Tales Of Leadership: Don’t Get Stuck

Good morning, cadre family. It's Luke Wentland. I'm going to come to you live twice this week. So Monday motivation and then I do tales of leadership. Sometimes I do it on Tuesdays or sometimes I do it on Thursdays. See the play with the tea there. Tales of leadership Tuesday. Tales of leadership Thursday. But regardless, I'm here and I'm excited and I love it. So it's really always the best in the world to be a part of the cadre community. Today I woke up with JC and I couldn't help but laugh. It was the Shannon Paul wood chips.

It was one of the best things ever. Like seeing how many wood chips that Shannon Paul had on. I actually saw that live and it just made my week. So that was a good one. But tales of leadership. So I'm going to share a story today. Everything I always share is true. Everything I always share. I hope that one way or another just hopefully sends a message to you in ways in which you might just like lean into a different perspective and a different thought that you have in your brain than you may have like just immediately went to.

So this tales of leadership that I want to share today is about ten years ago. Good morning everybody. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. So ten years ago, it is a beautiful backdrop. Speak wonder. It's always one of my favorite things. Decaf coffee. Get going and here we are. But so ten years ago, it was a year two, let's call it, year one of an organization I started called North Star Behavioral Health. And an individual was one of the best employees we had. He worked overnight. He worked mornings.

It was a 24/7 facility helping support individuals with substance use disorder. And this individual just got back. He was deployed. Came back. He was probably 21, 22 years old from the National Guard. Just an unbelievable young man and really smart. He had also had a lot going on . So he had a young wife, not a young wife, but he had a wife, 21 years old, a wife, and then two kids. And they just had another one coming. So all of this was happening and you would always say, "Can I get as many hours as possible, Luke?

Can I get as many hours as possible ? I just need to make money. I've got a lot going on, all the things." So we have one office that is a locked office that has like a locked one, locked two, locked three. So it's like a locked one in the office, locked two in a cabinet, locked three to get into the next thing. Only few people have access to those things. So when you have the ability to kind of like figure out who did this, it wasn't very hard. So what ended up happening is this individual ended up writing out checks and ended up writing out checks for himself to be able to cover some things.

There was a rent coverage. There was a car coverage. There was some things that happened that he ended up writing checks out for. And there was one or two things that he could do. Number one was I pissed. I was. I was frustrated. I was upset. But what I felt was the number one thing to do was to sit him down and talk about it. And I said, you know, so-and-so, that was his name. I said, "No matter how this is going to go, you know, I want to let you know right out the gates, like you will no longer be working here."

But these are the one or two things we can do. We can, you know, report this and move it forward, or you can find a way to, you know, pay back the funds, et cetera. And then the last one, of course, is, you know, I just want to talk to you about, like, did you not feel you could come to us? Did you not feel that we wouldn't be able to help? Did you not feel that you didn't have the ability to, like, ask for it? And he just said, "Well, I never thought you'd give it to us." And just so we 're on the same page, three weeks earlier, we gave out a short-term loan for another employee that was going through a tough financial hardship.

This is all true. And as I explained, I said, "I'm not going to tell you the name of the individual, but three weeks ago, we had a soft loan that we helped support an individual, and we were able to work through their check and whatnot ." And so to think, like, what you did and what you jeopardized and the risk that you put yourself under, you're in military, you're all these things, and you rode out and you forged checks. Like, I won't take it to the next level, but I just need you to know you need to pay it back.

Three to five years later, he paid it back. It's actually, like, four years later. He paid it back in full. He would always work a little bit, pay it back, pay it back, pay it back. But what I want to say is though it didn't mean it didn't hurt and also didn't mean that I wasn't stuck and frozen that moment. I'll be very real. Like, ten years ago, I never thought that an employee would be falsifying your forging checks and taking those checks for their own benefit and supporting their family and do whatever they need to do.

And there's many opportunities to lean into, to share about, like, how you've been quote-unquote wronged, right? You've been wronged. We've all been wronged as, you know, victims for a minute. But so I'd stuck with it and it hurt. And I was like, I just, I need to talk to somebody about this. I shared. And, you know, what's interesting is, you know, if you run a business and you run an operation, usually within three to five years, you'll have some level of fraud. And what's crazy is here we are, you know, three plus years into cadre and, you know, again, nobody did this, but we had a fraudulent issue with our credit card, where we had to replace all the credit cards and update all the credit cards and all the things.

It wasn't an employee. It was nothing like that. But it just, again, another example. Like, when you own an operation, when you have a business, but back in the day, ten, eleven years ago, I took it so personal. I was like, I can't believe you do this. I can't believe you do it to North Star. I can't believe that he would take this and move it forward like this. And so again, you know, just sat him down, talked to him and said, like, one thing's going to be true, and then one thing is going to be your choice.

Like, one thing's going to be true. Number one, you know, I'm, we can do one of two things here, right? Like, you will be terminated. There's no denying that fact, but the second part is on you. Either it will be reported or it won't be reported, and I really do not want to report this. You have your military career. You have your wife. You have your three now kids . So why don't you do the right thing and just pay it back in time? And he said he would. And he made a hole on that. And he absolutely made a hole on that.

And the thing of it is this, where this all comes around and why it all comes full circle is this. At what point do you let things go? At what point do you let things go? Right? I mean, I'll be real, like hung on to it for probably like a week. Probably held on to a week sleepless nights thinking about this, like the why? Why would he do this? Why would he put himself in jeopardy? Why would he do that? Why would he risk it? And to realize like, that's not on me. That is not on me. Like, I'm not, I'm not here.

Like, that's not my decision. I didn't do it. None of those things, but I just literally ate it for a while. So what I want to push back on you all is what are you eating maybe today or this week or this month? That is from like a day ago, a week ago, a month ago. I mean, my gosh, I had an individual write thousands of dollars of checks against me. And five, seven days later, I'm like, it's not on me. I'm gonna let that one go. And move past it, move forward. There's been many, many of things that have hurt.

It doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. It doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. It doesn't mean it doesn't mean you can't feel it. It doesn't mean all those things. But there has to get a point where you've got to move past it. You have to move past it. You have to go and you have to say to myself, okay, that happened. I'm moving forward. I'm going on and I'm not going to be stuck in this cycle. JC always talks about it. He said, there's three things that are going to happen in any moment of your life. You are either going to regress.

You're going to have regression. You're going to have progression. You're going to have stagnation. So just look at this one event. Regressed. I stagnated. I stood tall in the moment for a week of like, why did this happen? What transpired? And I found it was killing me. It was killing me to sit there. And then last but not least, last but not least is, you've got progression. So again, regression, progression, stagnation. So I want to share again, are you regressing, regressing in your decisions?

Are you stagnating? Are you staying the same wherever you are? Or are you progressing? In the one that will kill you, stagnation. Regression is amazing. Regression is amazing. Regressing can be hard. And it can be a lot of like, even be I got you moments. It can be all these things. But then you can find your way through it. Find yourself unfrozen and continue to progress. So I leave you with thousands of dollars of checks written against me. And I love that man. We have connected. We still talk.

This is six years later. I know what his names of his kids are. He is a wonderful young man. But man did he had a tough patch in his life. And so I encourage you to find ways to forgive those people that even sometimes hurt you the most. And it could be in business. It could be in life. It could be all those things. And sometimes it's okay to put up a barrier and say, "Hey, we aren't going to be here today. We aren't going to be friends. We aren't going to be all those things. But you know what we are going to be.

We're going to be able to move forward." So I encourage you and then also like how you show up from the moment. It's really big too. All right, you guys. Take care. Have a wonderful, wonderful week. Lift somebody up. I hope the tales of this leadership hit you one way or another. I think there's a lot there that you might be able to look in yourself and say, "Man, I'm holding on to something today. I'm holding on to something today and I got to let it go." Share your recovery cafe, accountability though.

Love all your handles situation with corrective approach and empathy. I'm always going to be human first, no matter what. No matter what is just human first. It is what it is. I 'm always going to lean into that side. Love the story. Thanks for sharing leadership. It's not easy. Oh, man. It's the hardest thing in the world. That's for damn sure. When they say leadership is tough and you're on an island and all these things, like number one, it's really true. But number two is when you have the right people around you to support and make the right decisions moving forward, you 're going to find yourself in this beautiful moment of flow where you can make decisions fail, fall down, fail, fall down and feel amazing while you're doing it.

So there you go. Take care of y'all. Have a wonderful week. Peace and lift somebody up today. The world definitely, definitely needs it. Bye bye.