose pets, we lose emotional experiences and innocence. Identities so much, and I, I think so much of the suffering we experience in the world is actually a backlog of unprocessed grief because we're scared if we allow ourselves to feel it, that, like I said earlier, it will break us. And I've had the opposite experience that as I have embraced grieving the things I have lost, I have gained so much more access to joy, hope, possibility, optimism, presence, and um.

[00:41:48] Barrett Brooks: I'm not saying every moment of that was I was grateful for, I enjoyed, but yes, it's given me a lot more freedom, Jason. That's exactly it.

[00:41:55] Jason Yarborough: I remember years ago I was sitting with a, a therapist and we were kind of addressing some, some patterns and we did this. Uh, it was, it was kind of a silence exercise. If we get down to it, it's like, you know, he gave me this prompt. he said, now just sit with this.

[00:42:13] Jason Yarborough: Sit here and, and just think about this prompt from this time in your life. And man, I can remember sitting in that chair in that little therapist room and I just, like, I broke down crying. I was just bawling. Anybody that knows me, that's not a huge surprise, but it broke me and it was like the best kind of breaking.

[00:42:29] Jason Yarborough: It was something I needed to address, something I needed to sit with and think about and come to an actualization on. And it's one of those moments that like I look back on, it's like, it was kind of a defining moment, you know, for me in that, that. Part of my life that I needed to address. And gives you a lot of freedom into how you move forward from that pain, from that grief and like how you begin to explore it instead of

[00:42:52] Sam Yarborough: Let it define you.

[00:42:54] Jason Yarborough: Yeah. It was one of those things that like, I felt like it held me back, but once I did that, I felt like I, I addressed it and it became something that was no longer holding me back. It was now that slingshot that was able to propel me forward.

[00:43:05] Barrett Brooks: Yeah, I, I can relate to that so much. I mean, I, for almost 30 years of my life, I did not cry. I didn't know how, I literally had to learn how to cry.

[00:43:12] Jason Yarborough: Oh man,

[00:43:13] Barrett Brooks: Um, you know,

[00:43:14] Sam Yarborough: Stop Barrett, you're just attacking me left and right.

[00:43:18] Jason Yarborough: don't worry. I cry enough for the both of you, so 

[00:43:22] Barrett Brooks: um. Now I, it's, I, I embrace it, you know, it's like I'll watch a corny movie and I'll tear up over it and I'll let myself cry now. Whereas before I would've said like, I'm not, that's not allowed around here. That's a ridiculous thing to do. Um, and if someone wants to laugh at me because I cried over some stupid Christmas romantic comedy, then you know, have at it and like, laugh at me all you want.

[00:43:46] Barrett Brooks: I'm gonna be okay. Yeah.

[00:43:49] Jason Yarborough: Before we kinda went down that trail, I think you were going to break into the next step of like your major stages of becoming aware of how story shapes how you show up. Um, breaking that down a little

[00:43:59] Barrett Brooks: Yeah. So if we think about the middle stage being, uh, developing awareness of how these things are showing up in your life today, um, we've just talked about a few of the ways they might show up, right? If you have not processed grief, then it's probably true that you have an ever-growing backlog of things to grieve.

[00:44:18] Barrett Brooks: And you probably avoid situations where grief might be a useful tool for you in your life, in the present, uh, or other stories like, points on my graph might be, uh, waking up early and making my parents coffee and breakfast or the day. This is just the funniest memory. It's like it, these are the little things that it's like, these don't seem like they're important.

[00:44:42] Barrett Brooks: We were having spaghetti one night. And my mom was not home yet. My dad was a stay at home parent and he dishes spaghetti to my, my me, I think it was me first, and they were on these like pasta plates. And the spaghetti was, I don't know, had water on it or something. So it was slippery. And I turn around real fast to go to the table and the spaghetti flies off my plate onto the wall. My, my dad had a difficult relationship with anger and he was very angry. And then my brother, you know, and now we're in silence in the house and my brother goes and gets his spaghetti and turns around and does the same thing.

[00:45:17] Sam Yarborough: Oh God.

[00:45:19] Barrett Brooks: It's just the, you know, in a movie it would be hilarious except for, you know, if I think about my compassion for my dad, at the time my mom was at work, it was probably 6:00 PM and she wasn't home yet.

[00:45:30] Barrett Brooks: He had been parenting all afternoon. Bedtime's gotta happen. Lunch for the next day has gotta happen. You know, all the things that need to happen with kids the next day are probably on his mind. He's probably exhausted. Um, and two of his kids just spilled half the spaghetti he just made on the wall, which he's gonna have to clean up.

[00:45:48] Barrett Brooks: And now there's

[00:45:48] Barrett Brooks: not enough food for everyone. And you know, I, I think he screamed at us and my mom comes home, she walks in and we are all sitting at the table with a very small plate of spaghetti each in absolute

[00:46:00] Barrett Brooks: silence. Yes. And literally it's still on the wall and she's like, what is happening? But this is an example of an experience where I didn't mean to spill the spaghetti on the wall.

[00:46:14] Barrett Brooks: I'm a kid. Like I just turned around, it flew off. And what a silly thing to happen. But what I internalize all of these experiences as is if I can be perfect in my behavior, I'll never get yelled at. And the amount of ways that was showing up in my life were nearly infinite. And so this middle part of the process is once you've told your story and you see it, and you can start to see the trends across the dots on your wall, now you can begin to say, so how does that show up for me today?

[00:46:47] Barrett Brooks: How does the fear of being yelled at show up in my marriage? How does the desire to be perfect show up in what I'm willing to try and not willing to try? How does. Asking for things and being repeatedly told no, even though they were reasonable asks affect what I do and don't ask for in my relationships today.

[00:47:06] Barrett Brooks: These are all real versions for me, and you can begin to see the fabric of your existence all in play all at once. And so this middle chapter is to begin to acknowledge it almost in like a log of, oh, look at how I'm doing that thing that I learned to do. This relationship by default, and I don't even know that that's what I want for myself, and it's this middle piece of becoming aware of it in real time.

[00:47:33] Barrett Brooks: That then gives you the ability and the option to begin making different choices in that third stage.

[00:47:38] Sam Yarborough: just texted Jason and said this is a therapy session me. Um.

[00:47:43] Jason Yarborough: confirm. 

[00:47:44] Barrett Brooks: I get that more often than you would believe when I go on podcast. It's a weird effect.

[00:47:50] Sam Yarborough: You know, it's really interesting Jason, and I've been going through a lot of, I don't even know what we'd call it. We're going through like some Joe Hudson, we're doing the connection course and whatnot right now. And yesterday we went through, um, one of 'em, and for me it was all about control and I couldn't really get to the basis of it, but it's just that like I had a very loud dad in, in a similar way that you did. It sounds like My parents were divorced at five and in my mind it was like, okay, well if I can just show up perfectly for everybody, then everybody else will be fine. And all of this chaos will not matter and we can just like go on with our lives. And I still take that today into everything until at work.

[00:48:30] Sam Yarborough: Like if I can just do this for everybody, then everybody will be better off. And you know, in the last six months it's come to a head and I'm all of a sudden. I'm fucking tired for starters.

[00:48:42] Barrett Brooks: Yeah,

[00:48:43] Sam Yarborough: but even understanding that like in my kids, like I just wanna control the situation and that's very unhelpful really.

[00:48:50] Sam Yarborough: Um, so it's just a coping mechanism to your point that just shows up everywhere. So

[00:48:54] Barrett Brooks: exhausting.

[00:48:56] Sam Yarborough: that. 

[00:48:56] Barrett Brooks: Yeah, it's exhausting to have to carry that. So, can I just reflect something back to you in this moment that I'm, I'm what was striking me, as you were saying that is how beautiful it is that here you are with your partner in life, not only in a long-term relationship that's been successful to this point, but also making a show together, like making creative work together and leading people towards harmony together and how inherently different that is. Than the circumstances that shaped that desire for you and I, I wonder what surrendering to the safety now might allow that part that wants to control things to do instead.

[00:49:40] Sam Yarborough: Well show's over folks.

[00:49:42] Jason Yarborough: a guest has said on the show, that is beautiful. Thank you for sharing that and We're going to, uh, pull that out and frame it. Um. Going back to some of this stuff. I know we're coming up on time here, so bring it home. We, we, you kicked off the show by talking about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and I know with the, the pinnacle of that is that self-actualization.

[00:50:05] Jason Yarborough: Right? Which it sounds like as you walk through some of these, these, this framework or these stages, you're, you're talking about, we're kind of walking to this point of self-actualization and awareness of like who we are and what we're about, what makes us. Tick. How does coming to that, that point of self-actualization, if this is even what it is, like make for a better leader? We have our own concept of what that looks like, but I wanna, I'd like to hear it from yourself. Maybe we can trade some notes here.

[00:50:32] Barrett Brooks: yeah. I'd add one little, like right at the top of the pyramid there's a little point, and it's actually the last point. And, uh. To me that last point is surrender to self or a, a one word version is, is wholeness or peace Maybe. And I think what peace makes possible or surrender to self makes possible for a leader is to be with any circumstance that comes their way and know that they will be okay.

[00:51:03] Barrett Brooks: And from a place of I will be okay no matter what I encounter in this life and in this world. We can be with our teams in everything that they're experiencing. We can be what they need us to be in any given moment, rather than reacting in the way that maybe we were trained to by our experience. We can, from a place of peace, build strategy rather than from a place of fear or, uh, unmet need.

[00:51:30] Barrett Brooks: Um, I think we avoid a lot of the things that are deeply negative and hurtful behaviors that show up in organizations that, you see it all the time in college football, which I apologize to the audience, but I went to the University of Georgia. I can't

[00:51:42] Barrett Brooks: help it. I grew up a a Georgia fan. Um, you know, you see so many of these coaching scandals where they will have had an affair, they will have done this or that.

[00:51:51] Barrett Brooks: And I don't place any judgment on that, but I just find it interesting that in this pressure cooker of a profession, you see so much of that kind of thing come out. And I think what peace and surrender to self make possible is for. These like shadow side downside behaviors, not to need to be expressed in that way, but for much more healthier direct conversations to take place so that, um, we don't inflict pain on our teams and our organizations and our customer bases in that way.

[00:52:23] Barrett Brooks: And so it's, in some ways you could say the way it shows up in leadership is the absence of shadow side behavior where. It may not even be noticed because it's the absence of pain rather than the presence of something remarkably different, and I think that that's a huge part of what it means to lead well.

[00:52:47] Jason Yarborough: I just wrote down alongside that, I was like, no longer the need to like prove yourself

[00:52:52] Barrett Brooks: Yep.

[00:52:52] Jason Yarborough: right. More around like how you're being and empowering and existing and, and just kind of showing up for your team.

[00:53:01] Barrett Brooks: A great example of this is, let's say you're, to go back to kind of the traditional measure of success. You're an entrepreneur who's raised $50 million for your company and you're, you know, the hottest shit since sliced bread in the industry right now. The question I would ask you is, can you be at peace with the fact that you will be okay even if your company goes away, and if you can really arrive at that piece.

[00:53:26] Barrett Brooks: I don't need this thing in order for my existence to be justified, then I think the decisions you make will be more likely to lead you to the place you say you wanna end up than if you lead from the place of fear, proving yourself, trying to get the money back for the investors, all of those things.

[00:53:43] Jason Yarborough: Do you feel like you've got to have a, a, a strong belief and understanding of like what your values are to get to that point?

[00:53:50] Barrett Brooks: I think it helps to have principles for life, principles for decisions, an idea of what really matters to you at the end of the day. but I think more than anything to really end it on a corny note, I think it's like a love for self despite your mistakes. Or, or even like an embrace of mistake, an embrace of imperfection, an embrace of failure.

[00:54:12] Barrett Brooks: Not because we think failure is good, but because it's inherently human to not get everything right. I think it's almost like that realm of things, that maybe is even more important than necessarily a declared set of values.

[00:54:25] Jason Yarborough: It's strong love that

[00:54:27] Sam Yarborough: Okay, I wanna close with a question, and this is so new. So first of all, congratulations again, but talk to us about presence based coaching and what you're doing there. And even furthermore, if people want to like follow you all that, like that look like?

[00:54:43] Barrett Brooks: Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity to share that. So presence based coaching is an organization with a long history 20 year legacy of doing really beautiful, I call it healing work for people. And it's just is packaged up as coach certification and leadership development training. Um. So if you are a coach or you are thinking about becoming a coach, then going through our base level presence based coaching course, we have three of them next year, two in Asheville, North Carolina, one outside of Portland, Oregon.

[00:55:12] Barrett Brooks: Um, I think that it is one of the three best tr uh, coach training programs available in the world. Uh, and I mean that genuinely, I wouldn't have stepped into this role if I didn't believe that. I think it's the most wonderful place to start, and you will do all of the things that we just talked about.

[00:55:27] Barrett Brooks: Not the exact exercises, but all of the work at that level of your inner existence will happen there. Um, there's advanced training as well, but you gotta go through the base level before you get there.

[00:55:38] Barrett Brooks: And then we also have a curriculum called Presence Based Leadership, where we'll be making leadership training available to founders, executives teams that I think, It's like you shouldn't have to be a coach to get to experience this quality of training and this quality of material. And so we'll take it and we'll package it in a way that people can apply it in team, community and family environments as well. And that will be available in 2027. So you'll just have to kind of keep an eye on things for that.

[00:56:06] Jason Yarborough: Got it.

[00:56:07] Barrett Brooks: then where to follow me,

[00:56:08] Barrett Brooks: barrettbrooks.com and presencebasedcoaching.com. I've got a newsletter that goes out every Monday called Little Leadership Lessons that packages up a single coaching session and turns it into a universal lesson for all leaders.

[00:56:20] Jason Yarborough: this has been every bit as good as I expected it to be. Just as always, not enough time. We appreciate you taking some time outta your day to, to come hang out with us and share some of the benefits here.

[00:56:31] Barrett Brooks: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Really delightful y'all.

[00:56:35] Sam Yarborough: Thank you friends. We'll see you next time. Go follow, bear it. You won't regret it. Um, and we'll talk to you soon.

[00:56:41] Jason Yarborough: See y'all.