Seth Dobbs (he/him): Do you feel ready to take the next step in your leadership journey? Are you daunted by the challenges in front of you? Are you uncertain even What’s next for you? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs and this is the Principle Driven Leadership Podcast where I share principles of leadership, along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be.

These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building organizations and in coaching others to become leaders themselves. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential for helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact.

And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results. And leadership is a journey. But what does that really mean? I’m gonna wrap up this season with a more personal story, or maybe more specifically two personal stories. One about a physical journey that I’ve taken that can serve as a metaphorical framework for my leadership journey.

Leadership is a journey of improving yourself and improving others, of creating a vision, of setting out to reach outcomes, reaching them, and then moving on to what’s next. So I’ll start this by saying I really enjoy hiking. I grew up in the Midwest and I did a lot of hiking in Wisconsin. I also love the mountains, the beauty of the air, the vistas, all of that to me is just mental and emotional sustenance.

And so more recently in my life, I’ve managed to combine the love of hiking and mountains, and I’ve spent a lot of time hiking various trails in the front range of Colorado. So I’m gonna talk a little bit about my experiences in doing that and then relate it back to. Lessons on developing as a leader.

So let’s start by talking about Fourteeners. A fourteener is a mountain peak that exceeds 14,000 feet in height or an elevation, and there are more than 50 fourteeners in Colorado. Now, to be clear, when someone talks about doing a fourteener, they’re not ascending all 14,000 feet. Typically, fourteeners can can have an ascent of 1500 to several thousand feet and can cover a pretty wide range of mileage and length.

So what makes a 14 or so special? There’s a couple key things at, at least to me in my experience, first, that takes you well above the tree line. Now there’s nuanced details, but simply put, the tree line is the altitude past which trees can’t grow. And it varies by climate. In Colorado, we’re talking about an alpine tree line, a point past which trees can’t grow because cold and snow pack, soil quality, high winds, things like that become the limiting factors to growth.

In Colorado, the tree line is roughly 11,500 feet. But just for a point of reference, it’s actually only 7,200 feet in the Swiss Alps. But this means in the front range of Colorado on a fourteener, you actually have a lengthy part of the journey without any tree based protection from the elements.

Second, and perhaps more significantly is the oxygen, or rather the lack of oxygen starting at around 8,000 feet. The amount of oxygen in the air is reduced enough to actually risk altitude sickness, especially if you’re on a rapid ascent where you don’t take the time to AC acclimate. Now living near the mountains at a high enough altitude certainly helps, but at 14,000 feet at the peak, the air has 43% less oxygen than at sea level.

And because of the reduced air pressure at high altitude, the volume of air you breathe into your lungs contains less oxygen molecules in each breath. And because of this, this can lead to symptoms including. Fast breathing, headache, vomiting, sleeplessness, loss of appetite. Now, hearing this, you might ask why, and honestly, I’m asking myself in hindsight as I did the research to really understand all these statistics, but I’ll say even in high hindsight, for me, it’s a sheer joy.

And there are moments absolutely that were, that are rough, but I love it. I love being in the wilderness. I love the air depleted as the oxygen is and the views at the top of even less high peaks, Just bring me indescribable joy. I’ve slogged slowly up a glacial field with a frigid wind blowing down on me and laughed and teared up and decided I might not make that particular journey again.

But it’s worth it to me. I think there’s an effect similar to the so-called runner’s high. The endorphins kick in and I just feel great even when I’m exhausted. So with all that, getting to 14,000 feet doing a fourteener seemed like a great challenge for me to tackle. That would bring just real pleasure.

Now, there were many challenges in getting ready for this, nevermind the climb itself to start with. I will say I am not what you would call the epitome of fitness. Been around a bit and throughout my life I’ve gone in and out plenty of times of being in what some might consider good shape. Also, as I mentioned, most of my hiking experience was in the Midwest, and that might get you in a scent of a few hundred feet, but not thousands and all of it near enough to sea level to not make any real difference in kind of the ecosystem and the oxygen.

Also, the distances of many trails were shorter than a typical fourteener, but that was as much my choice. There’s ample opportunities for long hikes. I just didn’t always avail myself of those. All of that together means the first challenge I had to deal with was training for the distance and the sometimes very steep climbs.

Also, much of the hiking in the front range of Colorado is far from any kind of real services, bathrooms and water and things like that. And a fourteener will typically take you through several different sort of climates and zones. And so this means you need to be really prepared the food, water, both for sustenance and for countering al altitude sickness, first aid maps, layers of clothing, compass, other supplies and survival gear, which means you need to carry all of it.

And that brings me to my own significant challenge. I have a chronic pain condition that essentially means I can’t wear a backpack very long on bad days, very long. Can be measured in minutes, on better days, quite a bit longer, but not enough for me to ever feel confident in a long hike and carrying a backpack that whole way.

I. Now the first challenges were around strength and endurance, and those could be met with training and I’ll discuss that soon. But my physical limitation was a huge potential setback. Now, my hiking companions, which I’ll also introduce shortly, said they’d be happy to carry whatever I needed for me, but I couldn’t let them do that.

There’s some mutual support in hiking and other wilderness stuff that I think is good, but if I couldn’t handle the basics for myself, my own food and clothing, I didn’t think I should go on that hike, I’d actually potentially put us all at risk if I couldn’t take care of enough of myself. Now, fortunately, along the way, I took a survival training course and the instructor who is the highest level certification in all things wilderness survival and well-versed in equipment, recommended a couple specific lumbar packs that could carry a lot, and so lumbar.

So it wraps around your waist and actually puts all the weight and pressure down on, on your hip bones and things like that rather than having to put it on your shoulders where. I have STR problems, and so now I have a couple lumbar packs that are amazing. I can barely feel the weight even when they’re heavily loaded.

I feel more mobile than I’ve ever did with a backpack, and now you can spot me even running through airports, wearing this thing, carrying all my computers and stuff like that. So, as I said, I didn’t take this journey alone. I didn’t even train for it alone. I was accompanied by my two adult children, both in their early mid twenties.

Now my son is the most experienced outdoors person of the three of us. He’s an Eagle Scout. He’s certified in field medicine, a kayak guy, a rock climbing guide, and he’s done around a dozen fourteeners prior to helping me on this journey. My daughter, who was a gold award, Girl Scout, but has far less of the outdoor experience of my son.

However, at the time of our training, she was by far the fittest of the three of us. She had the speed, the energy, and the eagerness. I. Now I was clearly neither the fittest, in fact, the least fit, nor was I the most knowledgeable, although I, I probably knew more hiking techniques and such than my daughter did.

But I had a different set of strengths. The most mental endurance and adaptability I. So now in spite of these differences, and actually in fact maybe because of them, we were highly compatible hiking team and on top of that, we’re all equally prone to comfortable silence on the trail. All pretty willing to just take in the beauty around us, pause at places to enjoy the view and look at nature and things like that.

And we all wanted to achieve this together as a team. Yeah, we had a unified vision of what we wanted to achieve. And in the hike, we’re able to give each other space for our strengths and weaknesses. My daughter’s fitness and her drive was inspirational. My son’s knowledge was invaluable and gave me far more confidence in embarking on all of this.

And my mental endurance and patience could help soothe their frustrations on the hike, could help counter their impatience with setbacks and get us realigned and refocused on the right things. So we trained, and actually my son did a fabulous job setting up a training program for us to build three things, our distance endurance, our ascent strength and adaptation to lower oxygen.

And it was great. It was a really well thought out, great program. And we didn’t do every part of it. We didn’t do it perfectly. We didn’t do it, execute it exactly as planned. And it was prolonged for various reasons, including someone getting an injury along the way and stuff like that.

Nonetheless, we got exposed to all three and we learned a lot along the way. We built skills and we developed principles on how to hike, on how to address, on how to recognize when we had problems and how to recognize when something was just not important, but maybe a little bit of discomfort. Learn things about proper stride and positioning while ascending and descending, handling rock, scrambles, feet position on gravely slopes.

All sorts of stuff like that. And we learned each of our own limitations and each others, and we became more in tune with our bodies and the signals of when we had to stop and how to deal with the various effects of fatigue and lower oxygen. And we learned about false summits. These are lesser peaks along the way that can fool you into thinking you’re done, when in reality there’s a lot more hike just out of you that it’s hiking.

And that’s important because hiking is both a physical and a mental activity. And so we learned to lean on each other’s strengths physically and mentally to overcome any of the challenges we face while hiking and even in our training. And so after many weeks of that, it was fourteener time and actually again a little later in the season than we’d initially planned.

But we did it. It was strenuous. Probably I will just say one of the hardest physical things that I’ve ever done. And as it turned out, we actually had to do a higher class fourteener than we had planned to due to it being later in the season. And weather. Yes, not all fourteeners are created equal.

There are actually. Five classes requiring greater technical skills essentially as you progress in class. And so we ended up doing a class two instead of a class one, which I didn’t know until after the fact, which was probably a good mental trick on my son’s part to not tell me. So I didn’t overthink it.

Nonetheless, it was grueling and it took teamwork to get to the top. We would stop to catch our breath along the way, and for me, it would come back quickly for all of us, but as soon as we started moving, I’d lose my breath again. And so you just sort of mentally adapt to that. Then we made it to the top and.

It was worth it. It was amazing. Just simply amazing. Awe-inspiring. I probably had a tear or two of joy when I reached the summit and we sat down, we took in the view, we ate some sandwiches, drank stuff, got re-energized, all that stuff as we took it in. But we reached the top, yet we weren’t done.

We had to get back down. We couldn’t stay up there forever. And in some ways, most of the hikes we did in training going down way faster than coming up. And this one, at least for me, it was even harder at parts than going up because of the steep rock scramble and me being the least fit. Because of that, there was parts where I actually slid down on my butt, because we were near the edge.

It was icy. I didn’t wanna fall off. And, true confession ripped my pants along the way, which I didn’t realize till I got home. Anyway, I did make it back down and it was it best day ever. It was just really, really great and so much fun to do it with the two of them. And now there’s only about 57 or so fourteeners left for me to do in Colorado, although I actually say fewer ’cause there are some that I will probably never be physically capable of achieving.

But let’s bring it back to leadership. It’s a journey and it’s one that affords opportunities to keep learning and growing and getting better. One that can be challenging, it can be rife with difficulty and the need to overcome adversity. Just like training for that hike and doing the hike. And so there’s six things that I learned from my journey to a fourteener that I feel like apply to leadership.

First, we all went on the same journey, yet we all went on a different one. We each had different things come easy and hard with different motivations, different experiences that got us to that trail. As leaders, we’re all different. We’re in different stages of readiness with different paths, different challenges, different desires and purposes, backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, and you don’t know what’s come easy or with difficulty to the people around you, nor the reverse.

But principles can help guide you and the people around you better than fully trying to model someone else’s behavior. Regardless of how different your journey or how same it is, using the principles rather than exact modeling will help you achieve that journey. Second, sometimes you have to overcome difficulty to get where you wanna be.

Now, in spite of my physical limitations, I was able to figure out how to overcome them to achieve something I really wanted, and the joy of the journey was worth it. As a leader, I’ve also taken on things that are difficult for me. I am by nature, a very social introvert, very social, but nonetheless an introvert.

Long interactions with people can tire me out and I can suffer sometimes from fairly deep social anxiety. Yet I knowingly took on a path that requires constant interaction with people. ’cause I love to help other people. The joy of it is worth it to me. And so I’ve learned to handle some of my personal challenges in being a leader in order to reach the outcomes that I wanted to reach for myself and for others.

Third, there’s always something to learn from everyone around you. My son, my daughter and I, we all learned along the way from each other and from experience. I’m insatiably curious, and I think this is a really important part of leadership. I’m always looking to learn to improve, to know something more, to get something better, and I’d look for what I can learn from people of all ages, much younger than me, with different backgrounds and different experiences, much older.

Again, getting all that kind of different input. I don’t see myself as just a bestow of wisdom. As a leader, I actually seek new insights from everyone I encounter to better understand the world around me. Fourth, know what you can do yourself. Surround with support. I couldn’t have done that 14 or without surrounding myself with good support, very much so.

Same goes for leadership. I’m strong as a leader, in part because I know my weaknesses and I’m not afraid of them. I surround myself with a team that can help me compensate, that can compliment where I need it, help me achieve more together than I could just by myself. Fifth, achieve goals through small steps.

We developed various skills and learned principles along the way to the fourteener to help us succeed at it. And so it goes with leadership. I’ve learned so many little things along the way through observation, through mistakes, through analyzing why things succeeded or failed. Much of that experience has shaped the provi principles I’ve developed along the way, and I’ve shared in some of these podcasts, but all a small step at a time and six, continually evolve your vision of yourself.

Hiking and life is full of false summits. You can feel you’ve made it only to be hit with another challenge. And even when you reach a goal, you should then evolve your goals instead of just becoming self satisfied. What’s next? Certainly celebrate your achievements, but then continually revise your vision, who you wanna be, where you wanna head, and overcome whatever gets in the way of that next goal.

Now I’ll observe that much like getting to high altitude. The stress of leadership at its worst can lead to symptoms including fast breathing, headache, vomiting, sleeplessness, loss of appetite. And again, one might wonder why, but just like with the hike, with leadership, you can train to handle all of this, even prevented much of the time, know how to work through it when needed.

Again in leadership. For me, it’s worth it. My joy of helping others drives me forward. Knowing I’m not alone on the journey is a big help. And the principle driven leadership approach I’ve developed along the way helps give me the tools, the principles, the guardrails to really avoid most of those symptoms.

So with that, I want you to think about where do you hope your leadership journey will take you next? What challenges do you need to overcome to get there? What support do you need on your journey? What’s driving you forward and what can you do today to take that next step? I hope you’ve enjoyed this season.

Please subscribe, share with your friends. I look forward to continuing our journey together next season.