00:00:06 Sayan: There's a misconception in leadership that intensity equals effectiveness, that if we just push harder or somehow move faster, momentum will follow. But what if I tell you the opposite is true? What is the most powerful leadership skill in moments of pressure? Isn't pushing through right, but the calmness? Today we are exploring how that inner steadiness becomes the forward motion.

00:00:31 Sayan: Welcome to another episode of analyte, where we explore the deeper intelligence behind, behind how we live, lead and grow. I'm your host, scion. As some of you would know. And today I'm joined by Dominic Garuba, a sales and leadership operator with nearly four decades of experience helping individuals and organizations regain clarity and forward motion. So with that kind of experience spanning fortune five hundred companies, small businesses, and even military service, Dominic really brings a grounded and steady presence shaped by high stakes responsibility. So I invite you all to join me on this conversation, where we'll be exploring about how intercom could actually become a practical leadership advantage. So, Dominic, it's a it's a pleasure to have you here among us, and I'm excited to see where this conversation heads to.

00:01:21 Dominic Carubba: Well, this one could go a lot of different places, so I really.

00:01:23 Dominic Carubba: Appreciate you.

00:01:24 Dominic Carubba: Putting it.

00:01:24 Dominic Carubba: There.

00:01:25 Dominic Carubba: It's definitely going to go a better place once we got clear about what you were talking about. So. Yeah. You know, you said at the very beginning that a lot of people think if I just push harder, if I just do more, if I just get faster. All those are accelerators we think that accelerating makes for right better.

00:01:47 Dominic Carubba: Yeah, and that's.

00:01:49 Dominic Carubba: True. But there are two other. And I just thought about it how some of the stuff that I teach and some of the things I've learned, I'll just tell you there's two other AIS that you have to be very clear on. And I just, I like acronyms, I like alliteration. So as a, as a, as a wordsmith that you can have intensity. There's nothing wrong with intensity. But it's like going to the gym and just picking up a heavy weight. If you don't have the right form or the right conditioning, you're likely going to hurt yourself, said everybody over forty who went to work out after. They haven't worked out for ten years and they tried to do the workout they did twenty years ago. It was going to see it. You know, they've hurt themselves.

00:02:36 Dominic Carubba: So yeah.

00:02:38 Sayan: Yeah. That's a that's a lovely analogy I would say to start with.

00:02:42 Dominic Carubba: Right. I mean look.

00:02:44 Dominic Carubba: A lot of sales leaders. So here's the, here's the thing I've seen right. As a my generation, I'm the leading edge of generation X. And I've done a lot of work on generations and all that. But. We're the one generation who has worked analog and transitioned to digital in two thousand and five, six and seven. When the millennials started entering the workforce, work was already digitized. So they've worked their whole career in a digital environment, and Gen Z is entering the workforce, having lived their whole life connected digitally. I'm not saying they're better or worse at I'm just saying it's different. And yeah. And by the way, generations, it's going to put a little plug in here for stop using generations as the reason why people do what they do. That's not we all share the same values. They're all individual generations is we just have the same influences that other people our age were exposed to for the first time. So we tend to do the things our peers do. It's still all about peer pressure and peer align, all those things. So that being said, intensity is one aspect of what a leader can use to move themselves or an organization. But there's two other parts. Do you want to know the other two parts? Integrity and intention. So let's let's look at at the driving. Let's use a driving analogy okay. Or even a word we could stick with workout. But I change analogies all the time when I'm training because I want to give people something to grasp onto. Right? Intention is the destination. It's the full intention is the is the what you're saying about what you're going to do. Right? It's and and it includes things like outcome, results, purpose, intention is a big word with a lot to it. And so if you do a lot of intensity and you're not clear of your intention, that's going to create a break in your form. It's going to create a break in your guidance system. It's going to create a break and all things that cause stress. It's going to cause stress to the third thing, which is the system which I call integrity. Now, when most people hear the word integrity, They think, oh, he's a good person. He's a person of integrity. That's not the integrity I'm talking about. I'm talking about the integrity of a bicycle wheel or the integrity of a car wheel. That is to say, if a wheel is out of balance, if you're missing spokes, if the tire is not inflated to the proper right, your operations are not going. They might be fine at a low speed, but once you add intensity, well, you add stress to the system. The more stress, the more out of balance you are, the more the car is going to wobble. The shakes. It's going to create even more stress in the system. Right? And then that repetition, that's how you bend steel, right? You just you kind of work it, work it, work it I do. Right. So so intensity is great if your integrity is sound And that is from a leadership point of view. That's where systems come into play from an organizational leadership point of view. What's the integrity? It's integrity of the system. Simple systems time did you clock in? What time did you clock out? What did you what's. And here's the problem how technology screws all that up. People by technology like fish attack bait. They hit whatever shiniest and closest, and then they bite on it and they get reeled in without thinking about the integration of technology. And technology is another. There's a guy named, uh, Dan Sullivan wrote a book. Who? Not how ten Z in to X and the, uh, the Gap in the game. I read all three of those books last year.

00:06:58 Dominic Carubba: Okay.

00:06:58 Dominic Carubba: And he was dead on. He did a little book about technology. Technology is like a dog. The dog's only good if it's trained well. And we. And here's what I know about dog. I used to date a dog. I used to date an animal psychologist who didn't like to be called a dog trainer, but that's what she was.

00:07:16 Dominic Carubba: A dog trainer. In my world.

00:07:18 Dominic Carubba: You train dogs. Dog trainer. A dog's behavior is more about the owner than it is about the dog.

00:07:28 Dominic Carubba: Yeah.

00:07:29 Dominic Carubba: And so the inner peace that you're talking about, that that's just a feedback mechanism to say something's off. I'm not operating in alignment.

00:07:44 Dominic Carubba: With.

00:07:44 Dominic Carubba: My intention, my integrity and my intensity. Some one of those three levers is off, and if they stay off, you just deal with the effects of distress. I mean, there's two kinds of stress. There's the kind of stress that makes a diamond. Yes. If you if your goal is a diamond, it's great. If your goal is a diamond, which I think people think it's valuable. And it is. But then there's the kind of stress that makes buildings fall and bridges break and planes crash. Right? So it's it. It denatures parts, and then the system breaks and we call it systems fault. Now, here's how it shows up in my life all the time. My CRM sucks. The CRM.

00:08:36 Dominic Carubba: Sucks, CRM sucks.

00:08:39 Dominic Carubba: This it's wasting my time. I don't use it, blah blah blah. Like, well, because you don't have any integrity in it. Integrity failed. So there's the integrity of the system. There's the and and and then how do you create that integrity? Well, in the world of CRM that I worked in for twenty seven years and still work in today.

00:09:01 Sayan: Mm.

00:09:02 Dominic Carubba: You gotta have some agreements. Right. All. By the way. When I teach this in leadership training, I say, look, all actions I taught, I taught thousands of managers how to coach and communicate more effectively. Right. And I said to him. Um, we. Get when other people do as a leader, when you're working with others, all action is based on agreements. All actions are based on agreements, right? I ask you to show up at this place at this time to do this thing. That's an agreement. That's a that's a behavioral agreement. Well, when the agreements get broken and they will. So. Right. You being right about them being wrong doesn't keep the action moving because the agreement is now broken so the action can no longer occur. Now, if you try to do like anything else, if you try to try to build on top of something that's broken, you're just future breaking. You're just causing future I love. Yeah, right. You're just causing it because you're not. You haven't cleaned up the mess. And so I used to teach in a communication strategy. I hope this it falls right. But you are disturbed and upset because you expected them to do what they said they would do by when they said they would do it and they didn't. So you have a couple choices.

00:10:35 Sayan: Yeah.

00:10:37 Dominic Carubba: You can ignore it, which a lot of people do. You can bitch about it, which is just ignoring with a volume on external speaker. Right. Yeah. Or you can restore the broken agreement. And that is.

00:10:55 Speaker 4: That's that's important.

00:10:57 Dominic Carubba: Well, yeah. Because by the way, the less the more you ignore it, the bigger it gets in you.

00:11:04 Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:11:05 Dominic Carubba: You can't sleep at night. You can't. You can't relate to that person in a healthy, positive way because there's a broken agreement now. Uh, so there's only three answers to why someone broke an agreement. So you can just forget about everything else. There's only three answers. Why? Somebody broke an agreement. Number one, something was more important that displaced their ability to create that agreement. So I taught a class at a corporation for five years. I taught this class. Right. and the year two. Year three. The class moved from a local resort hotel kind of thing to the building to the to the company's headquarters. They built out their training facility in the ground floor, and a couple people show we had an agreement to be on time for every session in a five day workshop, people would show up late. I'm like, great. What was more important than keeping your word, not keeping my agreement? It's a little different. I can't go in the whole class right now, but it's literally all that matters is their relationship to their word, which is a very masculine trait, not feminine. But we'll get into all those distinctions later. What was more important? Well, the the president of the company stopped me at lunch and wanted to talk. Great. That was more important than showing up to a class, right? That trumped the agreement. That was more important. Would you ever not would you keep an agreement to meet somebody for coffee the first time. On the way there, you get a phone call that your spouse just got in a car accident, and they need you at the hospital. Would you? Well, I can't go to the hospital. I gotta meet a stranger for coffee. No. Going to take care of your family is more important. That's why you work. That's why you meet strangers.

00:12:58 Sayan: Yeah. Important distinction.

00:13:00 Dominic Carubba: O importance is importance. Mm. However, importance can also be an excuse. We're going to get to that in a second. The second reason somebody breaks their word causes you a disruption in your inner peace. Something was missing. Oh, I didn't put it in my calendar, I missed it. I missed an interview last night. Why? Because I forgot I'm ADHD. I forgot to look at my calendar. I, I went home, I was on a track. I didn't tell my wife that I had a meeting at eight thirty. I told her I wanted to have dinner and then dinner was late, which I didn't say anything about. Sometimes just let stuff go. But something was missing, right? So this is where trial and error makes a difference. This is where you work with somebody. This is where coaching and training and systems like yo. Okay. Well let's let's put something in place. Let's have this thing called a calendar and we can create an invitation on the calendar. And then that created an agreement. And then that system might solve the problem. If it doesn't then it's the third reason okay. And the third reason is and people hate this reason, but it's the only reason there is it's something else. It's something else. If, if you if it was important to you. And by the way, as an ADHD guy, I had to learn this in real life. I would miss agreements sometimes, even if it was important to me. But people would say, you don't really care. I'm like, no, I really do care. You just don't understand how ADHD, how the ADHD brain works, everything I care about or don't care about is in the same place. So I put in systems and try to put in habits and things that help me sort that through. And then I put in the missing pieces and take out the things that are in the way. So something was missing. The presence of which would have made a difference. And if it doesn't make a difference, that's not the thing to put in, but it's something else. It's something else. Is the transformation of a conversation into a dialogue. Because you have to become curious as a leader. You have to say, well, geez, I know this is important to you. I know you didn't really want to miss it. I know you had it in your calendar. I know you, you did all the things. I'm curious, what do you think it could be?

00:15:19 Sayan: Mm. Yeah.

00:15:20 Dominic Carubba: Here's what.

00:15:20 Sayan: Leaders.

00:15:22 Dominic Carubba: And here's what leaders have to just set back and realize this. By the way, this is the greatest thing I like. When I did my classes, we had an agreement called Be on Time And in the beginning of the five day class, we all made the agreements. I'd say being on time means being at the designated place by the designated time, ready to participate, and then every break I'd come back and say, looks like we have a late. And everybody look around going, I don't know who's late. And I go, you two are late. And they go, what are you talking about? Y'all were talking when the clock hit one o'clock. You two were still talking, rustling around your bag. But I'm sitting here in my chair like, that's not the standard. The standard was to be ready to go when and where we said be ready to go. And oh, by the way, my standard was within one. If it was one, it was the time. Not one second after the time, not one minute after the time. Now, I held a high standard in that class. so that leaders could learn this one distinction. It could be something else. Because I gotta tell you, yeah, ninety two percent of the one thousand and thirteen people that went through my class, ninety two percent of them loved the impact of the class, eight percent hated me.

00:16:52 Sayan: There's no in between.

00:16:54 Dominic Carubba: Because I held the standard that said, you're not there in the room. But they were late and they had to do a consequence, and they had to do it in front of everybody. And it was goofy and blah, blah, blah. And a lot of people were pissed off. But if you can't get that, we all have something else driving us failing in our commitments, and you can't hear someone else's. You can't discover someone else's. You can't learn together through dialogue what that something else is. Because if you're not curious. You're not approaching your work and your relationships scientifically. Scientifically means you have a question. You see a problem, you speculate, and then you test, and then you discover and you learn and you teach and you grow. And by the way, if you can have that conversation, you can learn what was missing, more important or something else in the integrity, the intensity and the intention of what you're trying to accomplish with each and every person inside each and every agreement. And without a system to hold all that information, you have to hold it in your head. So holding in your head is where you cause stress too. So you've got to get it outside your head into a system, whatever that system is. And again, the integrity, the intensity and the intention of the system has to all match and move together Otherwise you're just distressing the system instead of you stressing the system. EU stress, which is the positive kind of stress. The kind of stress that makes a formula one car accelerate from sixty miles an hour through a turn. It's able to go sixty miles an hour through a turn and accelerate to one hundred and eighty miles an hour on a straightaway two hundred twenty miles an hour straightaway. You can't do that in a Yugo. You can't do that in a Toyota Tercel from nineteen eighty seven. It doesn't have the it doesn't it's not built for that. Doesn't have anyway. So that's as a leader being open to that. It's not personal. And here's the other thing. Right. You can't expect people to control their behavior. You can't control most of yours. So lighten up Francis. That's a quote from a movie you might recognize. You might not. Anyway, how was that? Was that. Yeah.

00:19:24 Speaker 5: It was.

00:19:25 Sayan: Solid. I mean, I love your personality and, you know, the kind of, uh, analogies that you brought into this mix of conversation. So, yeah, I think indeed, it's about the clarity and the curiosity. And so instead of escalating pressure within yourself, right, which could again, you know, radiate out to others, I think I think it's not about doing more. It's about seeing more clearly. Right. Um, and again, Dominic, I really appreciate the kind of clarity that you brought to this conversation. So, you know, for listeners who are listening to this right now and you know, who are hooked by the kind of analogies and the clarity that you provided. Uh, so for those who want to learn actually about your work or connect with you, where can they find you at?

00:20:07 Dominic Carubba: So I got two projects that I right this moment, sales and technology is my professional work that I do in systems and technology, and I bring what I bring elsewhere. And then I've got a, a web. So sales and technology comm so we can get to me there. Book a time on my calendar. Then I got this other website called the AD Leader. Com. That's where I have this program called momentum, where leaders, entrepreneurs and consultants gather together to sort through all of the weapons of mass distraction that live in the world and try to move forward with clarity, with commitment, with inspection, so that we can support each other in what I call compassionate accountability, to know that we're all just learning and we're trying to seek our own source of power and clarity so that we can move forward in the direction we say we want to go or discover. We want to go somewhere else. And that's basically it.

00:21:08 Sayan: I love that. Uh, that's a lovely initiative, Dominic. So, uh, definitely would include those links in the show notes for all of you listening to this right now. And since we are nearing the minute mark, folks, to everyone listening, um, you know, if you're in a season of pressure or stagnation, right? Perhaps the next step isn't acceleration. Perhaps it's steadiness. And, uh, like Dominic said, right. The foundation of which is curiosity. So thank you for joining us on if this conversation did resonate with you. Do share it with someone. Navigating uncertainty. And yeah, until next time. Lead gently, move deliberately. And, uh, you know, trust that the clarity would come from within. This has been science, and I'll see you in the next one.