Hello everyone, this is Tonya Dawn Recla, your Super Power Expert and I have with me today, Sebastian Richard. He is the author of, get this everyone, Lead Like A Superhero: What pop culture icons can teach us about impactful leadership. So, to say he’s our kind of person I think is an understatement. We’re gonna talk with him today about what superheroes can teach us about leadership and Sebastian knows a thing or two about leadership and he offers faith-based coaching and leadership training with a company called Thriving on Purpose. So, this is going to be a really fun conversation about what we can learn from our everyday superheroes. So please join me in welcoming Sebastian to the show. Welcome Sebastian.
Thanks Tonya, this is gonna be awesome. I mean, superpowers and superheroes, I think it’s a match made in heaven.
I agree completely. So, I do wanna just put a little warning out there to all the listeners on this show. We have a little bit of a delay on this but we’re rolling with it because this conversation’s gonna be so fun. You’re not gonna wanna miss it. So just have some patience, settle in and just know that the information is forthcoming and it’s a really good way to test your patience with guidance and verbiage. So, use this interview as an opportunity to just take a breath for a second and allow the information to kind of flow to you without feeling like you need to force the timing of it. So that’s my cautionary tale and as with everything we trust that there is a purpose perhaps maybe beyond what we can actually conceptualize at this stage of our existence. So, Sebastian without further ado, I’m gonna ask you, what are your superpowers?
Well, like most superheroes in the comics, finding my superpowers was not something that happened overnight. It mostly happened in my early 20s when I joined my local church and from being involved more and more I found that I had a gift for speaking in public, for preaching, for teaching and that gift was crystallized, if you will, when I was called upon to give a Sunday School class to men. It was based on a book by Stu Webber, it was based on the book titled Four Pillars of a Man’s Heart: Bringing Strength into Balance. Now keep in mind that I was not married, I didn’t have any kids and I didn’t have that much life experience and I was teaching some of the men in that class who were twice my age. So I wasn’t super comfortable. I was teaching it with another elder who was actually the right age for that so that kind of helped me with the dynamics of the class. If I had just been myself I would have felt pretty much out of place.
On that day, I understood I have a special gift.
Basically, I wrote down the course, I’m the one who put the course together and I gave one of the sessions on a Sunday morning and after that, one of my friends came to see me. And he said, “How do you do that?” And I said, “How do I do what?” And he says, “Well, how do you do what you just did?” And I didn’t really understand where he was going with that so I just said, “Well, you wanna know how I create the course? How I give the course?” He says, “How do you come up with that?” I said, “Well, basically I sit down at my desk with my books open, I do the research and I just write it down and then I deliver it.” And I could see that he was bewildered by the fact that I was able to do that because for him that would have been almost an impossible task because it just was not one of his strengths. It was not his superpower, it was mine. But at the time I didn’t know it but, on that day, because it of his question, I understood that I had a special gift.
And so, to sum it all up, my superpowers well, what they are is, I’m good at creating content through innovative ideas, through research and through writing. And I’m also able to deliver it in a talk or in public speaking so my superpowers are number one, my general knowledge base through reading. Number two, my ability to research and number three, my ability to write, present ideas and teach them in a way that’s relevant, whether in book format, E-book, speaking or blogging. I hope that answers the question.
Absolutely. So of course, you could have used that gift for a number of things so why did you channel that into leadership or wanting to help people thrive in their existence?
You just cut there. I’m just gonna pick up from what I got. Sorry Tonya. So basically I wanted to decide to use that superpower to help other people because I realized that when I talked, spoke or wrote, I had an impact on people but a good impact. I basically encouraged them to become a greater version of themselves. So, to me, the ultimate end goal when you’re trying to help other people as a coach, as a speaker, as an author, is for them to make changes that would result in positive results in their lives, right? It reminds me of a story about Abraham Lincoln. I don’t know if this story is true but I read it somewhere and I thought it was amazing. It was a difficult time in the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln went into a church after the service began. So, he sat in the back and he was not noticed and the whole time he listened to the music and the sermon and he left just before the meeting was formally dismissed and when he returned home, his wife asked him about the church service.
And it was okay, he said. And he didn’t seem that impressed so she probed a little bit further. She says, “Did you not like the music?” And he said, “Yeah, I did, I did.” Replied the President, “It was sung beautifully, it was sung artfully.” And then she said, “Well, then you must not have enjoyed the pastor’s sermon.” And he said, “No, no, no.” He said, “I enjoyed it. It was articulate. It was well informed, it was eloquent. He basically did his homework. He was humorous but not too much. It was sober but not too much. The sermon was very good. But,” he said, “ultimately, it failed completely.” And his wife asked, “It failed? After all that, how could it have failed?” And here’s what he said and I think it’s amazing. He said, “It failed because the well informed, humorous and articulate, the pastor failed to challenge us to do anything truly great.”
Wow. That’s a great story like you said, whether it’s factual or not it’s a very powerful example of I think one of the tenets of leadership and so how do you go about really challenging the people that you work with to do something truly great?
Well, I basically use my superpowers because I really believe, I’m a firm believer in the power of words but also believe that in the power of the human spirit. And I think that everybody’s here for a purpose hence the name of my company, Thriving On Purpose. So what I do is I try to get it out of them to make them believe that they do have a purpose, to help them find it and to help them run with it, right? Like basically they have to find their superpowers. I’ve found mine and that really inspired me to delve deep into that type of business. So, I make it my business to help other people to find theirs.
Very cool. And so, talk a little bit about the book. The concept is superhero and why … I like the fact the subtitle is what pop culture icons can teach us. What was the motivating factor for taking it in the direction of the superheroes?
Yeah, well, that’s something that’s never been done in my opinion, not on the scope that I’ve done it and like any great idea, sometimes it just falls on your lap in a way. Like Newton, the apple fell on his head, well, for me, I was just listening to podcasts that had nothing to do with the superheroes or not. I don’t even know if it had anything to do with leadership to be honest but sometimes your mind wanders and my mind was wandering at the time and I had the thought of superheroes and I thought about Superman and I was like, “Oh, Superman’s a really good leader.” And then I thought about Batman and I came to the same conclusion, he’s also a good leader. And then I thought about Captain America and on and on and all of a sudden, I was on a track that I found interesting, so I grabbed a pen and a paper, and I started writing down some popular superhero names or my favorite ones basically and I realized that most of them were really great leaders but I also realized another thing.
Superman leads from the front.
I realized that they all lead very differently. For example, Superman leads from the front, he just goes like a locomotive and he just gets it done. Batman leads from the back, which is very different. He’s gonna stand back, analyze, really look at things and calculate all the possible outcomes before he decides on a course of action. That’s another very different way of doing things. Spiderman leads from the heart even though he doesn’t even consider himself a leader. His servant-hood, the way he serves others, always putting his life at risk makes him into a leader even though he might be a reluctant one. For Captain America, it’s no holds barred leadership. I mean, he’s probably the epitome of the great or greatest superhero comic book leader, stars and stripes and all. I mean, the guy just goes into battle right alongside you and he’s gonna take the brunt of it and giving orders left and right and he just knows where to go and what to do and how to do it.
So, he just goes right in there and does it. So they all have a different style and I came down with 12 names of superheroes that I thought were really, really, really good leaders and all that took me about 5 minutes. So after five minutes, I re-read it and I was like, “Oh my goodness, oh my goodness!” I got excited, I grabbed the phone, called my wife, I said, “Honey, guess what?” And she said, “What?” I said, “I’m gonna write a book. I’m gonna write a book.” And I knew right then and there that I had come up with an amazing book idea and what’s great about the book is that when people read it, they can identify with the different styles of the different leadership of the different superheroes. So at the end of the book they can be like, “Eh, you know what? I find out that I lead more like Wolverine or Wonder Woman or Batman.” So, they have a better idea of their style of leadership, so it helps them to have a better grasp on themselves.
Mm, very cool. I love the imagery and the association. I think that’s powerful. So, we’re gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we’re gonna be talking again and I really want to touch on the difference between single leadership and collaboration based on some of the stuff that Sebastian’s been sharing with us. So, you’ve been listening to Sebastian Richard here on the SuperPower Up! Podcast. We’re talking about what superheroes can teach us about leadership. Stay with us and we’re gonna dive in even deeper when we get back from break, folks. Stay tuned.
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