In order for us to be good leaders, we have to tap into our emotional currency as much as we tap into our intellectual currency. How do our negative experiences in childhood and the emotions that come from them design us for our lives in leadership? How can we balance the hyper-focus between our internal selves and the outside world? On this episode, I talk with co-founder and president of the Flourishing Leadership Institute, Jon Berghoff, about overcoming childhood pain, how the seed of mentorship and coaching was planted early in his life, and the levels of leadership required to build successful organizations.

Three Things We Learned

How success can be a vehicle to prove ourselves

Jon believes that a lot of his early success was a rebound or pendulum in response to a lot of pain in his life. A lot of the energy and motivation he had was an attempt to counter not feeling accepted, and not feeling like he was enough.

What defines a good teacher

Every good teacher/coach knows that the amount of wisdom in the universe is beyond what they can teach. They know that their job is to inspire the student to want to learn on their own— to instill that hunger in them.

The most critical skill a leader should have

As leaders, one of the most critical things we can do is to listen through the eyes and the hearts of other people. In order to do that, we must have certain emotional experiences and emotional currency.

Every experience in our lives prepares us for each level, and this is especially true in leadership. As the world has become more complex, so has leadership. We may feel at times that the complexity of our world has surpassed our own capabilities, but that doesn't mean we are useless as leaders. In those moments we need to unlock collective intuition and work on helping the people we lead to tap into their own inner wisdom and strengths.