In this week’s episode of Retire in Texas, Darryl Lyons, CEO and Co-Founder of PAX Financial Group, explores the theme of leadership and its impact on personal and financial growth. Moving beyond traditional topics, Darryl shares his own experiences and insights on how true leadership plays a pivotal role in shaping our lives and communities.
Key show highlights include:
• Understanding leadership as influence and the importance of guiding others with integrity.
• Darryl’s personal journey and the mentors who shaped his career and values.
• How to identify your own strengths and develop them into meaningful contributions.
• The concept of “guru,” someone who brings others from “darkness to light,” and why everyone can be a leader in their own circle.
• Practical tips for fostering a culture of curiosity and growth within your community.
Tune in to reflect on your own leadership potential and gain insights on how to positively influence others. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to share it with friends, family, or anyone interested in growing as a leader!
Transcript:
Hey, this is Darryl Lyons, CEO and Co-founder of PAX Financial Group. And you’re listening to Retire in Texas. This information is general in nature only. It’s not intended to provide specific investment, tax, or legal advice. Visit PAXfinancialgroup.com for more information, visit PAX Financial Group. Go to the Contact Us button. Have a non-threatening conversation with a financial advisor for 15 minutes just to see if it’s a good fit.
So I want to encourage you to do that because I couldn’t even do this show if PAX Financial Group didn’t allow it to happen. So, what I love about this show is that it’s not a commercial. I was driving this weekend. And I was turning it on Saturday and man, the financial advice shows are just commercials. And a lot of them are annuities and they’re just really good salesmen.
I would say that I’m not the greatest salesman. And so these shows are information only. And you believe me if you want, but I just sincerely care about the well-being of our community and the financial well-being. And so that’s a calling for me. So I want these shows to be helpful to you. And the idea of making them commercials all the time just isn’t.
Does it make sense to me? Maybe it will one day. Maybe I’ll be like, man, I probably should use these times more effectively. But for now, as long as you’re listening, I think that’s the main thing. We’re seeing viewership or listenership go up and you’re sharing it with others, and people are very interested in digesting the content and it’s making a difference.
Then I’ll keep doing it. So please share. That’s my commercial. That’s my pitch. Okay. But today I want to do a little shift. I do want to talk about leadership. I don’t talk about it enough. It’s nebulous. It’s, but it’s but it’s important, you know this. Everything rises and falls on leadership, everything.
And so we have to talk about leadership. And if you’re not in a leadership role, you’d be surprised because you probably are. And it could be leadership relative to your siblings, relative to your parents, relative to your kids. And leadership is really influencing others. And oftentimes it’s the transferring of confidence to somebody else. And so we can’t discount this leadership role that we play in the circle that God’s given us.
We can’t discount it. And there’s the wherewithal that we need to have to be able to refine it, to be able to improve outcomes from people’s lives. So I want to digest that. I’ve got I would just call these leadership musings, from me personally and there’s ten of them now, kind of broken them up into three groups.
And so I’m just going to kind of have a dialog with you about some leadership stuff that I think are important for you to, to think about, in your life, and I’ll kind of weave in here some financial conversations as it’s relevant. But first, I want to just talk about historically in your life, in my life, number one, I want us to pause and just think about who played a leadership role in your life.
Both good and bad. I know that early in my life. You know, they say get good mentors. So when I first got into the financial industry, my number one priority in getting into the financial industry was finding a good mentor, because I really didn’t know how to navigate the nuances of any of the financial markets.
I have read Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker, and I just had realized that this financial market was much more than, than a college degree could, could help me with. So I know I needed mentors, but the first couple mentors I had, really let me down because they lacked integrity. And I was so, so bummed. It really, really hurt me.
And so I failed to really ever get another mentor in this business. I really did, and all I did was observe other people that I wanted to model myself after. But I never really, like, reached out and said, hey, will you mentor me in any capacity in the financial business? Because the previous ones had let me down so much that all I did was just observe the other ones.
But I took some great notes. But what God did do is he brought other mentors in my life that weren’t in the financial business, but just poured into me other ways, like, let’s see. Dan Miller’s one I talked about before he recently passed away. He wrote, 48 days to the Work you Love. If you haven’t read his stuff, he just really helped me think about a lot of things.
When I think about Dan, I think about how he was just the person in front of him was the most important person in his life. And you felt that? And I long to have that same, I want to say aura, but really attitude. And then the other one, there’s more than a handful, if I’m forgetting anyone, let me know.
But I say, let me know. You ping me, I apologize, but Bill Loveless, who was a very important mentor to me, taught me about what it means to really be a Christian. I don’t think I had to figure that part out yet. And know what it means to be a Christian is to abide. And so that was beautiful.
Those that know I have a great relationship with David Robinson and San Antonio Spurs, I’d consider him a mentor. Trying to think of a few others. Bill Sitter, C12, Rob Wainner, C12 are just some really awesome guys. If I told Rob that Rob’s like, hey, yeah, I may be your mentor, but you’re my mentor.
It’s like this mutual mentoring. And so we have this great relationship that way. But man, God was really awesome that he put some good people in my life to mentor. And I hope that’s the case for you. So that’s number one. I want you to pause. I reflected on the people who let me down. I just acknowledge that and also reflect on the people who came in.
Number two, I’d like for you just to think about your strengths. If I were to ask you to write down your strengths and weaknesses, which list would be longer? Which list would be longer? I hate to say it, but most of us would say our weakness list would be strong. And I might be honest, I would too.
And that’s okay. But I think we need what we need and I wish we would have all had in the past as somebody who could just speak into that a little bit more. In recent business, and I’d say it’s recent. In the last ten years I’ve seen something called 360 reviews become more prevalent.
And those reviews are, 360 degrees all around your, I guess, your head, but 360 degrees all around your life where people are just like, poking holes in your weaknesses, looking for blind spots, things that you can’t see. And that’s just so helpful. It’s a little humbling, but that’s been helpful over the years. And I think we just need somebody to say, man, I see your strengths, I see you, I see your strengths, and I want you to lean into those.
And then the weaknesses, I think when it comes to giving the appropriate amount of attention to your strengths and weaknesses, I do think giving the appropriate amount of attention to your strengths is the priority, because those are the gifts God’s giving you. But we do need to move your weaknesses up to a minimum standard of acceptable.
I say acceptability wherever you’re at in life. So, for example, if you’re really fumbling and speaking and you’re in a business that requires speaking, even though it’s a weakness, you’ve got to get at least to the standard of competency. So we’ve got to lean into our strengths but move our weaknesses up to a standard of competency.
And you can only do that if you have somebody kind of talking in and pouring into your life in a leadership role. Now, number three I’d like to talk about is, just the idea of discovery, which again, in this strength and weaknesses conversation, I want to say it this way. The greatest obstacle of discovery, the greatest obstacle of discovery.
I am repeating myself on purpose here. The greatest obstacle of discovering new things, either about yourself or about the world in general, is not ignorance. That’s not the real problem. It’s the hear me out. It’s the illusion of knowledge. It’s what we think is true. But it’s not. Honestly, as I’ve navigated with life, through life, meeting with a lot of people and having a lot of deep, intimate conversations, a lot of us have this illusion that what we believe to be true isn’t.
And so how do we discover the truth, and not live in ignorance? And we can only do that not, I mean, yes, to certain degree books, but it’s really just by having a conversation and typically it’s done by somebody who is willing to lead you and guide you and give you direction. Number four, one of the most beautiful compensations in life, one of the most beautiful compensations in life, is that no man or woman, for that matter, can sincerely help another person without helping themselves.
So it’s just very unique in this leadership idea that God orchestrated, whether you call it coaching, counseling, mentoring, whatever it is. But it’s really just in this idea of leadership that you can’t but receive some form of compensation. You can call it a dopamine hit or something euphoric, but it’s really just something unique.
When you help somebody else, how it makes you feel about life in general. And so we know that there is an innate desire in all of us to lead and be led. And so when we reflect on our past, I just want you to reflect for just a moment, not only to recognize the opportunities that you had to be led, but also the gaps where you were so distracted and you’re so self-centered.
And I say that only because I was there that you failed to be led and you decided to do things on your own and how destructive that could be in the consequences of that. So I did want to take the time to discover or to talk about the first four points about our past and how leadership has played a role, or the lack thereof has played a role.
And I want you to take inventory only because I want it to be a pain point to say, okay, so what do I do about that today? And so that’s what we’re going to go now. Let’s go to today. So I’m talking about the past. Now I want to talk about today. So number five I think it’s important for us to recognize that our gift that we receive from God is our potential.
It’s a gift. Our gift back to God is developing it. You hear me? So a gift is the potential that we have. And our gift giving it back to God is our potential. And I can only imagine as a father, when I see somebody, I see one of my children, lean into their potential.
It makes me smile. And I can’t help but think that that’s a reflection of how God feels about us. And so I feel like that we do have a responsibility to develop our potential. And I’m not talking about a career or I think that’s a real danger because our culture thinks that your bank account or your success is your potential, and that’s actually not it.
That’s where we got to kind of be careful because culture has a different message. And in the book 18 to 80, I’m sorry. No, that’s I mean, forgetting my books. And, in Biblical Responsible Investing, I talk about the world playing checkers and Christians playing chess and you may not be a Christian, but just know that the culture has a different framework of what success looks like.
And it’s usually money. And I see it all the time. I can’t even tell you how many times I hear it. But for you, your potential is something unique, and it could be relative to your family or your community. And I just need you to know you’ve got to develop that. That’s a gift to God from you. Number six.
Here we are today. And I just want you to ask yourself, are you hanging out with curious people? Are you hanging out with curious people that are asking about the deep meanings of life and about people and solving problems? I’m not talking about angry politics. This is just that it gets kind of dumb after a while. I mean, you can only talk so long about, I mean, just dumb Harris and Trump stuff.
Like, I get it. I understand there’s deep implications for that, but there comes a point where we gotta start thinking deeply about life in general, and it takes just a group of curious people. And so I want to ask you, are you hanging around curious people? If not, maybe you can lead a group of curious people. You don’t have to have all the answers.
You just have to know how to ask questions. And there’s plenty of ways to ask questions. So either you’re being led by curious people and it may be a mutually kind of lead thing, or you’re leading other curious people. Number seven, I think it’s interesting for us to just think about the word guru. And so if you want to be led, sometimes we try to find this guru and I, you know, this is not something that’s in the Greek or Hebrew.
It may be, but I don’t think so. Guru. It seems more of a middle eastern word, but it is an interesting word because, GU it means darkness and RU means light. So somebody that’s responsible for taking you from darkness to light or taking you, from, you know, not having knowledge to knowledge or not having wisdom to wisdom.
So GU means darkness, RU means light. And I think sometimes we just need gurus in our life. And, I want to say this because I see, I think I see sometimes more potential in people than they see in themselves. Just, it’s fascinating to me when I see people, I’m like, Holy cow, you are just amazing.
I only wish I had your gifts. But sometimes you need a guru in your life that can take you from like, darkness, obscurity, fog to, like, okay, I can see, I can see now. So I want you to start thinking about, like, maybe getting a guru. And don’t be afraid to be a guru, because it’s a pretty simple process.
If somebody is lost and floundering, that could be a child. It could be a brother, sister, a guru, somebody. And if you have that passion in you, then it’s not because it’s not without not your responsibility to take somebody from darkness to light. Number eight. And this goes back to the culture thing I was saying about when it comes to leadership is, you know, where are you going?
How do you define success? Like, I was talking to somebody the other day and they’re like my dad, his definition of success is, was he making more money than his two brothers? That is, that is actually pretty pitiful. Like, that’s how you value success and that’s how you and I like it blows my mind.
And I realize, okay, there’s an old saying that a man is only as happy as he is if he’s making $100 more than his brother in law. I’m like that. I can’t believe that’s true. But it is true that it exists. So let me give you another definition of success that may help you. And then you can, maybe become the leader that God has called you to be or find leaders.
But let me give you this. This is just one that I think it’s worth. It may not be the right one because, you know, when it comes to righteousness, I think it is a byproduct of our relationship with God. But I think it’s good either way. It’s more of a financial or a quantitative way to think about success.
But it’s the ratio of talents used to the talents received, the ratio of talents used to talents received. And you need leadership to be able to get that ratio up. You just need somebody and others need that leadership too. So now moving to nine and ten in these leadership musings, what about your future? What do you do now?
You know, I don’t think it needs to be overly complex, especially if you’re leading others or if you’re being led, for that matter. So they did this study done, and put a bunch of people in ice water. And so you hung out in ice water, and whoever hung out the longest, you know, was the success.
But, you know, the one thing that kept people in water longer than others, I don’t know, guess. What’s the one thing that kept people in the ice water longer than other people? There’s one thing it was encouragement. It was just encouragement. And so we think about leadership being, you know, this challenging thing. And I think oftentimes it’s just encouraging people.
It is, it’s just a matter of just pouring again. It’s a, word play here, but pouring courage into other people. And number ten, the final thing I’ll say about the leadership in these leadership musings is UCLA, Grad School of Management served over 1300 senior executives, 71% of them said that this one thing was the quality that mattered most to succeed.
This one thing. What was that one thing? What was this one thing that these senior executives said? The one most important thing that people need to succeed in life is integrity. And I think that gives you an appetite to lead others. And you’re thinking like, how do I navigate? Like leading somebody, lead them to do the right thing.
I know early in life, like there’s been seasons where I reflect back and I treated people wrong, you know, because I was, you know, caught up in myself or maybe I did the wrong thing. And most of the time it was just being stupid anyway, immature, dumb. But, I remember one time that I was in the financial business early and I was recruiting, I was a recruiter, and somebody told me, here’s how you can recruit people.
You can call, if you want the best salespeople in the world, call a car dealership and say, hey, I met with this sales guy, and he was incredible. And he was really good, but I forgot his name. Do you remember him? And the receptionist was like, oh, I don’t know. Was it John Smith? But was John a really good salesman?
Yeah, that was him. So I’d get on the phone with John and I say, John, hey, we met. I was out there looking for a car, and I was wondering if you talk about coming over to me to be a financial guy. And, that strategy of doing that was disingenuous. But what I was trying to do is get the best salesperson, because those were the good communication skills and moved them into the financial business.
And it and this is something I was taught, and I did that a few times and I thought about it. I go, wow, this strategy lacks integrity. And I know some of you are like, well, you couldn’t see that up front. No, I was caught up in the world of life, and that’s when I completely made shifts in the way I was pursuing this financial career, because I realized, gosh, I got suckered into this mentality that you cut corners to, to meet your objectives.
And, I thought to myself, you know, I may not be the smartest person on a go forward basis. I may or may not even be the hardest working. I’ll do my best on both. But what if I just out integrity, everybody? That’s what I thought at that point. I remember saying, what if I just out integrity everybody?
That seems to be a good approach. Is it perfection? Actually, it’s far from perfection. But I think if you can just teach others to out integrity, I think they’re going to find themselves in a place in life that they won’t regret. And so if you are challenged to figure out how to lead others, just lead them to do the right thing.
So those are my leadership musings of today, and I hope it helps you as you think about your role in leadership and you think about others. And how important this is, especially this election is, as I’m talking right now, the election is next week and everything does rise and fall on leadership.
And so we’re called to be leaders in our community, in our family and oftentimes beyond. So thank you for your time today. And remember you think different when you think long term. Have a great day.
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