Something to Give: A Journey to Become A Leader Worth Following

By Brigham Dickinson

True leadership is not about winning. It's about the people you bring with you to the finish line.

Congratulations! Your outstanding performance in the workplace has earned you the right to lead others because you have proven yourself in the trenches.

And therein lies the paradox. Instead of continuing to

• Language: English
• Publisher: Power Selling Pros
• Release date: Sep 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798987673508

Brigham Dickinson

Brigham Dickinson works hard to live by faith, such as that found in the Atonement of Jesus Christ. He's married to his dearest friend, Alicia Dickinson, and they have four incredible kids together and one beautiful granddaughter so far. Brigham is owner and founder of Power Selling Pros (powersellingpros.com), the company that powers your customer experience with call handling coaching and training for thousands of companies in the home service industry. He's also co-owner of Booked (bookedbypsp.com), a night answering service for hundreds of companies in the home service industry and a co-owner of Athlecare (athlecare.com), a sports recovery company for athletes that has two locations in Utah with more locations planned. Brigham continues to personally consult and train people working for companies throughout the home service industry.

Book preview

PURPOSE

The true purpose of a leader is to have something to give your followers. Understanding and becoming that leader makes you someone worth following.

MARCH 16, 2019, 7:00 a.m., the foothills outside of San Jose, California. I stood shirtless against a brisk wind that made me shiver, then shake, as I waited for the Spartan Race to begin.

Breathe, Brigham. Just breathe.

I worked my way to a spot near the front to stay ahead of the pack at the starting line and ended up next to a group of guys who all seemed to know each other. Their energy was palpable and contagious, their interaction jubilant. Fist bumps. High fives and handshakes that often converted into brief bro-hugs and firm pats on the back. Some dropped to one knee and prayed, but mostly they shouted, growled, and chest pounded. It was fun to watch their exuberance—and a little intimidating. All these men were around my age yet had chiseled bodies and looked to be in the best shape of their lives. Many had surely made the podium at one time or another. Were any of them accountable to anything but the race? Were any of them like me: married with four kids and the owner of established businesses with dozens of employees? I didn’t know. All I knew, as juvenile as it sounds, is that they were the Spartan popular kids, and I wanted to be popular, too. I had no thoughts of What are you doing here, Brigham? Grow up! This was me grown up. I wasn’t there to watch them and pretend I belonged. I was there to compete and be one of them on the podium. I wanted to win.

Something to Prove

Winning hadn’t been my desire before this Spartan Race. I’d done obstacle races for years but mostly as a hobby—to play and have fun. I never expected or even tried to win any medals. In fact, I felt lucky to finish my first race. I certainly wasn’t trying to win anything when I participated in the 2018 Spartan World Championship in Squaw Valley, California. Squaw Valley was brutal: thousands of feet of elevation gain (the total amount you climb in a race) over thirteen miles and more than 30 obstacles. When I took seventh overall in the open heat, I couldn’t help but wonder how much faster I could be if I trained to become a more proficient racer. I bought a 2019 Spartan season pass and signed up for obstacle course races all over the country. I hired a fitness coach and a nutritionist and spent the rest of 2018 and the start of 2019 running trail miles and working out in the gym five to six days a week.

The San Jose race was the first race I’d entered since I started training. I’d signed up for an age group heat: Men 40 to 44. These heats are more competitive than the open heats I’d raced in before and physically more demanding if only for the mandatory 30 burpees (squat thrusts with a stand between reps) racers must do when they fail an obstacle. In the open heats, it didn’t seem to matter whether you did your 30 burpees or not. In the age group heats, each one was counted off and there were strict guidelines on how each was to be done.

I failed my Achilles’ heel obstacle, the spear throw, in San Jose, but despite the burpees I had to do, I still ended up taking 10th in my age group and 50th overall. This was an incredible result. But whatever satisfaction I had was soon replaced by a deeply unsatisfying feeling of failure—I’d lost to all the popular kids. I resolved to not stop working until I reached the podium alongside and ahead of those guys. I would train as hard as I assumed they did. I needed to prove I could win. That became my goal for the rest of 2019.

I almost reached that goal out of the gate, taking fourth in the March 2019 Las Vegas Spartan Sprint. As I went back through each part of the race in my mind, I analyzed every facet of my performance, second-guessing my decisions and looking for specific reasons why I came this close to the podium. The conclusions were always the same: I needed to get faster and stronger. I needed to eat better and train harder. But it didn’t change my results much. The next five Spartan Races I finished off the podium. Heading into the August 2019 Hawaii Spartan Beast, I’d failed to reach my goal and prove anything other than I could lose.

Something to Give

Kaneohe, Hawaii, August 17, 2019. Eighty-seven degrees and rainy isn’t great for beach-going, but it made for a challenging 13-mile Spartan Race through a breathtaking and muddy landscape with almost 3,000 feet of elevation gain. It looked like Jurassic Park, which was appropriate: Kaneohe was where many of the Jurassic Park movies were filmed. But I had more on my mind than the course and my goal that day: This race was doubling as a team-building event for me and six other members of my entrepreneurial forum. Devoted to their families, businesses, and communities—and committed to valuing all people while achieving success—these people motivate me to be the best I can be in business and life. We meet every month to report on our lives and hold each other accountable to our personal, familial, and business ideals. We also take a vacation together each year to connect and strengthen our working relationships. I’d convinced the forum that this year’s vacation should be to compete with me in the Hawaii Spartan. They were all in.

We’d prepared for months together, some more seriously than others, but all of them were aware this was a challenge like no other we had faced as a group. The biggest and strongest of us, Crandal, had lost forty pounds and gotten stronger to prepare, and even he was nervous.

The forum members competed in the open group that started around 10:30 a.m., about two hours after my age group heat at 8:30 a.m. From the get-go, the conditions were brutal. I burned more than 3,000 calories as I raced through the mud and powered through the obstacles and burpees only to finish fourth. Off the podium. Again. But this time I didn’t sulk or start analyzing my failure to reach my goal. I thought about my forum members. Usually, I’m unable to move when I finish a race. This time, I felt alive, driven by a need to get back out there to cheer them on and make sure they finished the race. I grabbed a banana and some fluids before running out to look for them.

I chose to look at the five-mile mark. There, the course ran down the mountainside and looped back around to the top near what was the eight-mile mark. That eight-mile mark was a pivotal moment in the race: Once racers got back up the mountain, they had only five miles remaining with no more steep inclines. I would have the best vantage point from those marks to spot the team on their descents and ascents.

I arrived at the five-mile mark close to 1:00 p.m. and immediately spotted Crandal going down the mountain. He didn’t look good, but he was moving. I told him not to worry, that everything would be fine. I asked if he’d seen any of the other forum members. He said no.

They’re probably ahead of you, then, I said.

Thanks for bringing that up, he replied.

Oops.

I immediately shifted gears and told him I’d be right here waiting for him when he looped back to the top at the eight-mile mark. About an hour after I saw Crandal heading down, I saw the other team members come up. One by one, as the group passed me, I shouted encouragement and reassurance that the hardest part of the race was over. I’m standing on the last steep incline. Just five miles to go! All you have to do now is finish! They all gave me the thumbs up and headed off while I waited for Crandal.

Two-and-a-half hours later, Crandal arrived. He was now six-plus hours into the race, and he was visibly dragging—something I’d never seen him do. His face said he wanted out. I could sense that his will was wavering.

Brigham, I’m done.

Crandal had to know I wasn’t going to let him quit, let alone give him permission to tap out. Those who know me and my work know that I believe that when we say we can’t take it anymore, what we really mean is, we won’t take it anymore. When we say we’re done, we’re really saying we want to be done. It’s a choice we’re making. You can do more than your body says you can. You can do more than your mind says you can. You can even do more than your emotions say you can. It’s just a matter of recognizing that you’re in charge of making your body, mind, and emotions fall in line. I also knew the feeling that awaited Crandal if he stayed in and finished his first race. I told him to keep pushing.

You’re not done. You’re still upright! Your body can go much further than you think. Without testing your limits a little more, you won’t really know your true breaking point!

Upon hearing my words, Crandal’s face said more Thanks for nothing, Brigham! than Thanks for saying that, Brigham! To be clear, I think he wanted to kill me. And he probably would have taken a swing at me if he weren’t more concerned with holding himself up than knocking me down. I kept going: Is your body really done, or is it just your mind? If you’re still upright, you can keep going. You’re calling the shots right now. Dig deep. Find your guts, not a reason to quit … There’s only one way off this course, through the finish line. And we’re finishing together!

Crandal looked at me and nodded. We kept moving forward with me subjecting him to more words of inspiration about overcoming his body’s limits as he pushed through each obstacle. I narrated the course as we ran: Just up through this turn … We’re almost there … Just after that obstacle … We’re almost there … Just around this bend …" After more than two hours of this, Crandal was done with me. He yelled that he was sick of hearing me say we were almost there. But we were. Thirty minutes later, we saw the finish line. Upon hearing the cheers of the other forum members, Crandal broke into a near sprint as he crossed that line.

After he finished, Crandal put his hand on my shoulder but not to stop himself from collapsing. Instead, he looked me in the eye and said, You should know that I never planned to finish this race. He revealed that his plan before the race even started was to call it quits at the eight-mile mark. He finished, he said, because I hadn’t let him quit. Thank you for helping me finish.

Crandal’s words filled me up. Surrounded by him and my forum friends at the finish line, I realized I was part of a group far more significant and meaningful to me than those Spartan popular kids. When my focus turned towards an opportunity to give my time and energy to them, I forgot about proving myself to those other people completely, just as I had forgotten about my exhaustion and my fourth-place finish as well as how I had fallen painfully short of my unfulfilled goal again. At that moment, I experienced a shift in how I thought and felt about my purpose in life and what it was that held back my progression as a leader.

To become a leader worth following, I needed to give up thinking about what I had to prove. Merely winning was not and is not enough for me. Before Hawaii, I mistakenly thought that it was my time and place in a race that would make me happy. In Hawaii, the success of the people I came with and all of us together at the finish line were more important to me than my own time and place. This is what it means to have something to give instead of