Excited to welcome Dom Faussette to my show this Monday! Thanks Erik Swanson for this awesome introduction! Dom is a military veteran and ex-police officer turned motivational speaker with a moving story and an inspiring message. Don’t miss it!

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Listen to the podcast here:

Command Presence with Dom Faussette

We’re talking about Command Presence. I love language because language can sometimes send you off in different directions. When I built this show, every show is titled to be an action verb and a noun. For example, Cultivate Innovation. Cultivate would be a verb, and innovation would be the noun. In this case, Command Presence can potentially serve as a verb and a noun. You can command presence that is a verb and a noun, or it can be used as a noun onto itself or an adjective noun, command presence is a quality. I love when words serve more than one purpose. This is a good example of that. This is a show about commanding presence and about having a commanding presence or having command presence and that absolutely tickles me. We have a great guest whose expertise is in the area of command presence.

You may ask yourself, what exactly is this thing called command presence? We’ll get clarity about that during the course of this show. Is it self-control? Is it a quality of being present? I did a little research on this and I found a quote in the Toastmasters website of all places that command presence is an elusive quality, but you know it when you see it. Command presence takes place when you walk into a room, office, or any situation and you realize that there’s someone who’s in charge even when he or she is not formally in charge. Command presence is communicated both verbally and non-verbally. That’s a great definition because by that definition, this elusive quality called command presence is in my estimation a vital part of leadership. If you’re going to be a great leader, you ought to have some command presence. You have to have the ability to have people walk into a room and sense that you’re in charge and that you are the person whether or not it’s a formal title. It’s an important quality.

It reminds me, I hearken back to another interesting distinction that I heard from Robert Cialdini, the expert in the area of influence. In Cialdini’s book, Influence, he said, “Authority can take on different faces. You can be in authority or you can be an authority.” Being in authority is the title that somebody gave you. If you’re a teacher, you’re in authority and you have authority over others. You can boss them around if you want to but it doesn’t mean they’re going to like it. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to necessarily follow you. You’re in authority as opposed to being an authority, that is an individual who has an authoritative presence by virtue of knowledge, by virtue of a certain quality of being, by virtue of experience, by virtue of something about them that makes them an authority in the area on which you’re submitting to their authority or you’re submitting to their expertise.

To me, I would contend that command presence lives very comfortably in that. It’s a vital quality for leadership and the question we need to ask ourselves as leaders is how do we develop that quality? How do we become present in that way? How do we develop an ability to experience life through the eyes of one who has command presence? Developing that quality speaks a lot to the work that I’ve done over the years. We’re talking about learning to be unshakeable. It’s one element of this. You’re not going to be a commanding individual if you’re shakeable, if things tend to throw you off your game. If you tend to fly off the handle, if your emotions are raw or fragile, chances are you are not going to be one with command presence. Someone who doesn’t need the approval of others.

We’ve been teaching a course on approval addiction. A lot of people, more people than we might realize, have what we call approval addiction. They need the approval of others. They need other people to like them or trust them or believe in them. When you got that approval addiction, especially if you’re not aware that you have it, it reads non-verbally. The lack of need for someone else’s approval is another element, another face to this command presence piece.

Clear mindedness, you look at the people that you experienced as being commanding, as being authoritative in a positive way. They tend to be clear minded. They tend to know what they want, they know if they’re getting it. They know how to communicate about whether they’ve got it or not. There’s a certain quality of vision that great leaders have. A lot of that draws itself from clear-mindedness. Courage, the courage to walk into difficult situations and experience uncertain responses and then act appropriately based on what you find. These are all qualities that I would contend fit under the umbrella of command presence.

When I wrote the book Buddha in the Trenches, this was on my mind. As many of you know, Buddha in the Trenches is a book about being centered, calm, and masterful on the battlefields of life. Another way of saying that might be to say having command presence on the battlefields of life. In the research for that book, I interviewed leaders and I interviewed people who were on the battlefields of life. That included people in the military, Navy Seals, Marines, police officers, emergency workers, nurses, doctors, and executives. There are many different faces to this quality of leadership and in writing my book, I wanted to make sure that we were looking at what those qualities were.

Command presence, with that name or without that name, was clearly at the very top of the list of what it takes to be a Buddha in the trenches, be calm and centered on the battlefields of life. Having said that, this show evolved right out of that research and right out of that book. My desire to do this show is predicated on my eagerness and enthusiasm to provide you with people like our guest who is an expert in this area. I’m going to be introducing you to a new friend who’s doing some great work in the area of leadership by bringing his military and his police training into his methodology and teaching command presence.

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I am thrilled to be introducing my guest, leadership speaker, and bestselling author, Dom Faussette. He has been to hell and back, down as a military veteran and an ex-police officer with over ten years of corporate leadership experience. Dom is the CEO of Think React Lead, a company that’s dedicated to pushing people past their limiting beliefs by bridging the gap between their mind and their heart for increased success. I had an opportunity to meet Dom through a mutual friend, Erik Swanson, who seems to know everybody and has introduced me to some great guests and Dom is certainly no exception to that. We had a great conversation last week and meeting of the minds, you’re in for a big treat here. Everybody welcome, Dom Faussette.

How are you, Sir?

I’m fantastic, Dom. Thanks for being with us. I know you do a lot of traveling in your work, where are you now?

As of now, I am in Arizona and prepping to head out to Santa Barbara, LA and back to Florida, if I’m not mistaken.

Tell us a little bit about your story. I know you’ve got an interesting backstory. We had a conversation about this before and it starts with a military service and brings us right up to date with the work that you’re doing now. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

I was in the Air Force K9. I joined the military to go pararescue, but I failed a swim test by seven seconds and I ended up with a K9 slot. I was K9 in the Air Force and then once I got out of the Air Force, I became a police officer. I’m from California. I enlisted in the military from Arizona, but when I came back home after my enlistment, I started applying in a bunch of places. Anybody who’s ever tried to become a cop or has become one knows that it’s not an easy process. I threw my name in the hat to a bunch of cities and states and said to myself, “Whoever hires me first is where I’ll go.” Jackson, Mississippi is the place that got back to me the soonest and because I’m a man of integrity, I kept my word to myself and I packed my bags and left.

I did that for a few years and I realized that this was not the career path that I wanted. I got to taste, I got the t-shirt, it got ripped off of me and I landed a position in the corporate space. I did that for fourteen years with different companies. I’ve been a full-time entrepreneur for a year as a leadership speaker in the corporate space and thought speaker in the entrepreneur space covering command presence.

In our conversation, you had some interesting stories from the stage that are very gripping and that are moving about being up against some very challenging and scary situations.

I talk about command presence. Both of my parents are prior military. We can even call it confidence because that’s somewhat it is. I was headed to breakfast at 2:00 AM on a Tuesday and it was just me and my car by myself. I’m driving and somebody runs out and she’s screaming. It was a young lady. I stop and get out of the car and she’s yelling that there’s a man trying to kill to kill her. Because of all the TV shows that we watch, we go into this fight or flight mode. My position was to go into fight mode or like a bad man, if you will.

I found myself standing in front of a man, probably about fifteen to twenty yards away from him. I’m in the front lawn. He’s on his doorstep and in the South, most houses have raised front porches and he’s standing there. He’s a big man, I’m looking at about 6’2’’, 6’3” and very built. He’s got a knife in his hand. Up until this point, I was serving warrants and kicking in doors without a bulletproof vest. I had some issues going on that I hadn’t rectified and it brought me to this point of wanting to be taken out. I draw on this man and told him to drop the knife. We go back and forth and he didn’t drop the knife. While I’m looking at this man from my rear sight and my Glock 19, which is a handgun, I can look in his eyes and I see a certain level of pain and hurt that I could, unfortunately at the time, identify with.

I didn’t see him. I actually saw myself and as I’m processing what I’m seeing. I hear the words daddy and then I hear crying and there was a little boy who appeared from the right side of this man’s hip and he was about seven and then I see another child and another one. We’re looking at three young men that are standing there and I said to myself, “There’s no way I can kill this man in front of his kids.” I holstered my weapon and what felt like an eternity, literally was probably a second and a half later, he comes running off the porch. I went running towards him and we connected. When you fight, you don’t pay attention to the object that could take you out because that’s how you get taken out. That’s a skillset but in addition to that, I didn’t care.

 

If I would’ve been taken out, I figured I’d go out like a hero and I’d be okay with that. I don’t know what happened. I blacked out and I had handcuffs on him by the time I got done. After that, I realized I never wanted to be put in that position again. I needed to understand why I felt the way that I felt and why couldn’t I kill him. I would have been okay to take him out, but I wasn’t in a safe place. I put my two weeks’ notice in and the second chapter or third chapter of my life took shape from there.

That’s a moving story. You said there’s a part of you that you wanted to be taken out, that you were putting yourself in harm’s way. If I’m reading between the lines correctly, it sounds like what you’re saying is that you were not happy with your life or with yourself and you don’t have much of a self-preservation instinct. Is that what you’re saying?

That’s saying it lightly.

You were in pain, you were hurting and I know there’s a name for that, I forgot what they call it.

I call it a suicide by a suspect.

It was something like that, that’s a good spin on it. You could have checked out and had your heroism be the excuse for checking out when in reality there was something going on below the surface that was dark. What happened to that darkness? That’s a pretty big thing to have in your history.

It’s started in a way where my life was brought to my attention at that moment. You can see the sun is up and you can say it’s such a nice day outside or you can say to yourself the sun’s about to go down. When I left law enforcement, I saw a couple of therapists. One of the therapists I spoke with asked me what’s one thing that I did that put a smile on my face as a child? Being the hardened individual, my first response was not a happy response, but what we ended up pulling out of that was skateboarding. Skateboarding was something that connected me back to what I like to coin as a happy place. I bought a skateboard as an ex-cop, military veteran, and a grown man as I referred myself at the moment. I bought a skateboard and I would go around my neighborhood and ride my skateboard and that took me away from the feeling. I still dealt with my night terrors. When I first got back home I would spend nights in my closet because that’s where I was comfortable sleeping.

Was this PTSD? Was this something as a result of your military service?

No. This is PTSD from law enforcement. That’s due to the types of calls that I would respond to, day in and day out. There’s a part of society that does things to human beings that the news will never show. You will never see it on any TV screen and the newspapers don’t talk about it because it’s that malicious. As a 21 or 22-year-old police officer who’s still trying to find his way on this earth, you don’t know how to combat that. All you know is you combat it with your fist. I’m a trained fighter. I don’t train anymore, but at that time I had a pretty good skill set. My emotions would come out in effecting arrests in a very harsh manner when I was a police officer.

There’s a lot of lessons in this. You almost wish that the people in the force were people who had more experience and more wisdom, more of a capacity to act appropriately as opposed to reacting. A lot of these people are young and they’re acting on instinct or on emotion rather than through sober judgment.

There’s nothing that can prepare you for the streets. Whether you go on at the age of 35 or you jumped out of the police academy at 22. There’s no academy. There’s nothing that can prepare you to go into a house and see a little three-year-old girl with seventeen cigarette burns on her. There’s no video, there’s no role playing that can prep you emotionally for how you’re going to react to that. It boils down to our life experiences and that’s in law enforcement. That’s in executive leadership. That’s everywhere in life. Nothing prepares you for how you would react and respond. You actually get into the trenches and see how you respond.

Whether you're an executive or you're a front-line employee, everybody has to go to work. Click To Tweet

Until you master that to some extent, it leaves a scar. You heard me as we came into the beginning of the show before I invited you on. I gave my rap on command presence. Does any of that make sense to you at all?

It made complete sense. I loved the intro. I love how you put it all together and you made it multifaceted, which was wonderful. That’s the best intro I’ve heard yet.

Let’s dig into that a little bit, the command presence idea. What I’m hearing and why I was so intrigued by having you as a guest was that you are not somebody who’s coming out with, “Just go and do it.” You’ve got some real-life experience. You’ve had some real challenges and some real trauma. Even this part about getting the skateboard. That delights me because what we find is that we work with adults. We work with successful serious people and sometimes it doesn’t go down easy with successful serious people. The reality is that’s a part of your experience that informs your adult self. If you don’t cultivate your inner child, then your adult self is very empty indeed.

I would agree. I had to come to the realization that having fun is not a bad thing. We missed out on having fun. One of the first questions I ask any potential client is, “When is the last time you had fun?” You’d be amazed at how many people cannot sincerely answer that question without including others. For example, I asked a lady that question and she said, “I remember last Christmas I had so much fun because of my kids and their gifts.” I said, “That’s not you having fun, that’s somebody else having fun. You’re finding validation in the fun that they are having by way of something that you’ve done but when is the last time you had fun?” She started crying. She couldn’t answer the question.

It’s a challenging question. Here’s a personal experience. I end up getting on a project and I was working hard to try to accomplish that project. If I’m very successful and I get what I intended to get out of it, then the project completes itself and I could move onto my next project. If I’m smart, I may reap the benefits of having been successful and feel good about myself and reward myself with some fun. If I have a project and it’s not going the way I want it to or I’m not getting the results, let’s say I’m trying to market a new course and I’m not grabbing the attention that I want to grab, then I work a little harder.

I feel even worse, so I work a little bit harder and then I will feel worse, I work even harder. The next thing is it’s like being on a treadmill where every effort breeds more effort. The idea of stepping off that treadmill to have fun seems like a bad idea. I guarantee it’s not a bad idea, but inside of me at that moment, when I’m churning or obsessing about something that needs doing and I’m not getting the results I want, my brain becomes my worst enemy. It won’t give me the luxury of shutting down.

I find that I used to be that way. I’ve only been working outside of the corporate space for a year. Working from home takes a certain level of understanding who you are but I’ve learned to surround myself with toys. When I say toys, I have a motorcycle, I have a mountain bike, I have eighteen speed, and I have a lot of skateboards. What I have found is the 30-minute break that I take in the middle of the day as long as the weather is alright, it resets my mind. I learned that from the military. We would be training and training, not that we stopped training and have fun.

What would happen is maybe a cadre or a drill instructor would come out and make everybody started doing jumping jacks or made everybody go run five miles. That makes you use a different part of your body to clear up the space and the other part of the body that you were currently using. In this case, using the mind for a long period of time to re-engaging the physical body to reshape and give the mind a break and it comes back and uses the mind again. As simple as it sounds, guys like us, we find ourselves in the trenches, we get into the weeds, we bite onto it and we won’t let go.

The thing we attach ourselves to is the doing and the thinking. We forget the being and the physical, the body. That’s a good analogy. I found the same thing when I was interviewing both athletes and people in the military. What kept coming up that was consistent with my knowledge of things like Buddhist meditation is ultimately you have to get out of your head and into your body. Your head is a very dangerous place when you don’t have any escape valve.

You don’t realize it. Until you’ve got some wisdom under your belt, you don’t realize that that’s a place that you need to remove yourself from for a period of time. Our generation was taught to work, work, work and guys shouldn’t have fun.

In stress research, Hans Selye, who was the father of modern stress research back in the ‘70s or ‘80s, talked about the general adaptive syndrome. When something happens that provokes your fear response or anxiety where you have to go into flight or fight, it causes the release of certain neurohormones. A lot of adrenaline is released, epinephrine is released and certain nerve pathways are accessed. It’s important that you’re able to access that because this is a throwback to when we were cavemen and then the saber-toothed tiger would come out. You need it to be able to go into fight or flight mode otherwise you’d be dinner.

In prehistoric days, it was understood that you need the fight or flight response but once the stress is over, you replenish yourself. You go sit in the cave and you chill out for a while. Whereas in our modern world, our saber-toothed tigers aren’t going to kill us. Our mind doesn’t know that it reacts the same way and we don’t have that break. We go from stress to stress to stress.

As you were talking about that, it reminded me of the times that I would kick in a door. The way this works is intel would tell, “Faussette, we have two individuals at a house,” or maybe I’m sitting in roll call and I have to go serve a warrant. It sometimes can be a very simple task, but when intel tells you there are two individuals in a house and you go kicked in the door and when you kicked in the door, there are four individuals in there, you don’t have the luxury of saying, “I apologize, I’ll be right back with some more people.” If you’re doing what you’re doing, act like it never happened, we’ll be good to go. You don’t have the luxury of doing that. If they’re armed or even if they’re not, you’re outnumbered, typically outgunned. You have to think on the fly and you don’t have the luxury of depending on the emotion. You have to go straight to training and you engage. I’m here so I’ve succeeded in those realms.

 

For me, that’s where command presence came from. It’s very normal for me to take on a task that I know nothing about. The way I look at it is, it’s better than getting shot at. That’s how I operated in the corporate space. I’d see an opportunity, I’d take it, and I’d find a way to win. We say fight or flight but the mindset for myself was flight isn’t an option and fight doesn’t mean hand to hand combat. If I kick in a door and there are four guys and it was just me, there are a lot more hands than just the two that are on my body, so I learned to communicate. I learned the body posturing, as we call it peacocking. I learned to flex what I had to make the outcome be more beneficial in my favor.

I’m processing this. What it sounds like to me is that command presence is a tool that maybe negates the need for the fight part of this thing. In other words, if you’ve got command presence, then first of all, probably people aren’t as apt to fight with you. You’re developing a quality and that quality is protecting you from the need to constantly be in that high-stress crisis to crisis mode. Is that an accurate way of saying this? To tie command presence back to the issue of stress as we’ve been discussing it.

Yes, it is. I refer most of what I do outside of my house to what I do inside of my house. This is a rhetorical question, but how many people drive home after work to a relationship they don’t want to be in? A lot. If I’m driving home and I know that there is something that I did to negatively impact my wife, nothing major, but it’s called being in a relationship, then command presence in that instance is to stop by the store and pick up something nice. When I walked in the house, typically the last person to walk in is the one that changes the mood in the household, you make physical contact and use words of affirmation. Acknowledge everybody in the house. If you need to apologize, do so. To me, that’s command presence.

That relieves stress on me as a spouse. It relieves the tension in the house. As a leader, leadership is an influence, nothing more, nothing less. When you can lead from behind your door, inside the house, then it makes things much easier to lead outside the door. When I go the next morning in the work and my first appointment is a board meeting, instead of coming in and sitting down, I come in and I say good morning. I will typically walk around the boardroom table and I’ll touch a shoulder and I’ll shake hand. What I have learned is the person that touches first in that manner is the one that has the leadership, that has the command presence, that has the influence, whether they are running the room or running the meeting or not.

What I’m hearing is taking charge is choosing in advance what are the behaviors that convey that quality and then taking charge of making sure that you’re displaying those behaviors.

It comes from compassion. It comes from being vulnerable. People use the phrase, “I’m not a morning person.” That’s fine. I’ve seen probably four or five people breathe their last breath and as I’ve looked at them I said, “I bet they wish they were morning people because it’s nighttime right now and they’re not going to see the morning.” I don’t ever use that phrase. Personally, I’m happy to be alive every day that my eyes opened up. What I learned in law enforcement is that whether you’re an executive or you’re a front-line employee, everybody has to go to work. None of us truly know what those individuals dealt with the night before. If I can come into a boardroom meeting or if I can come to a department meeting and smile and say good morning and make a physical connection in an inappropriate manner, I might be the only smile that they see that day.

Given our society, I might be the last mile that they see. I might be the smile and touch that they need to positively influence those around them. Showing that compassion and not doing this thing where I used to do this, “I’m a veteran. I’m an ex-cop.” Just this whole machismo, “I’m a man. I don’t know how to be so I’m going to not smile and I’m going to be stern and I’m going to be a jerk.” I learned how to lead from my heart because I never knew what people were truly going through. Many people show up to work with a facade and it wasn’t for me to do that. It was for me to live with purpose, lead with purpose, and have command presence so people could see that I’m dependable, I’m accountable.

Lead as though one or three people were around you - your mentor, your spouse, or your children. Click To Tweet

You define some of those qualities, dependability, accountability, compassion. What are some of the other things that you would say fit under the umbrella of command presence?

Being silent and letting your actions speak much louder than your words, your posture, those non-verbals. Most of us can walk into a room or an environment and look at somebody and tell, “Person A is compassionate by how they’re standing. Person B lacks confidence by how they hunch over.” I believe that command presence is specific to the person and the situation based on where they’re at currently, compared to their past experiences. I would never tell somebody to stand in the way that I stand because the way I stand is a learned behavior, it’s ingrained in who I am. I stand with my chest out, my shoulders back.

That’s because that’s how I was brought up within the paramilitary and military ranks. If you think of a Southern grandmother, she has command presence and her command presence might be through her cooking. When you walk into the house she has on the apron and she pinches you on your cheeks or kisses your cheeks. I recently went to a family reunion on my wife’s side in New York and they’re all Italian. You could tell the matriarchs and patriarchs as they would greet you. They would grab you by your shoulders, grab you by your cheeks and give you a kiss. This are the men and women on each side of your cheeks. That’s command presence.

Maybe it’s the SWAT team leader that does kick in the front door and moves his troops along with integrity. That’s command presence. Maybe it’s guys like myself, who sometimes forgets to step away from the desk. It’s summertime, my kids are at school, step away from the desk and say, “Let’s go to the movies. Let’s spend some time with together.” Tomorrow’s not promised. I have to engage them in my actions and that’s command presence as a father.

What I hear in all of these is discernment. We need to be somewhat self-aware and decide to put that energy out there and decide not to let the woes of the day determine how you’re going to be.

That’s true, but it is so hard to do that in our society.

That’s why there are only so many leaders. We’ve got an audience that includes people in leadership positions in corporate America, as well as entrepreneurs and solopreneurs and people with small businesses. How can they develop their command presence? What are some of the things that you would say to somebody who’s maybe been struggling with their leadership, with the response they’re getting from their team? What are some of the exercises or tools that are at their disposal or attitude shifts that can help them be better at what they do?

One of the simplest approaches is I would say, lead as though one or three people were around you, your mentor, your spouse, or your children. Imagine if you’re leading a team and even when you get upset you don’t act the way you might normally act if your children were around. I asked one of my employees one time and he was a little besides himself. He took the position but he didn’t take anything outside of that. It was a positional thing for him, leadership was. I asked, “How would you lead if your thirteen-year-old daughter and your fifteen-year-old son were sitting in your office as long as you’re in the office?” He looked at me, he said, “I’ve never been asked that before,” and he broke down how he would lead.

That’s one exercise. The other one is write down your goals. For every one goal, write down your non-negotiables. If you understand what your non-negotiables are, then you don’t let things take you off track. As much as this is a buzz phrase, know your why. My wife for years has been changing one life every day for the rest of my life. I don’t have the luxury of getting mad over something that I don’t need to get mad over. It started with, and I’ll be very honest, I don’t like apologizing. I used to loathe apologizing. If I didn’t like apologizing, don’t do stuff that I have to apologize for later.

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That’s one way to deal with it for sure. That was brilliant. It’s great to suggest to people to lead as if somebody important is seeing them lead. Somebody whose opinion you value, somebody who you don’t want to embarrass yourself in front of. There’s a famous Buddhist story and it goes like this. There’s a person who is asked by the king to take a chicken and he says, “I want you to kill the chicken, but I want you to kill the chicken in a place where nobody sees you killed the chicken.” He comes back about a week later with a live chicken and the king says, “What happened?” He says, “Wherever I went, the chicken sees.”

It’s like if you have the chicken with you, if you have your thirteen-year-old daughter with you, she’s the chicken. The chicken sees your experience of life as if nothing you do is being done in secret. Nothing you do has no consequences. A lot of that comes down to integrity also. You talked about integrity at the beginning as being a man of integrity. That’s huge, being willing to measure yourself against the standard and not cop out on it. Again, the chicken sees.

I worked with a guy at my last place of employment who was a retired naval captain, a great guy. He and I couldn’t be two completely different people. He grew up in West Virginia as a pig farmer. I grew up in a trailer. When somebody says West Virginia, pig farmer trailer, whatever image pulls out, that’s how he grew up. We connected. We’re polar opposites, but we’re thick as thieves now. One thing he would always do and I would hear him say to himself in his office next to mine, “Honesty, integrity, loyalty, and service.” As he was thinking about his next action, he mentioned those words and he even had it on his license plate on his Corvette, HILS, honesty, integrity, loyalty, and service.

If what he was about to do didn’t align with honesty, integrity, loyalty, and service, he didn’t do it. Even if he was feeling maybe a little taken aback because somebody may have offended him, he would say, “Honesty, integrity, loyalty, and service.” That’s one of the ways Think React Lead came about. I used to be in a very emotional person, but that was because I didn’t know who I was. I would say, “Think as an executive, react like a soldier, and lead.” It takes all of the emotion out of the decision making at that moment.

In Buddha in the Trenches, the second principle we teach is to live by a code. That’s the HILS idea, honesty, integrity, loyalty, and service. You’re always measuring your actions against your request, against your higher purpose. How can our audience engage your services or learn more about you?

There’s my website which is ThinkReactLead.com. I can also be reached at ThinkReactLead@gmail.com and then on every social media platform. My first and last name, Dom Faussette.

It’s a nice website. It’s a new website. You’re still building some functionality into it but it’s a good-looking site. I know you’re going to have a dream test up there so people can go and take the dream test. Say a word or two about that.

The difference between a dream and a goal is a date. What I have found is most people lack the ability to set the date because they’re afraid to implements or they’re afraid to make a decision. Being able to make a decision is the end result of the dream test and it gets people dialed in on how they are going to accomplish what it is they want to accomplish out of life.

I’ll be interested in taking that quiz for myself. I very much look forward to seeing that piece of the site fleshed out.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

Now it is our habits to end our show with a metaphor, a quote, and a challenge for the week. Although I like to leave the challenge for my guests to deliver, I do like to share my ideas for a metaphor and a quote. The metaphor for this week is the metaphor of the lion. There are many animals in our animal kingdom, but I think of the lion when I think about command presence. I think about the strong, powerful king of the jungle. What would your day be like? What would your life be like? What would your week be like if you carry yourself as the lion?

Certainly, things come your way that may not be pleasant or appreciated, but as long as you maintain your dignity, your calm, and you act with courage and integrity, then all that stuff rolls off your back. Hold the metaphor of the lion for this week and see what that does for you. The quote for this week comes from Yogananda, the spiritual teacher who said, “Remain calm, serene, and always in command of yourself. You will then find out how easy it is to get along.” Commanding oneself is more important than commanding anyone else. With that, I’m going to hand this off to Dom to share the challenge for the week.

Thank you, Dr. Taubman. A challenge of the week would be this. I truly hope everybody engages in this challenge. I ask that you think about the person in your life that you feel owes you an apology or that you need to forgive. My task is that you give them a call. If they don’t answer, that fine, leave a voicemail. When you speak to them, I want you to think about them, not yourself and say hi. You don’t say, I’m sorry. You don’t have to ask for their forgiveness, just say, “I was thinking about you and I wanted to hear your voice.” This could be a brother, a sister, a mom or dad, an ex-coworker, or a child that you don’t have a relationship with. Do that and watch it completely revamp your life and how you feel day in and day out.

Get over that pit in your stomach. Get over that hurdle and engage a higher level or sense of command presence in your life. Click To Tweet

That went in and that’s intense. Thank you for that. That’s an act of courage for sure. I can see how it could produce massive changes. Call someone that you feel owes you an apology or that you own apology to and make the call. Don’t have an agenda, but make the call and say, “I was thinking of you.”

Getting over that pit in your stomach, even thinking about doing it, your stomach starts to get into knots. You can get over that hurdle. You’ll engage a higher level or sense of command presence in your life.

Thank you, Dom. Thank you so much for that gift. For people to learn more about you, they can go to ThinkReactLead.com or find you on social media and it’s well-worth making the visit and join in Dom’s world.

Remember folks to tune in again, share this with your friends and subscribe to my podcast. You can visit Executive Zen on iTunes, iHeart Radio, C-suite, and all sorts of other neat places or find the replays right on my website, SteveTaubman.com/ExecutiveZen. Next week we’ll be joined by humor expert, Karen Buxton. I’ll be talking about the power of humor in the workplace. Thank you so much for tuning in to Executive Zen, the show that helps you to lead consciously and profit responsibility. I’m Dr. Steve Taubman, wishing you a fantastic week and thanks again to our wonderful guest, Dom Faussette.

Important Links:

• Influence
• Buddha in the Trenches
• Dom Faussette – LinkedIn
• Think React Lead
• ThinkReactLead@gmail.com
• Dom Faussette – Twitter

About Dom Faussette