Justin Garcia - Tribalnomics: Laws, Leadership, and Tactics for the Tribal Minded

(tr-bl-n-miks)

The Laws of Alliance.

The only laws not made by the weakness of men are those of the tribe. These are the laws that will explain your failure, fuel your success, and introduce you to who you are designed to be.

After reading this book, understanding and leveraging alliance will be one of your strengths while most people around you will continue to make excuses about why alliance remains one of their biggest weaknesses. They wont admit it in that fashion, mind you. No, theyll continue to blame everyone and everything else for stopping them from designing a life as powerful as yours.

Understanding alliance will fix your marriage. It will triple your businesss bottom line. It will help you get in the best shape of your life. It will eliminate stress. Its done all these things and more for my coaching students, and for me before that.

I appreciate your buying this book. It has been over forty years in the making and it means something to me that youve invested in supporting me through connecting with it.

With all that said, however, someone who understands tribe but does nothing to use that understanding to forge the most powerful life he can is a loser . Formulas create everything of value in our lives, but only when theyre moving.

Pressure to Power

When I was around fifteen years old, I started on a path of discovering formulas and what those formulas could do for me.

Ill tell you my backstory. I was born and raised in the Bronx, and I was somebody who really understood the hard nature of growing up in the inner city in the 80s. At the time, violence was common for me, the environment, and the people around me.

We took reputation and physical ability very seriously. I later came to understand that my actions were the results of a collection of formulas I had amassed; these formulas served me well during those situations when they were forged. However, it would be years before I realized how destructive these formulas could be.

When I was sixteen, I found myself locked in a jail cell in Valhalla, New York. Its what I now humorously refer to as my first trip to Valhalla. Plenty of decisions had led me to that predicament, but at that point, being locked away in that cell, I realized that I couldnt even trust myself to make the right decisions in the moment.

Up until getting in trouble, I hadnt even thought Id made any wrong decisions, yet here I was sitting in a cage. I began to realize that I had to follow rules and codes that existed outside of my mood, outside of my current emotional state. I had to design my code when I was in a different emotional state, not the hot tempered one that betrayed me in the first place.

I knew that if I designed those codes when I was at my best, then when I was at my worst, I would have a compass to trust. A new life was born, and a new journey began a life of designing formulas and improving my codes.

Fast forward many years later. Im sitting in my office and two of my students are hanging out with me and one of them asks, MC, so what exactly is tribe ? How does it fit with everything that we know when we talk about things like loyalty, honor, having a brotherhood, etc.?

I began to discuss many of the formulas that I had designed up until that point, and probably four hours later my whiteboard was covered in diagrams. Each piece of a diagram was being designed as I narrated its value and function.

The Loyalty Matrix was born. I recorded a video series on the subject of the Loyalty Matrix. The video series described the intricacies of what loyalty was about, the different roles and how they related to one another. To date, the Loyalty Matrix video series is my most popular contribution on the subject of tribe. Until now, that is.

Not Why, But How Me?

You see, Ive been a martial art school instructor for two decades.

Ive also been a business coach and a performance coach. My coaching system, The Pressure Process , has empowered hundreds of men and women to reach a better understanding of how they can build a mindset based on Power, and how they should frame their relationships, and how they can better leverage the synergy of alliance to become better versions of who they are .

When you are in charge of hundreds of martial artists journeys over two decades, to say you have a lab to work with is an understatement. If there was anything those years of being an insecure bull in a social China shop taught me, I had to acknowledge that others journeys certainly had juice to them, too.

From the early tyrant versions of my pressuring students until they quit (and then wondering why they did!), to getting burned, time after time, by students who let me down in a way only I could be responsible for. I had a lab, if I was up to the task of learning from it.

This book is the culmination of thousands of hours of introspection, trial and error, coaching to success (and failure!), conversations with powerful allies, and the pressure to see it through.

Many of these paradigms that Ill share are the umpteenth iteration of such perspectives. I am a firm believer in Keeping ones feet on the FLOR. FLOR is an acronym representing the F eedback L oop O f R eality. In practice, this means that although I may think Ive got something figured out, at a certain level of complexity I need to see it happen in the real world before Id ever endorse it as truth.

If I had to say what frustrates me most when I hear some other folks speak about tribe, its that they tend to share ideas of either what theyve personally experienced with no regard for their individual biases or the limitations of those experiences or they tend to speak on what they want the reality to be. Well, Im someone with great respect for nature and everything that nature teaches us; I never get to the point where I feel I know more than nature or that I have an idea of how nature could be improved.

At the heart of it, this is where so many go wrong. See, folks often know theyre getting it wrong. They know they need to improve the way they manage their relationships and the expectations they place on others. This puts them at a crossroads where many sacrifice improvement for security. And security, they feel, is needed to maintain a healthy relationship with themselves.

Enter Tribe, via Dirty Laundry

Follow me long enough and youll realize how little faith I can put in words, spoken or written, when it comes to my trying to turn on the light bulb in another person while communicating an idea.

One such instance of this was a few years back when discussing the value of tribe with my three sons (9, 6, and 4 at the time). I realized that their ages would never allow me to thoroughly explain something as abstract as the concept of tribe, so I brought them down to our laundry room. Once there, I pointed to the large pile of dirty laundry that needed to be washed. There was an impressive mountain in the middle of the floor. I challenged them in the form of a game.

Okay, so heres the deal. I want you guys to grab as much laundry as you can so that theres nothing on the floor. You do your best by yourself and Ill even give you a hand. Ill balance whats left on your leaning towers of t-shirts. Lets see if you guys are strong enough to do it.