Episode Scott Peltin

Scott Pelton is a co-founder and chief catalyst of Tignum, a company focused on sustainable human performance. He has worked with athletes and military personnel to help them develop their performance mindset skills. Scott's passion for leadership began during his time as a firefighter, where he started to observe and learn from the leaders around him. He carried around note cards to reflect on his experiences and shape his own leadership style. Over time, he became a battalion and division chief in the fire department. Eventually, Scott realized his true passion was coaching others and helping them reach their potential. This led him to co-found Tignum with his partner Yogi Ripple. Scott's journey highlights the importance of embracing self-doubt as an opportunity for growth. In the fire service, leadership is about preparing and training your team to handle high-risk situations. It's about creating a culture of improvement and recognizing areas for growth. Lead long and prosper. The Spellcast for joy in leadership. Experiences, tips, and valuable hacks for all those who want to lead with joy. Hello, dear Spellcast friends. We are back again for the next new episode of our Spellcast. Today we have a very, very special guest. His name is Scott Pelton, and I will introduce Scott in a second. But let me first say hello to my co-interview partner, Sabine, and our Spellcaster today is Hans-Joachim. Scott Pelton is the co-founder and chief catalyst of Tignum, the world leader in sustainable human performance in the business world. He is the co-author of Be More and Think, Float, and Swim. Scott has worked with professional Olympic college and high school athletes, as well as the most elite special operations operators in the US military to help them develop their performance mindset skills. He coaches many top CEOs, C-level executives, and leaders around the world to help them make the greatest impact possible at both work and home. Scott's unique, authentic, and practical approach helps his clients break through their barriers and achieve potential they didn't know they possessed. Prior to founding Tignum in 2005, Scott worked as a frontline firefighter and captain, later leading his crews as a battalion and division chief in the Phoenix Fire Department. During his 25 years in the fire service, he developed many high performance and leadership programs for leaders and teams whose high performance under stress was absolutely non-negotiable. Welcome, Scott. Thank you. It's great to be here. It is great to have you. And I have to say, just reading your biography already gives me a chill because there is a lot in your own story. Before we go into the story that you are teaching others these days, maybe can we hear a little bit about your journey as a leader? And that's obviously what we are after here. How did you become who you are today? And we do want to know more about your firefighter story and what that meant in terms of developing your leadership skills. Can you give us a little bit of an insight into your own journey first? Absolutely. Thank you for that great introduction. I will say that I was going to university, to college, and studying kinesiology. So it was all about biomechanics and movement. It was all about human performance. And I stumbled upon the fire service, which just kind of got my interest a little bit. And what I realized is it awoken in me this passion that I had to make an impact in the world. And realizing that it was one thing to be a high performer in sport, but when you could be a high performer as part of your occupation, where you could actually make a difference in people's lives, where they call you on the worst day they've ever had, that really just excited me. And I'll be honest with you, I had no ambition to be a leader in the fire service. I just wanted to be a firefighter. And so it was no power search for me or nothing like that. What it really was, was I started to realize that I was depending on other people to make decisions for me. And as I started to watch it, I thought, you know, I can make those decisions. And I think I can do as good of a job. And I started studying the people that were leading me. And I also started to realize that if my true passion was impact, that it wasn't just running into a burning building, it was also influencing those on the team, and trying to enhance their capabilities and help them grow. And I had some unique skills because of my education around exercise physiology, performance psychology, and things like that. So how could I weave these into being a leader? And so I did something that was really, I think now odd, but it turned out to be brilliant. I started carrying around little three by five note cards in my pocket. And when I would go on a call or whatever, I would come back and write down what did I learn from that call? And partly what I would learn is, how did my leader lead this incident? How did they lead the team? And how might I do it different if I had that opportunity? Now, we all know that's a lot easier to do when you're, it's a lot easier to look at someone else do it and in hindsight, have an opinion about it than it is to do it yourself. But what I realized over time was I was starting to shape my own self image as the leader I wanted to be. And that led then to eventually, obviously, in the fire department, we have promotional exams, taking the test and you one of the things that you have is a assessment center, an interview. And what I realized without realizing at the moment, was I was tapping into 150, 250, whatever cards of experiences that I had lived in my own brain that I had visualized. And I had started to shape who I wanted to be as a leader and the impact I wanted to make. And my point being there that I started to get excited about what leadership meant. Because it didn't mean that I had to be always the expert. It definitely didn't mean that I was full of self belief, because I had tons of self doubt. You know, you're a young person leading people into a fire. And so many times, those people are older than you. And many times, they've been on the fire department longer than you. So, you know, completely irrespective of that, they still look to me to guide them. And so that took me on a journey that eventually I became a battalion chief, which means now you're running multiple stations and big incidents, and then a division chief where you're running sections of the fire department. And that led me somewhere that I never thought it would go, which was I realized that if I looked at everything that I did in life, it was all about coaching others. And even from the time I was in the university wanting to be a strength and conditioning coach, a performance coach for athletes, I had essentially become a leader in the fire service whose goal was to coach everybody. And then I met my partner Yogi Ripple, who had the idea of Tignam, a little bit born from the tragedy of his father retiring, getting diagnosed with cancer, passing away a year later. So it came from a little bit of that kind of bad experience of wanting to prevent that in other leaders. And then we met at a place called Athletes Performance that trained world class athletes. And we started sharing ideas. And I shared with him some of the way that I was approaching developing leaders in the fire service. He shared with me his experience, having run a business himself, and what he wanted to do. And there we came up with the idea of what Tignam should be. I will tell you, it was interesting, because, you know, in the beginning, I we had started Tignam. And I would fly most of our our jobs were in Europe, I would fly and deliver a program and do coaching on the phone. But I was still a firefighter, I was still a division chief in the fire department. And then one day, I thought, why am I doing this? And I realized that I was really afraid. It was all based on an insecurity, I had the security of the fire department. I had a job that was paying me, I had health benefits. But to be honest, I felt like I had kind of done my time there. And I was ready to do something new. And I happened to have at the time a driver because when you're commanding incidents, you have a driver is called a field incident technician that helps you. And he asked me a question, how did I move to Phoenix, from Washington, DC. And I was telling him the story of, you know, hearing this fire chief talk and how it inspired me and loading up a vehicle and driving across the country to a place I had never been. And it started to almost get the hair on the back of my neck up. And I realized, where's that Scott, the Scott that would be bold enough to want to take this big risk? And what am I afraid of? And I told the guys, Frank, get in the car, we're going down to administration. And I literally put in my retirement papers. And two weeks later, I was all in on Tignam. And so what I realized, and we can talk about this a little more and more, because I think this is a mindset thing that I've become super passionate about. We all face self doubt. And self doubt is not does not mean that we're done. And self doubt is a moment that we either can run from or we can embrace. And when we embrace it, we get a huge opportunity to grow and learn. And that was kind of what happened to me. And that began this journey then of Tignam. And what we do today. And before we go into Tignam, which in itself is a story to tell, maybe going back to your firefighting experience, you're talking about self doubt, which I know is a deep passion of yours. Can you explain us the situation? In a fire, you're leading other people and you're responsible for their lives. How do you feel in that moment? Or can you share a story maybe also where you had this moment and you were standing in front of this major crisis, you had to rescue somebody? How does self doubt feel in that moment? Or how do you overcome it? Yeah, it's a great question. Well, to be fair, what you have to understand is, it's something we train on all the time. So we take a lot of what most people would see as raw courage. And we actually put it into processes and procedures. So you practice high risk things over and over, and then they're not high risk to us. So what looks like a typical fire, where everyone's running out of the building, and you're running in, and they think that's a little insane. It's not insane to you, because it's what you've prepared for and trained. So really, where leadership has its biggest impact there is the type of the way that you engage your crews to want to train, and to want to improve and to recognize where they may be deficient, but where you can close gaps and improve and create higher performance. And that's actually one of the things that I learned to love about leadership, is that it's not about recognizing where people fall short and then criticizing them or documenting it or whatever. It's actually finding where they fall short and then helping them close those gaps by developing opportunities for them to grow. And so they transform them to the fire ground, right? So I do remember an incident where and I had a lot of young firefighters come through my station because it was a training station. And I had an opportunity where we pulled up on this fire as an apartment fire on the second story. Flames were shooting out of the off the balcony. One of my guys who was the newest guy was really excited, which it's hard for people to understand how your adrenaline hijacks everything in your system at those moments, even though you've trained. And I remember just taking one moment before we went in. And I just said, Okay, let's take a couple breaths. Let's calm down. We're going to go into the front door, we're going to make a right, stay on my heels. We're going to get to the seas of fire. I want us to spread out and search the living room when we get in. Because you learn even on the outside looking of where how a building is probably set up. I'll never forget just seeing the calmness come over this firefighter. And we talked about it afterwards. And he said, No one has ever just created a calm moment right before. I've always been caught up in the chaos. And you were the first one who just calmed us down. And then it seemed easy. We just went in, went to the right, found the seat of the fire, put water on the fire, spread out, search the building, no one was in there. Back, back out, everything went smooth. And so there is this idea of partially role modeling. But also there is this part of your job as a leader is to engage people in the moment and create the state that you need for them to be their best. Thank you, Scott, for this great example. I want to go a bit deeper in your leadership style, because you showed us that you had a very structured way to find your own leadership strategy. You told us about these cards and examples where you collect experiences and then you had your own style. So two questions. Can you describe your own style? And how do you teach this to younger people or not so experienced people today? They didn't have the idea to write down what was a good example or a bad one to create in a structured way, an old leadership style. So what do you recommend to these people who had not this huge experience to find the best way to be a leader? Yeah, it's such a great question, because you could probably also develop your own style, but it's your own, but it's ineffective. So there could be the danger of that. So I want to, I want to start with saying my job and my curiosity, and curiosity is probably the best word, was always around how to be the most effective leader. So it wasn't just me doing it my way. It was actually, what would effective be? And so I put myself on the end user side and said, is this leader bringing out the best in me? Is this leader inspiring me to want to grow and be better? Or is this leader just being an authoritative or disciplinarian, and, and just following the book, or as we would say, ticking the boxes. So I realized, for me, I didn't want to be a box ticker. I wanted, it wasn't about just rules, because rules have a place, but it actually was about humans. And so I wanted to be a very human centric leader. I wanted to be very authentic. I wanted to be very clear in my expectations. So I really wanted to be able to paint a picture for everyone that I led about what, what we needed to do as a team. And that wasn't about me. That was about us. And in that, like, often when I'm coaching executives now, you know, and I'll talk to their admins very commonly, and I'll ask their admin, how do you see your, your role? And they'll say, my role is to make my, my boss's job easier or life easier. And I'll say, no, that's not your role at all. Your role is to multiply your boss's impact. So you actually are an impact partner. And that's also the way I've always seen my job as a leader. My job is actually to make the biggest impact on our customers, our culture, our team. And therefore, to be honest, it wasn't about my style, it was what style is needed to do that. Because I'm sure, well, they're definitely, when you're running into a burning building is that it is not a democracy type of leadership. You don't take many votes. But in the fire station, we vote on everything. What do we want to eat today? What type of drill do we want to do today? What do we want to do for physical fitness today? I don't care. I'm not going to dictate that. There are captains that do dictate it. I decided that wasn't mine. So, so that was cool to be able to show people, here, we're totally open democracy. Here, we're not. We get into a fire. If I say it, we do it. Unless you see or feel something that you think I'm missing, which is another big thing that many leaders miss. In taking control and command, they miss that I can't see everything. That person on the back of the hose line sometimes sees something that I miss. And if they don't raise their hand or tap me on the shoulder and say, Scott, we have a problem here, then we have a problem. And firefighters die because of that all the time. So it is a very kind of fluid type of leadership. I'd say always built around is it being effective or is it not. And each individual that you coach or lead might require something different. We could talk forever, I guess about that part of your life. But we want to transition in your own transition, which you described already. You knew at some point the resignation needs to come. I want to move on. I want to create this new thing called Tignum. Can you describe a little bit what was going on there for you personally first, and then also what the idea of Tignum is and how you are using it today to help and coach some of the most senior C-suites in the world? Yeah, so we developed this program. And the first one we delivered was IMD Business School. And it was an executive MBA program. There were 50 people there from 26 different countries. And we introduced the concept of sustainable high performance. And quickly what we saw was there was a big need for it. People needed more resilience. People needed more energy. People needed more mental agility to be able to connect dots and think broader and be more curious and innovative. And people needed more stamina because they weren't making it to the end of the project. They were falling short. And so we realized that our message and our tools were really useful. In all honesty, if I look back at that, because that was 2005, I'm almost embarrassed at what our methodology and strategies were then compared to where they are now, which is part of the lesson, right, that we have to always grow and evolve. There's nothing that lasts over time. So that became really, really important. At the same time, to be brutally honest, I didn't know anything about business. So I knew more about leadership than I thought I knew because I had led people and been in the fire department. But to me, business was like a foreign thing. I've never had to sell stuff. I never had to do some of the stuff that my clients were doing. But quickly what I realized was the part that I was good at and that Tignam focused on was the human. So we are not business strategy coaches. There's tons of those that can help someone develop their strategy. Most of my clients have MBAs or have gone to big universities. They're in think-takes or some type of group where they share our strategic ideas. What they lack is the personal readiness. They lack the ability to bring their full talent to work every day and to recognize where their critical moments are in their day, where they can multiply their impact. So all of our strategies are around, how do you bring things like mindset, nutrition, movement, recovery to get rid of your energy leaks? Because we live in a world right now where you can describe it as poly-crisis or crisis loop, where it's one after another after another, which you do see deters young people from wanting to be leaders. They look at that and go, that looks horrible. But actually, it can also be very exciting. We often talk about, we help people with extreme jobs get stronger. In 2006, Harvard Business Review published an article on extreme jobs, where I have to show up at my best all day, all the time, where I'm available to customers and my team, sometimes 24-7, but long hours, where I want to be the best person at home as well as at work, where I think about work even when I'm off work. All these things. And we know now that a lot of people have these extreme jobs. And at first, when you hear that, it's like a kick in the gut, you think, Oh, my God, that's horrible. But then when I think of like an extreme athlete, like a big wave surfer, or skier, that feeling you have when you're up on a black diamond, and you make that turn and you head down the mountain, it's extreme. And the risk can be high. But the reward, the feeling, the satisfaction, the challenging your skill level is incredible. And you can't get that anywhere else. And so that became a big part of our passion is to help people reframe and to see that side also, and to see how much they grow along the way, which by the way, is one of the keys to overcoming self doubt. Given that journey and where you are now, we talked about 2005, 2006, then you have developed again, your own journey, you've seen many, many, many other people now going through their own leadership journeys. What is it that you have extracted for yourself, for your own leadership? But also, what are you now coaching others, especially the younger generation? I think number one, and I think the younger generation really resonates with this, you cannot sacrifice yourself along this journey, you are the commodity that adds value and that makes the impact. So you have to develop habits and invest in your on one side well being, but I'm going to take it all the way to your performance. And part of performance is getting the right recovery, and making sure that you can constantly show up at your best. And we know that we need recovery from three physical fatigue, cognitive fatigue, and emotional fatigue. And you need to learn skills and tools to do that. Number two is that self doubt is something that you have to learn to recognize, and to embrace, and then to use it as a bridge to keep building self belief. Because one of the myths of self doubt is that one day I'm going to get good enough and it's going to go away. That's not going to happen. In fact, the opposite happens. The better you get, the smarter people you work with, more self doubt, the better you get, the harder the problems you face, you've earned it, more self doubt, the higher the role you take, the more self doubt you have, because you've never been at that level. And so if you think that you're going to somewhere get to where you no longer have self doubt, you're fooled. So start learning to embrace it. And then start tapping into, and I alluded to it a little bit, tap into your self belief bank. When did I face self doubt? And I overcame it? What did I do? What was the payoff for that? What were the unique things that I learned from that experience? Well, as you start to build your self belief bank, so I have a lot of my leaders, all my athletes, keep leaders, keep learning journals. And every week they write down what did I learn this week? Sometimes they do it every day at some stages, especially when they're in very difficult, challenging times. And what they start to look at is, oh my gosh, look at how far I've come. And at the moment that I put in my retirement papers, one of the things that I realized, I faced self doubt many times and overcome it. I've developed huge skills that will add value to this next stage of my life. I'm afraid right now, but that's okay. And that actually might be the thrill of going. So I think this, you know, learning skills to manage yourself down and build authentic self belief, learning that sometimes you don't, many times, maybe all the time, you don't need to be perfect. There is no perfect. There's no perfect leader. There's no perfect employee. There's no perfect husband or wife, or father or mother or kid. And so give up that and say, I'm on this journey to just get a little bit better. And become curious. I think curiosity would be my next advice, because it's so easy. It's really bizarre. We live in a world where you can type in a chat GPT, or Google, any question and find tons of answers. And yet, we tend to get less and less curious, we tend to migrate towards people who think just like us. And we stop asking great questions that open up our world. And it's one of the things I love, like right now, we're working with Starbucks, this idea that Starbucks has, which is a place. So you think of coffee, oh, it's a coffee shop. But it's really their vision is a place where people can come and have meaningful conversations and change the world. And that's actually we all have that ability to create meaningful conversations and change the world. Before we bring in Hans-Joachim to summarize this amazing conversation, or actually your your story, what's coming up for you next? How does your leadership journey continue? Yeah, so we just started something called the bold circle. So around this idea, our four values of our company are impact, innovation, fun and freedom. And so we paused a little bit and said, what would be the funnest thing we could do that would make the biggest impact to be innovative. And we created a thing called the bold circle. And the bold circle is a place where people who want to do bold things in their life, some of those are personal. Like we have a guy who is overcoming Guillain-Barre syndrome, which is a very painful autoimmune thing where your body attacks its own myelin sheath on your nerve cells, and you become paralyzed. So his bold journey is his recovery from GBS, which is really cool. We have another person, Deb Bubb, who was the chief HR officer of Optum. So a huge 50, $60 billion company left and started a new company called 20 Summers, which is a thing for leaders where you ask the question, if you only had 20 Summers left in your life, what would you want to do? And it taps into how you use art and creativity. And so this bold circle, I think, is one of the things we're really passionate about, how we can grow this. So it's, you know, it's a discussion, it's a networking, it's a infusing sustainable human performance strategies to help those people achieve their boldness and to do these bold projects. So I think that's what's next for us. So Hans-Joachim, how do you summarize all of this? Thank you very much. It was great and wonderful to listen on our podcast, Lead Long and Prosper. And I think that fits already to something like you said, we would like to have sustainable performance. And sustainable means the body is relevant. You started actually with the body. You know, you started with technology to understand how the body is the structure who holds our head. You know, what I took down is more than to recover now, but chance and choices, I like that word, you know, it's not about chances, it's about choices. And your purpose, the purpose is impact. It doesn't matter how. Your story comes from a high-risk organization. And I thought, you know, do we have low-risk organization these days? So actually, we are living in a world of high risk. Another thing which was in the line of that was you need self-doubt. If you are too sure, you should ask yourself, am I reluctant or am I not aware enough? You have to practice. You have to practice high risk. I liked very much your note card to reflect what I have learned, what I have learned. I think that is, that's sort of two things. You reflect what you did and learned and you have a compendium of things to move back if something challenging comes. So like Walt Whitman said, you know, oh, my cap, right? So in the moment where you have high risk, everybody's looking at you and you have to stand that. In a nutshell, curiosity, choice and embrace things. Thank you, Hans-Joachim. And as always in our spokest, our guest has the last word. Scott, what takeaway do you want to give to our listeners? And what's your own takeaway from this half hour with us? Yeah, this is an honor for me because I speak with a lot of leaders that are on the other side of their career. And you guys have focused a lot on new and young leaders. And I love that. And the world needs you. The world is absent of the next generation of leaders and leadership. So please engage even on the smallest level and realize that you have something to give. So be curious and become a leader. This was your Spellcast. Lead long and prosper with Sabine Schmitzroth, Achim Glückebaum and Hans-Joachim Spreng. Thank you for being with us and see you next time.