Your Response is Everything, E+R=O; Guest - Brian Kight, Founder DIGNVS

This episode of the Competitive Kindness podcast shares how to lead with Competitive Kindness, even when circumstances are difficult. Dr. Clark hosts guest Brian Kight, renowned leadership expert and founder of DIGNVS, who has worked with championship teams (like Ohio State Football and the Seattle Mariners). 

BK shares the powerful championship mindset approach of Event + Response = Outcome. He further shares the impact of reputation, how to effectively "control the controllables" and powerful leadership advice from his father Tim Kight as well as other championship coaches. 

The movement continues…

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to the Competitive Kindness Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Clark. What if the way you lead could change lives, not just results? We're building a movement, proving you can compete relentlessly for championships while elevating everyone around you. This is your competitive edge. Each episode will share stories and strategies to help you make an impact that lasts. So, if you're ready to win the right way, you're in the right place. Now let's get rolling. How do you lead with competitive kindness? The how hinges on one word. Response. Your response builds or destroys championships. Your response builds or destroys human dignity and matter more than almost anything else in leadership, relationships, and of course life. It's not easy. In fact, at times it might seem downright impossible. I learned this in a very real way playing college football. I was a team captain standing in midfield at a coin toss prior to the game, and one of the captains from the other team, this massive human being who resembled Andre the Giant more than a left tackle, pointed at me and said, I'm gonna put you in a body bag. Now, first of all, that's pretty aggressive for a coin toss. We hadn't even played yet, and we were still shaking hands. So I was like, come on, big fella. We can at least wait until kickoff before the murder threats. But I knew exactly what he was trying to do. Intimidation, dominance, trying to get in my head before the game even started. So fast forward to later. One of my teammates made a tackle, and I'm standing near the pile with this weird dead space in between the play when the whistle hasn't blown yet and the play is over. Out of the corner of my eye, I see movement and I hear this guy screaming like a choo-choo train. He's coming at me full bore. This same large human being who outweighed me by a lot is five yards away in a full dead sprint, coming right at me to hit me after the play. Now, this isn't a moment where you think, let me reflect on my leadership values. This is an instinctual moment. So I turned, dipped my knee, shoot my hips with a powerful forearm shiver, and I leveled him. Clean hit. And he goes down hard. And then this is the important part. I reached down and helped him up. I smiled and I said, Am I dead yet? He was mad in the moment, but after the game we both laughed about it. And that moment stayed with me because it captures a few things I'm trying to share with you that's about respect and human dignity, keys to staying true to competitive kindness. First of all, I didn't back down. I didn't threaten him back at the coin toss. And when I leaned on my championship training to level him, I didn't humiliate him by celebrating all over him on the field or dancing around because of meaningless hit or posing over his body on the ground. Instead, we created a moment of connection. It was humorous, I'll be a tougher one for him, especially as our team won. But a few things came about from this. Strength with respect, firm with humanity, championships results with kindness. That's competitive kindness. And here's why this matters beyond football. Every day in life, people test you. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes because they're stressed, sometimes because they genuinely want to hurt you, sometimes because someone else hurt them. And sometimes because they don't know how to behave any better. And when that happens, you have three choices. Option one, become cruel back. Match their energy, escalate. And congratulations, now there are two problems instead of one. Option two, avoid, withdraw, tolerate. Congratulations. Now resentment is slow cooking like a crock pot inside of you that you forgot to unplug. Burned food is incoming. Or option three, competitive kindness. Stay calm, stay clear, stay firm, hold to the championship standard of behavior. The I want this relationship to work, and this behavior doesn't work for me. That's kindness. I respect you, and I'm not agreeing to that. That's kindness. Saying no with respect can also be kindness. Very underrated word, by the way, that one syllable can be life-changing. So here's what's fascinating. Cruel or aggressive people expect you to give two reactions, submission or explosion. When you give them neither, you disrupt the pattern. Calm confidence is confusing to chaos. And neurologically, what you're doing is powerful. Instead of reacting from a threat, fight, flight, or freeze, you create space for your choice. You respond instead of react. You keep the championship standard. You keep your dignity and you protect theirs too. Whether or not they appreciate that is inconsequential. Because kindness is not about how others behave, it's about how you decide to respond. So let's be honest. Some people will be difficult, some people will still push, some people will ambush you. And a few people, bless their hearts, and I mean that in the southern way, are committed to making you miserable no matter what you do. Kindness does not require proximity. Distance can be kind. Consequences can be kind. Accountability is kind. One of the kindest things you can ever do for yourself and others is to refuse to participate in unhealthy behavior. That's real power. You don't have to harden your heart to protect yourself. However, you do need to be intentional in your response to become the best version of yourself. Because the strongest people in the room aren't always the loudest. They're the ones who can stand firm without losing who they are. And that is competitive kindness, because your response is everything. Our guest today is Brian Kite, a nationally recognized expert on leadership, culture, and personal discipline. He is the founder of Dignus and the creator of the widely followed Daily Discipline newsletter, where he teaches simple, repeatable habits that drive elite performance. BK is best known for the powerful framework E plus R equals O, an organizational behavioral model and mindset that has elevated Fortune 500 companies, championship teams like Ohio State Football and the Seattle Mariners to align behavior with results. If you listen closely, you might learn concepts that will seriously help you and your teams to level up. Welcome, BK. Rob, good to be with you, man. Hey, I was introduced to this concept of E plus R equals O many years ago at an athletic director's conference, and it changed my life. It really did, and my paradigm shifted. So I was hoping that you'd walk our listeners through this. So for someone new to it, what's E plus R equals O and why does it matter?

SPEAKER_01 8:16

E plus R equals O stands for event plus response equals outcome. I've been teaching E plus R equals O for 20 years in business and sports and in schools, but I've been using it since I was 16 years old. And what E plus R equals O is like the building block of human life. Physical matter is made up of atoms and molecules combining and putting together, and everything is made of matter. E plus R equals O is the building block, like the matter of our experiential and behavior world. Life and work, we experience events every day. We want to produce and create outcomes. We want experiences, we want outcomes, we want results, we want to be able to do things and have things, security, safety, all the traditional stuff. And what all of life and work is trying to figure out to create the outcomes that I want to create from the circumstances that I'm in, how do I need to respond in order to create those outcomes? And what I love about E plus R equals O and what gives it all of its utility, why it's so awesome. And you've, I know you've experienced this, is that what however and wherever you apply that, it applies to that scenario, right? It's the parenting equation, it's the competitive equation, it's the leadership equation, it's the sales equation. I used E plus Cycles O. My dad and I taught and used E plus Cycle Zoe for 15 years while we worked together and we used it in our business. My dad used it when he got diagnosed with cancer. He used it to fight cancer. I used it to deal with him dying of cancer, use it in traffic and delayed flights. My sister-in-law texted me this morning. She had a flight landing at 857, and she was landing eight minutes after when her flight was scheduled to take off. That's an E plus R equals O moment. And so it is a simple structure for seeing what's happening, what it is that we want to create and produce, and then our role and responsibility for what we control to be able to create those outcomes that we want to produce, no matter what kind of circumstance was delivered to us.

SPEAKER_00 10:30

You talk a lot about this response. Walk us through when that event happens. How do you control what you do? What's your next response?

SPEAKER_01 10:39

I'm going to take us one step back because when we read E plus R equals O, we think event, response, outcomes. But the real use of E plus R equals O doesn't begin with when the event happens. The real use of E plus R equals O, the majority, 95% of the use of E plus R equals O should start with what are you trying to produce? What, who do you want to be? Where are you trying to go? What do you want to create? And I'll tell you why. We don't wake up in the morning and wait for events to start happening to us to decide how we go do that day. I don't go get in my car and wait for an event to happen to decide where I'm going to drive. I get in my car because I need to go somewhere. I get in my car with an O in mind, an outcome, a destination in mind. The events don't start happening until I start trying to go after an outcome. So if we're thinking event-oriented first, then what happens is we start changing the outcomes we're pursuing because of the events that happen to us. And a lot of times the events will shift and change what our desires are. So I always like to tell people whenever I'm teaching this, and even with my own kids, we're going to start with what do you want? What are you responsible for creating? What are you responsible for producing? What is the excellence or the fulfillment that we're trying to achieve here? And then here's the event that shows up. And so how to control that. There's three core elements to e-postorical though. There's a mindset, there's a skill, and then maybe my favorite is the speed element. The mindset is the most important, though. And that is you have to understand we do not control events. We do not control outcomes. We are the only ones, though, who control our response. So as a competitor, I played college football. I own and run a business. If I controlled outcomes, I would have my outcomes in college football would have been different. We would have won every game we played. I played safety, right? I would have made every tackle and every interception and I would have done everything, but I didn't control outcomes. I earned outcomes through the quality of my response. And so this is really tough for people, right? You're in a position of leadership. If you controlled outcomes, I imagine things would be going different under things that you are responsible for because there's outcomes you're trying to create where you are trying to figure out how to get them from circumstances that you did not create. And so that to me, that is where the power of equals O comes in is first, it helps you see what is in my control, what is not in my control. Well, one of my favorite phrases is the skill to separate what's up to you from what's not up to you. I think a lot of listeners will know this is the phrase control the controllables. We say this straight, control the controllables. The problem I have with that phrase is that when people say it, they don't define it. They say control the controllables, but then they don't articulate with crystal clear, sharp lines what is inside the circle of things in your control, what is outside the circle of things in your control. And I'll give you a tangible example. The outcomes you target are up to you. The outcomes you get are not. Just that difference right there can change your life. The outcomes that you choose to target, those are up to you. The outcomes you get, though, those are not up to you. Which then makes a very specific application. Your reputation. Everybody listening, right? You, me, we all have reputations. But when you ask the question, is your reputation up to you? It's a really interesting question because it forces you to draw those lines. People struggle to recognize and then accept and acknowledge your reputation is not up to you. The reputation you target for yourself is up to you. The reputation you have is not. Because for me, my reputation doesn't live inside of me, it lives in everybody else. And because it lives like my reputation with you doesn't live in my head, it lives in your head. And I do not control what goes on inside your mind. I control what I say, I control how I try to come across, I control the person I'm trying to express myself as, or maybe if I'm trying to persuade you or befriend you or challenge you or create conflict with you, whatever I'm trying to do, I control what I do to target that approach. But once the words leave my mouth, once my body language and my positioning is once I'm done doing what I do, all of that now goes into you. And now I don't control any of it. You do. So my reputation is not up to me, but the reputation that I'm trying to target is. You see the difference between those two things?

SPEAKER_00 15:30

Yes. What's fascinating to me is a lot of people are pursuing that. That's their outcome they're looking for is reputation of other people and how they're perceived. You've worked with many championship teams. I know that your father had written a book with Urban Meyer, and there are so many that look for these outcomes, whether they be on the field or in the boardroom, and things always get emotional. So, in these moments, what strategies would you suggest to ensure that our listeners compete for championships while treating others with dignity and respect?

SPEAKER_01 16:07

I think in a true competition, the first part to be able to do it with respect is compete as hard as you can. And I think that matters. Compete as hard as you can. And then when you're done competing, regardless of what outcome, shake hands and say good job. That's it. Like I have kids. That's what I want them to do. I want them to compete as hard as they can. And then when they're done, stand up, put their hand out, and say good competition. And what that means is, now I I talk to people about this all the time, Rob, and it is like sacrilege in in the competitive field. I grew up in in football and I work a ton in football, basketball, baseball, major league teams I work with. And but I believe this to my core. If you want to be a great competitor, you have to be okay with losing. Because otherwise, you are not going to compete. You're going to think it's wrong for you to lose, and it's not wrong for you to lose. Tell me, are there any other outcomes when you enter into a competitive arena besides winning and losing? Are there other outcomes? There aren't other outcomes. It's the nature of the competition. If you're unwilling to lose, get out of the competitive arena because you are going to be the person who inserts disrespect and whatever we want to call the opposite of dignity. That's what causes these problems is people enter a competitive arena believing it's not okay for me to lose. I'm above losing. So if losing happened to me, something bad happened and wrong, and I'm gonna react the way I need to react. No, when I enter a competitive arena or anybody that I'm working with enters a competitive arena, you've got to understand once you are in it, losing is an option. You need to embrace that, you need to accept it, and you need to not be so afraid of it that you react with lack of emotional discipline when you lose. To me, that's a very weak person who can't handle the very obvious outcome of losing when you step into a competitive arena. So that's number one is compete at your absolute hardest. Because once you accept that I'm gonna win or I'm gonna lose, and I enter the arena knowing one of those two things is going to happen. Great. I'm not in control of that. If I was, I would win every single time. Trust me, so would you. So would everybody. So I'm gonna go compete as hard as I possibly can, and the result will be whatever the result is going to be. That's what allows you to compete with dignity and respect is accepting that those are the two outcomes. That's number one. Number two, and this is what feeds the response in E plus R equals O. I refer to these as core skills. Is you refer to it as respect and dignity, which I love. What drives that is your response has to be really strong in the three core skills of your responsive behavior. And that is you need to do it with high self-awareness, high self-discipline, and high self-confidence. But that's the triad at the foundation of your response. Know yourself, control yourself, and then become yourself. Know who you are, control who you are and how you operate, and then become who you are. And that's what we're all trying to do is become a closer version of who we are, who we want to be, who we're meant to become.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

You referenced emotional discipline and that behavior. Could you elaborate a little bit more on how do you exercise that?

SPEAKER_01 19:41

So, one, the word discipline, most people misunderstand. I read a daily newsletter called Daily Discipline. And it's funny for me because I don't have a naturally disciplined bone in my body. I am I am 100% learned discipline. And I had probably the same challenge that most people had with discipline, in that grew up thinking discipline was just uncomfortable, robotic, military, compliance, obedience, doing what you don't want to do, being told what to do, all that stuff that we associate with discipline. And it wasn't until I got out of college that I learned the truth of discipline. And that is that a discipline is really just having power over yourself. All discipline is you being able to have power and control over you, not in a commanding dictatorial way, in a strength way. And so what emotional discipline is, it's not, and something you said, know what it is, know what it's not, it's not forbidding yourself from feeling anything. It's not pretending you don't have emotions, it's not leaving emotion out of it. What emotional discipline is the ability to separate the signal your emotion is sending you from the decision you are going to make about what to do. And when you understand that emotion is a signal to act, and that you can have a feeling, but you can make a decision about what to do with that feeling. I think of it in my own life as my emotion is saying this, but I don't have to obey my emotion. I am the chooser, not my emotion. And so discipline for me plays the role of here's what I feel. What decision do I need to make and action do I need to do? And for a lot of people, discipline is allowing yourself to move in alignment with that emotion. A lot of people feel things they never act on. We feel like having a conversation with somebody in our life, and we feel like, man, I have an emotion of I want you to know this, and then we never act on it because we are afraid, which is another emotion, then we allow that to control us. We allow the fear emotion to choose for us over the emotion of wanting to get closer to somebody or improve a relationship. Other times, I feel something, and discipline, power, control over myself says that emotion. Usually anger is not the one I want driving my action right now. So I'm going to feel that emotion, but I'm going to take a step back and I'm going to use E plus R equals O to make a decision about what I'm going to do, not driven by that emotional signal, but aware of that emotional signal, but driven by a stronger purpose or priority, which is ultimately what our big power as human beings is over every other thing on the planet. We have the ability to do that. Nothing else on the planet does. And so I view it as my responsibility to do that, lest I'm not using the gift that I was given.

SPEAKER_00 22:36

If someone listening today feels stuck, whether they're blaming circumstances or other people or the past, what's the response that they could choose right now that would start changing their life immediately?

SPEAKER_01 22:47

The big one is we get defensive by people pointing things out, gaps in us, we feel criticized, or we're complaining about I shouldn't have to deal with this, I shouldn't have to deal with that. I would just challenge you to think to yourself, who in your life wants to hear you complain about situations more? I can rationally explain why complaining is not smart. You're in leadership. Do you guys pay for problem identifiers over there? Solvers. Solvers. You guys pay big salaries for people who can point out all the problems? No, you pay for people who can solve problems. Now, maybe if you can uncover a problem that nobody else knows about, I'm not saying there's no value in that. There is. But if you can't solve it, there's a lot less value. So the first is we pay for the solvers, not for the identifiers. Don't be an identifier, be a solver. In terms of getting beyond that, every time we complain, every time we get defensive, every time we're blaming people, what we're doing is we are pushing responsibility away from us. And the response that I would encourage you to consider is if you find yourself pushing responsibility away, ask yourself, why am I doing that? Why am I pushing responsibility away from me? And what if I pulled responsibility closer to me? And that goes back to up to you, not up to you. It is up to you where you push your responsibility. Now, if you and I work together, Rob, it's up to me what I do with my responsibility. It's up to you, if you're my leader, to provide boundaries and consequences if I push responsibility too far away. But you don't get to decide what I do with my responsibility. I could push responsibility as far away as I want. Now I might push myself out of a job, but you can't make me take responsibility and accept responsibility for things I do not accept it for. And that's the that's one of the biggest misunderstandings is responsibility assigned does not mean responsibility accepted. A lot of leaders struggle assigning responsibilities and never checking whether the people they assign them to actually accepted them. And so for me, for the individual and for all of you listening, is you're pushing responsibility away or you are pulling responsibility close. So if you find yourself blaming a circumstance or getting defensive about something that somebody pointed out to you or complaining about a circumstance, complaining about what's going on, every one of those is you trying to push that responsibility away. Ask yourself, why am I doing that? And do I want to be pushing responsibility away? And I think this is the killer question because it's social. Do I want to be known as the person who pushes responsibility away and tries to distance themselves from responsibility? And then here's the second piece. The second piece is act in your true interest. Always act in your true interest. Get really good at thinking about and asking yourself and making decisions based on this question. What's good for me? What is in my best interest here? Because if you don't think that, and I don't mean like pleasure or gratification or comfort, I'm not talking about those, those are not necessarily in your best interest. Ask yourself, what is in my best interest? And then make decisions in alignment with is it in your best interest to complain about that person at work when you get home to your spouse? Is that in your best interest? Is it in your best interest to make your spouse listen to all the worst stuff that happened to you at work today? I think if you ask that question, you'd be hard pressed to say yes. Because if you're not asking that question and you are not acting in your best interest, who is? Who's gonna act in your best interest if you're not gonna do that for yourself? I think a lot of people need to hear that.

SPEAKER_00 26:46

Absolutely. Now you've worked with a lot of championship teams. What, in your opinion, separates champions who win the right way and those who might only win in the short run?

SPEAKER_01 26:59

They establish crystal clear standards with crystal clear boundaries and they hold them. This is the way we're gonna do it. It's exactly what Kurt Signetti had done at Indiana. Everybody wants to know how he did it, and it's the furthest thing away from magical. All he did was the simplest possible version of this is exactly what it takes. This is what it needs to look like. It's going to look like this for anybody who plays here. And anything else that doesn't fit this is not going to be part of what we do. And I'm going to do it in a demanding but a caring way. I'm going to teach you how to do it. And I'm not going to change it based on your feelings or your personal preferences, whoever it is that you are. Now, just doing this doesn't mean that you're going to be good at it. Like you got to learn how to draw really good boundaries. And so early in your career, early in your timeline, I would hope you get a lot better at this over time. Signet has been around for a while. He's done this for a lot. I know in our work, when we met Urban, this is 100% true. When my dad and I sat down with Urban, the very first time we met him to go over what we do and how we do it, my dad asked me to position E plus R equals O with Urban. And I laid it out. And 60 seconds in, Urban paused me and he said, Stop. And I was convinced he was going to kick us out of the office and send us back in. But he said, I won't say the exact phrase that he used, but he said, We're doing all of this. And he locked in. And I'm not kidding, in 60 seconds, he quote unquote bought and committed the entire Ohio State football program, staff, players, everybody in 60 seconds. That is the honest truth. And I am 100% convinced had we met Urban even one year earlier, we would have failed that moment. I don't think Urban would have locked in and started working with us had we met him one year before when we did, because I don't think we were good enough yet. So as you draw those boundaries and as you do those, recognize it has to work. Just drawing the boundaries doesn't mean it's going to work. But to get there, you've got to follow the principles. We can't draw fuzzy boundaries and then change it based on feelings and preferences and all these different things. You've got to figure out what works and what doesn't in order to do that. And they just don't draw the boundaries where you do. They just don't want to work like that, which is fine. But if you are the one who's leading it, you have to lead what you believe in the way you think it needs to happen. And anybody that doesn't align with that or doesn't want to do it, they can be a good person, but they're just when they run their team, they can draw the boundaries where they want. When you're running it, you got to draw them where you need. Just like parenting, I got to draw my boundaries where I do. I can't do it how another parent does. They have to do it how I do it. So that's the thing I would tell people. And it's probably the thing I think coaches and leaders are struggling with the most right now because there's so much noise about where those boundaries and rules and order should be. And everybody wants to do stuff while getting approval from everybody and no criticism. And then what happens is people end up just drawing messy, fuzzy, basically invisible and fake boundaries, and you can't lead a high-performing team of any kind like that.

SPEAKER_00 30:11

DK, we're going to shift gears here. All right. This next segment I call the fast and friendly five. So I'm going to ask you five quick questions, no long pauses, just gut answers. All right. You ready? I'm ready. All right, number one, your go-to hype song when you need a boost.

SPEAKER_01 30:29

Well, probably going to be a DM, something in DMX on the way to football practice. I don't know. X gonna give it to you. Let's go with X Gone Give It Tia. DMX. Solid.

SPEAKER_00 30:38

All right, number two, your go-to movie when you need inspiration.

SPEAKER_01 30:43

Interstellar, Christopher Nolan. First for the exploration element of it. And second, if you're a parent and you haven't watched that movie as a parent, yeah, go watch that movie as a parent because it's a completely different movie once you're a parent.

SPEAKER_00 30:56

All right. One or two books that have impacted who you are.

SPEAKER_01 31:01

First book that impacted who I was changed my life, Man's Search for Meaning by Dr. Victor Frankel. And the second book, Anti-Fragile, by Nassim Taleb. And 90% of the people that I've referred that book to refuse to finish it because it's too difficult and awkward of a read for them. Challenge given to everybody who hears this.

SPEAKER_00 31:22

Alright, number four. What's the best leadership advice you've received?

SPEAKER_01 31:28

It came from my dad. He said when I was a kid, you are responsible for how you respond to circumstances you did not create.

SPEAKER_00 31:38

All right, last question. Who's the best leader who is kind and why?

SPEAKER_01 31:45

I'm gonna go with my favorite leader of all time, Winston Churchill. And I don't think people naturally associate him with kindness, but I've read almost everything I could possibly find on him. And he was, in fact, a very tender and kind man. He cried all the time. And I think his blend of steely resolve and genuine care and love for the people that he led and protected, that combination was arguably the highest on each of those scales, maybe in world history. And it was the source of, frankly, the savior of our free world.

SPEAKER_00 32:29

Awesome. BK, we're gonna close this up. But before we do, some closing comments here. What advice would you offer our listeners on how to lead the right way?

SPEAKER_01 32:39

Leadership is the act of taking responsibility for things you do not control. So if you want to lead and you want to lead the right way, you will have to take responsibility for things that are not in your control. And most people are already struggling to take control of things that are in their control. Leaders have a higher task and a higher duty and a higher call. And that is, they take responsibility for stuff that's not in their control. So if you're willing to do that, the world needs more people like that. If you're not willing to do that, I encourage you to step out of the leadership position and get into a producer position so that somebody who is going to take responsibility for stuff outside the control can get into that position. And there's everything right with both of those choices.

SPEAKER_00 33:35

Awesome. DK, thank you so much for this enlightening conversation. Really appreciate you being on the competitive kindness podcast today. Thanks, brother. Thanks for tuning in. If today's episode got you fired up, please check out the book Competitive Kindness Winning the Right Way. Available on Amazon. Join the competitive kindness movement by sharing this with your friends, family, and colleagues. Also, I would love to connect with you, so please share your thoughts or stories with me on LinkedIn or on X. My handle there is at Rob Clark10. Remember, dare to lead differently. Dare to be kind.