Loneliness is a common issue among leadership. The key is to learn how to articulate your emotions to have meaningful conversations. The show’s guest in this episode is Dr. Debra Dupree, a dispute resolution enthusiast and leadership development coach. Dr. Debra talks with Dr. Tracey Jones how her experience allowed her to discover how crucial it is to surround yourself with like-minded people. You need a network because no matter how smart you are, you can only see certain parts of your situation. Tune in and be open to different perspectives!

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Episode 134 - Dr. Debra Dupree - Leaders On Leadership

My guest is Dr. Debra Dupree. I want to tell you a little bit about Debra. Dr. Dupree is a dispute resolution enthusiast, workforce and leadership development coach. She's an international trainer and a keynote speaker. She was voted in the top ten of worldwide trainers by SkillPath Corporate Strategies. She embraces the philosophy that mindset shapes our behavior and how we show up matters, particularly as leaders and mediators going way beyond race, ethnicity and religion. Debra, welcome. I am delighted to have you on our show.

Thank you so very much, Dr. Tracey. I'm delighted to be here.

Dr. Dupree, I want to start by talking about the price of leadership. My father, Charlie Tremendous Jones, spoke extensively on leadership. One of the speeches that he gave the most was called The Price of Leadership, which is the things you are going to go through to be a true leader and not a LINO or Leader In Name Only. The first one he talked about was loneliness. We have all heard that it's lonely at the top. A lot of people have this wild vision of this romanticized idea of loneliness. Can you explain how loneliness has impacted you as a leader and maybe some tips for our readers that may be in a season of loneliness?

It's something that leaders struggle with all over. As you rise, you have to wonder, “Who can I trust around me? Who may take advantage of me if I show my vulnerabilities?” It crafts that pathway to that whole notion of loneliness. Like you, my father also had founded a family-owned business. It was interesting growing up as a kid to see this family business in full while also growing up in a large family. I could see how gregarious, charismatic, good decisions, a negotiator like no one I have ever seen before even at a young age. At the days’ end, who could you talk to about everything? My mom was busy with nine kids and running the household. As time went on, while he was naturally charismatic, you are not having anybody you could truly turn and talk to, certainly in the line of business that he was in, the usual one, buying and selling dairy cattle. What colleagues did he have?

As time went on, he struggled big time. Unfortunately, he did turn to other substances to help cope with the pain and anguish that came with that. He ended up being a lonely man and not having anybody to turn to and not knowing how to express his thoughts, feelings and what was going on for him. That is something quite true for a lot of males, particularly, as far as being able to express themselves around their emotions. From a neuroscience perspective, we know that emotion precedes all cognitions. If we can learn how to articulate them, we can have some pretty meaningful and deep conversations that are real and can break that cloak of loneliness.

You saw this as a young girl growing up. I watched my father go through bouts. He was in his late 50s. I was in middle school. Back then, it was chronic fatigue. He was exhausted. This impacted you watching him the importance of getting that support network alongside you to help you carry the load so to speak.

Let’s be quite candid here. It was watching my large family but also watching my dad in this family and in this business that fueled my passion for understanding and learning more about human dynamics. When you are a leader, all eyes are on you every moment. The mood of the leader sets the tone for the day in whatever environment you are in. I get excited helping people understand. I love talking about how to read the clues that are readily available in our behavior, in our tone of voice, how we speak and things like that. Leaders have that deeper understanding of how to connect because it's a skill and an art.

I'm thankful that you brought this up. Everybody wants to bash leaders and everything is falling apart and the world is going to hell because there are no leaders. Leadership is exhausting, tiring and lonely. I love the fact that you are there. If it was easy, if everybody could do it, everybody would do it. When you say we are all the leaders, it's because it's a very difficult thing and you have to pay this price. I'm thankful that you dialed that in. We always think, “Leaders have to take care of the organization.” The organization has to take care of the leader, too. Otherwise, they are not going to be at the top of their game. They have to be willing to authorize people to come in and help them, which is what you were alluding to.

It can be a narrow circle up there. We have seen in many organizations that if you have yes-people around you and that will confirm what you already say, that's a cognitive bias right there. It distorts your thinking and leads to thinking errors. That's why it's important to be open and vulnerable. Have people around you who will challenge you to, “How can we look at this differently?”

I'm glad you hit on that. Having yes-people around is one of the loneliest things in the world because it's almost like an echo chamber. You want followers. My passion is followers that are great critical thinkers. Iron sharpens iron. They are going to sit back and say, “Wait.” Otherwise, you are like, “I feel like I have a bunch of robots and we don't get a lot of interaction.” Yes-people may make you think that everything is okay. You are going to wake up one time and feel, “I don't have anybody to sound this off of.”

We have lots of examples in our worlds of leadership, right, wrong or indifferent. It creates and we have heard this term a lot a bubble of artificial existence because you don't have any connection or touch on reality.

Loneliness In Leaders: If we can learn how to articulate our emotions, we can have meaningful and deep conversations that break the cloak of loneliness.

You and I have probably tried formal masterminds, informal mentorship. What would you recommend? It could take a friend, somebody that's gone further than you have, some formal group. What would your input be for the leaders out there that are like, “I need to get a little support network?” Also, preferably somebody outside the organization because you hit on it in the beginning and I had not heard anybody do it before. There's that trust issue. As a leader, we have to be open, vulnerable and transparent. Any leader worth their salt has realized, “There have been some people that I have taken care of that have not taken care of me.” Any advisement for people? I'm sure there are different strokes for different folks. What are success stories have you seen?

We probably are all familiar with executive coaching and having that one-on-one coach. That's not counseling. A coach is going to be there to be objective but to help you shape and form your opinions with some outside perspectives. Get a good coach behind you and that will be a true ally. Another thing that I have seen powerfully influential, whatever group it might be if there's a number out there, is to get involved in executive groups of like-size businesses. It either could be revenues, the size of employees and things like that but who will probably share some common concerns and challenges. Make sure that the leader of whatever group that might be is somebody who also is not just from a business strategy standpoint but also a people strategic standpoint. Learn from others.

One of my mottos is to learn, live and grow. We are all unconsciously incompetent about something at any given time. We just don't know and yet, something happens and now it’s like, “I need to learn about this.” We then can start applying it. We don't want to stop at being consciously competent. We want to grow on to the unconsciously competent so that it comes easy to us. Now it’s like, “Now we get to learn something new.” I love that model of living to apply what you have learned, testing it out, seeing how it is and then growing.

One of the other things I will say too is that I often see leaders not taking the time to, quite frankly, debrief. Debrief when things go well and when things don't go so well. Particularly, when things don't go so well it’s like, “Let's move on.” It's important to say, “What did work well and what didn't work well? How can we improve upon that?” I like to always talk about coaching forward feedback and not just feedback. What went wrong? Instead, “What can we learn from this?” The mistake about mistakes is not that we have made them, it's not learning from them.

Prior to the military, every time we do deployment or anything, we call it a hot wash. It’s funny because you put stuff in the wash and everything comes out in the hot water. You sit there and you have to have an after-action report. It was after-actions because no lesson is learned until the behavior is modified. You hit the nail on the head when you said that the neuroscience of that feeling precedes the action and to back it up even further, the thought is where it originates. we would sit there and do that. One of my tremendous triggers is when people do stuff and they are like, “This is where I’m right on.” I'm like, “What happened?” They are like, “I don't know.” I'm like, “You can't go forward until we unpack what happened and do a little bit of root cause analysis.” It’s important for leaders too.

I love this point where you realize, “I can't do this alone.” Have you found that that's more of a mid-career seasoning thing? When you are younger, you are like, “I'm tenacious, stronger and more active than these old Boomers and these Greatest Generation guys.” You finally go, “That's not the way it's meant to be.” It's not that we are not strong enough. It's that we are threaded together as a collective. We are better together. As a leader, the more aware I get, the more I realize I need other people. In the beginning, I'm like, “I’ve got this. I have been to war. I can figure this out.” It's not the way to do it.

Several things are going on too in mid-season. When we are younger, we feel we can handle anything. We are encouraged in ways we didn't even realize we had. Life starts happening, whether it's marriage, kids, different job levels and stuff like that. We also start having experiences with the death of people around us, too. I say that because, in my own experience, it was one thing to have the recession of 2008 and some not good things happened to me business-wise around that, that shook my world. Coming from a large family, I started to have siblings become ill and pass away. I went through a time, about five years I was like, “What's going on? What next is going to happen?” There’s so much beyond my control.

It was about 2011 when I found myself shaking and a close friend of mine said, “You are one anxious person.” I’m like, “What? I’m not an anxious person.” I had to reflect on that and go, “I have become very anxious.” It’s because I was faced with so much uncertainty and unpredictability that I was constantly on edge. I took that to heart and said, “I have to start making some decisions about what I do in my life.” 2012 was a pivotal point for me in my life and career. I made some big changes and I said, “I'm done doing certain things. I want to do this. I will focus on this.” Quite frankly, that's when I went back and got my Doctorate Degree. I had always wanted to do it.

People questioned and challenged me. I put it off because people were like, “Why would you do that now?” I was like, “It’s because I want to.” It was such an empowering experience because I realized I had to do something different about myself. Of course, that meant going into counseling myself and getting a coach. Not that I hadn't done this before but it reinforced for me even more so about how important it is to reach out and be involved with like-minded and unlike-minded people to learn and be challenged by.

I have a saying that we need to be courageous enough to be curious but we also need to be curious enough to be courageous. Sometimes it's uncomfortable stepping out there in ways that we don't know. Uncertainty, unpredictability, inconsistency creates instability. When we feel unstable in our environment, then we do feel anxious and our ability to trust is out there. What I put out to leaders all the time is that, “It’s on you.” How do you show up? We may not always know things and feel uncertain but be open enough to express that. Look at the last couple of years, it’s incredibly uncertain. We are all finding our ways. That’s a lot of the message I bring to employees of organizations when they get frustrated with their leaders. As far as I know, we were all faced with uncertain and unknown things that we didn't know and we are making the best decisions we could. We are all in this together.

Thank you for unpacking loneliness with me, Debra. The next one and it goes hand in hand a lot of times with loneliness is weariness. There's good weary from a job well done and then there’s bad weary. Different things can drain us and our energy, not just being physically tired, although your physical element is so important. Can you share with me about weariness for you as a leader? I love how you talk about this pendulum in life. In one year, you can have everything going right. It's life. There are going to be times where you feel a lot more robust. Can you unpack weariness for us and some advisement you give to leaders so they can stay in top fighting form?

Loneliness In Leaders: We can learn from each other rather than fight one another.

Weariness is an upfront and personal thing I went through, too. For many years in my younger career, I was one of those who thrived on 4, 5 or 6 hours a night and I would get up super early. I love getting up early in the quiet of the morning. Particularly with raising kids, I love getting up early and having that quiet moment where I could do my thing and also do more contemplated work. I also realized that not getting enough sleep was hugely impactful. I had energy, there’s no doubt about that. I also realized that that left me on edge and I wasn't always on the top of my game. From sleep research and so forth, we do need 7 to 9 hours of sleep to function.

For any of our readers who are thinking, “I don't need that much sleep.” You may think you don't but you are not functioning on all cylinders. That gets back to neuroscience. Not only do our bodies and brains need that adequate sleep but also how we pace ourselves throughout the day. Organs like our heart, our gastrointestinal system or our lungs, our brain happens to house your mind. Our brain has a lot going on neurobiologically. When we are constantly thinking and pressed with demands and things like that, that’s a lot of energy. There are a lot of neurons firing. There are a lot of neurotransmitters going on. We have different neurotransmitters for different emotions.

High levels of stress lead to high levels of cortisol and too much cortisol can interfere with our ability to access our prefrontal cortex, which is our executive brain. We do make decisions in emotional moments but they are not always the most grounded. A colleague of mine, Gabrielle Hartley said, “Sometimes we have to step back to step forward.” Not everything is an emergency. Allow yourself, your brain a chance to be like, “What am I seeing here? What's going on? How do other people see it?”

I have what I call a 360-degree perspective. Whatever the issue is, no matter how smart or intelligent we are, we are only going to see certain parts of that issue. That's why it's important to reach out and say, “How do you see it, Tracey?” Even now, you are looking at things differently than I am. You are seeing things differently. That’s why it’s about being courageous enough to be like, “How do you see it? What are you seeing that I might not be seeing because of my vantage point?” We are not all on the top of the mountain and being able to look down in the valley or maybe we are not high enough. What do other people see that we don't because we all come from different vantage points?

As much as I want to go, “No, I can get by with a little sleep.” That 7 to 9 is great input. We don't realize what that's doing to our brain and accessing that. That’s a wonderful insight. Loneliness, weariness, the next term my father uses is abandonment. Abandonment gets a bum rap. His reference was that we need to abandon what we like and want to think about in favor of what we ought and need to think about.

I'm like, “Dad, what does it take to be successful?” He's like, “Tracey, I do more in a day to contribute to my failure than my success.” His point is that if you weren't intensely focused on every moment and every thought, you can start getting on mission drift or scope creep. How do you stay on point? Maybe share something where you had to realize, “When I went back for my PhD, I had to abandon a lot of stuff because there were not going to be enough hours in a day.” Can you speak to that abandonment, Debra?

That word generates several things from me in different ways. We probably have heard about abandonment issues from childhood. That's real. Abandonment, as your father said, is letting go of stuff. I had been teaching as a professor for about five years. Finally, as an adjunct, the enrollment had declined and so they didn't need me yet. It's like, “I'm going back to school.” I was on the board of directors of several organizations and a bunch of stuff, I had to let that go and say, “That's okay. I can't do all that plus this.” I continued working full-time. I saw my children at home. It was how I structured my life differently and letting go. A lot of people have had to make those choices from 2008 to this past couple of years.

Going into the pandemic, for example, when a lot of people were afraid about what was going on. I was doing a lot of Facebook presentations at the time. I said, “I'm not scared about this because if I could get through 2008 and the death of so many family members in a short time in the financial devastation I went through, I can handle this. I need to focus on myself. What can I do to be safe? What can I do to keep others safe? I will do my part in how I impact and influence others.” Going back to abandonment, it is powerful and I will say for certain communication styles, which are for the whole issue of abandonment comes up greater than others. Others are oblivious to it but they are still those issues. It can trigger a sense of abandonment, however, that might show up for people can trigger an emotional flare-up. Therefore, the whole neurobiology of the emotional brain versus the cognitive brain.

We oftentimes will get emotionally flared up when we fear that something we have is going to be taken away, that we are going to lose it. For me, that ties into that abandonment, too. It’s like, “I’ve got to hold on to this.” That stepping back and say, “What's this about here?” It’s like what your father said, “Where am I focusing on?” We can add that artificial bubble if we are not being realistic enough into saying, “How does this look from other vantage points? How do other people see it? What can I learn from that?” I like to say knowledge is power and the more we can find out about what's going on for how other people see it and how we see it in that collection of minds, it’s much more powerful decision-making emerges from that and we don't feel so isolated. We don't feel abandoned, “I’m out here all by myself.”

You brought something to mind. When you dial in abandon the stuff, you abandoned, not your people. Somebody told me, “Tracey, start to stop trying to make not your people, your people.” The more crystal clear the more niche I go, the more unclear, and all of a sudden, I start finding the right people to have the right conversations with. I used to have a fear of abandonment. I'm in pet rescue. Abandonment is the number one sin people make. When I started realizing this, I'm like, “I need to get clear.” Debra, can you unpack that for us? Conflict back to life like leadership. All the world is leadership. All the world also conflicts because we are human beings. How did you hone in on your specific zone of expertise that you have focused on?

It's a journey that I have had to explore and go, “Why am I so attracted to this?” I go looking for trouble and now I go looking for who want to find a resolution. I shifted that finally. I would have to say, it goes back to my family of origin. I grew up in a large family and I was on the younger end but there were about 4 or 5 years between me and the older siblings. I was amazed. I’m like, “How do all these people not get along.” I jumped to conclusions. I saw a lot of dashed dreams, hurt hearts and feeling my passion for getting to the field of psychology. To me, the field of psychology wasn't enough because I’ve got into mediation because of some changes in the law in the fields I was in. I was suddenly finding attorneys and union reps showing up on my table. I'm going, “I need more skills.” That's how I’ve got into mediation.

Loneliness In Leaders: Visualize how you want your life to look like in 20 years.

As I went on, I have done a lot of on Title VII protections, discrimination, retaliation, harassment and those kinds of things. It was like, “How can two people see something so differently?” Psychology wasn't helping me there and that's where I went back and did my research. That's why I do a lot around communication styles because there are four worldwide. It doesn't matter what religion, ethnicity or race you are from, worldwide. That drives a lot of our behavior. Our styles see things differently. If we can learn to read the clues and understand more about these styles then we can see where people are coming from, which helps take out the personal attack that we contend to have and say, “From a large body of people, this is where this person is coming from.”

We can then make objective choices about how we deal with people. That's why I love helping people understand how they see things differently. It's not that someone is right or wrong. It's just different. What can we learn from each other rather than fight against each other? That's where I get passionate about dealing with conflict. Quite honestly, conflict in itself is not a bad thing. Conflict can be a great generator for creative ideas and new ways of doing things. It's all about how it's managed. That's why I get passionate about helping people understand how to manage conflict constructively and not destructively because a lot of great things can come if we navigate through conflict, artfully, strategically and effectively.

I love that you said not choices but objective choices. Thanks for unpacking that because I always love hearing how people keep dialing it in. You brought your imprinting as a child and you brought your influences to the professional workplace and now your aspiration. Thank you for sharing that. That's fascinating. Last and certainly not least, we have a vision. My dead father always said, “Vision is nothing more than seeing what needs to be done and doing it.” I grew up in a big family towards the tail end, watching a lot of great people and like, “I'm not Oprah or Mark Zuckerberg. I'm not a visionary.” My dad was always like, “Everybody is a visionary. Anybody can see it but then you get it done.” He was so pragmatic about everything. Can you share with us what vision means for you and how that drives everything that you do?

It goes back to communication styles. Some of us are focused right on here. It’s like, “Lift that head up. What's out there?” Step back to step forward. I have to acknowledge my college days and my graduate school days. I started off as a career counselor. One of the strategies we had was to help people visualize how they anticipate their life to look like in twenty years. It's a lot of work because people are like, “Twenty years. If you are 21 now, what do you want your life to look like at 41? If you are 41, what do you want your life to look like at 61?” Start creating a vision for how that unfolded. You dial it back and say, “If I want to look at that in twenty years, where do I need to see myself in ten years? Where do I need to see myself in five years? What do I want to accomplish in the next year?” It’s like what we teach preschoolers and kindergarteners, how to chunk it down. Have that vision but chunk it down and say, “What do I need to do to get there?”

In that regard, it has not been a smooth road but because I did that work early on in my early twenties and saw myself doing back then as far as being a consultant, speaker and writer. I am living the life I saw back in my early twenties. I get that it’s not an easy road. It's not necessarily exactly how I saw it but when you have that vision that can help you make whatever choice you are making along the way you have to say, “What I’m about to do help me towards that longer-term vision or am I going off on a side road?” Our roads are not always straight, narrow, either but at the same time, if you don't know where you are going, you won't know when you get there.

I love that you hit on that. In the military, we call it reverse engineering. That's why we are worried about if jets would go down behind enemy territory, that was a bad thing because the pilot would always get out. We had great ejection systems but then they have the technology, they could reverse engineer and create it from that. I love that you had that visualization. For pragmatic people like me, I skip over that a lot. I have only started re-dialing that in and seeing it. I'm an engineer so I'm down here but I see it first and put that in there.

I'm glad that you hit on the visualization aspect. We covered loneliness, weariness, abandonment, and vision. This has been a rich, robust discussion about the science behind leadership too, which I absolutely love because it puts a framework on it and how everything that's going on up here, we can understand and affect it. Debra, is there anything else while we are talking with our leaders out there reading that you would like to share along your path with them?

One of the things again that a phase as a mediator is, I had the opportunity to view a lot of different behavior at a lot of different levels, including the military because I have worked a lot a long time with the Department of Navy. One of the things is the willingness to learn, be open and look at things from different perspectives, it’s powerful. Not that I have to know everything and I have said this to somebody I'm coaching, “Don't feel like you always have to have the answers. Know that your job is to seek the answers.” The answers will evolve out of the conversation, discussion and learning from others because then we get clarity.

Anytime you've got a few heads that come together, clarity emerges from sometimes amuck. If things get murky and cloudy that's where it's time to not think that you always have to have the answers but seek to learn. I will go back to my live, learn and grow. Always have that mindset. As Carol Dweck said that many leaders go into this with a fixed mindset of like, “I’m smart. I’m intelligent.” Instead, we want to adopt a growth mindset. When I was on the foundation of my Doctorate degree in the Psychology of good bosses versus bad bosses and what drives them, it was an interesting study of world leaders and business practices and certainly Carol Dweck's work on mindset.

Mine was good followers versus bad followers. It’s the same thing. Leadership and followership are the two sides of the same coin. I love that you said that your job is to seek answers not know them. Leadership is lifelong learning and people are like, “I'm not a leader.” I'm like, “Yes, you are. You are constantly trying to up your game, be in politirism, being a better parent, giver and community citizen.” That is true leadership in its purest form.

Like you, I have leaders and followers as part of my work, too. I had to say, “You can't be a leader if you don't have followers. If you are out marching along and no one's behind, that’s it.”

Loneliness In Leaders: Be open and look at things from different perspectives.

You are a leader in name only. You are a LINO. Debra, thank you. You taught me so much, you reaffirmed a lot of existing truths, which is always good to get confirmation. With your background, it’s so important and you helped me see things in a new light. I absolutely love it and I learned a tremendous amount. Debra, how can our readers stay in touch with you or maybe contact you about your services?

I will be happy about my phone number. It’s best to text me at (619) 433-4264. I also encourage people that I do have a podcast called Decoding the Conflict Mindset. I encourage people to go to YouTube and subscribe. We've got some fascinating speakers. I learn so much every time I do it, whether it's in the world of mediation, arbitration, a legal field and also leaders in different forms, fashions and so on. It would be a great way to connect with me too and of course, my website.

Are you still doing that for companies? If so, what size companies for our readers out there?

I get asked the size of companies and I say that it ranges. I had worked with the Department of Navy, which of course is huge on some different bases but also, I have been into big companies as well as small companies. One of my big projects is with a smaller credit union with several offices throughout Southern California. We have been doing a lot around cultural change and working closely with the CEO. I'm working with their management team every month and we have town hall meetings with all the employees. It’s only about 75 people in the organization.

That's a huge part of our readership, too so I want people to know. If they go, “She's probably with,” reach out to Debra because it's so important. There are two sides to every story and the sooner we unpack and find out the 90% we do agree on, then we can save ourselves a lot of pain, heartache, expenses, legal fees and all that good stuff. Debra, thank you so much for being our guest.

Thank you, Dr. Tracey Jones. I have loved being here and of course, a topic that's passionate for my heart, too.

I could tell. You are welcome. For our readers out there, if you like what you read please be sure and hit the subscribe button. Also, if you would do us the honor of a five-star review, we would truly appreciate that and be sure to look at the link below. You can download your own free copy of the Price of Leadership. You can unpack further what we are talking about. We couldn't do this without you. Thank you to our leaders out there that are reading, thinking, sharing and paying the price of leadership. Have a tremendous rest of your day.

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About Dr. Debra Dupree

Dr. Debra Dupree is a Dispute Resolution Enthusiast, Workforce & Leadership Development Coach, International Trainer and Keynote Speaker. She was voted in the top ten of worldwide trainers by SkillPath Corporate Strategies. She embraces the philosophy that MINDSET shapes our behavior and how we show up matters. particularly as leaders and mediators, going way beyond race, ethnicity, and religion.