The Human Connection: 4 Ways to Strengthen or Inadvertently Destroy Your Ability to Influence | Brian Bogert

Brian Bogert understands how physical, emotional and mental pain can keep people buried, can keep people from reacting the way that they want to, and can keep people from being the best versions of themselves. Brian helps leaders process what's in the past to be able to show up, connected, authentic and ready to make a difference today, I'm so glad you're here to hear from Brian.

Welcome to the Courage of a Leader podcast. This is where you hear real life stories of top leaders achieving extraordinary results, and you get practical advice and techniques you can immediately apply for your own success. This is where you will get inspired and take bold, courageous action. I'm so glad you can join us. I'm your host. Amy Riley, now are you ready to step into the full power of your leadership and achieve the results you care about most? Let's ignite the Courage of a Leader.

Thank you for being on the Courage of a Leader podcast today. Brian

Amy, every time we chat, it's always amazing. So to record this and put it out to the world, it's a privilege. I'm excited to be here.

Yes, me too. I appreciate your time. We're going to jump right into it. We are going to talk today about how do we connect powerfully with others. And I think that this is super important for a number of reasons, and I know that you help folks do this even when they have significant obstacles in front of them. So I want to hear from you, what do you mean by connecting powerfully with others. And why is this so important?

Well, if we look at it through the lens of like the human experience, I think we seek and desire all of us the same four things. We all want to feel safe, yeah, we all want to feel protected, and those are not the same thing. We all want to feel seen and understood, and we all want to feel connected, right, connected to ourselves, connected to each other, connected to something bigger than ourselves. We all want that, okay? But here's the reality, okay, the second we walk into an environment that we don't feel connected, we don't feel seen and understood, and there's not a clear level of protection that allows us to feel safe. What do we do? We protect ourselves, right? So this might be going to a networking event where everyone's handing out business cards and everyone wants something from you instead of for you, right? This could be going back to your parents house for Thanksgiving or a holiday, and you know that your dad, your aunt and your grandma are all gonna look at you a certain way. They're going to make comments about you and you already weeks before start hesitating and putting that guard and armor up and just trying to figure out how I'm going to get through right? It could be a conflict with a spouse that leaves you feeling yucky, and now you got to go into a prospect meeting or lead your team. Okay? But once you've been activated into that state, your armor is up. Here's a visual that's going to help you and everybody else connect this. We talk about the trash from people's past. Okay, the trash from your past, or those emotional triggers, behavioral patterns and environmental conditioning that cause your cellular memory to activate and react in moments, often, of which causes you to not see things as clearly in front of you and create a ripple effect of damage. Okay, so when we look at it through this, what's important to understand is the trash from your past is not your fault. It just becomes your responsibility once you become aware of it, or you start burying others in yours, you know those 35 gallon black trash bags. Yeah, okay. I want you to imagine unfolding one flat on the table and grab the corners and pick it up, hold it up in front of your face, above your eyes, right? That's your armor. That's your armor. Big black trash bag. So now my question for you, Amy, is, how could you properly expect anyone in your life, right? Your spouse, kids, closest friends, colleagues, people that work for you, your clients, your communities. How could you ever expect anyone to see all of who you are, what you're willing to do, what you're not willing to do, your heart, your soul, your desire, your intent, your boundaries, your worth, your value, delivered through that opaque force field. Oh, and by the way, that's assuming that they're not already carrying their own layer of armor. That's going to further dilute the message. Okay, so how does this show up in the world? I'll give a personal example. Okay, my wife would say something as simple as this, Hey, honey, what do you what do you want to do with the kids this weekend? But my shame and my anger filter you? That created armor would cause me to hear it this way. Hey, honey, you've not done enough to be a good husband and father here recently. So what do you do to make up for it this weekend? Now, all of a sudden, my cells are activating. I feel that visceral response. I feel my heart start racing. My breath gets shallow. I feel my chest expand that wave of heat and emotion over me, and what do I do? I rattle off the 10 things I've done in the last four days to show her I'm a good husband and father when that wasn't even what she asked I

was asking about this weekend. Yeah, right, yeah.

And so when we look at this, how often in life are people in situations and positions where they don't feel seen, they don't feel understood, they don't feel connected, they don't feel like no matter what their truth is that it's going to be accepted and understood right that their intent is so often misunderstood, and yet they're always wondering why people can't seem to understand where they're coming from. Here's the truth of all of it, the world will never judge you based on your intent. The world will always judge you based on your actions, even if you're unconscious to them. Yes. So what does powerfully connecting mean? It's the only place I see as a possibility for us to have opportunity and growth, because we're dropping the armor and we're showing up open.

Okay, you said so much good stuff already. Brian, why do we want to connect powerfully? Because the things that humans want the most is to feel safe, protected, seen and understood and connected. And he said, there's a difference between safe and protected. Let me double click there, because we talk a lot about safety in the workplace, right? We want psychological safety because that's when people are going to be able to admit their mistakes and throw their ideas onto the table. I think this would be helpful to break this down and give us another lens. What's the difference between safe and protected?

Yeah, so safe is something that you can create for yourself or you can experience under someone else's guys. Okay, so what does that mean? Someone who holds space for you, somebody who makes it so that you don't have to be paying attention to every single variable in detail. As a leader in a company, right? I can gaslight my employees and they don't feel protected or safe or right. I can take vulnerability authenticity. I can be a human being, and I can stand up for and defend my teams, particularly when it's bad news, and let them celebrate in the wins. See the reality of it is, is that if you recognize that the second you protect yourself, you actually disconnect yourself from the two things you want most, which is to be seen and understood and to be connected. Right? You also, the second you protect yourself, disconnect yourself from who you are and what you want in this world. And so the only way for us, as leaders in families, in businesses and in communities to show up and ensure that everyone gets everything that they want, which is all four of those things. It's to go into those environments and find a way to lower our armor by convincing ourselves that we're safe and we don't need the external protection. Now, what does that look like? It's twofold. One. We can fabricate it in a moment by literally intellectually convincing ourselves that we're safe or we can do the deeper work to actually unpack and heal through the things that we're still unconsciously protecting. Great example, my reaction to my wife, what was I protecting? I value greatly being a good husband and a good father, I value greatly that they believe that I'm a good husband and father, because that knows that I'm congruent in that approach. I felt like I'm being challenged there. That's what I'm protecting. Okay, right? So I'm now protecting myself, but that also means I'm disconnecting. So to be a protector and connector means to lower your own armor and wrap a layer of protection around the environment that you're in, protecting everyone in it so that everyone can be safe, everyone can be protected, everyone can be seen and understood, everyone can be connected. What it requires you to do, though, it's to have what I call a strong spine and a soft front. A strong spine is I've done the work to know who I am, what I'm willing to do, what I'm not willing to do, my value, my value, my worth, my desires, my boundaries, right the ways that I communicate most effectively, my skill sets, my unique areas of brilliance. Because if I know all of that stuff and I've done the work to eradicate the shame and the anger and all those little underpinnings that keep us stuck, then I can walk into any environment and be unwavering, because I don't have anything to justify, nothing to defend, no worry about criticism judgment, because I'm good, right? It's kind of like Eminem in the movie eight mile, if anybody has seen that, the very last rap scene, right? He goes off and talks about all the bad things that he knows his competitor is going to rip on him for. Her, he goes first, he owns all of it, and then basically drops the mic, and he's like, so what do you got on me? Yeah, right. If you don't have anything to hide, justify, defend or protect, then you can be open. And that's where the soft front comes from. And I think of my wife and my kids in this scenario, but it applies to teams, right? If somebody wants to come to you for light, love, leadership, protection, they want to come to come to you to be consoled. They want to come to you to talk about something vulnerable. Do they want to lay their head down on a metal chest piece of armor? No, yeah. And so we have to be able to have that soft front because that's what makes our heart accessible. That's what makes our frequency and vibration accessible, and that's what makes the energy transfer Okay. A

couple of things here, I think distinguishing that safe and that protected is an interesting thing, because I was going to ask you the question, Brian, like, what if I'm on a team and I like, there's evidence that my team leader is not going to have my back, right? Like, I've seen this person, you know, throw people under the bus before. But this means that there's a part of it that we can do for ourselves, like we know who we are. We know the quality of our work, right? And I can stand in that. I can do that work to have that, that strong spine, and, you know, I don't have to add layers of protection and armor here,

anybody can do this, regardless of title or hierarchy. Like, that's the point, right? Yeah, you can be a protector and connector without being the business owner, without being the leader, without being the team, like you don't, however, you can still facilitate that energy, right? And it's the spaces that we walk into, right? You've heard of those people that people describe as, like, Man, when you walk in the room, like, even if you don't say a word, I know you're there. Word, I know you're there, right? It's because their energy is so open, it's so vibrant, right? And often people feel safe around those individuals, because there's just a calm presence, okay? And so we can be protectors and connectors to facilitate the energy in any room. And the most simplistic way that we can boil this down is we all have the ability to be the thermostat, not the thermometer.

I was thinking about this the other day, Brian, I think it was yesterday. My family teases me. Sometimes, sometimes I am ready to laugh with it, you know? I just roll with it, and other times I get defensive. And I was like, when do I get defensive? Right? It's like, when I feel like I haven't done something that I wanted to do in that arena, right? I was in front of a team this morning right there. They're questioning me on the content. We're talking things through, right? Where do I feel defensive, where I'm like, yeah, right, I just demonstrated that, and that part wasn't perfect. When we're willing to admit our mistakes and say, Yeah, this is who I am, my strengths, not my strengths, all the things about me, then, yeah, we're able to drop that armor. You're

exactly right. And, I mean, it's also the big distinction between, like, wanting to be right versus wanting to get it right. You know, like, I don't care about being right at all. What does that prove to anything? All it does is create fighting. What I do care about is getting it right right, which also means that, like, I realize I'm human. I don't see everything. I make mistakes. But to even your point, it's like, what are those areas that we get defensive? I just had a call with a client today. He has been at the highest of high levels of private security. So he works with, like, literally, billionaires and celebrities and some big names that people are known. And I'm having him start to go through and start to just observe. Just observe, like moments of trigger, and then we're starting to associate with physiological patterns to them so that we can bring them into a place of conscious awareness. And we unpacked the situation today where he was basically talking about, it's like any time I feel like I'm being questioned, no matter if it's right or wrong, if I feel like I have to justify, I have to explain. He said it could be an answer. It could be something I want to, like spend money on. It could be, he said, all of these pieces. Well, it went through this whole process. We've never been working together for a while. But what did he realize he was able to connect just by putting intention to recognizing the patterns that he was getting that way proactively for a measly $300 investment, and he was afraid to talk to his wife about it, because he didn't want to be criticized that he didn't want to have to defend. He's anticipating this, like, it's going to be a difficult he's like, $300 it's not even a rounding error in our house. Like, good, good. But yet he's going in. And so he caught himself, and this was another example. Had he walked in there defensive with armor? What energy would she get, right? If he felt like he was gonna have to justify it, right? It's like that scarce energy. When you're getting a salesperson that you know, they don't have a lot of deals, and they need this one to make their payroll, they are trying really hard, right? And you feel all that energy that's armor can. Okay, so what did he do instead? He was able to go in and be like, Okay, let's just see what happens. Yeah, he told her, and she was like, oh, that sounds fun, cool. When do you start? In reality, it wasn't even an issue, but that was the cellular memory from all the times as a kid that he didn't have the tasks that got followed through, or the teachers told him that he wasn't smart enough or right. His parents overlooked the detail that he had because he grew up in a house where there was one right way to do everything. Yeah. The point is, all these are conditioned within us, and most people are unconscious to it, which further disconnects us even from ourselves. Okay,

I want to talk more about the cellular memory, but let's pause here for a moment, Brian, so I can tell listeners more about you. Brian Bogert does not start outside with what you need to do. He starts inside with who you are. You've already heard it in a world that is disconnected. Brian is revolutionizing how individuals, leaders and entrepreneurs deeply connect with their authentic selves to achieve the best versions of themselves at just seven years old, Brian was faced with a traumatic injury that most of us can barely even imagine. He was run over by a truck, and his left arm was severed from his body. After years of intensive rehabilitation and over 24 surgeries, Brian has a deep, lived understanding of how physical, emotional and mental pain can keep people buried, regardless of what their initial trauma was, his belief that everyone's story is as important as his own is what makes him one of the most accessible, relatable and authentic individuals you'll ever meet. As a human behavior and performance coach, speaker and business strategist, Brian disrupts the normative approach on how to create sustainable growth and lasting change, and he has helped individuals and companies discover and activate their limitless potential. Brian and his team live with intentionality as they are driven by their vision to impact a billion lives by 2045, thank you for being here to share what you've learned personally your expertise with us, Brian,

I just, I love it, I love it. I love it. I love being with you, my friend

same and I have felt personally what's described in that bio. So when we talk about cellular memory, Brian, it can feel like, oh, that's buried deep in me, you know, like, how am I gonna unravel that? We've started talking about a question I wanted to ask you, like, what are the typical ways that we protect ourselves? Like, how can we notice when we're doing that, so that we can raise our self awareness about it. Because I'd imagine, you know, like our brains are built to protect us, so we do some of this unconsciously. How do we make it more conscious? I know I've already been talking about like, when I feel that defensiveness right then, then I'm ready to get that trash bag

up. Well, I mean, to your point, awareness is always going to be the very first step, right? But the issue for most people, when they start going through this process is they just become more aware of all the ways they should be judging themselves, versus actually knowing what to do with it, right? And so that's the first place that we have to start. Is the only way that you have any shot. And I don't mean this to sound fleeting, because it's accessible for everyone and we can compress time, but the only way this happens is if you can truly listen to what I said in the beginning, is that this stuff is not your fault, right? Here's the truth. We have to be able to view ourselves through an objective and non judgmental lens, because the second shame or blame kicks in opportunity and growth go out the window. Should is a shame based word, yes. From the time we are little, kids, parents, teachers, coaches, employers in the world starts telling us, You should do this, you shouldn't do this, you should be this. You shouldn't be this. You should want this. You shouldn't want this. You should live here. You shouldn't live here, right? And all that does is it starts funneling us down this, this path, until we fit inside the box of who the world has told us who to be instead of who we really are. And why is this so important? Because why is this showing up? Where does it show up, and how does it show up? It can show up in literally hundreds of 1000s of different ways. However, each person is unique and different. So one of the first things that I say to people is, hey, do you know what it feels like to be triggered, regardless of the emotion? Okay, right? Yeah. And everybody says, yes, yeah, okay, cool. How quickly are you aware that you're triggered? Man, immediately, like, within seconds. Awesome. Okay. What process do you have in place to better understand it in that moment and break the pattern in that moment? Right? And so here's where this comes to fruition. It's these moments of reaction that whether it's external and it creates damage or it's internal, and we bite our tongue, we make ourselves. All we make ourselves quiet. Do you ever feel disconnected? Do you ever feel unworthy? Do you ever feel like you need to justify to be heard? Do you ever feel like your truth isn't seen and understood? Do you ever feel sometimes like you might be surrounded by people, but you're completely alone? If you feel any of those things, you're protecting yourself and you have trash that has not been found and eradicated in your past that is still showing up in moments. Now. How does this show up in a variety of ways. We have somebody in our mastermind who is an unbelievable creative like Unreal she's been doing it since 2016 as a really unique market, okay, but she's also completely undervalued herself. She way under charges for her services. She's constantly told that, because of the way she does it, it's not going to fit within the marketplace, even though she has on average, 7 million views per week across her channels. In her very first mastermind call, we got her into a place about a conversation she was getting ready to step into where she was gonna have to say what her rate was and start to open up a conversation, and all of that, like, hesitation crept in, yeah. So we used that moment to say, Okay, well, you've been triggered. You know that you've been triggered? Cool, let's get in your body. Okay, she got in her body. And I said, How does it show up in your body? And she goes, Well, it's like, really heavy. I feel really stressed. Cool, good. Go deeper. That's an emotion, that's a feeling and a sensation that's not your physiological pattern. What's happening in your body right now? Now, I don't remember her specific pattern, but it was something along the lines of heart racing, biting her tongue, shrinking down right and then I was able to use that moment while she's really activating those cells, feeling exactly what I'm asking her to and we transported her back to in compressed time to realize that her greatest shame is actually tied directly to her profession in a situation that took place around the age of 10. And by activating the cells in that moment, we actually were able to help her transport and realize the source of a lot of those reactions. Now it's deeper than that. But why do I say this? Six months later, she just landed her first $25,000, influencer contract that only requires two posts a month. For six months, she has been overwhelmed in the last three weeks with four other influencer and relational type deals. She's putting together a conference to bring all these people together with overlap agreement that's multiple seven and eight figures in these deals for her own business. Oh, and she's also tripled her price, and she's no longer paying for travel and accommodations, and she's been able to do this in multiple different scenarios, so that we're bringing it to a place of conscious awareness, so that we can unwind the intellectual and emotional narratives that are tied to it and be able to see the patterns that cause us to react in those moments, which means that we are not being present and seeing accurately what's right in front of us.

Yes, I'm just working with the leader on this. I mean, she's now to a place where she's, like, triggered by her boss. Yeah, our brain has that stored right? Right? And then it becomes this automatic feeling, body emotion, reaction, thoughts in that moment. And yeah, we're working on, how do we unravel that? So I'm hearing, know where we're triggered, know the body sensations that come up for us in that moment. And I'm also here. If we can sit in that, we can help ourselves find, figure out, what's the history there, what's that heavy thing?

So we teach, we teach the five pillars of waste to wealth, which we're not going to have time to go through today. But what I walked you through at the highest level is the fifth pillar, which is move. So you just articulated. It's how do these emotions and feelings move through our body? Through our body, right? How do they move through our world so that we can move through them again? If I don't understand that and understand the patterns, how do I ever get ahead of it? Okay, I have over 50 shame triggers in my world. I have over 60 anger triggers that I'm aware of. Why is that important? Well, because when my doorbell goes off, and my two little chihuahua mixes start barking, and I get on sensory overload. It feels like an anger response, and I am full on ready to scream at those dogs. But if I can't catch myself in that moment, take a breath and separate and release. What happens when one of my two special needs kids comes and jumps in my lap two minutes later? What energy do you think they're gonna get? Yeah, yeah, it's all one. So these are the things that people aren't paying attention to. And you reference safety in companies I work with, a lot of large construction a lot of healthcare companies that promote safety, is like one of our number one tenants, right? But they don't contemplate the fact that this has to go beyond physical safety in those environments. And this idea of intellectual and emotional safety is real. Because guess what? I was just working with a heavy surface contractor that operates heavy equipment. What happens if that person gets into a fight with his spouse, finds out that his brother or sister has cancer the night before, gets into a near car accident, and then they get in that piece of heavy equipment? Do you really think they're going to be as present and capable of performing their job to make everyone else safe with that environment? It? No, we don't look at it that way, right?

Yeah, so Brian, let's say that there is a team leader. They've got a team 585, to eight folks, and they're like, oh, yeah, I want to feel more connected with my team members, right? We're, working on a surface level here, it's very transactional. I'd love to have more meaningful relationships, but we're remote and right when, and we're moving quickly. What would you suggest?

So I believe that the glue that binds human connection is a combination of vulnerability, authenticity and emotion, yeah. That does not mean where you're hard on your sleeve, and that does not mean that you have to be fully transparent with every single difficult thing in your life, yeah. But one of the best ways to get people, yeah, but one of the best ways to get people to see you and understand with you and feel safe with you is for them to be able to feel like you not only see them, but that you understand and have credibility and understanding for the situations that they're in. So maybe they are all virtual and remote, right? Maybe a facilitated conversation around Hey, you know what? Guys, it's been really interesting. I've been in this corporate space for 15 years. I have now operated in a virtual capacity for four and what I've realized is that we all have a desire to be more connected than we ever have, but we've also been more disconnected than we ever have. Never, as an employee and a team of multiple people, have I ever felt like I was completely alone, but I know that some days I feel that way when I'm sitting here behind my screen. I try to create meaningful connections with each and every one of you, but I also don't know that I'm facilitating the conversation in the best way to make sure that we all have the opportunity to come together. So really, I just wanted to do a check in with each and every one of you in a group capacity. And I wanted to share some of my observations and struggles and open up the floor for any of you to participate in the same way. If it seems like that aligns for you. Lovely,

lovely, yeah, share what's going on with you. If you're feeling like you want to make a shift, why is that? Share the why? Share what you think you might be falling short, right? I'd like to, I'd like to talk about this. I'd like to hear your perspectives, right? And then you can figure out, what are we gonna what are we gonna do about it? Possibly,

yeah, lovely. I mean, at the end of the day, people don't, if they don't feel safe with you as a leader, they're never going to tell you the truth. Yeah, yeah. They have something to lose. Most employees, it's a transactional relationship. Their livelihood depends on their performance, which only reinforces the deeper root of shame for most, which is those of us who learn to receive love, validation and connection through performance, which means it was always contingent upon what we did. And if now our livelihood and our income is also tied to that, why would we put ourselves out there and tell the truth? Unless we know that we're going to be protected by our leader, we

can only start to know that if our leader shows up, vulnerable, bingo, authentic, willing to show some emotion, willing to drop that plastic, big black plastic trash bag and say, All right, here's here's where I'm at. Right now,

let's talk, and even admitting, as a leader, that you don't know the answer.

I know, I know, but gosh, those have been the moments that I have seen team members be the most inspired, the most engaged. Yeah. I'm thinking, yeah, yeah. I'm thinking particularly about a sales manager. They were in a tough situation, lots of pressure, needed to make some changes. She was ready to say, let's go in this direction. So she had the courage to do that. But she was also saying, I don't have all the answers, but I know collectively we do, we can figure this out

to the point of courage and truth. I mean, that's, that's literally what I tell people. A lot of people ask you, like, Hey, Brian, who's going to be successful in your world? Who's good client for you, who's a bad client for you? And it always comes down to a really simple place. Like, if you don't have the desire, the interest and the courage to find in and stand in your truth, you're not ready to be in my world. Yeah,

there needs to be that commitment there. That's a powerful place to wrap. Brian, thank you so much for sharing your experience, your expertise, with us on the Courage of a Leader podcast. Pleasure

to be with you, my friend. Thank

you with you as well. Thanks Brian. Thank you for listening to the Courage of a Leader podcast. If you'd like to further explore this episode's topic, please reach out to me through the Courage of a Leader website@www.courageofaleader.com I'd love to hear from you. Please take the time to leave a review on iTunes that helps us expand our. Reach and get more people fully stepping into their leadership potential, until next time, be bold and be brave, because you've got the courage of a leader.