Greg is a military veteran, author, podcast host (Your Transformation Station), and student in the field of organizational leadership. He spent almost six years in the United States Army, excelling as an expert Infantryman and then a radio operator who managed a 4,500-person brigade. As you will hear in the conversation Greg is someone who values strong character, authenticity, and candor. He didn’t just snap his fingers and embody these values though, it was a long journey starting with horrible sexual abuse as a child, continuing difficulties dealing with that Trauma throughout his life, and a series of unhealthy Relationships. The reason Greg has been able to achieve the things he has and overcome the brutal start to his life was because he committed to a daily, life long process of trying to better understand himself, what matters to him, and what work he had to do improve his life.
The conversation started with Greg stating “character” as his most important value, so we spent some time defining that. We even used the real life example of Vladimir Putin to try and understand why the attributes of character can be really tricky to pin down. Often times the most dangerous people in the world think they are exhibiting great character when they are causing immense human suffering.
What I really enjoyed about this episode was Greg’s candor about how hard all of the work is to build character and improve ourselves. As he mentioned we can all go on Google and look up ways to improve our life and find literally thousands of inputs. A good bit of them are even legitimate and have some good advice. But the problem isn’t lack of information or tips though, the problem is for any of them to work you have to put forth an extensive effort every singe day to actually reap the benefits. And for many people, myself included and especially people who have dealt with extreme trauma, that task can seem like too much. The idea of having to work so hard to gain better perspective and find happiness in our lives seems unfair; but as Greg illustrated it is likely the the only way.
