WAYNE BROWN: Hello, I’m your host, Wayne Brown, and welcome to the ET project. We’re delighted to be delivering this podcast for executive talent all over the world, whom we’re affectionately referring to as Team ET. Today, we’re flying into Baltimore in central Maryland, USA, and chatting with skydiving sensation Mr. Joe Wyrwas. Joe works at the intersection of leadership, technology, and human decision-making. He’s the founder of Wyser With Joe, where he coaches leaders and delivers keynotes and organizational training focused on clarity, confidence, and purposeful action under pressure. In parallel, Joe serves as the vice president of Anthem Engineering, supporting U.S. government and intelligence community programs and bringing more than a decade of experience leading complex technical teams in high-stakes, mission-driven environments. His work spans strategy delivery and people leadership, where the cost of misalignment is real, as well as the margin for error being super small. Joe’s speaking blends practical leadership frameworks with real-world experience in personal storytelling, helping leaders navigate fear, uncertainty, and responsibility without losing momentum. Outside of work, he’s a licensed diver with more than 650 jumps, an experience that deeply informs his perspective on trust, risk, and leading when conditions are anything but confident. Team, this conversation gives us an opportunity to dive into many parallels between skydiving and leadership, and Joe is the perfect person to speak from both perspectives. Another incredible opportunity for you as leaders to go deep and consider what might be possible if you are just willing to take a step back and see the big picture.

INTRO: Welcome to the ET project, a podcast for those executive talents determined to release their true potential and create an impact. Join our veteran coach and mentor, Wayne Brown, as we unpack an exciting future together.

WAYNE BROWN: Hello, team. We have what I would like to think is an adrenaline-pumping conversation lined up for you today. Many of you know that I love a good set of statistics, so I’m going to introduce one here, and I’ll be interested to ask our guest about it shortly. But statistically, a skydiver will experience a major malfunction every 1,000 jumps. So, consider that if you’re a passionate professional skydiver, you’re jumping out of airplanes at 14,000 feet, terrifying enough, and the outcome with a malfunction could be as severe as they come, right? So, think about that. But then consider the corporate world, arguably just as unforgiving in many instances; studies show us that 70% of change initiatives fail to meet their objectives. And of course, while the failure isn’t going to be as physically damaging as jumping out of a plane and having a mishap, the consequences, of course, could feel equally traumatic. So, my guest today navigates both of these high-stakes environments. He’s a licensed skydiver with over 650 jumps, as well as a senior technology executive. Joe Wyrwas, you’ve built your career and the philosophy, I believe, on leading when the ground disappears. So today I’m going to play around with some of the parallels between both of those activities. Joe, welcome to the ET project. 

JOE WYRWAS: Thanks for having me, Wayne. I’m so excited to talk with you today. 

WAYNE BROWN: 650 jumps, my friend. You’re zeroing in on that 1,000 number; any nerves? 

JOE WYRWAS: Yeah, that’s a great question. Really, for that number, no. It comes down to making sure you don’t forget about the basics, particularly around packing your parachute, doing safe things with your friends in the air, and just really focusing on that. So maybe when I hit 1,000, we’ll see what happens, but right now I’m feeling okay. 

WAYNE BROWN: So, if you don’t mind, let’s go right back to the beginning, to your first jump. Do you still remember that first jump? 

JOE WYRWAS: I do. I did my first jump way back in 2017, much like what most people do, which is a tandem jump. So, I was attached to someone else, the professional. I did a road trip up to Chicago, Illinois, in the United States to visit some friends. And the friend I went with was like, “We should do a skydive.” I was like, “All right, it’s one of those bucket list things; why not? We’re on this road trip; add it to the adventure.” I was actually only nervous for four seconds the entire time, and those four seconds were right when my feet were hanging outside the plane, and I was like, “What did I get myself into? ” But then boom, it just happened so fast. 

[00:05:00]

WAYNE BROWN: If we pivot now and think about a young leader, maybe coming in for the first time as a leader, we use the parallel of the static line or even the tandem jump. What would be something that the manager of that new leader could do that provides a similar sort of support to the static line or the tandem jump? What should we be thinking about doing with the other leaders to help them really overcome the fear or overcome the unknown? 

JOE WYRWAS: What I would recommend is identifying what those worst-case failure scenarios are that the young leader could get into and really clearly identifying them and what the kind of starting to be a tipping point is, and the boss or the coach or whoever is really in charge of that young leader knows the signs and knows when to step in. And so, like I just kind of talked about, that first student jump, and for your first several student jumps, you’re with two instructors holding on, and they’re literally trained to save your life, to come in and deploy your parachute if you fail to do it for yourself. If you’re spinning out of control, they have to come in, stop you, and deploy it. And so just like that, scenario where the number one and only thing those skydiving instructors focus on is that one failure scenario that’s life or death. And so hopefully it’s not life or death for that young leader. But the best training I’ve seen is when we give these young leaders, these up-and-coming managers, a chance to get into some of these challenging scenarios. But you know, as their coach, as their boss, when you should step in, in a productive way, of course, to say, “We’re about to cross that life-or-death line; I need to deploy your parachute. I’m going to have to clean this up, and then we’re going to be okay.” And you want to talk about that beforehand; you don’t want to surprise your young leader, walking in, deploying their parachute, and then they’re all the way up in there now looking down like, “What just happened!? ”And so having these conversations up front really prevents that harm to the young leader, feeling like you overstepped without them knowing. But two, it gives them the confidence to know, okay, worst case, they’re going to come in, they’re going to help save me, so I don’t have that complete failure scenario. And so, it’s the best of both worlds when you have that conversation up front, and everyone knows that in one of those situations, that boss, that manager will come in and save that person’s life. 

WAYNE BROWN: I would love to think that was a standard practice for many companies, but sadly, I have to think… my own experience and looking at the companies I’ve worked with typically isn’t the case, but it could well be, right? And it’s not such a challenging task to actually have that conversation up front and to be there for the new leaders. And I’m sure there’ll be a higher survival rate as well if that were the case. Another aspect for a new leader or a parallel to skydiving, is that you have the altimeter, so you’re measuring your distance from the ground all the time, right? It’s kind of your guiding tool, I guess. I’m guessing that you still use that? 

JOE WYRWAS: Yeah, I have two, actually. I have one I read, and I have one in my ear now, too. 

WAYNE BROWN: At what height do you deploy the chute? I guess that’s my novice question to start with. 

JOE WYRWAS: I apologize to most of the world that doesn’t use feet, but I am in the United States, so I’m going to go with feet here. Typically, we deploy around 3,500 feet, then that gives you about 500 feet for your parachute to open, and then a couple of thousand feet to fly it back to wherever you want to land. 

WAYNE BROWN: Again, we try and draw a parallel for the young leaders, if we think of the altimeter as a metric or some gauge that they can use as a guide, is there anything that comes to mind for leaders that they should be thinking about or watching or observing that helps them understand where they are in their process and in their journey? 

[00:10:00]

JOE WYRWAS: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I’d actually throw in another part into how we use that altimeter before even getting right into the heart of your question. The other big thing we do as skydivers when there are multiple of us is we actually plan out the altitude we’re all going to break away and safely create distance before we deploy our parachutes. And so why I mentioned that is there’s so much value in that metric, that feat, in not only saving yourself by deploying at the right time but protecting those around you as well. And so for me, one of the things that really comes to mind with your question is how we protect each other, especially if I’m in a leadership position. It’s that check-in that’s once weekly, once monthly, or once quarterly, making sure that we’re not only aligned with what we’re doing and the tasks we have, but who you are as a person, that person on my team, a person that I work with, and someone that I hope to continue to work with for a long time, which means I’m actually checking in and caring about your well-being. And so, why that came to mind is throughout your entire skydive, a good skydiver doesn’t just wait till the end, checks how high they are, and deploys their parachute; they’re doing a check-in every couple of seconds, every thousand feet or so. And so, with that, I see the direct parallel of if we waited until deployment, if we waited till something went wrong, potentially could go wrong with our team, with our company, or with someone under us; we waited way too long. We should be doing those check-ins ideally once a week or once a month, where we’re not just waiting for the wrong things, the bad things, or the thing that ‘uh-oh’ type of moments. And so, for me, it’s really that continued process of making sure we’re paying attention to what’s important, i.e., the ground and how close it is. And by doing that constant check-in, i.e., with our people, we’re not surprised when we look down, and I’m like, “Uh-oh, there is the ground,” way closer than I thought. 

WAYNE BROWN: Coming back to the parallels again, thinking about it from a leadership perspective, that first, let’s say first assignment, first initiative that they’ve been given, quite often there’s that fear of failure that they’re not 100% sure they’ve taken all the right preparation steps, they’ve made all the right decisions, and there’s anything they can do that’s going to guide them effectively through that process. 

JOE WYRWAS: Yeah, definitely. I’m really big into learning styles and the people I work with understanding how they really like to receive information and how they process it. And the skydiving programs in the United States do a really good job of actually doing three different ways, all tied in for every single lesson, in one written form. So, write your instructions down. As a leader, the number of times that I realized that I messed up when I verbally said something to someone, and I just assumed they would remember all the details. And so, I encourage everyone, no matter if you’re in a leadership position or not, to write it down. The second thing that skydiving instructing does, and what the best leaders do, is then verbally discuss the thing you wrote down, ask them to put into words what they understand about your written instructions. Don’t just read to them what you wrote, but actually have them verbalize their thoughts. And so, then you can check for understanding; you can sometimes realize that what you wrote might not have been as clear as you thought, and you had an assumption or two in there. And then the third thing, if practical, walk them through an example; show them what it looks like, in skydiving again, for body position, they have this little wooden man that is like the arms move and the legs move and the head moves. And so, they show us on the wooden man, here’s what your legs should look like, and here’s what your arms should look like,” and so, then you can visually see a representation of the thing you’re trying to do. When we’re practicing what you’re supposed to do under your parachute, when they’re saying, “Hey, on landing, before you get to the ground, you want your arms all the way straight up,” they’ll have us put our arms all the way straight up. And so, as a leader, if you’re able to give those concrete examples, this is what a good finished product looks like, this is what a great finished product looks like. This is kind of on the other end; this is not good. And so, write the instructions, and verbally talk through them. 

[00:15:00] 

JOE WYRWAS: And then if you’re able to then show that end product, and ideally even that process to get there, that really solidifies that first learning step for someone on your team or someone under you. And then again, you can build that into a repeatable process. And now say you’re a growing company, and you’re no longer the middle manager, or the manager directly of a team, you’re moving up. Well, if you repeated that process enough, if you actually made it consumable in a way that you can hand it to a new leader, then they can do the same thing for their team, and then the next leader, the next leader, and the next leader. And that’s how great companies expand and build when you really document those processes and you can then clearly hand them off and hand them down and you don’t expect everything to come out of one guy’s mouth or one guy’s head. And especially if he leaves the company or moves to a new position, you don’t have to worry about those challenges either. 

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah. There are so many supporting factors around all what you just said there, I’m just thinking the logic is beautiful and clear and for it to happen, you need the environment, right? So, you need to have that feeling that I can ask questions if I’m not clear, I get the opportunity to demonstrate or to practice and failure is not something I should be frightened of. So, there’s a whole raft of different things there. One thing I was thinking is when you pack your parachute, you also have a reserved chute, right? Typically. 

JOE WYRWAS: Yeah.

WAYNE BROWN: So, in the workforce or as a leader, what would the parallel there be to the reserve chute? 

JOE WYRWAS: Sure. So that reserve chute, particularly in the United States, is actually packed by a US… certified by the Federal Air Administration, that person goes through training to pack that parachute and they have to pack it every 180 days and if you’re out of date, you can’t jump, like 181 days, if it’s a good drop zone that follows the rules, they have the system that says, “sorry, you can’t jump.” And so, with that, it goes back to that support system, exactly what you were alluding to, where is it an environment of support? Are the leaders above us and around us actually creating a culture where one, again, we feel supported, but two, we can ask questions. Three, we can feel a little awkward in the moment by not knowing what the heck we’re doing. And so, with the reserve parachute, that’s such a level of safety that you would never expect a normal skydiver to ever even touch the thing. But they are in charge of making sure that they go to that certified person every 180 days to make sure it’s repacked because you do have to pick some responsibility on everyone in a team, everyone at every level. Because if you expect and always just say, well, it’s my boss’s job to tell me what to do, then you’re not a good employee at the end of the day, but two, you’re not building a collaborative culture. And that’s when accidents start to happen, when you hit that thousand average number, because you put the responsibility on someone else always. And so, it has to be that symbiotic relationship where you have to expect each person to do what they should be doing and signed up to do. I’m hoping I’m going to blow past that thousand number, not only because I’m doing the minimum thing of going to my certified rigger for that 180-day check, but also going back to him to check my gear, to make sure that I’m still learning, I’m still doing the things that are going to bring my level of safety to the appropriate level and I don’t hit that average and I can be much above average, that’s the hope. 

WAYNE BROWN: I guess it comes down to… a number of leaders become complacent as well, so they get very comfortable in the process. They’ve been doing it for a number of years, they start to cut corners, take shortcuts, and that’s often when things go belly up, to your point, and if that happens in the skydiving arena, the consequences could be quite dramatic.

[00:20:00] 

JOE WYRWAS: Yeah. And it’s those small things that made a good leader, sometimes a great leader, that pushes them back down to a good leader or not so one; those weekly check-ins with their team, the actually being clear by writing out instructions, following up and showing examples. It’s the practices that we start taking for granted, like double-checking my gear before every single jump, that one time you take it for granted, might be fine. Two times, three times, you still might be fine. But then that one other time, you have that failure scenario that had you done the things you knew you should be doing, you’re now in that, uh-oh, we have to go fire 20 people, or that product did not launch on time or we didn’t hit the revenue numbers. 

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah. But for the leader, the equivalent of that second check would be before launching, maybe checking in with the team, make sure that they’re all clear, are there any last-minute questions? Is there anything that they haven’t locked in or got ready, et cetera, I guess, right?

JOE WYRWAS: Exactly. One of my core philosophies that I follow that one of my great mentors in college taught me was over-communicate. We think that we’re communicating enough and what really he stressed and what I now stress to anyone I work with is if you think you assume that you’ve told enough, particularly people above you or next to you, you didn’t, go do more because almost always someone is going to say either, “oh, thank you for that reminder” or “thank you, I didn’t know about that” or “thank you, I did, but it was useful just for everyone else to hear.” And so, I always recommend over-communicating just like the example you’re saying, hey, let’s do that quick little double check before we go launch that last product. And that over-communication process has worked wonders in my life and my career in skydiving. And the one thing I love to say about it is, especially when you’re over-communicating up to your bosses, ask them, “hey, if I ever over-communicate too much, I tell you too much, let me know.” My entire career, I’ve never had that happen to me, never as a boss said, “I don’t need all that information, Joe, stop keeping me in the loop, I don’t need that status.” My challenge is, if that does happen to you, give me a call, I want to hear that story, I want to know why your boss doesn’t want that information. 

WAYNE BROWN: When you’re up in the plane, how do you know when you’re in the right location to actually jump? Is that left to the pilot to give you the signal or how do you find out, okay, now is the time to jump? How do you determine the wind velocity versus what’s going to send you off track type of thing? How do you prepare for all of that? 

JOE WYRWAS: Yeah, so as you’re probably going to start to recognize, there’s a lot of symbiotic relationships, a lot of… there’s two parties involved to make sure things happen correctly. For what we call the spot, the area we want to actually jump in that we know if we jump within that circle, we’re going to make it back to the landing area that we want to go to. And so, for the spot, if again, you’re a safety conscious-minded skydiver before you ever even get into the plane, you actually go figure out what the spot is. Most drop zones, they’re already going to do the math for you, they’re going to have a big visual representation of the area that you’re in and they’ll draw a circle with like a dry erase marker. And how that circle, that spot is calculated, is basic math, how fast the average wind velocity is times about 60 seconds. And you can then figure out, okay, in free fall, I’m going to actually drift a half a mile, a mile, two miles. And so, then you figure that out, you figure out what the winds are now only a couple of thousand feet above the ground and how much I can penetrate back into that with my parachute. And then you draw a circle based on all of that, it sounds complicated, it’s actually pretty straightforward. And so, most zones, the pilot in conjunction with the DZ manager, the drop zone manager, will figure that out, they’ll draw it or announce it somewhere. Once you’re in the plane, once that pilot has set up above roughly where the spot is about to begin, they have a red light that comes on and that says, “cool, we’re getting ready, we’re on jump run, open the door.” 

[00:25:00] 

JOE WYRWAS: And so, you open the door, whoever is that first jumper out, leans out of the plane and literally looks down and says, “yep, that’s about where I’m about to jump, that looks good.” Also, they’re looking for other airplanes flying around, maybe somehow there are skydivers that are still below us. And so, they’re doing that safety check. Then we get to the edge of the spot, the green light goes on and we all know, cool, we should be within the spot. Again, that first skydiver looks out, “yeah, that’s where I want to be.” And jumps out with him, with his friends, with whoever is in that group. Each subsequent group should do the same thing, look out real-quick, “yep, that looks roughly where I want to be,” and jumps. Well, it happens all the time, a skydiver lands off from where they want to be, they got out farther, either too early or too late and they tried to fly their parachute back, couldn’t make it. A pilot can only do so much, they put on the light, and tell you roughly where you need to be. And so again, back to that leadership and back to that safety aspect, you can only do so much either for the people under you as a leader, you can only do so much for the leader you’re trying to train and then they also have to take responsibility. And so, it’s a balance of creating environments of safety, of expectation, of understanding, and then helping those around you or under you or even above you rise to that occasion. And then of course, they have to take ownership too, they can choose to ignore that the green light went off, which means, well, you had your chance and we’re going home now or the red light is not even on and they’re doing crazy stuff. And so, you have to, again, create an opportunity for safety and success and then you also have to put in your own ownership to succeed within that spot as well. 

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah. Do you keep a log book? Do you track everything you do? 

JOE WYRWAS: Yep. So, I track, right now I’m in the point of my skydiving career where I do write down the basic of what jump I did, the number of people, the type of jump, et cetera. When I first started jumping, especially as a student, you write down a lot, you really want to log in and understand the progression. You get to a point where it’s more for posterity’s sake where you’re just kind of counting metrics. If you become a skydiving instructor, if you go back to any type of student status or anything like that, then you put a little bit more effort. But it’s not required at the end of the day, except for if you go to a new drop zone, they want to understand when the last time you jumped was, how many jumps you have. But I have some friends that they just write down, like, “hey, I jumped 50 times this past month,” good enough and they don’t put in a level of detail and so, it’s a mix. And I’m going to circle back real-quick, Wayne, to our last conversation for one second, because I had this story that popped into my head back to that spot and back to that safety. So, I actually had an experience about two years ago where I was jumping with a friend. We got to the edge of where we should be getting out. And I was like, “okay, let’s go.” Like, there’s clouds, but we can make it back, I made it back, she didn’t, she actually landed three fields over, and had to walk back like a solid mile and the lesson I learned there, you might be okay in a scenario yourself, but if you’re bringing people along with you, you have to look holistically. And that one I’m pretty sure I wrote down in my log book, I’m like, “sorry, Natalie, I’ll never do it again.” And that popped into my head because we really sometimes get too focused on our own skills and abilities and sometimes we stop paying attention to how far we’ve come and we don’t realize that the people around us might not have the same sets of skills, abilities, and things that we thought they could do. And so that was one thing that I was like, “that’d be a good one to share with Wayne.” 

[00:30:00]

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah, for sure. And I was going to talk as well about the whole team dynamic because you jump with groups, you mentioned earlier. The degree of planning I can imagine would intensify the larger the group and the more complex, whatever you’re trying to achieve within that group. Is that the case? 

JOE WYRWAS: Definitely. So, depending on the number of skydivers, the skill of each individual skydiver, and then the complexity of the jump you want to do, all goes into factoring that, both on the actual planning on the ground, as well what’s happening in the air. And so, we’ve had jumps where I’ve jumped with 14, 15 other people, but they’re all exceptional skydivers, I’m actually the worst and the plan was very simple. And so, it was like, okay, we only need about five minutes to talk this through because we’re all just going to jump out of the plane, head to me and just make a big circle. Now, if I’m the most experienced and even the same, we’re going to make a big circle and we have 15 people, we’re going to spend 30 minutes talking about safety, proper altitudes of when to break off, what it looks like if the plan isn’t turning out anywhere close to what we expected. And so, it’s a judgment and risk call. And that really is how my brain, I love approaching every scenario, both in skydiving, as well as every aspect of my life, with that risk lens of how much conversation, how much planning, how much risk are we willing to take and what that all looks like together. 

WAYNE BROWN: I think that’s a good signal or a message for leaders, particularly younger leaders; the more complex the environment, the larger the group, the more difficult the challenge requires additional effort, yeah.

JOE WYRWAS: Exactly. I see a lot of like risk management plans where we overcomplicate it, we put too many variables. And what I always encourage are, what are your most critical variables that have an effect? And so, for a skydiver, it’s the number of skydivers, the amount of experience each one has, and the formation or thing we’re trying to accomplish. And it simplifies that decision-making process. Sure, we can also talk about how successful we want to be in that process and maybe we need to put more time if we want to be very, very successful opposed to, “well, it was fun, we almost did it,” type of thing. And so, I always, with planning, especially around risk, it’s let’s not make this 100-page document that no one is going to read, instead, let’s focus on the couple, maybe five, maybe half a dozen key attributes, key risk scenarios, and do really well at them, and then build off if we need some smaller things to worry about. 

WAYNE BROWN: And just shifting the perspective a little bit now, thinking about the instructors who, you know, have worked with the student jumpers and in the case of the leaders, the mentors, the coaches, the senior leaders, you have a dual role all of a sudden. So, you’re jumping out of the plane as well in many cases, so you also have to look after your own interests, but you’re also trying to guide the student jumper, how do you split that focus? Is it that intentional or is it something that’s more innate? 

JOE WYRWAS: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I’m going to tie it back both to skydiving and the personal experience I had with volunteering, actually. And so, for skydiving, again, in the United States, it’s very purposeful where your first teachers are called instructors and they’re literally trained to save your life. And that’s their number one goal, not to actually train you, but to make sure that you get on the ground safely by at least getting your parachute out. And to get there, typically you have hundreds and hundreds of jumps, you’ve gone through a very intense instructor program. And so, by the time you become an instructor, the things you’re teaching and the things that are going to happen during a skydive are a cakewalk. It’s, “oh, I could do this basically in my sleep,” and so, you can dial in just on that one important thing, saving that skydiver’s life if you have to. Once you make it to a point as a student where you’ve demonstrated consistently, “hey, I can deploy my own parachute, I can save my own life,” you actually graduate to what we call coaches and now the coaches are trained to teach you more skills to finish out the rest of your skydiving student program. Those coaches aren’t trained to save your life, are actually told if they’re in a bad scenario, don’t try to save them, you’ll probably make it worse, you’re there just to teach them the remaining skills. 

[00:35:00] 

JOE WYRWAS: And so, by really taking the one very important thing, focusing on safety for instructors, and then just focusing on skills for coaches, allows them to get past kind of that divide of worrying, how much experience do I personally have as a coach or an instructor to be able to then do those things. Coaches, it’s kind of funny, you actually only need 100 skydives and then go through a coaching program to get your coach license. And so that’s why there’s such a different separation on those two positions. And then a lot of drop zones, once a skydiver has their license, will really try to get other community members to be unofficial coaches. I do this actually at my drop zone, where we call them ‘The New Kids’ program’ and we come in and organize jumps with new skydivers that have their license, where I’m sort of teaching them skills, but that’s not the number one goal because I’m not in a coaching position right now, I’m another fun fellow skydiver trying to organize a safe learning experience. And so, continuing that education, but removing the, ‘I’m going to save your life,’ removing the, ‘I have to teach you a skill to make sure you graduate,’ I’m creating an environment for you to learn, to continue to grow, but without the pressure of an instructor or coach. The psychological aspect, the thing that popped into my mind was I do a lot of volunteer work with high school students, I love training new young leaders and I’ve been part of a nonprofit volunteering with it for 13 years now. And a couple of years ago, I was putting in 500-plus volunteer hours a year for this program and the goal just like skydiving was to really try to train them, create environments for them to grow as young leaders. But it wasn’t a clear separation like instructor, coach, and just friend and there was a lot of responsibility on me as another volunteer to promote them, create the program going. And so, I actually got to a very large point that I was burnt out and had a lot of negative feelings and emotions because of the situations I was put in. And I share all this because with leadership, particularly there’s burdens that we take on in both positional leadership as well as even volunteering. And we have to sometimes take that step back and ask ourselves, is this actually a productive, healthy scenario situation for myself? And it can be challenging, a lot of particularly young up and coming leaders are high achievers, they want to take on everything, there’s that grinded out culture and that can only last so long until burnout becomes a thing, mental exhaustion becomes a thing, negative emotional patterns become a thing. And so, I really always try to look holistically now in my life in that balance and when I recognize new opportunities, either getting paid as a coach or volunteering or through the technical software work I do, what category is it supposed to fall in and is it actually falling in? Am I being an instructor? Am I saving lives? Am I coaching? Am I teaching skills? Am I a friend? Am I creating a fun learning environment? And are those the things actually happening? Are those the expectations for me in that role? 

WAYNE BROWN: Yeah. Any closing comments or suggestions for young leaders as they’re starting out in their career that you would have liked to receive when you were a first-time leader? 

JOE WYRWAS: Yeah. I think three quick ones. One, I was just talking about it, is that perception and perspective, where we see something sometimes so far out of our world and our reality and we don’t know how to get there. And what I would encourage people to recognize is you can get somewhere that you’re aiming to go if you create that plan and you take small steps, push yourself out of your comfort zone. The second thing is to do that, get a coach, I have multiple coaches right now; I have a business coach, I have a life coach, I have an emotional wellbeing coach because I recognize the places I still want to get to. Really, I need that support system, I know I need people that have been there or are going there as well. 

[00:40:00] 

JOE WYRWAS: And so, look at your reality, realize that you can get there one day if you have a right plan, if you have the right person with you. And then the last big thing is why? What’s your purpose? What’s your reason? For anything you do, I always ask myself, I always encourage and challenge anyone I coach or work with, what is your why? What’s your purpose? And always center on that. And if you come back to that, even in those troubling trying days where you don’t want to get off your couch, it has been a rough week and you can revisit your why, that is going to be your guiding light, your North Star. And you’re going to recognize that the work, the effort, that plan is all worth it if you continue to focus on that purpose. 

WAYNE BROWN: Great advice, thank you for that. And to your second point, the accountability partners, the coaches, the mentors, we call them our personal board of directors. I think it’s such an important ingredient for anyone who is really looking to advance. Can people connect with you if they’re interested to find out more about what you do? 

JOE WYRWAS: Yeah, of course. There are two great ways to get contact with me, one is on LinkedIn, it’s my name, Joe Wyrwas, it’s a tricky one, W-Y-R-W-A-S. I love to connect with people there. I post content, leadership and personal development three times a week and then I also have a website, wyserwithjoe.com, and that’s actually Wyser with a Y because the ‘why’ is important, W-Y-S-E-R withjoe.com. 

WAYNE BROWN: Definitely. We’ll make sure we link to it in the notes. Wonderful connecting, Joe and I look forward to that one thousandth jump and reconnecting. 

JOE WYRWAS: Of course. Again, great chatting with you, Wayne.

OUTRO: Thank you for joining us on the ET project, a show for executive talent development, until next time, check out our site for free videos, eBooks, webinars, and blogs at ‘coaching4companies.com.’

[END OF TRANSCRIPT]