About Stan Gibson: Stan Gibson is passionate about guiding organizations to build thriving, human-centered cultures. Through his engaging keynotes and leadership coaching, Stan equips companies with frameworks and tools to put people first. He advises executives on adopting transparent, collaborative leadership styles that tap into teams’ collective wisdom. Stan’s actionable insights help leaders role model vulnerability, foster psychological safety, and unlock the full innovative potential of their people. Organizations that work with Stan soon benefit from improved trust, communication, and knowledge sharing. By focusing on developing a shared sense of purpose and community, Stan enables companies to boost engagement, agility, and performance.
Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Stan.
In this episode, Nancy and Stan discuss the following:
- The critical role of emotional intelligence in leadership
- How emotional intelligence, well-being, and productivity are interconnected
- Strategies for preventing burnout and maintaining balance
- Key habits to optimize your mornings for a productive day
- The importance of balancing mind, body, and soul
- Techniques to manage energy levels for peak productivity
Key Takeaways:
- I think that when leaders learn to coach, employees learn to lead.
- Emotional intelligence is one of the critical things that I believe.
- You’ve got to know your system; when you are green, yellow, or red, you work around that.
- Do things right up front and create a legacy.
“And so, I really work with many clients on how to start the day so that they have the energy, power, and passion to take care of everyone and everything they do. Despite being only 2.5% of our body weight, our brain consumes over 20 to 30% of our energy. When we spend a lot of time on Zoom, staring at our own reflection, it’s like a 1.5 to 2X tax on our brain. Understanding these dynamics helps explain why an eight-to-nine-hour workday can feel like a 14-hour day. So, understanding the three-legged stool—emotional intelligence, well-being, and productivity—is crucial. Effective habits and systems that support asynchronous work, rather than endless meetings, are where I’m focusing my efforts with organizations, Nancy.” – STAN
“The first thing when you get up, is to thank God you are getting up. I think, “I’m alive, I’m well.” The first thing I do is head out to get some water. Your body hasn’t had any fluids for the last 10 hours, so it’s important to hydrate. […] The lemon juice comes in a glass bottle, which is better than plastic. This helps me get my electrolytes; even Olympic athletes hydrate first thing in the morning. The second thing I focus on is what I call “mind, body, and soul.” You can tackle these in any order you prefer, but I believe you need to work on all three. If you want to work out next or go for a walk, that’s great. I’m adapting my approach because, although I used to be a “no pain, no gain” type of person—an ex-athlete who pushed the limits—I understand the tremendous benefits of simple movement. Walking three miles or whatever you can manage in a day is incredibly valuable.” – STAN
“One tool I use is the Enneagram. I like the Enneagram—and for those who don’t know, it’s spelled E-N-N-E-A-G-R-A-M—because it identifies nine different personalities. This system is probably over 2,000 years old. The reason I like it is because it’s part of your DNA. When you’re born, you possess one of these nine types. Strength Finders is more about how you are in your current season of life, because it can change a little bit. But the Enneagram is so unbelievably accurate. It even delves into your fears, your stresses, how you act under stress, and how you react to fears. It explores a whole new element of things that I believe leaders really need to understand. For me, it’s fantastic. It’s just a real holy grail for self-awareness.” – STAN
Connect with Stan Gibson:
- LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/oxygenplus/
- Stan Gibson Speaks: https://www.stangibsonspeaks.com/
Try Our Proven, 3-Step System, Guaranteeing Accountability and Transparency that Drives RESULTS by clicking on this link: https://oneofakindsales.com/call-center-in-a-box/
Connect with Nancy Calabrese:
- Twitter:https://twitter.com/oneofakindsales
- Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/One-Of-A-Kind-Sales-304978633264832/
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Voiceover: You’re listening to The Conversational Selling Podcast with Nancy Calabrese.
Nancy Calabrese: Hi, it’s Nancy Calabrese, and it’s time again for Conversational selling – the podcast where sales leaders and business experts share what’s going on in sales and marketing today. And it always starts with the human conversation. Today we’re speaking with Stan Gibson, the owner of Stan Gibson Speaks. Stan is not just a business consultant and executive coach, but also an accomplished author and top rank speaker across various organizations. With a wealth of experience working with executives, leaders, and teams spanning diverse industries, Stan brings a unique approach to consulting and coaching. He is a certified trainer in DISC and the genius portrait leveraging tools like StrengthsFinder to facilitate transformative change within organizations and team. As I mentioned earlier, Stan, we’re pretty well versed in the DISC assessment. I’m a huge fan, so I’m really excited about today’s discussion. Welcome to the show.
Stan Gibson: Thanks for having me, Nancy. I’m excited and heard a lot about your show and listened to a few episodes. So, I’m stoked. I’m ready to go. Let’s have some fun with this. [1:27]
Nancy Calabrese: Let’s have some fun. And okay, so I read somewhere that you truly believe leaders should embrace two paradigms. What are they?
Stan Gibson: Well, I think one of the paradigms, and I’ll tell you what, I really kind of got a three -legged stool here that I believe. See, I believe that what’s worked in the past isn’t going to work in the future. And I think that organizations are having to make a real shift. And one of the things I believe is I believe that one of those legs of the stool is emotional intelligence. You see, I think with IQ, I think we all have a certain amount of IQ or we wouldn’t be in the positions that we’re in today. But I do believe that even though the IQ is becoming kind of level set. I believe it’s the emotional intelligence. It’s the ability to lead. It’s the ability to have, you know, fruitful conversations. I have a saying that I believe that when leaders learn to coach, employees learn to lead. And I’ll just restate that. I think that when leaders learn to coach, employees learn to lead. And I really believe that there’s a lot of emerging leaders out there today that want a lot of the experience of those that are getting ready to retire or to time out or whatever it is that they’re looking to do. I believe there’s a lot of emerging leaders that are saying, I need that. I need that emotional intelligence to understand how to work in corporate environments, how to work in private environments, how to get the most out of clients. So emotional intelligence is one of the key things that I believe. I believe the second leg of that stool is well -being we’re just all facing a very different environment than we’ve ever faced before. Burnout is so prevalent, Nancy, and in almost everybody I talk to, all my clients. We work in a safe place, but you can just see the emotions start to pour out. And so probably 15 years ago, I really started diving into the research, the neuroscience and all the physiological sciences of sleep and nutrition and fitness and relationships and hydration and routines and all these things because I believe that I have another saying and that is that, you know, you must be a little selfish to be very selfless. You must take care of you first, Nancy, and those first one to two hours in the morning, when the morning, when the day. [3:56]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. Love that.
Stan Gibson: And so, I really work with a lot of clients about how to start the day off to where you then have the energy and the power and the passion to take care of everybody and everything you do. And then the third leg of the stool to me is really around productivity. The more systems we have, the more routines, the more habits. You know, as individuals, Nancy, we take in over 30, we make over 30 ,000 decisions a day. And we typically sometimes, you know, sometimes we make that by about six o ‘clock in the evening. And that’s why we’re ready to veg, watch Netflix watch anything, eat the Cheetos, whatever is in our way. So, to keep your energy up to get to, even the realization that our brain is only two and a half percent of our body weight, and yet it consumes over 20 to 30 % of our energy. So, when we’re on a Zoom and we’re looking at a reflection of ourself all day, we’re actually, it’s almost like a 1 .5 to a 2X tax on our brain. And just knowing those little things, it’s no wonder when we get through with an eight-to-nine-hour day, we’ve worked 14 hours. So having this understanding of this three -legged stool, emotional intelligence, well -being and productivity and systems, and what are those habits that are effective and what are those systems that help us to work asynchronously versus being in meeting by death, that’s where I’m working with organizations, Nancy. [5:26]
Nancy Calabrese: Wow. So, what do you recommend we do during the first two hours of each day?
Stan Gibson: Oh boy, I’ll tell you what, it’s so important. It’s so important. And you know, I really do think, you know, everybody’s got their own time clock as to when they like to wake up. I do think you’ve got to press the limits on that. But I will tell you for me, I have a certain set of routines. And you know, the first thing, obviously, when you get up, number one, thank God that you are getting up. But you know, I’m alive, I’m well. And you know, the first thing I do is I head out and you know, your body has not had any fluids for the last 10 hours. Go out, get some water. I put lemon juice in it and I go to Costco and I get the glass. They’ve got great products at Costco. It sounds like I’m working for Costco, but they’ve got a lot of organic products and the lemon juice, it’s in a glass bottle, which is better than plastic. So, I’m getting my electrolytes, all Olympic athletes even, they hydrate the first thing in the morning. The second thing, and I always call it mind, body and soul, and you can take it in any order you want, but I believe you’ve got to work your mind, your body, and your soul. So, if you want to work out next or get a walk in or whatever, I’m actually adopting because I’ve always been a no pain, no gain type of type of person. I’m an ex-athlete. And so, I really push the limits. And now I’m starting to understand, even as I get older, there’s tremendous benefits in just movement, walking, you know, three, three miles, you know, whatever you can get in in the day. [6:57]
Nancy Calabrese: Right.
Stan Gibson: But there’s tremendous. And one of the things I do is I get outside because I do live in warm weather climates because even getting sunshine on the retina without the sunglasses, it starts to have this retinal type of effect on your body to where it wakes you up and it regulates you for the day. And it lasts with you. I try to get a little bit of sunshine at kind of sunset level later in the day because it helps start to increase the melatonin who start to help you get to bed. So, I do a lot of things in the morning. And so, some of it is around my body and what kind of workout I plan on doing that day, whether it’s a walk, whether it’s a boot camp, whether it’s yoga, whatever it is, I have, there’s six days out of the week that I like to be active and I like to recover the seventh. So, I’ve got something different. From a mind standpoint, I’m a very faithful person. So, to me, I’m going to be in the word. I’m going to be enriching my mind and my soul with something that’s very, you know, that just sets me up for the day. And then the third thing I would say is because I’ve said mind, body, and soul. So, I’ve talked about the body. I’ve talked about the soul, but the mind, even when I work out, when I’m walking, no matter what I’m doing, I’m always listening to a podcast. I’m listening to a book. I’m doing something that enriches my mind. So, I feel that within that first hour and a half you know, by the time I’m ready to take a shower and I do believe in cold plunges, I do believe in cold showers. There’s all the science around that. I know I lose most of my clients when I get to that point. Yeah, we’re off, you know, isn’t going to do it, but I will tell you what the feeling is amazing. So anyway, when the, when the morning, you know, when the day in, I will tell you, I have this belief. And I’ve always talked to my clients about it, but back in 2018, so six years ago, my wife had developed non -Hodgkin’s lymphoma cancer. And so, it was one of those really, we had never felt that kind of adversity. And while my heart poured out, I realized, I got to take care of me so that I can take care of her. [9:08]
Nancy Calabrese: Right.
Stan Gibson: And while I was also in the corporate world, I was helped leading a team. We were overseeing over $2 billion worth of corporate real estate globally. I had community responsibilities. I had a lot of things, but I had to prioritize. And of course, my wife is first and foremost. And to do that, I started getting up earlier. Then I was getting up at five. And I was, from five to 6 .30, it was meditation. It was working out. It was mind, body, and soul. So that come 6 .30 or 7, I was ready. I was ready to take care of her. I was ready to take care of the people that rely on me. So, I really believe that that’s a big, a big step a lot of entrepreneurs should take. [9:47]
Nancy Calabrese: Yep. Well, let me ask you this, but there are plenty of people out there that aren’t morning people. So, what do you say to them?
Stan Gibson: That’s fine. That’s fine. You know what? There aren’t. And some people like to go to bed later. In fact, I have I have rituals, not just for the morning. I have evening rituals and it’s called 10-3-2-1. And it’s just a handful of the rituals I have. But 10 means no caffeine. Ten hours before I go to sleep, caffeine will stick in your body and into your mindset. I really cut all caffeine out 10 hours before. Three hours before is I don’t eat or drink, especially any alcohol or anything because it will mess up the five basic stages of sleep that we need to get in. Two hours before you start to cut off the technology. One hour before is really when you start to read journal or do something that’s a little more mind numbing that’s going to set the melatonin in. But for some people, like you said, they don’t like to go to bed at nine or 10, like I do. Some people like to go to bed at midnight or one. And if that’s the case, you know what? That’s fine. Start your next morning. But but schedule in for you. It might be it might be midafternoon. It might be after lunch. One of the things I talked about with productivity, Nancy, when I work with clients is you’ve got to know when you’re green, yellow, or red in the day. We’ve all got different ways that we operate. Me, I’m green in the morning. I have the most energy. That’s when I’m going to work on mind, body, and soul. It’s when I’m going to work on the three to four biggest things I’ve got to do in the day, or I won’t get them done. I start to go into yellow about right after lunch, maybe till two or three, and I hit red about 430 to six. And when I’m hitting red, this is when I’m going to do emails, when I’m going to do very mindless things that I know aren’t going to take a lot of cerebral powers. So, you’ve got to know your system and when you are green, yellow, red, and then you work around that. [11:46]
Nancy Calabrese: Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Now you mentioned that college athletics gave you a very different perspective about leadership. What happened?
Stan Gibson: Well, I tell you what, it’s one of those things. So, when I was in high school, I was recruited for football. And I went to a school, now I went as a preferred walk -on. And what that means is you’re doing everything that all the scholarships or scholarship players are doing. You’re just not getting paid for it. But I wanted to go at this level of football. I wanted to go at the very top and I wanted to see if I could make it. And so, I went and I looked and I saw the recruiter. And the guy that even hosted me, when we say hosted, they show you around the campus and they kind of adopt you for a day or two. He went in the third round to the Pittsburgh Steelers. And so, they had this kind of talent on the team. And so, I was really excited and I was going against these guys every day in my freshman year. They lost their first game, their second game, their third game. They lost 10 games before they won the final game of the year. They went one and 10. And I was devastated. I was like, you got to be kidding me. I’m looking at this talent here. And what is wrong? Well, you don’t keep your job in college football if you go one in 10. And so, they let him go and they brought in a new coach by the name of Darrell Mudra, also known as Dr. Victory. And wouldn’t we all love to have the name Dr. Victory attached to our resume. But I remember he showed up and for younger people, they won’t know what I’m talking about, but there was an old show called Columbo. [13:25]
Nancy Calabrese: Right.
Stan Gibson: And the character, he kind of came in and he stumbled around his words, and he stuttered. And you thought he was the dumbest guy in the room, and he was the smartest. And he looked at us and he said, gentlemen, I’m just going to tell you right now, I know very little about football. And of course, coming off a one in 10 season, everybody’s kind of, well, this isn’t very enlightening. And he said, in fact, I’m going to watch the game from the press box because I can see better. And he said, but I’ll tell you what I am going to do. I want to make sure you get good coaches. I want to make sure that you’re trained up and developed better than you’ve ever been before. And so, you know, he hired a bunch of people that, in fact, one of the guys that he hired had just played at the school and the school is Eastern Illinois University. He had just played at Eastern Illinois just three years prior. And he became our offensive coordinator. Well, this gentleman’s name is Mike Shanahan. And for those of you that know football, he’s got four Super Bowl rings, I mean, as a coach. And his son is the current head coach for the San Francisco 49ers. And he hired all these people like that. So, he not only hired good coaches to surround us, but he looked at all of us and he said, but you, every one of you, you’re just as much a coach as they are. Because when you’re on the field, you know, if you’re getting beat, or if you’re beating the guy across from you, we can’t adjust until we know what’s going on in the field. And I thought, well, how many organizations would excel if they had the same approach to their employees? And so that got me thinking. And then the final thing that really got me thinking was this team, this team went from one and 10, the very next year, the very first year of him coming into coach won the national championship. They won the national championship, won 12 and two, went all the way into the playoffs, won it, huge rings, all this. It was just a fantastic story. And I kind of, again, I was at a level where I was probably sitting and watching all these guys and they were all my best friends but watching. And the thing is this, the cool thing is it was basically the same players. [15:43]
Nancy Calabrese: Wow.
Stan Gibson: Now he brought in about four or five players from junior colleges. And that was great. He put one in, you know, he one became our quarterback. And our previous quarterback from the year before became a real standout wide receiver. And so it wasn’t that he was a bad player. He was just in the wrong swimming. He was in the wrong position. And we took a guy that, you know, was a linebacker and had to think all the time. And we put him on the line where he didn’t have to think. He just had had to rush the quarterback and he became all American and later played in the NFL. And so, you know, we had all this success. And to me, this is what I call a people -centric approach. And that’s what I have adopted in working with organizations is how do we take a people -centric approach to leadership, to coaching, to embracing, you know, a lot of the input from the bottom up, not the top down. So, I do things very unconventional, but that’s the way that I know organizations win just like Eastern Illinois won. And just to let you know, if you haven’t heard of Eastern Illinois, and some of you are football fans out there, the legacy that was created, I mean, some of you have heard of Tony Romo. You know, he was there a few years later. Sean Payton, you know, he was a quarterback there. I can go down the list. Garopolis, you know, quarterback for the Raiders. This school never had a history and a legacy until that very first year. And that’s what you want your organization to do. Do things right up front and create a legacy. [17:21]
Nancy Calabrese: Wow, wow, wow. What do you mean by leaders doubling down?
Stan Gibson: Well, number one, I don’t think we really have enough self -awareness. I think when I say doubling down, I think you’ve got to double down on you. And when I say double down on you, all the things I talk about from a well -being perspective, I think, again, you’ve got to know the sciences around sleep. You’ve got to know the sciences around nutrition, you’ve got to take care of you, but there’s other elements as well. I think self -awareness is a huge, huge component of individuals excelling to the next level, but also teams, because when you have self -awareness and team awareness, you now start to have authenticity, you start to have trust. I was just on a coaching call this morning and I was talking to a client who is you know, having to manage up, you know, people above and I happen to know what these managers and these leaders, I happen to know what their, what their psycho, its strength binders, but I happen to know what their strengths are. And when I started to communicate to this person, what their strengths and their kryptonite is, is like a light bulb went on so, you mean they’re missing these little components that I have in my strengths. And if I bring these to the table, you know, the thing about self -awareness, and again, I use two different psychometric. Yeah, I’ve used disc in the past and I’ve used various assessments. But I do have my clients always take strength finders from Clifton. And if you’re not familiar, people aren’t, there’s 34 strengths. And out of those 34, you just possess five and they are you. They are what make you the superpower that you are. [19:23] But we take it…
Nancy Calabrese: Right. And isn’t it true that the third one pulls one and two and four and five together?
Stan Gibson: I don’t know that I’d ever heard that Nancy.
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, yeah, that’s your core core.
Stan Gibson: The third one holds four and five together. I love that. I love that. So, what we do with this, though, is we take it even a step further. And I’ve worked with a gentleman out of Rex Miller, out of Texas. And we have created, there’s a large consortium of us that have created what’s called the Genius Portrait. And what we do is we take the strength finders, but you know, I don’t know what your strengths are, Nancy, but for me, let’s just say one of mine is being strategic and all that means is just that I filter very quickly. I don’t like to listen to 10 or 12 alternatives. I filter very quickly to two and try to come up with the answer very quickly. Well, if I’ve got strategic and you’ve got strategic, they still might look different. So, we really get into a very myopic way of understanding what does your strategic look like? And there will be a sentence that will be created from how your strategic looks, there’ll be a sentence on mine. And when we do that with all five strengths, we now have a paragraph. And we have a paragraph of when dopamine is just popping out of your head because this is you, this is you as a superpower. But we also do it no different than any muscle that we don’t work. It becomes atrophy and it becomes a weakness, and we call it kryptonite. [21:00]
Nancy Calabrese: Right.
Stan Gibson: And so, we go through the same process for those very five strengths that make you the superpower you are. If you are overwhelmed, you’re in distress. Then we create a paragraph of your kryptonite because we have to know when you’re when you’re at your best and when you’re not. And when you start to put a team together around the table and they start to look at everybody’s superpower, they say, Nancy, that’s why you’re so, now I get why you’re so good at what you do. And then when you start to talk about the kryptonite, they realize, well, nobody’s being malicious here. You know, that’s, it’s a wiring. And so, when they start to see people’s wirings, it’s like my wife and I, we’ve taken it and it will tell you what. One of hers is developer, which means she loves to help people. [21:52]
Nancy Calabrese: Wow.
Stan Gibson: Well, I’ve been married for 42 years. I wish we would have taken this our first year because I will tell you. Now I can look at her developer of helping and saying, she’s helping me. She’s not complaining at me. And I’m an activator, so I get things going. You can tell by my voice; I get things going. And she likes to slow me down. So having that education helps us avoid, we can have conflict in a healthy manner. And then the second one that I do is the Enneagram. I think the Enneagram is, the reason I like the Enneagram, and for those of you that don’t know, there’s nine, Enneagram, E -N -E -A -G -R -A Enneagram. And there’s nine personalities in the world. And this is probably over 2 ,000 years old. I mean, it’s very, it’s so…It’s the reason I like it is because it’s part of your DNA. When you’re born, you possess one of these nine. Strength Finders is more of how you are in the season of life that you’re in, because it can change a little bit. But the Enneagram is so unbelievably accurate. It even goes into your fears, your stresses, how you act under stress, how you act with fears. It goes into a whole new element of things that I believe that leaders really need to understand. And for me, it’s fantastic. It’s just a real holy grail for self -awareness. [23:26]
Nancy Calabrese: Well, I can’t believe Stan, we could be speaking for an hour. We’re up in time. We’re over time. What happened? no, no, no, no, no apologies. You were fascinating. And I like to bring you back on sometime down the road so we can continue, you know, promoting what you do so well. A huge thank you for spending time with us today and sharing your expertise for folks. Well, let me ask you this. How can my folks find you?
Stan Gibson: I’ll tell you what, just go to stangipsonspeaks .com. And if you want to see a little clip on me speaking, that’s right there. I love to speak. I’m getting ready to start a mastermind here this fall and also a podcast myself. So just stangipsonspeaks.com and no sales pitch for me. I just love to talk to people and see kind of what they’re all about. [24:21]
Nancy Calabrese: You’re going to be an excellent podcaster. Hope you have me on your show. My goodness. So, folks reach out to Stan, listen to his enthusiasm and his passion. It’s contagious, Stan. I need more people like you on the show. So, I don’t know what you all are going to do, but I’m revved up for the rest of the day and I’m going to make it a good one. So, until we see you or speak to you again, make it an awesome sales day and definitely reach out to Stan. [24:53]
Stan Gibson: Thank you very much everybody. Please live a rich and intentional life. [24:58]
Nancy Calabrese: I love it
