Hi and welcome to today's Talent Trade podcast.

This is Stephanie Maas, partner here at ThinkingAhead Executive

Search. I am super excited to have one of our favorite my

favorite partners here with us, Chris Gray. Chris is a true

Renaissance man, but today we are going to focus on one of his

specialties within the executive search practices here at

ThinkingAhead, specific within the energy practice. Chris,

thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you, Stephanie. It's really an honor

to be doing this with you. And as you know, I'm a huge fan of

yours and in the podcast, and that's meaningful to me to be

doing this here with you. And so thank you for having me a little

bit about me and my background. So I did not start out in sales

or recruiting. I started out in music. I started playing music

in sixth grade, and my first instrument was the saxophone,

and I did that for a couple of years, but I was always really,

really drawn to the drums, and my parents did not really have

faith in me to stick with something. I was the typical

kid, you know, I had started and quit multiple things, like Cub

Scouts. I took karate for about three years, where I got the

crap kicked out of me Tuesdays and Thursdays for three years of

my life. Taught me a lot, but it wasn't that pleasant, so I

dropped out of that, and here I am telling my parents, hey, you

know, I don't want to play the drums. And they were like, yeah,

right, sure. Okay, whatever, buddy. But I just persisted. You

know when, when a kid wants something and they stick with

it? You know, parents are all over the place and unfocused,

but children, when they want something, they're very focused,

so they can sort of wear you down. And that's what I did.

Kept bringing it up to my parents over and over again,

and, you know, finally they agreed to get me a set, but not

before I basically practiced air drums in my room to MTV for a

year, and then they finally got me the set. And the first set

they got me was really cheap, and I beat it into the ground in

like six months. But that was the beginnings of a probably

close to 30 years in the music business. Got two degrees in

music, got a master's degree from the Eastman School of

Music, lived and taught music and played music and helped to

run a music business in New York City for about 12 years. And you

know, been talking with my family about New York. It's a

very tough place to live, very expensive. Now, there's really

two New Yorks. There's the New York that you go to when you're

a tourist, and then there's the New York that you are in when

you have to live and pay bills. And those are two different New

Yorks. Then it just became apparent that it was at the

time, it was time for a change. So we sort of started plotting

to get back to Tennessee, and we got back, and I'm kind of trying

to figure out, like, what am I going to do? You know, I had

done some HR functions within the company I was in New York.

But of course, there was nothing down here, like what I was doing

up there, which was traveling to schools all over New York City,

Philadelphia. So I just kind of started applying to jobs online,

kind of what we tell people not to do. I did everything through

the internet. Got no results, got discouraged, and I started

going to a group in town called the National Career Transition

group. And I met a guy there, and I was talking to him about

my background and things that I had done, and he said, you know,

maybe you should go into recruiting, you know, like third

party recruiting. And he goes, You know, I'm I'm not really

hiring right now, but I know somebody that it might be good

for you to meet, and it just happened to be thinking ahead,

and as I move forward now, after being here for over 11 years,

you know, this has just been a very good place to me that I did

not expect. And that's kind of how I got from music business in

New York City to head hunting in Nashville. I joined the energy

team because that was the opening that we had. I'd

actually interviewed for nonprofit a year before that. So

what we do here in the energy practices, we work with

substation and transmission engineers, and these are the

people that design the stuff. These are the people that build

it, highly paid people with PE licenses and bachelor's and

master's degrees. And we've also branched out into renewables

engineers and also environmental engineers. It's been really,

really fun for me, you know, working with all the people that

we work with, and clients and candidates, but also our

teammates. There's really no place like this. I've learned a

lot. So wanted to talk today about head game, you know, and

Stephanie. And when you're teaching and training, you break

down what we do into four categories, recruiting, biz dev,

planning and the head game. And I've had some definite doozies

and tests with the head game over the course of my life. I

broke down the head game into five categories that I think can

apply to almost anything or anyone, no matter what you're

dealing with, whether it's a personal thing, whether it's a

professional thing. Something at work. And so I'm just going to

talk about each one of those, and I'll try to include a little

example of how that applied to me. So the first thing in the

head game. So let's just assume that you're in a you're in a

you're in a pickle, you know, you're in a situation, you're

you're losing the game, you're you're back sliding in some way

in your life, the situation that you're in, it's not going the

way that you thought it would go and, you know, we go through

different stages of how we deal with that emotionally. You know,

the five stages of grief you talk about, I guess the main

three, you know, denial, anger and acceptance. That can

definitely happen when you're when you're going through

something difficult, you sort of deny that it's happening, or

maybe you you don't see that it's happening, and then you get

you get mad, you know, and you're just angry at the

situation or yourself, you know, a lot of people go into self

blame at that point, and then at some point, you accept that,

okay, this is real. I'm dealing with this. You decided that this

is real, and you're looking at this, and she said, Okay, I

gotta do something here. So I think the first thing I would

say is, get going. Get going. Get started. Move. One example

that comes to mind for me is, you know, it's teaching music.

And I was working for a company that provided instrumental

lessons and the instruments to Catholic schools all over New

York City. So it's our business. Had well over 12,000 kids that

were customers of ours. And one of the things we did was every

year we would get the best kids from the school, from each

school, and we'd get them together, and it was called

Honor Band. And in New York City alone, we had over 300 kids in

the band. When you think about 300 kids playing music at the

same time, these are six to 12 graders. They are at various

levels. Some kids are superstars. Some kids probably

got invited so their feelings wouldn't get hurt. They got

various stages of intonation, how to put the instrument

together, their quality of their sound, they're just overall

musicianship. And all of a sudden, you're standing in front

of these 300 kids, and they you start the first song, and I'll

never forget like and it was an easy song, and I could not tell

what was happening. It was such a monstrosity of sound. It was

such a wall of chaos. And all these kids were blaring into

their instruments at the same time, with no regard to playing

with each other, listening to the beat, watching my conducting

your knee. That was just total chaos. And I just remember, and

I had my superiors were watching me. You know, it's like I was

almost like being observed. I kind of felt like I was on

trial. I mean, it was super intense. You know, you stop the

band because it's terrible. It sounds awful, and you stop them,

and then the kids are like, all quiet. They're looking at you,

300 kids, 600 eyes, and they're like, what's he gonna say? You

know, what's he gonna tell us to do? Is he can tell us it was

good. And I froze. I didn't know what to say. I just stood there.

And the more I didn't speak, the more pressure I felt, and I felt

my colleagues staring at me, and it was not a great moment, but

eventually I just said, You know what flutes are at a tune or

something's off, so let's just run the flutes. And then I said,

let's just run the clarinets, and let's just run the trumpets

and just the act of starting somewhere, I started to build

momentum off my own action. And that's one of the things I would

say, is what you need to do if you're stuck is, get going. Get

moving. Do something. Start small. Start anywhere but start.

Don't sit in the unproductive energy of inertia, but get

going. Next thing, I would say, is one day at a time. So when

you're dealing with a task, or you're dealing with a mountain

that you have to climb, it's really, really easy to look at

the totality of your task and get overwhelmed. And that's when

negative self talk can creep in. You know, wow, look at this huge

thing that I have to do. I'm not going to be able to do this. I

can't do this. It's not going to happen. It's too big. The odds

are against me. Logically, it's crazy to think I can do this.

And so we start convincing ourselves that we're not going

to be able to do what we need to do to fix the situation. So just

one day at a time, just kind of focuses on, okay, I'm here, I'm

present, I'm in the moment, and I'm gonna decide and figure out

what I can get done right now. And these are closely related,

you know, so get going is about the right now, and so is one day

at a time. It's about being present in the moment, not

overthinking the next week, the next week, or even, really,

tomorrow. And you know, my faith also tells me that I'm not

supposed to worry about tomorrow. And that is a skill,

that is a skill that will not come naturally. We are all

inclined to look forward and stress out. So the skill is, I'm

not going to do that. I'm going to stay here in the moment. But

one of the things I do is I make a list of everything that's

freaking me out. So it could be a Word doc. You scribble it on a

piece of paper. It doesn't really matter, but I make a list

of the things that are swimming in my head that are negative,

and I get really specific. So like, let's just say it was a

financial thing. Like, right? Let's say I was kind of worried

about money. And I will literally put not just I'm

worried about money, but I'm. Worried about paying XYZ bill,

and then I just go through and I make the list, and one of the

things I notice when I do that is that the list is never as bad

as I thought. You know, when I'm looking at it on paper, it's

never as bad as what I had swimming in my head. Is it just

gets it out of me, and I'm not sitting with that negativity. So

one day at a time, the next one is, remember your most

successful times, or remember your wins. And when I think

about that, I think about my time in New York. I'd been there

for about a year, and I was a teacher, so I was making like,

32k in New York City in the year, 2000 in a single income

situation. So of course, I'm looking at the summer, and

teachers don't get paid in the summer. And I'm like, What am I

going to do? So I started looking through the New York

Daily News, like the hard copy, and I saw that there was a job

posting for a couple 100 bucks a week part time. I thought, well,

if I can start now, this was in January of 2001 I thought, if I

can start now, I can build up enough cash to get through the

summer. So I found out it was a paper route for the New York

Times, and I was waking up at two in the morning in Queens,

and I was driving to Hell's Kitchen to a warehouse. I was

putting together papers like 225 editions in the New York Times,

loading them in my car, driving across 23rd Street to the east

side to four buildings called waterside Plaza. Each had 37

floors. You need to take the elevator all the way up to way

up to the top stall the elevator with your push cart, run out and

toss all the newspapers at the doorsteps of the people so that

when they came out of their apartment, the newspaper would

be there and pretty on their doormat. And that was four hours

of work. And then I went and did my full time teaching job, and I

was working overtime with that. So I was basically working from

2am to 8pm I'd go home, eat a sandwich, go to sleep, wake up,

do it all over again. I did that for a year, and I learned more

about myself in that year than I ever have in my life, the things

that I was capable of doing, the ability to push myself, the

ability to believe in myself, and then again, tied to these

other two right, one day at a time, and get going. So I was

able to do that. And I remember that a lot when I'm in a pickle,

you know? I remember those times of of what that was like, and

sometimes what you feel in the moment is the worst times can

actually be the best times when you look back and you realize

how you grew as a person, how you strengthened as a person,

and and just the lessons that you learned and the memories

that you made. So the fourth one I would say, is visualize

winning. So remembering successes, that's about looking

back at winning. Visualizing winning is about looking forward

and saying to yourself, Okay, what's going to happen when I

win, not if I win, when I win, what's going to happen? What's

that going to look like? And you go through that, and you

visualize, okay, if I hit this goal, or if I get out of this

situation, or if, obviously, in what we do, you know, if I make

that placement, or if I get that billing, or if I win this new

client, if I win the search, and you you start to let your

emotions fill in that picture in your mind. You start to

visualize what that looks like, and everybody will react to that

differently. You know, some people, that'll be great fuel

for them to move forward. Somebody like me, I struggle

with it a little bit. I'm not I'm not as good as visualizing

what the future is going to be and how good it's going to feel.

I do think that it's good to at least like. Think forward into

the future. Think about those positive pictures and what

that's going to look like when you overcome, when you pull

yourself out of this and when you win. So far, we have get

going one day at a time. Remember your success is in

visualize winning. And so that brings me to the last one, which

is tune out the negative as much as you can, even if it's real.

So an example might be that you're in a situation and the

odds are sort of long that you're going to win, you know,

almost like an athletic event between a really good school and

a sort of a not really good school, you know, the odds with

that not so good school winning are slim, you know. And

sometimes you might be in a situation where you have a slim

chance, or a less than 5050, chance. And sometimes people

around you, even if they love you and they care about you,

they'll point this out, you know, they'll, they'll try to be

realist with you here, you know, we call it being a billionaire,

and it's kind of like, hey, you know what? You got this thing

going on. It's kind of a long shot. But hey, you know, do your

best. You know, give it a go. We're pulling for you, you know,

we're praying for you, and all that kind of stuff. And it's

like, sometimes you have to just tune all of that out, because if

you focus on it, even if it's real, that's the key. It's not,

I'm not just talking about people being negative. We all

know that that's probably not good, you know, people being

negative, but I'm talking about people being realist with you,

and it's negative. You gotta tune that out, because it will

pull you back, and you'll start to give that life. You'll start

to give those long odds life, and you have to tune it out and

say, You know what? I'm not giving that anything. I'm not

giving it any of my energy. I'm not giving it any of my time.

I'm focusing on all these other things that are positive, and

I'm going to believe in myself even when it doesn't make sense.

Six if I don't believe in myself, why should anyone else

believe in me? So those are just some things that I have

developed over the years, and I'm definitely not saying that

I'm expert or sensei on that stuff, but I'll just hit them

real quick again. So it's get going one day at a time.

Remember success is visualize winning and tune out the

negative, even if it's real.

Well, I had planned on my brain not being

able to keep pace, and I was literally hanging on every word,

Chris, thank you so much. That is such good counsel. Thank you

for the vulnerability and sharing some of who you are on

and off the field with us. And you know the reality of it is we

only learn these things when we have to. The fact that you know

them means at some point you've had to learn them.

Well, I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you. Stephanie.