In this episode, Dr. Alex Golden dives into the concept of triggering others as a leader, exploring how leadership often involves sharing visions and growth that may challenge others’ boundaries. She explains that triggering is not always negative but can be a natural part of the leadership journey. Dr. Alex discusses how a leader’s energy field can attract or repel people, with authenticity amplifying this effect. Instead of shying away from triggers, she encourages leaders to see them as opportunities for growth and reflection. Tune in to learn how to transform potential challenges into valuable leadership lessons.
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Transcript:
Dr. Alex Golden:
Hello, hello. Welcome to the becoming zesty podcast. So glad that you are here. Dr Alex, here with you. I am so glad that you are here. Thank you for tuning in. Today, I’m going to be talking all about triggering people as a leader. And this is a important topic. It’s a hefty topic because essentially, as part of leadership, we come up to this experience where sharing expansion, sharing growth, sharing a future vision with people, comes with some hefty consequences. And I don’t mean negative consequences, because really, at the end of the day, none of that is actually negative. There’s nothing that has gone wrong here, and that’s part of what we’re going to talk about. But living with the fact that leadership is always, in some ways, going to rub up against people’s boundaries of what is right we run into when we’re talking about leadership, we’re talking about something that doesn’t exist before. So in some ways, leadership is signing up for a life where things are constantly unfolding, and that involves the ability to persuade movement from other people. Are other people going to come with us or not? All right, so that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Before we get to that, I want to extend an invitation to a one day habit event that we are hosting in Dallas, here October 5, if you are interested in learning about leadership habits, about how to live as a leader. How do leaders think? How do they wake up and feel? How are they being? That is what we’re going to talk about. And then, of course, the ever elusive question of, how does a leader help other people change their lives? Right? We know that we can’t just show up at their house and make them do anything. I mean, people have tried, but it didn’t go well. Started a couple wars, and I was just kidding, but the that process is something that is akin to always think about the movie Inception, right? Is where, like, how do we help people transform through the lens of speaking, and then other people raising their hand and saying that idea, I want to accept it into my mind, and then I want to live it. I want to actually embody it enough so that sounds like a big undertaking, and it is. And part of the reason people feel like it’s such a big thing that they can’t quite figure out or sink their teeth into is that people make it sound like a mysterious process of attraction or something like that. And the thing is, leadership is a set of skills. It’s a set of understandings, a way of thinking, a way of moving, and a way of explaining and role modeling things for people, where you actually implement change in the world. So if that is something that you have been wondering around, maybe you haven’t even been exposed to the ideas of like, well. How does it happen? There’s an actual process. Email us support at becoming zesty.com and we will let you know all about it. October 5, you can be virtual, or if you’re in the Dallas area, you can come on by, so just shoot us an email. All right. So now, now we go back to the conversation at hand. So that is triggering people as a leader. So let’s first talk about this is going to be a multi part conversation, but one of the things that is true about triggering people as leaders is that first we have to talk about the fact that it’s what is it about it that even triggers people, right? Because before we can come up to what are we going to do about it, we have to understand the process that we’re actually in. So why do leaders tend to be kind of triggering the people? And you can see evidence of this general belief. And if you look at any famous person in the spotlight doing something different, you will see, and you go to the social media, you will see a bunch of comments of a bunch of people agreeing with them, celebrating with them, whatever, whatever. And then aren’t there? There’s the group of haters. So almost anyone doing anything out of the ordinary, aka leadership, whether you agree with it or not, has a subset of people that are rubbed the wrong way. So what is happening there? And you know kind of what’s going on. Because the problem is that people look at that and make it a problem, and that becomes the problem. But in some ways, we have to understand what’s happening so that we can appropriately contextualize the experience. If we have an experience and we label it as bad, you’ll fall off. And so often, people are trying to grow. They’re following their social media, their reach, their impact, and then they reach a certain thing, they get some hate, and then they go back and they hide, they start a new account, they don’t post for a month, whatever, whatever. And all of that momentum goes away, and then they’re frustrated, building it back up, but what happened was that someone got triggered, then they triggered you back and down your buns went and kind of take you down emotionally and mentally, and then the actions didn’t follow, well, right? The actions followed the not lack of movement, because you were thinking about the triggering. So if we can unpack that, we just first need to ask, why does that happen? And is there a problem, or is there just a way of thinking about it that can work better for us? Right? So it’s never about what’s right wrong. So much of leadership as you get to decide so the what’s right and wrong is not even on the table. It’s more like what’s going to serve you and isn’t moving you towards your goals. And so that’s where we’re going to focus today, and then we’re going to meet up again in another podcast episode talk about kind of solutions or ways of working with it. But when it comes to leadership and the triggering. The vast majority of what is happening there is an energetic rub. You can kind of think of it as almost like a leadership body odor. There are, there’s going to be kind of your energy field, the vibe that you emit. There’s it that can seem like a nebulous topic, like, oh, there’s just the vibe and it changes. Yes, but essentially, the scientists have measured the kind of energy around a person. And the reality is that our electromagnetic field extends past our physical body. So that’s why so often we have the experience of, you know, a kind of vibe, or you kind of get a feel for a person before your mind can really explain why you feel that way. And there are real measurements that people have taken of this and a good way of thinking about it. You have experienced this if you’ve walked into a room with people and you’ve gotten the sense that there was an argument. They were arguing, right? There are body language clues visually, but even if you don’t see them, and your eyes are closed when you walked in, you can feel the energy. You’re like, oh, there’s something going on here, right? So that’s what we’re talking about here. And so in leadership, part of the power comes in the fact that leaders. Have developed and cultivated and have worked for and fought for a large energy field. That’s what makes some people very magnetic to follow. People are even if they’re weird, people are like, I’m intrigued. I want to know what they’re doing. What’s up, right? So that big energy feel is kind of that size, but it’s also then what is emitted in that energy field. And that’s where it can be, almost like, you can think of it as like a smell, like a body odor, or pheromones. And in leadership, when we are functioning as leaders, the more authentic we are, the more powerful our energy hits. Essentially, you just think of it like a spot lamp, right? Instead of scattering the light and a bunch of different directions to be. I am this Alex to this person. I’m this version to this person. I’m this version to this person. I’m this version over here, right? That’s a scattered light, whereas when I unify myself and I show up as my authentic self and all scenarios, I am completely unified. And so that light, that the power of that light, begins to shine brighter. That is where that energy feel is going to attract and repel, like and not alike, kind of like a magnet. That is to say, our energy sort of does a function of sifting through attraction and repelling. The trick of it, though, is that when we trigger someone, it can look like that’s a negative. We are repelling them. But it’s actually more complicated than that. Some people are really seeing positive to the light, and they’re actually being repelled, like, as in, they’re like, that’s a nice concept. Yeah, that seems great. That seems lovely that you’re doing that. And in their head, they’re like, I’m never gonna do that. And they just leave, right? And sometimes that’s where the people getting triggered are, the people that are close enough to you, close enough to the role modeling that they see. Ooh, they’re really being somebody that I want to be, because I don’t feel that I am not. It’s quite triggering to see that reflected back to me, right? I can see I haven’t made that amount of money. I can see that I haven’t had that kind of impact. I can see, you know what you’re talking about, XYZ. But sometimes it’s that triggering that allows people then to go back and go, oh yeah, I was really bugged by them. Maybe they seemed really confident. Maybe they seemed really all this, all that, that kind of bugged me, and then they sit back and go, Gosh, I really want that, you know? So that’s where we really have to look into just because it’s triggering to someone, we have to start to ask, what’s going on underneath the surface here, right? Because just because it looks like a trigger does not mean that it’s negative. Because quite often, the part I know for me personally, so often I have had conversation, the most impactful conversations are things where I wasn’t quite ready to hear it, and my gut reaction, my knee jerk reaction, was not necessarily a kumbaya, oh my gosh, you’re right. This is so great, because, honestly, it was like something that I need to look at. It was, you know, something I wasn’t proud of. I maybe was hurt by it. Maybe I was like, Well, I have all these valid reasons why I am like that. But then I still had to swallow kind of the bitter pill of being like, I know I have valid reasons for doing that, but do I want to overcome it like, Am I ready to take responsibility for the fact that it happened, even though it is totally valid and was never my fault? But now, what do I want to do with that? Is that going to be my driver for excuses, or is that going to be my kind of reasons for why I am motivated to move right? And so that’s what I’m talking about by leadership, inherent to the function of leadership. The embodiment of leadership, of role modeling is the fact that the right thing, sometimes for people, is to see a reflection of themselves through you. And for some people, their response. So that is to be triggered and to leave. Some people will be triggered and motivated to work. And honestly, there’s a whole bunch of other actions that people take that are in between. Sometimes people leave for five years and then come back later, like hey. And then this happened, and I realized you were making that point, and I finally got it so you never really know how someone’s going to digest it, but the whole decision, then at the end of the day, lies in you answering the question, what are you gonna make people getting triggered by you and your leadership mean? What is your interpretation? Because if you don’t think it through the negative experience of getting the pushback, of getting the person’s feedback that’s not necessarily positive, or even just feeling the rejection of someone not agreeing with you, there’s a cost to all of that. So that’s why we don’t around here. It’s all about resources, right? We’re not trying to get the perspective of, oh gosh, I have all these limitations. I need to hear all this triggering stuff back to me, and then I have to process it maybe. But I’ll put to you maybe not. Maybe it’s the way that we’re looking at it and saying, What’s the function of the trigger? And if I can think of it in a way that includes the trigger as part of the experience, here’s what’s going to happen when we include triggers as part of the experience, what we realize is that any triggers that we find along the way, as we walk around, being us in the world and being leaders, we just found an objection. We found an objection to people purchasing from us and buying our experience, buying our leadership, the thing that we’re trying to sell them on becoming the identity that they’re becoming, right? So it becomes an opportunity for us to bust that objection. If the triggering is, hey, you put yourself out there and I don’t feel comfortable being seen, then we can have aspects of our marketing, our outreach, our free trainings, our podcasts, our social media posts all talking about overcoming something like that, right? Because essentially we’re saying, Hmm, I’m not going to vilify this triggering experience. I’m just going to take it as, oh, that’s what experience some people have with my leadership. That must mean they are bumping up against some sort of boundary within themselves that they have. As a leader, I can teach them to overcome that, and in taking that into account now, I have helped them navigate that now they are one step closer to working with me. So see how that works. Not only are you not telling yourself a story that gets you to be quiet and shut up, because right if you say, oh, leadership, I just I’m so triggering to people who wants to post, who wants to do trainings, who wants to do a podcast when you’re like, I’m someone that triggers everybody. They don’t like me. No one finds that motivating. I’ve yet to find somebody that like glows up at that, right? Whereas when we say, oh good, me being intent, you know, if I’m doing what’s authentic, and I happen to come find that that’s triggering to people in this way. I know that the people that are meant to work with me are many of them are probably having that experience. So how can I help them do that? See how you’re applying leadership to that, instead of making it a problem that’s like you’re a victim to you’re actually taking your cohort of people that you’re leading, that you’re coming into contact with, and you’re getting the feedback. You’re getting something really useful out of that conversation. And now you have content to create and put out in the world as then people interact with that content, you are actually showing them what it’s like to learn from you and to be under the scope of your leadership. Over time, more and more people can begin to feel the safety net that you are creating, essentially the platform of your leadership. More and more people can come stand in your energy having overcome some of those triggers now, they become your spokespeople. They say, hey, when I came here, like whenever I share about some mentors that we have had, the people that I’ve worked with that have been really impactful for me when I think back, when I. Told people about them, I had like, little disclaimers. I’m like, they’re a little weird on this, but here’s how I thought about it that made me get it. You know what? I mean, it’s almost like anybody that is really impactful has that kind of messing where you kind of have to tell people like this, and this is what to expect. But see how I became the ambassador for them. I took their leadership, I applied it, and I was able to verbalize that to somebody else. I became a referral partner to their podcast, to their program, to their leadership, and so now I’m beginning to be an important part of their work as someone who is a referral partner and essentially is evangelizing on their behalf. And so if I can do that, then other people can do that for our business, see how that goes in a whole snowball. That’s why thinking about leadership and owning that leadership is so very important, because in doing so, we get to ask questions that have real constructive answers, and an imply applying those real constructive answers, it literally leads us into our own ownership. Who are you really serving? What are their problems? What are they dealing with, what do they need help overcoming? Where don’t they believe in themselves? Where don’t they believe in the authority figures out there? What happened with there? Why are they salty about that? Why are they being cynical? Right? Now, any and all of that becomes a powerful way to say, I can incorporate those objection busting marketing teachings within all of my work, and now, literally, there’s not much selling that has to happen you teaching is overcoming the objections that they have to purchasing your further leadership. Now, of course, this is all predicated on the fact that you have something really good, right? You really believe in your work, you believe in your programs, you believe in that. And if you don’t, it’s okay. Come on by. We have certification programs. We will train you. It is all good. Sometimes competency really just has to come for more resources. And if that’s all it is awesome, that’s a really easy one to overcome, but otherwise, this is where you want to start to say, let’s really look at something I probably have been missing out on greatly, and let’s look at where people find me triggering. Is it that you think people think you’re too blunt or too direct, or too Woo, woo, or too holistic and crunchy, or too you believe in aliens? I don’t know what you got, but more than likely, there’s been a whole bunch of information and goodies on the table for you on where you can really powerfully move people to purchasing and to taking action in the way that you are leading, just by looking at that area of your leadership and beginning to follow the thread of those questions. So take a look at that. I would love to hear what you come up with. Shoot us an email at support, at becoming zesty.com, because one of the things that I want to talk about next in an upcoming episode is, how then do we begin to work with this further? What does it really look like within us to own how we come across? How can we begin to use that more as an intentional way to lead people and an intentional way to stand out from the crowd and really make our leadership known out into the world to create that ripple effect. So stay tuned in the meantime. Would love, love. Love to hear from you so I can talk about real life examples. Shoot us email support at becoming zesty.com. And I’ll catch you on the next episode.