DailyJim: Emotional combat training for leaders

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. Today is Thursday, August 15th, 2024. I missed yesterday again. I think I missed Monday this week. It's been quite a week.

What do I want to talk about today? Maybe I've already talked about this before, but actually no, I'll just be straight up. This idea of wanting to train leaders in emotional combat, or basically emotional combat training for leaders. Um and what do i mean by that so maybe i've mentioned in the talk on the show before about emotional combat but this idea that emotional self-defense is good if there are one-off attacks or they're one-off fights you know but the problem with that is i've noticed that conflict is pretty constant and pervasive and comes from external sources and internal sources and that's if we're We're only interacting with a few people. Even if we're just interacting with ourselves, there's still conflict. We're interacting with the environment, there's conflict. The whole man versus man, man versus self, man versus nature, et cetera, et cetera. Conflicts that they talk about in story writing.

Seeing and believing that conflict is pretty constant pervasive i think ah emotional combat because what is combat except for like prolonged non-stop uh conflict that's coming from multiple sides and attacks coming from multiple sides and so when we think about attacks it's not just attacks of hatred but also attacks of love and attacks of indifference and yeah so when we when I think about that, I start to not only give myself a break and recognize that fighting is, nonstop and pretend that the conflict doesn't exist, doesn't mean the conflict goes away.

But when I also frame it this way as emotional combat, I start to see other people as going through a lot. I just talked to a woman today who works as a waitress and she was telling me she's She's 21, and since she was 16, she's been taking care of her and her brother and her sister and her mother, and now she has a young daughter. And she is making 18,000 shillings a month, which is $130 maybe. How are you supposed to take care of five people on $130? It's crazy.

So just trying to understand people. And, you know, that's just the financial aspect of it. But then there's so many other conflicts that are happening in her life as well. And so when we think about it there, I mean, I'd say most human beings, we could learn to get better at staying in a fight, taking an emotional punch and still staying there and punching back with love instead of punching back with hatred or punching back with indifference. But I think it might matter even more to people who are in higher positions of leadership. We can talk about leadership as a parent, you know, if you're a leader of just a few people in a family, but we can also talk about it at the organizational level. We can talk about it at the societal level. Nowadays, there are influencers who are, frankly, influencing a lot of people with reach of 10,000, 100,000, millions of people.

Their ability, their style of fighting can strongly impact the people below them or the people following them. Somebody in an organization who is leading the organization is struggling with a conflict in their personal life and cannot resolve it can bring that conflict into the workplace and therefore spread it to the rest of people. Spread the anger, spread the hopelessness, spread the cynicism, spread the hatred and indifference perhaps. But they can also spread the love depending on how they deal with the conflicts or whether they deal with it or avoid it. And I think a lot of us avoid conflicts. And as we go up, as the numbers of conflicts, as the number of conflicts increases, maybe we'll have a stronger tendency to avoid conflict or really just pretend that it's not there. So what do they say? You know, If you want to be a leader, you have to have a thick skin. I'm like, no, no. How can we be a leader and have not like a thin skin, but how can we have a still, like a really warm heart and really respond to a lot of people with love and kindness despite the number of conflicts that we're going through internally and externally? And I just don't think we have a lot of training for this. Maybe there's a book on this. Maybe there's a PowerPoint presentation. presentation, but I don't know if there's a lot of practical, really grounded training in this, in how to deal with rejection, how to deal with guilt tripping, how to deal with, being ignored, how to deal with being complimented, how to deal with somebody blaming us or cussing us out, or how to deal with some really hard truths that we don't want to accept about ourselves. How do we deal with shame? How do we deal with...

Dreams and people supporting us beyond our imagination. How do we deal with all these things without kind of shrinking and running away from life? And I think with the work I've done with Emotional Self-Defense, I feel confident I'm quite good at it. Actually, I think I'm better at it than almost everyone I've met. And yet there's still so much room for me to grow as well. And so I'm really excited if any of you are curious about this because you're a human being or more specifically because you're in a position of leadership that can be in your family or an organization or society or whatever, and you want to get really good at this, I really hope you reach out to me. We can do a one-on-one call where we do something informal, just talk about it. We can even do exercises and training drills on the call. I would like to run some online classes as well. but I really want to see leaders in society become really good at staying in the fight and fighting hard to bring more love, uh, not only to ourselves, but to each other. So if this is something that really interests you, please reach out to me. You can find me on Instagram at, at, uh, Hey Jim Clyber, or you can, uh, send me a message on Jim and friends. If you want to join that, um, which is just friends.jimclyber.com.

And what else? Yeah. If if you have my, you know, hello at jimklyber.com is my email address. And yeah, I really just want to start training. Um, I'm going to train myself a lot more these days, but I also want to start training other people because, um, I just, I can only imagine how society would be if we're good at this. I can only imagine how much trust and how much love and how much cooperation and how much, which, frankly, economic wealth and more would come if we got good at resolving conflict and staying in relationship with each other and deepening the relationships with each other because we are able to, because we don't give up, we don't run away just because we feel hurt or because we feel afraid, that we have the courage to stay and the skills to stay and the endurance to stay in relationship with each other. So on that note, look forward to talking to you all soon.