Hello everyone and welcome to The Upstream Leader. My name’s Jeremy Clopton. Glad to be with you here today for what is going to be a bit of a unique episode, a special episode. A couple months back, goodness, it’s been almost three months now, we had our HeadWaters conference up in Chicago, Illinois, and at that conference I had the opportunity to kick things off with a keynote about legacy, and I’ve been trying to think about how I could work that into the podcast and share some of what I talked about in that keynote with our audience here on The Upstream Leader. In hindsight, it would’ve been great had I actually thought to record the keynote, and perhaps we could have utilized that as an episode, but that didn’t happen.
However, one of the attendees at the conference and a good friend of mine, Heath Alloway, is the host of the Common Threads Podcast, and he invited me to be on that show to talk a little bit more about legacy and what was discussed at HeadWaters. I was really excited with how that episode turned out, so what we’ve decided to do is we’re going to re-air that episode here on The Upstream Leader. I had a great conversation with Heath talking about legacy, the various ways that you can take control over your legacy and how you show up, and I really hope that you will find that episode to be incredibly valuable to you, that conversation, and have maybe some actionable ideas as to what you can do going forward to create your legacy. So with that, I’m going to turn it over to Heath on the Common Threads Podcast as we talk about legacy.
Jeremy Clopton, welcome to Common Threads.
Heath, glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Absolutely. Well, Jeremy, I’m looking forward to this one, and one of the things that I love about the podcast is just getting to meet people. And I know you’re not part of Sorren, you’re with Upstream, so I’m going to give everybody a little window, at least a glimpse of who you are and what you do. And you’re a first to actually use Copilot to write your bio. So jump in, correct me if anything is off. Jeremy Clopton, managing Director of Upstream Academy. Jeremy works with firms across the country and in Canada, to help develop leaders, build stronger relationships and drive intentional growth. He brings a unique perspective on leadership and the future of the profession. He’s a father of three and a husband, and a little bit of the analytics and technology, that’s my improv part. So, Jeremy, welcome to the show,
Heath. I appreciate it. No notes. I feel like that was accurate and my favorite part, concise.
Probably all of our guests too. Well, something we do to kick off the show for every one of our guests: What really brought you into the public accounting profession and what have you found that you love most about it?
Yeah. So I probably got into public accounting perhaps a little bit different way than most: it was my interest in a murder trial. So probably not a lot of accountants are thinking, yeah, murder trial, I should be an accountant, that sounds like just a wonderful, natural transition, right? But when I was a kid, my great uncle, actually both my great uncles were accountants. And one of them was still practicing in the area, he was a certified fraud examiner and he was actually working with a criminal defense attorney on two very high-profile murder cases where I grew up. It was just fascinating to me. Before that I thought, I’ll probably be a lawyer. I enjoy speaking. Anybody that knows me knows that I always enjoy that, and arguing is kind of fun too. So I thought maybe I’ll be a lawyer and realized, I don’t know. I really love math. I love the number side of things. I love patterns, kind of the logical reasoning side. And I found it fascinating that he was an accountant doing all of this stuff.
So that was sixth grade, I think? I can pretty well remember actually listening. I was going to date me a little bit, listening to the verdict over the radio in word processing class. So if anybody wants an older reference, there you go. I was like, that’s going to be a super fun career. So I decided to go into public accounting and had no desire to ever do taxes or audit or anything that’s actually traditional public accounting, but wanted to get into the forensic side of things right out of the gate, had the opportunity to do so, and here we are. I don’t do any of it anymore, though, which is I guess, a little bit odd.
Well, with what you get to do now and thinking about, you get insight to a ton of firms, you get insight into a ton of upcoming leaders around the profession. How has maybe, what brought you to the profession? How has that changed and where do you find you’re most excited about?
I don’t know that what brought me to the profession has inherently changed. It was the excitement of problem solving, critical thinking, making a difference for clients. Yeah, that looks a little bit different when you’re working in fraud prevention or detection versus maybe audit or tax, but I think we probably exaggerate the difference. Realistically, we’re all out here trying to help clients, and we’re trying to help them do what they do better, achieve their goals. I don’t inherently know that that’s changed. What changed for me is I realized that I loved working with people, and in particular accountants, a lot more than I enjoyed doing accounting. That’s what ultimately led to the career change, to go from public accounting to having my own consulting firm to ultimately joining Upstream and, you know, succeeding our founder, Sam Allred as managing director.
And it wasn’t so much any change in the profession as much as it was, I was very dead-set on exactly what my career path would be. Like sixth grade, right? I want to be an accountant. Most would say really that early, but yeah, that early. I knew I was a nerd from the get-go, so I was like, I want to be an accountant. When I got to college, my college advisor still tells me when we check in, “You remember when you came in as a freshman and said, I’m going to be an accountant and I’m going to graduate at this point and I’m going to take these classes now, how do I do it? And I told you, that’s not what most people do. And you said you don’t care?” I said, yeah, I remember it very clearly. She goes, “Still not a lot of people take that approach. You were very direct.” Like, okay, I had it all figured out until I realized I didn’t.
And I think that’s what is so fun for what I do now, is helping people realize once you find your passion and your excitement and what you love, the more that you can lean into that, the more successful your career you’re going to have. And what’s great about public accounting is you can do just about anything you want. That excites you within the domain of business within public accounting. Now I get it, if you become an accountant, you’re a CPA for eight years and you decide, you know, actually I’m pretty sure heart surgery is what interests me the most, that’s a bit more of a transition. But for most people it’s not that drastic. It’s, you know, I’d really like to be a CFO or do this or do that and the other. And what’s great is we have a profession where there are so many opportunities and that’s what really gets me excited about what I do now is, I get to see people that have an enormous amount of passion for what they do, and just helping them figure out how to unlock that ability to lean into the passion and their strengths and go have the impact they want to have.
Yeah, it’s interesting to hear you say that because it, whenever I joined Upstream too, and you, you do, you get to work with a lot of people around the profession. I thought for, you know, 14 years, spoiler alert for everyone in the know, Jeremy and I were at the same firm for several years too, so we have that background as well.
But yeah, when you said you get to meet people earlier, I was like, I feel like we’ve met before.
Well, you know what I mean!
I do.
So for that was all I knew was our firm. And I felt like we did a lot of things really well there. As always, there’s opportunities to improve, but one of the things that I learned when you did interact with firms of all sizes, people across the US and Canada. They’re just a ton of really great people, and that’s one of the things I love the most is you have, you know, 98% of the time people are willing to share like whatever they’re working on to help lift others up. And that’s been pretty cool to watch. And you mentioned Sam Allred and how he started Upstream. Maybe give our listeners, I know some are familiar, but just a real kind of high-level overview of Upstream, and then we’re going to talk about the last couple, two or three years and some of the transition and succession that’s been going on.
Yeah, definitely. So at a high level, Upstream’s been around for about 25 years. We just celebrated our 25th anniversary HeadWaters Conference. Primarily what we are most known for is leadership development and helping partners make the transition from senior manager or director, whatever it looks like, into equity partner specifically becoming high-yield, low-maintenance. So, you know, helping them understand that it’s not just production, it’s leadership, it’s influence, it’s all the other things that go with it. So we do a lot of that. We have complimentary programs for new managers, more experienced partners as well. But really on that, I consider it unlocking people’s peak capability when it comes to being a leader. I genuinely believe everyone has some capacity to lead within them, and it’s just figuring out to what level and how do you help them achieve it.
Beyond that, we also do strategic planning, retreat facilitation, ultimately trying to help good firms become great. So they know what they’ve got to do, they’re just maybe struggling a little bit to get over the hurdles, get out of their own way maybe, and implement some of the really hard stuff, and we work with him to help them achieve that goal. And we do that through, like I said, retreats, strategic planning, executive coaching, some, you know, one-on-one firm type engagements, and then we bring people together, in a variety of ways, whether it’s managing partner groups or for the profession our HeadWaters conference to, like you said, people in this profession, they love to share. So many leaders in this profession, they want to get together with other leaders, share ideas, what they’ve learned, what they’re working on and all of that. And HeadWaters is such a great place to do that. And we do that every summer. So, that’s Upstream at a pretty high level.
You, you just mentioned HeadWaters and we had a team that was at that conference, so it was an awesome conference, but you did a session really focused on legacy that was, I think I shared this, I think it was one of my favorite presentations that I’ve heard you do. And for our listeners, I know some know of Sam Allred or maybe knew Sam Allred, but Sam, he was an impact in the profession. He had a lot of years impact that, a lot of careers and was known as probably one of the, the best advisors, best consultants, and in the profession, you know, over the last couple years, stepped out. I say stepped out, he kind of jumped out and you jumped right in. Hearing you do that session and knowing what you’ve been working through the last couple years, I thought it would be a really powerful message for our team members. So maybe start with when you were preparing for that transition, knowing it was coming and then, you know what, I’m sure it was every emotion you could possibly imagine of fear, excitement, kind of walk us through that transition and maybe anything that we should be thinking about as a firm.
Well, you mentioned that he jumped out and I jumped in. To the outside world. It probably looked that way. Realistically, it was a five-year process, so it was a very slow-motion jump if it.
Well, he did call it his expiration date, which I thought was a little morbid.
He did. He did. He always referred to that. I have an expiration date. And once we set the expiration date, we knew it was, it was coming. You know what was really interesting in the process is early, early on. By early on, I mean, when we had discussions, Sam and I, about me joining Upstream, it was through the lens of being his successor. So there was no hiding the fact that I was not just joining the firm, but I was going to be stepping into a very significant leadership role within the firm, and we settled on what that date would be. If you are nearing retirement, one of the things that I will say that I believe made Sam’s transition so effective: He knew what he wanted to do when he retired, so there was no hesitation to letting go of things. It was very intentional how we did it, and I’ll get to that. But he knew that it was not, “I’m going to retire one day and then have to figure out how do I keep myself busy.” He knew exactly what he wanted to do, and I think that’s a really important component of retirement. We don’t spend enough time on in the profession is, it’s not like you retire and then you just spend every day on the beach or the golf course or wherever your happy place is, and you feel fulfilled. For many, what you’re doing has been your identity for decades. So that retirement is a bit of a scary idea. So I would encourage you have a purpose for when you retire as to what you’re going to do and the impact that you want to continue to have.
So, that tangent aside, I was initially worried that I had to step into his shoes. Plenty of people told me that: You do realize who Sam is. Obviously, it’s not like I joined the firm and had no clue who he was. And it was just, I was reminded of it time and again at conferences. “Oh, you do realize what he’s done? Everybody knows Sam, nobody knows Upstream,” all of these things, and that’ll give you a little bit of anxiety. So I was already worried that, okay, I have to become Sam because that’s what everybody knows. That’s who everybody knows, not the organization. And, Jake Thompson, who is somebody that you and I both know and think very highly of, I was chatting with him about it early on in this process and he said, Jeremy, one of the most important things you’ve got to remember is you are not becoming Sam’s legacy, you are building on Sam’s legacy. What he’s done will be in the past, what you do is all about what you want to do in the future.
And that was such an important moment for me to recognize I’ve got to remain who I am and be ready to build what I believe is the best thing to build. I can respect what came before me, but it’s not my job to become what came before me. So that actually helped ease the fear just a little bit, and then it was very quick: Okay, who am I? How do I want to be viewed, and being really intentional over that period of ensuring that my voice sounds like me. Anybody that has ever put out any thought leadership articles or whatever knows that yes, marketing touches it and they make it sound like it’s on point with the brand, but with some personality to it. And I had to be very clear that I had to have my own personality, and I wasn’t just trying to mimic Sam’s. And there were a couple times over the course of that transition that I could tell that it was working because I’d have someone come up to me and say, you know what? We have all the respect in the world for Sam, but we love the fresh perspective you take. And that just kind of helped to reinforce that yes, I’m not discounting what came before me, but I’m being very intentional to ensure that I build upon that in my own way.
You know what’s interesting, Heath, is the last year before Sam retired was probably the easiest of the five. And that sounds probably a bit odd to some folks because you’d think, oh my gosh, how could that be? But we had done so much work in the prior four years and the first six months of 2023 when he retired, that by the end of the year, I mean, he and I were chatting one time and he said, you know, my phone’s not ringing and my inbox isn’t filling up and it feels really weird. And I said, well, if it makes you feel any better, mine is. So that means we did what we set out to do. The transition at the end of the year, it felt more like a, the signature changed—we had to sign some documents and stuff and all that fun jazz—but realistically, it had already happened from a leadership standpoint because we were so intentional about it to where I don’t want to say it was a non-event, but it wasn’t a disruptive event. And I think that was a really important part of our planning process there.
Yeah. So, and I don’t even know how to ask this, Jeremy. I’m not even implying that this has happened, but I know what happens some. But you think about someone that’s nearing retirement and you hear it a lot in the next generation talks of, oh, the next generation kind of deal. Do you think there’s times where those that are passing a torch maybe underestimate the people that they’re passing the torch to, just because they’re not doing it exactly the same, but maybe it’s different?
Absolutely.
I guess, did you ever feel that or do you see that?
I did not.
Because I can see it being a risk.
Yeah, it is definitely a risk. And it’s probably more a testament to Sam than anything that he was never concerned with, did I do it differently, was it the way he would’ve done it, or any of that. He was always willing to give me counsel if I had a question, but he was very quick to say, “Hey, when you’re leading, you lead the way that you think it should be led, not what you think I would’ve done. And don’t worry about whether or not I think it would’ve been the right thing to do. That’s not my job anymore. It’s to help you feel that you are ready to make decisions.” So it was more about the process of decision-making, not ultimately what the decisions were. I did never experience that with Sam. I have seen lots of firms experience that though, where it’s, I have all the faith in the world, but you’re doing it wrong. It’s like, well, no, you’re doing it different is actually what’s happening. And difference’s not inherently wrong, it’s just different. That’s all that it is. Even if they got a different outcome than what they wanted, that still doesn’t inherently mean it was wrong, it just means it didn’t get the right outcome or the desired outcome.
So there is a hesitation. Sam is what I would consider to be a level five leader going to the Jim Collins theory of being willing to develop people to become an even better leader than you are, having the security to be able to do that rather than trying to develop them to be almost as good, but not quite so that they can’t ever take over.
Yeah. He always used to say there’s like the hundred sayings that he used to have that still kind of linger in my head, and he used to say, “I’m not a good backseat driver, I’ll always be in the front seat.” So like, when it was that time, he is like, “I’m not going to sit in the the back seat”. I think that mindset probably helped with letting go of some of that. What’s your session at HeadWaters? You know, it was really focused on, on legacy, I guess kind of two-pronged, like why did you choose that and how, in your words, would you define legacy?
Well, the overall theme of the conference was Legacy in Motion, and that was chosen because it was our 25th anniversary. It seems like one of those milestone types of moments. We have at Upstream fully transitioned through one generation, so not only have we retired, Sam since I joined, we’ve retired Sam, we’ve retired Tim Barts, and we’ve retired our director of operations, Georgia Cummings. So we’ve gone through a full generational transition to where everybody that was here when Upstream started is no longer here. We’ve got employees with tenure, but that transition has occurred and it seemed very fitting to talk about legacy and also talk about legacy at this point in the profession’s evolution because there are so many people that get hung up and it goes back to the question you just asked a little bit: So many people getting hung up on the way somebody is doing it is different, and is that okay, and what would the managing partner ago think, or what would this person think, or whatever it might be?
I see a lot of folks making decisions based on the people that came before them, rather than the people that are coming after them. That’s why we chose Legacy. And Legacy in my mind, is the impact that you leave. It’s what you leave and pass on to the next generation. Why I thought a keynote about it, and especially the approach that I took in the keynote is so important, goes back to a quote from Adam Grant in the book, Hidden Potential, and it’s one of my favorite quotes, and it says “It’s more important to be good ancestors than dutiful descendants. Too many people spend their lives being custodians of the past instead of stewards of the future. We worry about making our parents proud, when we should be focused on making our children proud. The responsibility of each generation is not to please our predecessors, it’s to improve conditions for our successors.” And I feel like we’ve got a lot of people in the profession right now Heath, in leadership roles, that are trying so hard to please their predecessors, that they’re forgetting that their actual responsibility is to create a better environment for their successors.
Yeah, it’s a powerful quote. It’ll make you step back and self-reflect and think about it. I may have to share that internally so everyone can see it or maybe pull it up on this.
Yeah, absolutely.
In that conversation, you talked about like five different approaches to legacy creation. It was the wanderer, the shapeshifter, anti-villain, the hero, and the mentor. Talk us through that.
Yeah, it’s interesting. When I was building the keynote out and I came up with those five, and I’m a huge fan of story. I love origin stories. I love being able to get into the storytelling side of things. You know, villain or origin stories for whatever reason, very much intrigued me. It’s always fun to see what happened to someone and how they ended up the way they are. But as I was thinking through those five, I initially thought, they’re static. You either show up as the wanderer, the shapeshifter, anti-villain, the hero or the mentor. But as I got more into it, and started thinking through them and doing a little bit more research into examples of leaders that might fall into each of those archetypes, what I realized is it’s actually a progression. We all almost always start off as the wanderer. We see it a lot when you get a big promotion. Now you’re put in, you’re a manager maybe, or you’re put in as a new partner, and you’re supposed to lead this thing, and you’re put into leadership and you think, “I have no idea where I’m going, but I know I’ve got to do something, so I better start doing something.”
In my mind, that’s what the wanderer is. Now all of a sudden we don’t really have a purpose behind our decisions. We’re trying to make decisions that are very consistent with who we are and who we want to be, but we don’t really have any intentionality to our leadership style. And it’s not inherently bad, by the way. You can be an effective leader and be a wanderer as it relates to legacy because you’re probably making good decisions. But when I think about legacy and something that you want to pass on to others, it requires a level of intentionality. You don’t get a lot of wanderers that are necessarily the individuals that you think of with legacy. They didn’t have that significant impact necessarily, right? Yes, they were good at what they did, but we’re not really sure what their intent was.
So from there, once we realize we’re wandering, we get this self-reflection, we have this aha moment, we’re like, “Oh! I’ve got to have a purpose, I’ve got to have a direction.” It’s so easy to say, “Ooh, I saw Heath over there doing that. I’m going to be like Heath, or, I’m a big book reader. Everybody knows that I’m going to be like that. Or I’m going to be like, and you read another book and it’s like, ooh, I’m going to do that. And you read another book, ooh, actually I’m going to go do that.” That’s what I call the shapeshifter, where we aren’t really sure of who we are, but we sure know a lot of people that we want to be. Said a better way, a lot of people that we want to be like, and that we want to shape ourselves after the trap that we fall into is we start shape-shifting to try to become them rather than using what we like about their approach to influence who we become. And it’s easy to get stuck in that cycle, especially if you are an avid content consumer, right? Podcasts, books, articles, whatever it may be, TED Talks, and you’re almost modeling the flavor of the week. And people are like, “Oh, I can totally tell that Jeremy read that book last week. I mean, he even sounds like the book,” and then a month later it’s like, “Yeah, he sounds like that guy now.”
Yeah. I hate to admit it, but I probably fall in that trap. I was trying to keep up with the number of books you read and I got to a point where same thing, like he’s latched on to something and then it would the next in. It’s not, I hope our listeners don’t take that as like, don’t read books, since there’s a lot of good books out there, but, I 100%, fell in that trap. No doubt.
I still do on occasion, even though I know about it and I’ve got that awareness. And that’s, again, like I said, it’s not like we get stuck in these states forever, but once we realize it, then we’ve got to figure out where are we going next. Similar to the shapeshifter, and shapeshifter and anti-villain for me, sometimes they are, you fall into one or the other, sometimes. They’re almost at the same kind of step in the journey, it just depends on, did you zig or did you zag into that journey? The anti-villain is where it’s not so much that you consumed content, “oh my gosh, I’ve got to be that.” It’s typically driven by a negative experience where you show up through the lens of, “I don’t know who I’m going to be or what I’m going to do, but I can guarantee you it’s not going to be like that, because I hate that and I never want to be like that.”
We see that in business when there’s been a CEO or a managing partner or whatever it may be, that was maybe a bit dictatorial and they ruled with an iron fist and fear and all of those things, and the next person gets in place and it’s like, “I don’t really know who I want to be, but I can’t be that and I don’t want to be that, so I never will be that.” And what happens, unfortunately. I’ve been here before, not from a business leader, where I saw a business leader that I’m like, “Oh, I will never be like that person. ’cause I hated the way they led me,” but more on the personal side, what happens is you are actually leading from a place of negativity, and it shows eventually. It initially is more of a, “this is positive because I’m ensuring that I don’t do that,” but it leads to a place of negativity because effectively what you’re dwelling on is the thing that you hate so much that you can’t ever be like it, that you unfortunately, in a lot of situations almost end up being like that. Yeah, that’s a hard one right there.
Yeah. And you’ve been a lot more open, at least you know, the last two to three years of some of the driving force behind that. You shared, like some of that drove you to like trying to be a perfectionist or high performer to kind of prove a point. I guess, how did that influence you in your career and being a, you were trying not to be, but in some ways were you also trying to prove something, I guess is maybe a way to…
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, so, you’re right. Over the past few years, I’ve tried to become a bit more authentic in sharing my story. Some people would look at my story and think, okay, that’s not a horrible childhood, it could be a lot worse. And I will readily admit, yeah, there are people with a whole lot worse childhoods than I had. But the very short version, I grew up in a small rural community. I was raised by two parents that divorced, when I was 16. It was in eighth grade—and I had a very poor relationship with my father, we did not get along, he was verbally abusive, there was just a very bad situation—my brother on the other hand, got along great with him and it was kind of weird. And in eighth grade, I remember somebody at school saying, “Hey, I think we’re cousins.” I’m like, well, that’s weird. How on earth could we be cousins? So I went home and I was talking to my mom and I’m like, Hey, this girl says that we’re cousins. She’s like, “No, you’re not cousins.” I’m like, “Well, I thought that was pretty crazy that she would say that.” She’s like, “But she is your half-sister.” I’m like, “What?! Like, hold on a second.” Eighth grade. This is kind of a big moment. Turns out my brother’s dad was not my dad, and it was eighth grade when I found this out. He still lived in the town that I grew up in. As it turns out, he went to the church that I went to. I had seen this man for, I don’t even know how long, but I never knew who he was and that he was actually my father, because what it turns out, my biological parents divorced before I was born, so, right before I was born, they divorced.
So anyway, that was my eighth grade year, which is a super exciting way to spend eighth grade trying to figure out, wait a second. The person that I thought was my father is not my father and the person that is my father I’ve never met, but apparently I have two half-sisters at the school that I go to that I had no idea we were even related. Fast forward a couple years, lost my best friend to cancer. He had just turned 16, which is a really, you know, and, and then my parents divorced, or my, not my parents, but my mom and my brother’s dad, my stepdad at the time, divorced then about two or three months later. So it was one of those where I didn’t exactly grow up in an environment that was what I would call overly loving and supportive. There was a lot of, “I’ll be there to support you as long as you’re successful, but only if you’re successful. If it’s going to be embarrassing, I’m not showing up.” This isn’t a surprise to anybody, and Heath, you know me pretty well. I’m not the most athletic person in the world, but I’m pretty darn nerdy. So academics is where I showed up.
Don’t sell yourself short.
I’m not unathletic anymore. But as a child, I was not the world’s fastest or most coordinated kid. Love sports, it just wasn’t in the cards. So it was all academics for me. It really turned into a drive to be a perfectionist, and if I can achieve more, it will essentially earn praise or love or whatever the right phrase would be. So I ended up being very fixated on achievement—not competing necessarily, but the actual achievement of things. Like I had to have the title, I had to win the award, I had to come in first, top of the class, all the things. With that, very closely tied to it, was people pleasing, because of the environment that I grew up in. And ultimately, I didn’t realize it in high school, but also very much workaholic tendencies because for me, when I was working on schoolwork, I was in control and I was thriving and nobody could really, it wasn’t nobody could touch me, it was, I couldn’t be disrupted, like that was my calm, is what I mean by that.
So I ended up being very good at using work to repress emotion using achievement to repress insecurity, using people pleasing to try to control the environment around me. And what’s interesting is being driven, being great with people, and wanting to compete are all attributes of our best employees. But if you approach it from the wrong reason, and I wasn’t approaching it through the right reason, mine was all the anti-villain approach—I will do all of these things to prove that I’m worth more than y’all ever thought I was. What happens, those strengths, those superpowers actually now become your weaknesses. The very thing that gives you a superpower, effectively becomes your kryptonite and it destroys you from the inside.
And that is the approach to legacy-building that, it’s interesting, Heath, it can be one of the most supercharging initiative-producing driving forces possible because anybody that’s ever been angry and gone for a run knows, you’ll set record times, the more ticked off you are when you’re running, because you just run until your body just explodes, right? Until you just want to fall down. It can help you in a weird way, create a legacy, but at a point that will consume you and it will destroy the legacy that you’re trying to build. That’s the really hard part of the anti-villain.
We may need like two hours for this one, Jeremy. I’ve got questions. So with that kind of mindset, the high achiever proven a point. Is it ever enough though?
No.
But do you feel like…?
You’ve got to do the hard work to figure out how to redefine “enough.” So for me. It really required it. It’s required two things over the years. First, I will be the first to admit this, I worked with a therapist for quite a while, probably about a year, which for me was quite a while because I went 35 years without it, so a year felt like eternity, to really unpack and address all of that. And a lot of that coincided with the fact that I did eventually meet my biological father when I was 30. My wife and I had started having kids, and I needed that for me as much as anything. The cycle started to repeat itself. He was bailing on stuff for them, and I just had to make the really hard decision at that point, okay, well, it may have happened to me as a kid. It won’t happen to my kids as grandkids, so that isn’t working. A lot of that ended up with, I just need somebody to talk to about that. I’ve got to work through it, figure out what’s going on. So that was incredibly helpful. The other thing that I’ve been doing a lot over the past couple years is I work with an executive coach that helps me, one of the things that we’ve worked on a lot that he is helped me with is removing emotional attachment to the way that I think things should be.
Easier said than done.
Oh my gosh, yes. I always feel better after we work through something, and so completely exhausted. It’s like, oh my gosh, this is, it’s hard work because you’re trying to figure out why do you have this such strong belief that this is the way that things have to be? AI’ve got to achieve this or I’ve got to achieve that.” And what he is really helped me to do, and I would encourage others if this is helpful to you, just the overall basis of it is first and foremost., you’ve got to look at it and say, “Okay, this is the way that it has to be in your mind. What are 10 benefits of it not being that way?” And my immediate response is always, “There are none, that’s why it has to be that way,” which as it turns out, is not a good enough answer. So you’ve got to work through that. And then on the other side, what if it is that way, what are downsides of it? What are 10 or 20 downsides? If it is that way, and what it does is it, it’s really helped me develop the skill of neutralizing the emotion of “should.” And as much as anything, it helps me get out of the anti-villain cycle as well because I can catch myself when it’s, “Oh, I’ve got to do it this way because I’m never going to be like that. Or I think that is just horrible and I’d never,” okay, but what if? And it doesn’t necessarily mean that I changed my viewpoint, but what it does mean is that I release my emotion to it, and I can see it through a clearer perspective and I can acknowledge, yes, there’s some benefit here, maybe there’s some downside, and this is the actual reason that I want to do it. Sometimes I do change my perspective when I say, “Actually, no that doesn’t actually matter. Now that I’ve neutralized that it’s not actually that important.
Well, very helpful, Jeremy. I appreciate you going in more detail let that conversation go for a little bit.
Yeah, absolutely.
Why don’t we knock out the hero and the mentor side?
Yeah, definitely. So once we get through all of our own stuff, then we get to the two sides of legacy-building that are, incredibly rewarding. The hero side runs the risk, admittedly, of stopping short of creating the best possible legacy, but it’s the one that’s celebrated the most. And the hero side of legacy-building is what can you do that will have an impact, but often in the hero side, you’re the center of that impact. You are the reason that it happened. That is not inherently a bad thing, by the way. You see all the time, in science and mathematics that people come up with these breakthrough discoveries and their name gets tied to it. That’s okay. It is okay to get credit for doing great things. By the way, I should say, for anybody that’s listening, that’s thinking, “Okay, even thinking about legacy feels egotistical from the get-go. So why are we even having this conversation?” It’s not egotistical. What it is, is it’s ensuring that you use your strengths and passions with a purpose. And the hero side is when you do that, but you want to make sure it’s about what you achieve. You can have a great legacy based on what you achieve and what you put into it, what you drive forward.
The next step beyond hero is when you say, “Alright, I have achieved a lot, but to really solidify my legacy, I want to help others achieve even more.” And that’s what the mentor side is. None of these are inherently right, wrong, good or bad. They all have pros that can come from them, they all have cons that can come from them. On the mentor side, this is the legacy to where 10, 20, 30 years after you’ve retired, people are still talking about the impact that you had: on them, on their career, on their families, on the profession, on their communities, because you made it about others, not yourself. And what’s interesting, it almost sounds like a hero when people talk about it, but it’s because you were so great about making it about others that they want to give you the credit now after the fact. And that’s a bit of the difference between hero and mentor is hero. You get in the credit in the moment, mentor, you probably get it after the fact because it wasn’t ever about the credit, it was all about the impact on others.
Right. And Jeremy, you’re fully aware of the Sorren story and firms coming together.
Yeah.
That’s been a significant amount of change in the last two or two and a half years. And some cases, you know, names of partners were on the name of the firm and that’s a big change with, you know, name change and along with everything else that comes along with it. Any advice to those that are, maybe I guess living this as we speak on where we’re at in that journey, and how we continue to build upon the legacy that was there and then where we’re going with Sorren. Any thoughts around that?
My initial thought that comes to mind when you say that Heath is nothing you do as Sorren will ever change the legacy that came from the individual firms before they came together. We aren’t rewriting the past, we aren’t undoing anything that was done. The decision that’s made when firms come together, like Sorren has, is we’ve had incredibly impactful and successful existences as individual, independent firms to this point. And we recognize that the impact that we can have on our teams, on our clients, on our communities, with one another, is far greater as a collective than as individuals. So we’re going to acknowledge and accept, man, we had some great legacies. People that came before us, they paved an an amazing trail that got us to here, and now it’s our responsibility to make sure that we honor that legacy by going out and building an even better one for the future.
There’s nothing destructive about coming together. It’s a better path forward. If anything, it builds. The only risk of destruction is when you view your responsibility as keeping the status quo, despite the fact that the status quo is no longer even possible. You can’t do it like you did yesterday because yesterday’s gone. You can only do it like you can today or tomorrow. So it’s making that decision, and if there’s a leader listening and maybe your name was on the building and now you’re at Sorren and you’re thinking, “man, this is really hard,” give yourself a moment. Take an afternoon. Write down what you’re excited about, what you’re proud of, everything that was achieved, and then draw a line under it and say, great. Given all of that history, how do we use that to go build something even better with all these other amazing firms that have come together, and go forward and create a legacy that you’ll be even more proud of than the one that preceded where you’re at today?
Love it Jeremy. Good discussion. As we kind of wrap up here, is there anything that I haven’t asked yet that I should be asking?
I don’t think so. A lot of people don’t want to talk about legacy. It’s something we talk about after the fact. We talk about coaches after they’re gone and they’ve written their memoir and they’ve retired, and so much of legacy is an after the fact reflection. Right now in our household, I have three daughters, as you said; all three daughters are very big Dolly Parton fans. So it’s been, as we’re recording this, it’s been a very tough week in our house. It’s the week that Dolly Parton passed away, and I mean, there have been tears, it’s, yeah. And we think about legacy, kind of like we are right now with, you know, her passing is, oh, let’s think about all the great things that she did. Maybe the one thing that we haven’t touched on that I just want to make, the point is it isn’t that after the fact we somehow bestowed this legacy upon her, or upon any leader that came before us. It’s actually the fact that they were very intentional about building everything they did to have the impact that they wanted, because it’s what they believed created a better future that ultimately created the legacy. It’s just that sometimes the rest of the world, the rest of us, we need some “aha” moment to go, oh wow, that’s incredible what they’ve done. But it isn’t incredible because we just had this epiphany. It was incredible regardless. It just took us a little while to catch up.
Once we wrap up, one of the things we started doing, and I know you don’t know who the next guest is going to be, but what question would you like to ask one of our upcoming guests?
So the question that I will pose to whoever it is that is coming after me that will get this question, if you made the decision to start being the leader that you want to be, rather than becoming the leader that you want to be, what action would you take today?
It’s a good one.
It’s a hard one.
Yeah, no one’s going to want to be the next guest now. Jeremy. Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.
Like who’s that guy that asked that question? My gracious,
That might be a solo episode. I’ll have to address that one.
Give him a heads-up.
Yeah, I will. I promise you I will. Well, greatly appreciate the conversation, appreciate your time and your insight, and I think it’ll be, you know, extremely helpful for, for our listeners, not only within Sorren, but maybe even outside of Sorren. So greatly appreciate it. If someone wanted to know how to contact you, what would be the best way to do that?
Absolutely. So they can email me directly, JeremyC@UpstreamAcademy.com. They can connect with me on LinkedIn. As you know, and, and many of your listeners know, I am always happy to have a conversation if you’ve got a follow-up question. If something from this episode, you know, sparked interest or joy or questions in you and you want to reach out, please don’t hesitate. I’d love to have a conversation.
Awesome. Well, I look forward to the next one and I appreciate all of the listeners, and everything you all are doing as well. So thank you.
I appreciate it. Thanks, Heath.
As I said at the beginning, this is a bit of a unique episode since we are re-airing that discussion that I had with Heath on the Common Threads Podcast. I hope that you found it valuable. I hope that you’re able to be a bit more intentional as you reflect on your actions going forward, how you want to create the legacy that you’re going to leave behind, and the recognition that we can’t wait until the end of our career to determine the legacy, but instead, it is determined by the actions that we take every single day. I hope that was valuable to you and that conversation gives you some clear direction as you move forward. As always, thanks for joining us on The Upstream Leader. Can’t wait to talk to you again soon.
