How to become a better, more trustworthy leader

What is it that kids, dogs and even horses intrinsically don’t trust? 

They don’t trust emotionally unstable humans.

And looking at the behaviours of dogs around emotionally unstable humans brings about a powerful leadership lesson. When a dog is associated with an emotionally unstable human, do you know what it’s default response is?

“This human has not got its shit together, I need to be the pack leader.”

And do you know what creates neurotic behaviour in a dog? A dog trying to lead a human.

So if your dog is neurotic, it’s got nothing to do with your dog and everything to do with the fact that it doesn’t trust you. It may jump on your lap, it may lick your face, all right, it might piss on your cornflakes when instead, it should always be walking around calm and relaxed. If a dog is highly strung, it is merely just echoing and demonstrating and reflecting your behaviour.

Cesar Milan says, “I don’t train dogs. I rehabilitate dogs and I train humans”.

And when I work with a business owner, especially if they’ve got a team, they say, “Can you train my team?”.

I’ll rehabilitate your team and I’ll train you. Because your team is for the most part just reflecting your emotional instability.

Humans by nature, they will not trust people who are emotionally unstable. They’ll be your friend. They’ll say nice things to your face. They’ll even say bad things to your face. But if you are emotionally unstable, humans, at a core level, won’t trust you.

Because people who are emotionally unstable, what do they do? Fucking anything!

They’re unpredictable. And human beings see people who are unpredictable as a threat and a danger.

And kids especially see emotionally unstable adults as threatening.

In order to lead, we’ve got to be calm-assertive.

And how you start building self-leadership, self-discipline, and self-motivation in your team, is again through trust.

Like someone who walks a dog who doesn’t know how to walk the dog. They're stiff and that leads to the dog constantly pulling on the lead. Now, when you’re stiff and you’re constantly pulling your dog back, what are you teaching the dog?

You’re teaching the dog to resist you. So when you walk with the dog, the idea of walking your dog is learning how to develop enough trust with the animal so that it’ll walk just beside you, just a little bit behind you and it will follow you.

And to do this, you have to start to institute discipline through teaching the dog through little corrections. You give the dog small nudges so it understands that every time it walks where you don't want it to, it will get a nudge.

And it soon gets used to the leash being relaxed because it knows where to go and then the dog learns to walk in a relaxed manner. It’s the same with kids, and it’s the same with your team.

The team need to be corrected when they exceed a boundary but they need to be corrected in a way that is calm but assertive.

Remember - calm-assertiveness is the key to trust between a leader and their team.