251: Multiply Who You Are with David Achata

David Achata, Founder of Achata Coaching, Inc., is driven by his mission to help leaders multiply the best of who they are by fostering self-awareness and intentional growth.

We learn about David’s journey from high-energy workaholic to leadership coach, shaped by personal challenges and a deep desire to help others become healthier, more effective leaders. The guest explains his Four Disciplines of Retreating framework, which includes going away alone, with a guide, with your team, and with your family. David emphasizes the importance of self-reflection, cultivating social resilience, and building strong personal connections to enhance leadership effectiveness.

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Multiply Who You Are with David Achata

Good day, dear listeners Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast and my guest today is David Achata, the Founder of Achata Coaching, Inc., a leadership and team development coach, trainer, facilitator, and speaker. David is also the author of two best-selling books on business leadership, including the latest one, Executive Retreats for Busy Business Leaders. David, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Steve. I’m so excited to be here. I love the energy you’re bringing. I’ll try to keep up with you.

So let’s start with your personal “Why,” because you have a very powerful one. What is it and how do you manifest in your business? What’s your journey that lead to your point of manifesting right in your business?

Yeah, my message, Steve, is that you multiply who you are. So pay attention to that. Do you even know who you are? Typically when we meet people, we ask questions like, what’s your name? What do you do? That kind of thing. But I promise you, if you really want to stump people, ask them a question like, who are you? And see what they say. And so I break that one out at parties every so often and about 60 to 70 percent of time people can’t answer it So my message is know who you are. You’re gonna multiply the best and the worst of who you are and so that’s what my latest project is about but my journey toward the work I do today as a coach and as a consultant, as an author and a speaker is I am the classic overachieving, high-energy, workaholic, can’t-turn-off-my-mind type of person. It was probably seven or eight years ago now when I was working in a worldwide semiconductor company in California, amongst some other companies. And what happened was that my mother, who had cancer, had come back and there’s nobody to take care of her. So I had a client out in North Carolina. I thought I would go check on my mom on the way to the client. And so instead of flying like normally what I brought my family, I said, hey, let’s do a road trip. And what happened was we just found that she was in much worse condition than we thought. And what I thought would be a two-week visit turned into six months. And it was in that six-month process of isolation, time away from my family, trying to manage a business and still work with clients for a while, I couldn’t keep it up, that I really had to come to grips with the fact that I had a mind problem, I had a me problem, and that I couldn’t turn off constantly thinking myself into the future and implications of what might happen if I failed or something went wrong. And so by the time my mother passed away, I went back to California thinking my mind and my work and my life would just snap back into normal and I would keep on going like I had before. But instead I started getting lost, walking down the street, driving down the highway, forgetting things. I couldn’t find the dishes in my own cabinets. And this type of thing happened to me off and on for about six months. And as I got into some help and started digging into my own personal story, I realized that I had a really big issue and it was that I was overly responsible. So I took on too much all the time for everyone. And my work only intensified my natural propensity to want to fix problems. And so what happened was I took a little time off and started a number of years of personal work to really get underneath some of the reasons for this. And it brought me to where I’m at today with a new message. And so, my career didn’t start as a corporate consultant. I actually started as a high school teacher. I mean, I was probably almost 25 years ago now. And from high school teaching, I actually worked as a pastor for a number of years with churches. And the church that I worked with was connected to a health care provider and some of those guys helped me get my start in the corporate world. And so it was 13 years ago now that I started my own business in the corporate world and it started out as executive coaching. It grew to executive off-sites, leadership development programs, organizational health. And so now where I’m at today is I work with groups all the time. I design leadership development programs for companies, but my greatest joy and passion is when people will come away on a retreat with me. Share on X And that’s what the content of this book is about. When leaders say, hey, I need to get myself out of the environment that I’m in to sort of allow myself to rest and get into a deeper and a better place. So I become a healthier person, healthier leader, healthier parent and so on.

So is this your “Why” to help people become healthier leaders or healthier individuals?

Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, all the work I do plays toward that. But when you can get deep time with people a few days, the conversations get better, people get more honest. It’s really easy to hide behind an hour meeting. It’s really hard to hide when you’re walking around with somebody for a day or two days. The conversations get better, more substantial, and you can really get to really what matters for people.

That’s really interesting. We are all very hungry to have those conversations because there’s very little chance of having them. You don’t normally spend so much time with people in one go. Recently, I had a drive with my daughter who was moving from Los Angeles to Colorado, and we spent 20 hours in the car, and that was awesome. We could really get those conversations and I knew it was going to be great and it was. So tell me about what are the ways to get people to reflect and to get into these conversations. You’ve written a book on executive retreats and you’ve developed Four Disciplines of Retreating. So tell me a little bit about what those disciplines are and why are they important?

Yeah, so the four disciplines are go away alone, go away with a guide, go away with your team, and go away with your family. And the reason I called the book Executive Retreats, plural, is because the whole idea behind being an executive is that you have the power to bring into existence things that should and shouldn’t exist. So what if you applied that to yourself? What if you implied just a little bit of the intention that you do in your business to yourself? And so another foundational way to understand this is that the word retreat comes from two words put together in Latin: “re” and “trahere.” And it means to draw back, to attract, or space. And the whole idea is that if you don’t take time away from your normal life to draw back to a place, you’re going to be always thinking fast, you’re not going to have a chance to think slow. And so the whole idea about thinking slow is can you think more strategically, can you think deeply, can you think about your health, can you think about your values? And so these four disciplines get at that. And I could walk you through each of them. I’d be happy to do that, because there’s a lot of great stuff within each of those disciplines, but I’ll pause right there to see if there’s anything you want to touch on.

Yeah, I think the way you speak about this, I think what I was missing for a very long time was that just being busy and doing a lot of things doesn’t mean that you are making important, you’re doing important work. In order for those things to happen, you need to have some space. And 15 years ago, I was building my business, it was an investment banking firm, and I was growing my staff, and I hired this senior executive, and we basically ran out of office space. And the only place I could sit, I had to give him an office because he was a senior guy, and the only place I could sit him was in my office.

Okay.

And from that point, I didn’t have an office any longer. So I couldn’t hang around indefinitely in my office because there was nowhere for me to sit. It was uncomfortable. So I started staying at home one or two days a week. And what happened was, was an amazing impact because essentially I started becoming really creative. I pulled myself out of this hecticity and I started writing a newsletter, which became very successful. And I started actually strategizing in the morning. I read much more in the morning and I had some quiet time. We still had four kids, but the hurly-burly was gone by 8 a.m. and then I had the whole day and I stopped taking calls. I started stopping taking calls on those days when I was out, people couldn’t reach me easily. So that really elevated my business to the next level just to have that quiet time. So when you talk about retreating, that really resonates with me. So tell us about your going away alone. What does this look like and how do you teach clients?

Yeah, so the next project that I’m working on right now is actually a project on midlife. And to answer that question, I need to explain that some of this is dependent on how old you are and how you believe you can organize your time. So probably before we’re 40 years old, most of us are trying to build a life or construct a container. But after 40, definitely after 50 and onward, you’re thinking more about, how do I become a particular kind of person? Sure, I’ve built a certain amount of stability, a job, a family maybe, but who am I now in the middle of all this? And so the whole idea behind this first discipline of going away alone is about helping people understand you’re worth more than your ability to make money for somebody, or even for yourself, or even for your family. And so you’ve got to get some time regularly in your life where you get solitude. And what happens when you are taking time in the quiet is stuff will come up that would not come up normally. What’s really fun, what I do with clients, is when we go away on a retreat, oftentimes we’ll take time in the quiet before we begin, whether it’s a walk or just time, sitting in the quiet together, and I’ll ask, what’s coming up for you as we start? And usually they’ll say something like, I haven’t been this quiet in five years, or they’ll say something like, I’m thinking of all these things that need to be done, or if they’re a little more settled and self-aware, they may say something like, man I need more of this. I’m gonna ask why. The answer is because I need this kind of rest mentally, physically, I need this kind of rest. And so we’ll begin our retreats by talking about what’s coming up for you.

And we also spend time together helping clients understand and unpack what their values are. Share on X So the way that you get your values is that you just do a reflection on your life and you look at high moments and low moments. And in those high moments, the questions are really about what was happening there that you really valued. And in the low moments, what was missing that you wish would have been there. And when you look back on all those experiences, those give you your values. And so the whole idea about looking at solitude is, now that you have cleared in these values, are you living from them? And one more piece about solitude is that it takes us a long time, a lot of quiet and discipline to become a particular kind of person. It’s good to pay attention to what you’re noticing. It’s awesome and essential if you understand your values. But if you don’t have enough time alone, you’re going to become the type of person who doesn’t notice things. So when I say becoming a particular kind of person, what I mean is becoming a kind of person who notices things. So in the book, I tell the story of the biblical figure Moses and how he ends up in the wilderness for 40 years. And what happens in the story is that after about 40 years he sees this bush that doesn’t burn up. And what the text says, or what the story says is, when God noticed that Moses turned aside, then he spoke from the bush. So what the text is essentially saying is when God noticed that Moses had become the type of person who noticed things then he spoke up and so the whole idea behind Solitude is are you taking time to nurture becoming the kind of person who notices things about yourself about other people about your organization? Because if you don’t take that time to notice things You’re gonna become a very dangerous person because you’re gonna be plowing through with your plans, you’re going to be destroying people, you’re going to be losing people, as opposed to become the type of person that says, something’s going on here, let’s pay attention. So that’s what the first discipline is about.

Yeah, I love it. It’s really interesting that how you develop this perception, this heightened perceptiveness, awareness by cutting the noise out of your life. Is this easier for introverted people to do than extroverts?

I think everybody has a hard time with it. I think that people who are more introverted, man, there was a Harvard study I wish I could quote it exactly, but what they found was that introverted leaders did better with highly engaged teams. It makes sense because you have people who are wanting to contribute. So people who are more naturally quiet would get out of the way and let them do that whereas extroverted people do better in disengaged environments because they’re stepping up and they’re leading the way so I think the personality pride does play into it, but I think probably more importantly the question is like what type of environment are you in and is it necessitating that you get some time away because you may be running yourself too hard?

Okay, so let’s switch gears here and let’s talk about the second discipline, which is going away with a guide. So what does a guide do and what can a guide do that will help an executive or leader?

Yes, I’m a big advocate of developing what I call an ecosystem of wisdom. And an ecosystem of wisdom are various helpers that you have in your life that are giving you inputs. If you’re always putting something out, you’re going to eventually run yourself dry. So what are the inputs you have in your life? So think about this term that we use a lot. This term we use a lot about a high capacity person. We typically refer to a high capacity leader as somebody who can do a lot of things. And that’s actually a mischaracterization of the word because high capacity is not an output term, it’s an input term. Like a balloon, it has a certain capacity before it explodes, a certain amount of air that it can hold. So to be a high-capacity person actually means becoming a high input person. And so then the question I ask and I work through with my clients that I’ve written about in my book is you’ve got to have all these helpers in your life. It could be a doctor. I have a doctor that I go to once every three weeks to check me out, work on me. Could be a counselor. It could be a coach. It could be a masseuse. It could be a mentor. But what I focus on in the book are two kinds of important helpers, and that’s coaches and mentors. And the whole idea behind finding a mentor is somebody who is beyond you, probably in age or in stage of life. Somebody who’s done what you want to do, somebody you admire. And the way that you go about finding a mentor is just make a list of people that you admire and list all the qualities of those people that you admire. Share on X And that’s a way that you can start to reach out to a mentor who’s beyond you. And the thing about working with a great mentor is that they’ll help you also face your shadow side. And what I work with my clients on is understanding your shadow side. This is more of a Carl Jung framework to understand psychologically, what are the parts of me that are untended to that could do some damage if I don’t pay attention to them? And the way that you get your shadow side is you make a list of the people that really bother you and write down all their characteristics and circle the ones that you absolutely disdain. And if you look at the people who bother you and the people you admire, what you’re probably looking at is a lifetime development pathway. You’re looking at characteristics that you actually might embody when you’re at your worst and characteristics that you want to grow more fully into that you probably have already, but you just want to nurture. And so that’s the idea behind finding a mentor. And when you can’t get as much time as you want as a mentor, I encourage my clients to find a coach, whether it’s me or somebody else to help them grow in some of those areas.

As you were speaking about this, the shadow side, I kind of had a theory for decades that people are irritated of the faults of others that they also have to some extent. Most irritating in others.

It’s so right.

Kind of it confirms, what you’re saying it confirms my suspicion about this. So that’s great. So, going away with a guide, it could be a mentor, it could be a coach, potentially both if you can have both, it’s fantastic. A mentor who is beyond your age and who can kind of model things and you can emulate the behaviors and then the coach who really asks the right questions, I guess it’s kind of a different role. That’s awesome. So what is the third type? You talk about going away with your team. Why is this important?

Well, the reason it’s important is because your team is your closest group of relationships that you’re with all the time. So this is probably the discipline that most executives, most leaders, most team leaders are familiar with. And they might be thinking like the executive off-site and that’s part of that. It’s part of what I’m getting at but it’s not the entirety of it. So going away with your team is important because your team is a system of relationships. It’s people with stories, with needs, with questions and what I like to see my leaders work with on their teams is developing social resilience. And so social resilience is a term that came from, oh, what’s this guy’s name? John Cacioppo, he’s a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. He’s a neuroscientist, and he coined this term social resilience. And the whole idea behind social resilience is that humans don’t have what animals have in terms of claws or great strength, but what we do have is we have our ability to band together. That’s why we’ve gotten so far. Social resilience, it actually challenges the dominant theory of evolution that says that all life is basically selfish. It’s survival of the fittest. But social resilience, if you look at the whole of human history and say, actually, not all creatures are selfish. We have so many great stories out there of people who learn to lean into one another in order to survive. There’s a need that teams have to get away and develop the kind of relationships that will lean into each other when problems come as opposed to running away from each other. And I got this idea from a book I read from a retired park ranger. The book is called Lost, and his name is Dwight McCarter. I think it’s not a print book now, but he was a tracker in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. And it’s just a book about all these people that he tracked during his career. And one section of that book has continued to capture my attention. And he talks about the psychological effects of hypothermia when people get lost in the wilderness. He said they will tend to run away from help when it comes because they’ve been lost, their mind is not right. He said, but that all changes when people are lost together. When people are lost together, he said it could be with another human or it could even be with an animal. People move toward their rescuers and they’ll survive as opposed to when they’re separated or they’re by themselves. And so as I was studying Cappiaccio’s work and I was reading this book, I was like, that’s what social resilience is. It’s making sure people are together to move towards solutions, because, you know just as well as I do, what happens so often on teams is that people get so tied up in the day-to-day work. They don’t have time to learn to trust one another so they can find their best solutions when problems happen. See, that’s the thing. You know what a team is really made of when problems happen. And so ways that you can develop social resilience, some of it’s really simple. Do you do anything together outside of work? Go take a funny, like, improv comedy class. Go learn how to make a meal together. Learn one another's stories. Share on X Those are all things that you have to be doing along the way so that when problems come, you can do your best work.

Okay, all right. So it’s great. So we talked about going away alone, going away with a mentor, a guide, going away with your leadership team. The last one is family. Isn’t that an odd one out? How does it go with the whole leadership concept?

Yeah, you would think so, right? I remember when I was thinking this through and I was creating it. And so a little bit about my story and I’ll answer you. So my dad came from the highlands of Peru. He’s an Inca Indian and from a mountain town not far from a little mountain town called Sandia. So I’m actually really interested in indigenous people’s beliefs and history and stories because it’s part of who I am. And so there was a ruler of the Inca Empire, and I may say his name wrong, but I think it’s Pachacuti, Pachacatec, I think. It’s a big name. But here’s what he said, one who cannot govern his house and family will be much less competent to govern a state and should not be given power over others. That’s deep, right? I mean, I know you’re asking me this, but when I read that quote to you, what comes up as important about that?

So I thought about this differently, not so much as a leadership training, try to manage, no one can be a prophet in their own house, so it’s kind of a challenging one, but this was not what I thought about. I thought it was more about creating the balance in life that allows you to maximize and to realize your potential at work. Because if you look around, there are very few people who don’t have this kind of support systems who become successful eventually. And your support system, so you have to take care of it. You have to nurture it. You have to recharge from it. You have to use it as a safety valve. If things don’t go well at work, you can get what you’re not getting there in your head to help you rebound. So it’s kind of social resilience, I think, really comes from the family. That’s what I thought.

Well, it’s good. Well, it helps me now respond even better, I think, because maybe our listeners are thinking about this also. They’re wondering like how does this apply? So think of it like this. It’s more of a question. What is the quality of your influence? Back to the message, you’re multiplying who you are. What are you multiplying within your organization? So if you’ve got a healthy home life, you’re going to multiply health in the lives of people who are also brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers, they’re going to do exactly what they see you doing. It’s no secret that one of the hardest problems that a lot of organizations have is high turnover. Why? Because they’re doing what they see their bosses doing. You know what their bosses are doing? They’re working like dogs. They’re exhausting themselves, expecting everybody else to do the same thing. How much money does it take to train somebody, to get somebody up to speed, especially if they’re a high-level person, and then to just lose them like that? And so one of the pieces that I think leaders need to understand, this is brain science, and it’s the idea of limbic resonance. And so what that is, is we mammals in our limbic system in our brains. We possess the ability to literally pick up on the vibes that somebody else’s brain is putting off. So as animals, as an example, if you were to get in between a bear and her bear cubs, that bear is going to tear you apart. Even with a squirrel or a dog, definitely with mom and her baby. That’s because we have a certain kind of attachment with each other. It’s also the reason that it’s more powerful to go see a movie with a bunch of people in a room as opposed to sitting by yourself. Now the reason this matters in terms of leadership, it’s because people are literally picking up on the vibes that you are putting off. And so are you a settled steady presence or are you more of a reactive, fearful type presence? And so the whole idea behind going away with your family, this is back to that system of input. If you’re gonna be a high-capacity person, what we leaders tend to think is that we have to be superman or superwoman for the people that depend on us. And there’s some truth to that. They do depend on us. But here’s a revolutionary idea. They have a lot to give you too. They have love they want to give you. They have care they want to give you. And one of the big turning points in my life when I lost my mind that I was describing earlier. I remember my wife took me away on a camping trip. She packed everything. My kids came and everybody was there. They gave me gifts. And I remember how sweet it was to sit still and receive from them. And I took that lesson with me into the future because it actually changed the way that I view my role in this world. It’s not all about what I can do for other people. It’s about what they can do for me. And what would it be like in our organizations if we were able to nurture an environment where people knew we all had something to give one another? There’s a saying that a leader friend of mine used to always say, and it was that together, we’re a genius. And so whenever we’re fractured, we’re not finding forward movement, he would say, hold on guys, hold on. Together, we’re a genius. And you don’t get to that place by being a superman or superwoman. You get to that place by being a settled and steady presence where you can receive just as much as you can give. So, I want to read you one quote from the book about why this is so important. So, I had a client of mine give me years ago, the book might be 15 or 20 years ago, old now, but it was called Executive Warfare. And this client said, I want you to understand my world, read this. And it was by a guy named David DeAlessandro and here’s what David DeAlessandro said. He said as a top executive you’ll be lonely in many of the hours you spend at work because you may have to make so many decisions on your own. Don’t extend that loneliness in your personal life. Not only will it help if you’re in your career if you if you have family and outside friends who can offer advice support but you’ll also not be a pathetic and unhappy figure when your career is over As if that wasn’t enough here’s what he says, to get to the top and stay there, you will need to be able to lead human beings and the only way to learn how to lead is how to live. That’s why you gotta go with your family. It’s good, right?

That’s good. Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack there and I don’t think we have time on this podcast. Very interesting, I think we could spend the two hour podcast talking about all the elements here, but what I’m hearing is the ability to receive and to allow people to give you stuff, it really helps them connect with you as well, not just from your side to tap into their genius, that’s also very important. And then also this idea of being an adjusted human, it’ll make you a much more effective person because you, again, people can connect with you, that you become more of someone that they want to emulate. For all these reasons and there are many more, this is a good idea. Thank you for sharing this, David.

You’re welcome.

The four ways to go away is, go away alone, go away with a guide, go away with your team and go away with your family, not least, last but not least. So if someone would like to tap into what you can offer, maybe read your books and talk to you and maybe even hire you to help them reflect and be a better leader, where should they go and what should they be doing?

Do it. You can find me on my website which is achatacoaching.com. And there’s a contact form, you can find me there. And as far as any of those books, if people want to check those out, it’s anywhere books are sold. You can go to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, any of those places. And I would absolutely be honored to connect with you and your organization if you want to figure out how do we get healthier, how do we lead better, or if it’s just for you as an individual and you’re thinking, yeah, I need to pay attention, I don’t like what I’m multiplying. Maybe you need to go away, come on, stay a couple of days, let’s do a trip, I’d love to meet you.

That’s awesome, well, now I learned that I absolutely butchered your surname.

It’s all right.

At the beginning of this podcast, the introduction, ignore it, think that’s better. David Achata, who is a fantastic coach and can really help with retreats and also Embrace What You Don’t Know is another book that he wrote, which is on my shelf waiting to be read. So David, thanks for coming to the show. And if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure you follow us on YouTube. You give us a review on Apple podcast and check us on the Steve Preda Business Growth LinkedIn page where you can see video shorts of all the frameworks that we discussed on the show. So David, thanks for coming and thanks for listening.

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