Dain Dunston - Being Essential: Seven Questions for Living and Leading with Radical Self-Awareness

Published by Disruption Books

New York, New York

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Copyright 2022 by Dain Dunston

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Cover and book design by Sheila Parr

Cover image Shutterstock / elodea.proteus

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

Print ISBN: 978-1-63331-059-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-63331-060-5

First Edition

THIS IS DEDICATED TO MY MOTHER, NANCY BURRIS DUNSTON, WHO TAUGHT ME TO VALUE THE QUESTIONS I ASKED.

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.

ANDR GIDE

A LEADER STOOD IN THE hallway outside his office. Through a glass door, he could see across the elevator lobby to the other side of the building. Over there, through another wall of glass and, beyond that, a third glass wall, he could see three of his direct reports holding a meeting he knew nothing about. He thought about walking over to sit in, but he knew instinctively that he would not be welcome. And although he had only been in the job for three weeks, he knew in that instant that he was not going to succeed.

He had taken on the job of running operations for a fast-growing tech company because the new CEO, a client he had helped before with people problems, had called. He had some young, immature managers running sales and ops. He wanted to put them all under the leadership of a senior officer. He needed an adult in the room to herd them in the right direction.

It will be easy, the CEO said. Youll be great at it.

But it wasnt easy and he wasnt great at it. And the worst of it was he knew in his bones that this was a bad decision before he accepted the job, and yet he went ahead with it anyway. The offer of a few million shares of unvested stock would give him just the payoff he needed if the company went public. And why wouldnt it? The CEO was one of the smartest hed ever worked with and had already taken two large companies public with great success. How could this fail?

There were a lot of voices in the leaders head as he stood in that hallway, looking through those three glass walls, a lot of voices with some not-very-helpful opinions. The voices had a few questions, like What should I do now? But the time for asking the right questions had been before he got into this position.

To be fair, the situation was probably stacked against him. It was a little like a slapstick comedy where the new stepdad joins a dysfunctional family and the kids are determined to see him fail. To be honest, he came into the role feeling so uncomfortable for so many reasons that he surely would have come across as inauthentic and even just a little weird. He also came in with a fixed attitude about the young managers, instead of an open mind and an open heart. And to be really honest, he had come into the situation carrying baggage from some personal issues he should have been home cleaning up instead of commuting to another city, trying to pass himself off as an up-and-coming tech executive.

He lasted, in total, only four months in the job. He left feeling crushed, humiliated, and defeated. He had no idea where to go next except to try to reignite his previous client base and generate some revenue. Yet, he was determined to find the answer to one burning question: How had he become so lost?

Maybe you can relate this story to your own journey as a leader and as a human being. Who among us hasnt found ourselves in the wrong job, or feeling that we didnt belong, or wishing we could stop making decisions that took us into dead-end career moves? I know that Ive been there because the story I just shared with you is mine.

I grew up with a father who was on the fast track to becoming a CEO by the time he was forty-five, and I knew, by age thirteen, that I did not want his life. So, its ironic that by the time I was thirty-five, I was working in the C-suite as a speechwriter helping leaders tell their stories. When I saw an executive deliver a speech, I knew I had to help them understand who they needed to be on stage. From that inspiration, I found a natural progression to helping them understand who they needed to be when they came off stage as well.

So the experience of failing as a leader at the tech company shook me to my core. How could I have lost my connection to who I needed to be? But the experience also fired me up to find out why I had made such bad decisions and how I could rewire my mind to be the awesome, inspiring human being I always wanted to be (but secretly doubted I was worthy of becoming).

I started reading everything I could about how the leadership mind works and soon discovered there was no such thing as a leadership mind. There is only the human mind in which we each live. The best leaders are simply those who are the best humans, with better access to positive mindsets that help them live creatively and authentically. They live with appreciation and humility. And they also live with a fire in their belly, a fire to make a difference.

I talked to people I thought could coach me through the process. If I was going to get back in the game, I needed someone who could get me into the kind of mental and emotional shape that defines the best players.

In Santa Fe, I reconnected with one of my oldest friends, Dr. Sat-Kaur Khalsa, a Sikh minister and psychotherapist. Youve lost touch with your spiritual self, she said. You have to start there. And so I did.

In Austin, I was introduced to Dr. Frank Allen, a therapist and coach, who was to become my zen master (with a lowercase z). Along with his background as a psychologist and his work on understanding how the mind works, he is a grandmaster in two different Japanese martial arts.

In Boston and in Rome, in California and New York, I talked with some of the brightest minds I could ever hope to meet and watched as they modeled for me a new way of looking at life and living, a new lens with which to develop a sense of what I call radical self-awareness, so that whenever I wasnt thinking right (and it happens often, to all of us), I was able to catch myselfeven laugh at myself with amused curiosityand readjust the stories I was telling myself.

I also returned to my writing. I wrote a novel, The Downside of Up, which tracks a corporate speechwriter who lets himself be talked into becoming the CEO of a company, only to find that the investors are running some shady stock plays that could land him in legal jeopardy and leave 11,000 families without a paycheck. Its a comic, but very real, look at how the character has to retrain every part of his mind so that he can save the day. It was, in part, me rewriting my own story. And, in part, it was a journey for every reader as they reshaped their own leaders mind.