Navigating Growth and Legacy with Beck Sydow

Have you ever stood at the crossroads of personal growth and professional success, wondering which path leads to true fulfillment? Beck Sydow of Humankind Business Leaders joins us to light the way, showing us how the harmony of transactional expertise and transformational leadership breeds not just profit, but purpose. As we unpack Beck's own ascent, overcoming the boundaries of geography and culture, we're reminded of the power in acknowledging our heritage and the responsibilities that come with our privileges. This episode is a treasure trove of wisdom for anyone ready to lead with consciousness and make an impact that reverberates well beyond the boardroom.

Strap in for a transformative ride that questions your comfort zones and redefines failure as a stepping stone to enlightenment. Discover how Beck harnesses the Wim Hof method and mindfulness to steer through life's tumultuous waters with unwavering self-trust and enlightened decision-making. We dissect the influence of cornerstone personal development literature and the paramount importance of authentically engaging with your sources of inspiration. By the time we reach our destination, you'll be infused with the motivation to inspire, lead with intent, and etch a legacy that will echo through the ages. Share this episode with someone special—let it be the catalyst for growth and the beacon that guides them to their own leadership legacy.

Chapters

• 0:00 "Transformational Leadership and Overcoming Challenges"
• 10:18 Embracing Discomfort and Learning From Failure
• 24:04 Lead With Purpose and Inspire

Transcript

Baz Porter: 0:00

Good day to everybody. How are we doing? Welcome to another episode of Rise on the Ashes. Today, my guest is Beck, and they are phenomenal at what they are doing and how they're showing up in the world. Another entrepreneur. They are bringing light to some very interesting topics in the world. I would like you to introduce Beck to the world. Please meet Beck. How are you today?

Beck Sydow: 0:31

Hi boss, I'm great. Thanks so much for this opportunity and for having me.

Baz Porter: 0:35

It's a pleasure to be here with you today and it's also an honor to have the opportunity to spend time with you and just have a chat. Yeah likewise, would you please introduce yourself to the world and what you do and some of your passions and what you show up for.

Beck Sydow: 0:51

Yeah, I am Beck Sydow. I'm the founder of Humankind Business Leaders, which the way people understand what we do is mostly as business advising and leadership coaching and I say that because that's how people understand what we do. But really we're more guide and teacher to entrepreneurs and senior leaders. We are actively taking the two important parts of business, which is the transactional, and marrying it with the transformational, the transactional being all those ways that we have to be very astute and have a lot of business acumen, how we really run our businesses to create profitable businesses so they're sustainable.

Beck Sydow: 1:34

But the transformational part of business is the piece of you as a leader that lives inside. So the newer phrase from the inside out and conscious leadership are all the things that I'm involved in. But what we do differently at Humankind Business Leaders is work with those things together, so working with the transactional and the transformational at the same time. I'm really fortunate to have had some success in the business world doing that, so it is now my passion to share that with other founders, ceos, entrepreneurs and senior leaders of. We can do both and we need to do both. That's what we're being called to do now as leaders business leaders in the world.

Baz Porter: 2:18

I love that. I really like the message you stand for by marrying the transactional with the transformational. How did you come about that? Would you mind sharing?

Beck Sydow: 2:30

Yeah, I came about it from my own experience and, like most entrepreneurs, seeing a gap. Right, certainly, there are lots of business advisors and lots of leadership coaches and lots of support for entrepreneurs and senior business leaders, but what I'm not seeing a lot of is the talent and skill to work wherever you are to start with. So most of us business leaders are very head up experienced. Right, we're hard driving, we're hardcore, we know how to run a business, we're going to go get it done and I love working with folks like that. But I'm really up front saying that's going to take you so far. But if we start working with who you are as a leader and how you show up in your business, I think you're going to have a different kind of runway than you might even imagine.

Beck Sydow: 3:16

Other business owners entrepreneurs are more heart centered, we might say, and I love meeting people there. But inevitably what we're going to track toward is how do you really run a successful business? From a tactical standpoint, no matter where a leader is in their journey, I'm able to come and help them start right where they are. And then inevitably, if we're working on the business to grow your business, we're going to start seeing places where your leadership skill style capability could benefit from some additional work. And vice versa. If you're someone that is very focused on leadership style presence, there's probably a place in your business that's got your attention where you need to really be more tactically oriented. I love that.

Baz Porter: 4:05

Some of our listeners are fascinated with stories of adversity and overcoming challenges in their life. Is there anything you can share with the audience where you overcome a challenge in your life or equal your career, whereas ultimately turn into a huge opportunity for yourself?

Beck Sydow: 4:24

Yeah, thanks for the question. I love this question. My growing up experience put me on a journey to really uncover and give permission to myself to be all of who I am. I grew up in a very fundamental evangelical Christian home. My parents were very conservative and my geographic understanding of the world circled around West Virginia, pennsylvania and Virginia. So this way my life has taken shape. I'll give you a professional example.

Beck Sydow: 4:55

I worked for EPS for a long time and my boss one day said hey, come in my office and what's going on. And he said it was a great opportunity for a special assignment and we'd like for you to go to Utah. This was the early 90s and I swear we had to get a map out. I knew where Utah was, like I know the states, but I'm looking at, okay, utah. So I went on a work assignment for six months in Salt Lake City and my life has given me lots of opportunities to grow well beyond what I could have ever imagined as a kid living in this little small understanding of the world with not a lot of access to the world. Actually Professionally. It gave me a lot of ability to increase my understanding of the world travel my wife and I just got back from a trip to Bhutan and India.

Beck Sydow: 5:46

I'm doing things now in my life, right from my origin story, that I never thought were possible. So I share all the time with people, leaders, everyday folks. If you feel some tug, you are tethered to something, and if you keep following it, your life can actually take a form that you probably haven't yet imagined. And every time I say that, I'd also say I have a ton of privilege. I've worked really hard, but not everybody has access right. Having privilege is about having access to something other people don't, and not all people can literally pull themselves from the ashes, and I think it's important to say that too is based on people's circumstances and the access they have to resources. It's not going to be everybody's story, so I'm very active in giving back to the community and helping everybody that I possibly can.

Baz Porter: 6:42

I love the fact that you're contributing back to smaller communities from your own experience. It's very valuable for people to share that experience, because it's all about changing lives, I believe. So thank you for doing that. You're quite welcome. I found in my experience, successful individuals like yourself have a routine or habits they have adopted throughout the years of experience they have. Is there anything that you do ritualistically in the mornings or to set your day up for success?

Beck Sydow: 7:15

Yeah, it's a great question. I'm a mindful awareness and meditation teacher and practitioner so certainly that is part, and has been a part, of my life for 25, almost 30 years. So that is part of my morning routine is to meditate, but I'm always tweaking my routines. Some people have these. I do this every day and I've been doing it for years and I applaud those folks. It just it doesn't work like that for me.

Beck Sydow: 7:41

More recently, I've been exploring a new kind of journal. It's called the Oak Journal and the founder of this Oak Journal system is in the Denver area. I went to a conference called the Conscious Entrepreneur Summit in the summer and Oak Journal gave everybody that attended this journal. So I've been using that, which includes writing down three gratitudes setting a vision I call it intention for the day, coming up with your three top priorities. I just did a LinkedIn post about how I struggle with doing they call it MIT most important things. I just struggle with it, but I'm learning a lot.

Beck Sydow: 8:17

So that's part of my morning routine now and I've started reading Wim Hof's book and other folks that do breath work. And for the last about 10 mornings I'm up early before the sun and I do three rounds of breathing. I'm starting to explore cold exposure and right now I'm at. It's interesting. You asked me this question. I've been putting cold water on my face for a number of mornings and this morning was my first morning actually standing in the shower under cold water for 15 seconds. I'm an explorer. I do things until I'm like I need to do something else. Evening rituals and routines typically look like trying to get into bed pretty early and reading, so I can get up as early as I can in the morning.

Baz Porter: 9:00

Yeah, I love that. May I give you a tip, because my wife and I do the cold plunges and all the rest of it. My wife more than myself, I must say. The part of the reason we do the cold plunges is to reset the Vegas nerve.

Baz Porter: 9:15

That's right and it is for the post people, those people not aware of this. It's just in the neck or the lower part of the neck, just behind the karate archery. So if you are adverse to jumping in freezing cold water and you live in Colorado and when you go and put your Go and get in it and it's three inches at the top thick of ice, the other alternative is to put your neck Into cold water and do it for 15 seconds and three sets of 15 seconds and that will help. I'm cut. Go in there as long as you can until you feel uncomfortable See, don't drown yourself please and then it will help you reset them. That nerve in the base of the neck, it has the same effect. So if you have, I do, cold damage, damage from being cold environment, it does help with the rather alternatives showers at one way, but the ice plunge in. So jumping in it fully immersed, you can put your head in it does the same thing.

Beck Sydow: 10:16

Yeah, thanks for sharing the tip. I came into this cold water practice and I'm early in it and breathing because I know that, as humans, we avoid discomfort. Right, we all know it, and it is so easy to get You're already smiling attached to our comforts. Yeah, as business leaders, we take that to work with us and we cut a channel where there's comfort. Now, typically, entrepreneurs are the exception. Right, they're gonna do uncomfortable things, but oftentimes they're gonna do them with a little bit of shoulder Against doing it.

Beck Sydow: 10:53

For me, as a mindfulness meditation Practitioner and teacher, what I know about who we are as humans is we avoid discomfort, and that makes our life Shape really differently. So is true in the business world. So, exposing ourselves to what are those things that we feel discomfort around, and can we stay with those things a little longer before we move into action. So that's what all this wim Hof work is about, and others are doing it too. So that is one of the ways I work with senior leaders is where are you uncomfortable, where's the tension in you and where's the tension in your business? Because you can take that word intention and separate it and make it an in. If you're in tension, you need to set an intention. Once you do that and you start really working with what is my intention here, what I'm uncomfortable you can start to see that you're using this thing less right, because you can rationalize some of that.

Beck Sydow: 11:50

But you start to access someplace in you different that actually feels and trusts and understand what's going on. Because a lot of us that are prone to comfort we, when we see things that are happening in our business and our life that are uncomfortable, what do we just pretend? We have this really innate Ability to pretend like it's not happening. I've even worked with leaders that are like I've been in a room with them and they'll say what just happened. I'm like let's talk about what happened, right? Some of them will even write notes is this is what happened, right? I was like, yeah, but what was happening for you in that moment? And then the discomfort comes is oh, what was happening for me? Yeah, let's talk about what was happening for you.

Baz Porter: 12:31

And then it's a rationalizer, but it's not the same as them, because everybody, like you just said, have different experiences of the same situation. You can watch the same movie but have a different interpretation of that. So I love that distinction, thank you.

Beck Sydow: 12:48

It's easy, when that comes up, for me to answer the question as a guide, as a coach, whatever you want, and just say this is what was happening. That's me avoiding the truth of I have a leader that just said what was happening.

Beck Sydow: 13:00

And that's the work to do, and it was to share with me what you saw and what was that like for you and what does that mean to your business and what's an action you need to take. That, by saying what was happening, kept you from following your intuition and your wisdom around what needs to happen based on what you just witnessed.

Baz Porter: 13:18

Yeah, I love that In this fast paced world we consume so much information. Is there any books that you are reading or have read that you could recommend to people that could inspire them on their journey? That's been sentimental to you.

Beck Sydow: 13:36

Yeah, I'm sitting in my office, my home office, here. I'm surrounded by books. I tend to go back to the same ones over and over again, and one is a book called Radical Acceptance by Tara Brock, and she was one of the people I first started reading when I had the experience of I have all this external success. People look at the outside of my life and it looks pretty dang good, but it didn't feel like that to me inside. There was a certain point and I was in my early mid 30s and I discovered this book, radical Acceptance by Tara Brock, and the introduction of that book.

Beck Sydow: 14:14

Tara talks about meeting a person that was describing some work they were doing as becoming their own best friend. And I can still. I have the book right over there, like and still. Each time I think about that, I share that. It pulls at something inside of me that is really deep. So I've been on this journey for 30 years of becoming my own best friend and it has really changed a lot of things for me and sometimes I'm better at it than other times. So that's a really sentimental book for me. I like sharing it because I wanted to meet Tara. I wanted to.

Beck Sydow: 14:49

I lived in Richmond, virginia, at the time. She lives in the DC area could never find a way for years to meet her. Fast forward to about five years ago. I got certified as a mindfulness and meditation teacher in a program that was led by Tara Brock and Jack Cornfield. I share that as a way for folks to really think about the things you're drawn to following them. Read that book, read another book by that author, follow the breadcrumbs, do the work and just keep going right. Just keep following where it's taking you because, like me, you could end up with a person that wrote a book that meant something to you sitting in a room getting a certification of something that they're teaching. So I hope that's inspirational for folks to just follow things.

Baz Porter: 15:36

Yeah, I love the breadcrumbs. One of my mentors said success, please close. And if you start to really look at the people who have been successful, for whatever reason, and whether you're chasing, you can actually find Little what you said breadcrumbs to follow, to model and then make them on your own.

Beck Sydow: 16:00

So I love that if I think, in the saturated information that we get now, right, we end up like reading something all that was I, that meant something to me, and then we get the next thing. I think it's more important than ever to really go a little deeper. So we're consumption Heavy right now, and so I'll take I have to take a break from LinkedIn and Instagram and books, even, and audio books. Right, I like to listen to things and I'll go along hiatus. It's where I'm not ingesting and I find, when I do that, that I'm drawn back to things that I might not have followed all the way through. And I also find, when I take breaks from Consuming information and I consume a fair amount that I'm more creative. On the other side of that, what I recently? I heard someone say we consume a lot and in doing so, then we damp, damp and down our creativity. So it's one of the things I do as a way to restart my own creativity as I I'll start to consume less and create more.

Baz Porter: 17:03

Yeah, I love that and that's great advice for anybody who is in the mindset of Up must learn. If you're learning or consuming all the time, there's no time for you to implement what you've learnt and Put it where it needs to be put where it's in your life or business or somewhere else. So you need. I love that distinction of pausing from the world, stepping back and then reappend Somewhat, applying it or re-evaluating what it is You've been learning. So I love that failure.

Baz Porter: 17:34

Is often viewed by the world as oh my god, the world's gonna end, but it can also provide us with valuable lessons. Is there anything that's happened in your life that stands out above anything else, that has been first perceived as a failure and then gone, actually Know that was a win and that's cool?

Beck Sydow: 17:57

I would reframe the question just a little. Yes, I have failures and I'll share one with you, but I don't know if they always turn into wins. I think they turn into learning. It's a question I ask leaders frequently what are you learning what? What is your team learning what? What do you need to learn? What are you actively learning? Because that helps helps also Refrain this idea of these failures. Right, there's all this in the business world. Is it failure and fail fast and all that stuff? Before we started recording, I was sharing with you.

Beck Sydow: 18:26

A year and a half ago, I was the CEO of a company that had achieved quite a lot of success and I Absolutely loved being in that role. I led the company through an acquisition and eight months on the other side of that, I made the decision that the context had changed, as they do, and it was time for me to go do something else. But the underbelly of that was that I had failed in some way. The whole Stay. There's this, all cultures around me to stay in things and the right thing for me to do was to leave. But because of all of this way that we put emphasis on Working through hard things and I ended up with this Residual. I must have failed.

Beck Sydow: 19:15

So what happened was I thought I've only been a CEO once, so incomes a little imposter syndrome on On the other side of that failures I should probably do it. I should probably be get another CEO role, and I had some interests, folks that were interested in Doing that and then I got wise to yes, that's not the answer to this little nagging. I must have failed. I must have done something. I gotta go do that same thing again to Wash this feeling away.

Beck Sydow: 19:41

So I made the decision not to pursue other CEO opportunities and made the decision to help CEOs, senior leaders and founders Navigate through their experiences of leading amazing Organizations and needing support and help and guidance to do that. So I think there's a lot of personal reflection that's needed anytime. That since comes up that Shoulda, coulda, woulda right kind of thinking of if I only had and trying to rewrite the way things happened. So there's a lot of information in the way that things actually did happen. So I'm in a place now where I can just see how it all unfolded and I'm all the better and more grateful for it.

Baz Porter: 20:25

I love looking towards your future and Having the awareness of where you are right now. Where would you want to be or where do you? Would you see yourself in a couple of years time? You said about traveling earlier and and India is a phenomenal place to go. I've not. I've been through it. I've not been there to spend, but where is your number one place, either to work from or position, or you want to position, you want to set yourself up to be in in a couple of years or few months?

Beck Sydow: 20:58

Yeah, I think the future for me looks like a home base here in Boulder, colorado, and traveling and having work where I can travel and work at the same time, which is really the dream, and being able to create that is what I'm in a process of doing and then also being able to help folks that have organizations that are a heavy load to carry on your own. You may have a really great leadership team or not, and you need someone that can be a partner sitting in that sidecar. I think about it as the person in the green room right, because leaders are always on, they're always on display and what you wear and what you say, the meanings you go to or don't, people are making meaning out of that Having someone like me in the green room that has been in that role but has also done a lot of work on my leadership capability and I also love I'm a business geek through and through. I love all things business and I'm trained in a number of ways to run companies, so we can pick one that works best for, specifically for an organization.

Beck Sydow: 22:05

I'm not big on one size fits all. There's some of them out there and I think they can take you some distance. There's some good things in those things, but they won't take you the whole way. The future for me looks like just continuing to create and build and peel back this onion of all that I've learned and how I can put that in the world to be of benefit to others.

Baz Porter: 22:27

I love that. Is there anything you want to share with the audience? If they want to reach out to you, where's the best place? Is it a website? Is it called Action? Is there anything you'd like to share?

Beck Sydow: 22:39

Yes, I'm easily found on LinkedIn. At BexSideOut. I have a website and development right now, humankindbusinessleaderscom, so that'll probably go live the first part of the year and that's been a real labor of love trying to distill the. You've done it. Distill the. What is it that I do? And every word matters right when someone's looking at a screen That'll be out soon.

Beck Sydow: 23:00

My call to action really for listeners that are business leaders that really want to make an impact and do something unique and different in the world that benefits everyone, is to really understand this intersectionality of the transactional part of your business is key to its success. You've got to have a business that is profitable. I say a good company to work for is a profitable company because without profit you can't do the other piece and really bring that transformational way that you lead an organization and support and bring benefit to the people in that organization. We can do both right. I think there's a myth and a misunderstanding that you've got to choose one and the reality is, anytime you choose any one thing, you probably are limiting what you can do with that one thing. So I know we can do both. I know that we need to do both and I'd love to talk to anybody that's interested in having a companion on their journey that helps them understand how to do both at the same time.

Baz Porter: 24:04

I love it. Beck, thank you very much for joining me today To all my listeners, thank you very much for tuning in, downloading. Please share this episode and inspire somebody with the light that Beck does today For myself. Lead with purpose my friends and inspire with legacy. I'm Bad Porter and have a very blessed day.

Beck Sydow: 24:27

Thank you.

Baz Porter: 24:28

Thank you.