Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?

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Climbing a mountain isn't just about the summit. It's about the storms, the false summits, and the moments when you think you can't take another step. Leadership and business are no different. Today we're talking with someone who's lived it on the mountain and in the boardroom, Chuck Garcia.

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Welcome back to "Is Anything Real in Paid Advertising?", the show where we cut through the hype, challenge the noise, and explore what really drives growth. I'm Adam W. Barney, Energy Coach, Author, and host of this growing podcast where leaders and change makers share the truths behind success.

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Today, I'm joined again by Chuck Garcia, founder of Climb Leadership, Columbia University professor, executive coach, mountaineer, and author of "A Climb to the Top" and "The Moment that Defines Your Life". Chuck has helped thousands of leaders build resilience, communicate with influence, and navigate the toughest climbs of their careers.

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And he's here to share what's real about leadership, influence, and growth. Chuck, welcome. Thank you, Adam. It's a pleasure to be here. All right, so you've coached executives and climbed mountains. What parallels do you see between the toughest climbs and the toughest leadership moments?

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Well, it's. When I first started mountaineering, it was on my second climb, which is on Mount Kilimanjaro, where something struck me there. It was a massive effort that involved 13 climbers and 36 porters. And I was already 20 years into a career, and I hadn't thought about that parallel.

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But it was toward the end of the climb, and it took seven and a half days to climb Mount Kilimanjaro from the top to the bottom. And it was on the seventh day when the team, we were reflecting on what did it feel like to climb the mountain? And that's when it hit me. Oh, my goodness.

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As I thought about how did I frame the capacity to climb a career, and did it have any similarities to what we just did on Kilimanjaro? And I thought of three things, and it was so clear, and I think they could apply to either one.

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And the first one is we set a goal. Even though the goal may be adjustable, the fact is you're trying to accomplish something. Now, in the case of mountaineering, when I originally started climbing mountains, the goal was get to the summit, but as I became smarter, that is not the goal at all.

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The goal is to get home to my family. Accidents occur. People die on mountains. So the first thing: be clear about the goal. Now in careers, you have a goal, and it could be make a million dollars, it could be CEO. That is likely to change, as mine did. So that's the first thing. Set a goal and recognize at different points in your lives and careers that could change.

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Right. Number two: It's one step at a time. So for context, there was no shortcut up career mountain, and there was no shortcut up regular mountain. I can imagine that on Mountain Kilimanjaro. Yes.

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Well, even in careers, Adam, I say to my Columbia students, many of them want to be CEO. They want to be at the top at the time. They're 26. I don't want a boss. I want to invent my own thing. And I said, good luck with that. Who doesn't? That is a noble wish.

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But what I recommend to them; take your time, be patient. You got a lot to learn between now and then. So take a step at a time. Don't try to look too far. Don't focus on the outcome. Focus on a step at a time. And then the third part, Adam, which it struck me as certainly the most important in mountaineering, but when I reflect upon my own career growth, the people in my lives, in my life who have helped me, and that's you can't do it alone.

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And I think it's tough, when we come out of college, and you aspire to do what you're going to do, sometimes you feel very alone. You might have a mentor, you might have had a professor that inspired you. But until you join a company and you find your tribe, which, sadly, some people never do.

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That is true. And I say that because so much of my own career growth came from the people that have a big impact and influence on me. And that's why I encourage our listeners. Think about the people in your life who have had an influence and impact on you.

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How did they do it? What is the manner by which they engaged? And most important, can you give that. Can you pay it forward to someone else? And I think that's my biggest lesson when I think of the frame. So to repeat, set a goal. One step at a time.

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Can't do it alone. My call to everyone listening, to my students: take a deep breath and recognize this is not going to happen immediately. There are very few miracles. Nothing happens without intention.

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While fate may play a role in some, I think that's fair to say things you can't predict. Right. Most important, it's a series. Success is not one thing. It's a series of small steps and of continual adjustments.

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That's mountaineering. That's careers. Right. And I love how you talk about that. You know, I know, Chuck, that you're less interested in simple success stories and more in the zigs and the zags, clearly. What's one zig or zag in your own journey that taught you a really defining lesson to lead you to where you are today.

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Yeah. I was most curious when I got out of college. I went to work for a big bank. I was recruited by a big Wall Street bank, and it was a training program with 15 other people. So there were 16 newly minted college students. Everyone was equally smart.

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They came from all kinds of colleges. Ivies, not. Whatever. It didn't matter. All of that went away. But what didn't go away, Adam, and I think was my biggest revelation that I encourage everybody to consider, I looked around as, in this program, people were coming in, introducing themselves.

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My name is. And my job is. So we were getting to know everybody in the organization. Right. I was struck by the people who came in. I didn't know where they went to college. I had no idea how smart they were. I didn't know their GPA. I didn't know their level of intelligence.

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But somehow that didn't matter because they had something else going on. The way they engaged. The manner by which they engaged, the way they communicated. Those that were clear, concise, and purposeful versus those that just came in to hear the sound of their own voice.

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Right. And that's when it struck me, Adam. I said, I don't know how they got to be that, but what I know is those are the ones that are influencing me to try to create a vision of my own style. And that was my biggest revelation.

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That I am in control of how I show up, of how I engage others, how I carry myself, how I'm dressed, whether I smile, how I use my body language. That Adam, to me, was so influential because now I'm beginning to think that there's something more than technical competence, because if everyone is equally competent, who's getting the promotions?

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There were 10 people up for promotions, and one was getting it. And I began to see the common theme. And that was when I had to focus on becoming the vision of the guy that I wanted to be. Not exactly knowing what that was, but I took a collection of influences.

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The way someone looked, his glasses, the suits. And not that I tried to imitate them, I just wanted to borrow the influence to create myself rather than an imitation of someone else. Right, right. And I, I love to equate that down, Chuck, to, you know, not just understanding what people are and how they show up, but the origin stories of where they come from.

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That's incredibly important to lead them to where they are today. And those aren't the things that title or positions necessarily show off. Right. And most of those leaders, you know, I would argue, you know, when they hit setbacks, you know, the summit isn't necessarily even where leaders are made.

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It actually happens in the storm. Oh, I agree. You find out who you are. Actually, I've heard an old expression. If you want to get to know someone, give them two things. Give them power, that's one way. And then give them adversity and see how they operate in either. And they're both revealing for different reasons.

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But I think anyone that has succeeded will tell you about how they overcame the adversity and the obstacles, that's where the growth occurs. It occurs in the mistakes and the imperfections. And I'm grateful for that because some of the mistakes that I made, nothing fatal, but things that I learned, they became my biggest teachers and how lucky we are to accept that and to invite it.

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Right. The sun is still behind the clouds on those days when you hit those stumbles. Right? It is. For many people that I coach, there's a tremendous cost of emotional capital when something happens and they don't have a blueprint for how to get out of it, and they feel stuck, or they feel alone, isolated.

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Those are absolutely horrible feelings that nobody prepares you that that could be. And I, I think that's where finding your team. You only need a few good friends. You don't need 100 million followers on Instagram. If you have three people that give a damn and you're in a bad spot, call your friends.

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You'll find out who your friends are. Those are your friends for life. And I have that. And I'm glad. And it's not a lot, but it's a small circle. I encourage everybody stop with the number of followers and the influencers. Okay, if that's your thing, I get it. My God, when you fall off that cliff, your friends are all you have.

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Exactly. Sort of shifting gears a little bit. You've I know you've been a spokesperson for billion dollar companies, a TEDx speaker, and you're a professor there at Columbia. Why is communications still the number one skill leaders underestimate or underutilize?

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Yeah. And sadly, alas, it is number one on the LinkedIn top five communication soft skills. You think about our education, Adam, and the program that I teach at Columbia was called Professional Development and Leadership. It's in the Columbia Graduate School of Engineering.

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And imagine that teaching engineers leadership skills, including communication, which is what I teach. At first, they were skeptical. Why? Because they didn't get a grade for communication. They didn't even have a class in communications. They were in STEM subjects. And right. Rightfully so.

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It is sad to me when I am called to help someone, they have taken communication. And it's not that they purposely dismissed it as irrelevant. They just paid it no attention. Right. And so the people that I coach, Adam, typically are the common theme: they're promoted on the strength of their technical competence into a job description that looks something very different.

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You are no longer the accountant. You're now expected to lead accountants. You're not just an engineer, you're a leader of other engineers. To me, this is a skill that requires the same discipline and rigor that if I were to teach you math, physics, or anything else. And yet many people don't come to that because our educational model doesn't promote it.

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It's a cram, exam, regurgitate. You go to the best school, you go to the Ivy, you get an A. Now that may be a very good way to succeed, but the Ivy Leagues do not have a monopoly on success. There are plenty of places where anybody, including me; I did not get into an Ivy.

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My grades couldn't even get me into an Ivy. And here I am teaching one because I've got an expertise that Columbia values. Right. But usually, Adam, more often it's driven by someone that gets themselves into a heap of trouble because they got a big mouth, they were offensive, they treated people like crap, and it's their own behavior.

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And what I do is I combine the elements of communication and emotional intelligence to be the opposite sides of the same coin. The capacity to communicate clear, concise tones under the weight of pressure and expectations. That, to me, is the secret sauce that, sadly, schools don't talk about.

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This is why I'm at Columbia: to spread the word, and my goodness, it works because they come back from. They graduate, they come back from Google and Goldman. They come back to me and they said, oh my God, I would have taken more classes with you. Not me, necessarily.

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They realize when they go out in the world, my goodness, engineering's easy. The people. That's hard. Right. I've heard it time and time again across my own coaching clients. I know my technical things.

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These are the things you can track on a piece of paper. It's those pieces you mentioned, emotional intelligence or EQ. It also gets into stoicism, which I know is another one of the pillars of how you think about leadership. How are those two tools of stoicism and emotional intelligence actually so critical when actually the pressure is the highest?

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Yeah. And when you think about the pressure, many people grow up in their careers often having not been conditioned to what it's like to be under pressure. Now if we equate this to the athletes, if you get someone just out of school, and I'm not a big sports fan, but I know enough that I watch these athletes out of college, they join a football team, they're not expected to do too much early on in your career, in that you got the veterans that are getting the spotlight.

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So we're going to take a quarterback. You got a 22 year old quarterback, he's got years to emerge. But what I watched in Tom Brady, in watching him emerge, he even talked about, there's other quarterbacks that have my arm, they have my skill.

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But Tom Brady is a self described stoic. And if you watch Brady operate in the Super Bowls, his mind immediately clears, even if he's thrown an interception, even though they didn't move the ball, 50,000 fans screaming at him, he doesn't hear them. And that's where the stoicism comes in, Adam.

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Because if we now equate that to careers, you got someone running a publicly traded company; he, she is on the continuum between quarterly results and long term gain. And it's very easy to succumb to making the decision short term quarterly gains.

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I grew up in a world of Mike Bloomberg. That was a private company. Every decision we made had to be long term. We did not have that pressure. But I say that because this is something like being an athlete you learn to condition to. If all of a sudden you are vaulted into this leadership position and you're feeling the weight of that pressure.

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Pressure changes everything. If you have not learned to continue, you're going to crack. It's just part of being human. You learn to operate, to stay calm, to breathe, to not say too much when the pressure's on.

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Try to find some clear place before you open up your mouth and you piss off a thousand employees. That's what usually happens. It's a learned behavior. I mean it's a little bit of, I equate it to grace also being a piece of the puzzle that, and I don't mean grace from a religious standpoint; grace from a silence and a space standpoint are so critical.

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I'd be curious to sort of understand Chuck, though, you've guided incredible students, executives, and entrepreneurs over the years. What have you learned about resilience across different generations of leaders? And how is it different today than maybe it was in the times when you grew up, in how companies and organizations respect those two tools of stoicism and emotional intelligence in the puzzle of their employee base?

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Yeah, I appreciate the question simply because we're in this really strange phenomenon in the workplace. There's four generations that are showing up for work every day, and people are not retiring at 55. I'm 65, and I'd like to think I got another 20 or 30 years ahead of me. But I also deal with 18 year old undergraduates and 25 year old graduate students and 50 year old executives.

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So here's why I'm saying this. Every generation has a different expectation for what they want in the world and what they think the world owes them, or what they think they're going to get out of it. And I see that in the younger generation: incredible idealism. They come out of college, they just want to save the world.

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Right? When I got out of college 40 years ago, all I could think about: how am I going to pay the rent? I couldn't even think of any greater noble cause. I didn't have that luxury. I wasn't entitled to anything. I had to work for everything I had, and my attitude had to be that way.

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But your question speaks to, we are in an age of diversity and inclusion, that we're very sensitive to how we respond to it. We're in an age of an avalanche and onslaught of over-information that is causing tremendous anxiety.

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And I say that with great care and kindness because it is everywhere. And I've never seen it like this. So we are now, even though I'm not a behavioral therapist, I do see behavior through the lens of leadership, through leadership.

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Right. I try, Adam, as best I can to help everyone in my gravity understand that we are in a very challenging climate here. But that climate is more based upon the fact that our behavior is transparent and visible at any given moment.

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As soon as you're talking to me, I can whip out my phone, and I could hit a button. Until 20 years ago, this kind of thing never existed. Everything was in private. Not anymore. You can assume you're being recorded, and, or, you're being watched. So why does that matter?

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The spotlight effect does something to people and it changes their behaviors. So I say that, in that we are dealing with multiple generations, multiple cultures, multiple languages, and an anxiety level beyond anything I've seen before.

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So you factor in all of these. I'd like to think we live in a healthy society, but I am going to state very boldly here, our society is not healthy. It's actually It's actually quite unhealthy. And I see loneliness and despair and anxiety; not to say that's everywhere.

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Adam, we, you, me, do in the service of your clients, we first have to, at the barest level, make sure somebody's mental and physical health is sound, and then we worry about everything else. We didn't think that way 20, 30 years ago.

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Right, right. And I mean, Chuck, you know I've gotten involved with the Global Loneliness Action Project here. There is a loneliness epidemic. But I would remind everyone listening also that resilience isn't just about bouncing back, it's about bouncing forward.

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And it actually builds strength if you keep going. In that realm, though, Chuck, what gives you hope about future leaders, especially where you sit there at Columbia shaping those minds of the next generation? Yeah, what gives me hope, and I think about my students, and I'll use Columbia as an example.

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It's a bell curve in how I see them emerging. What's common is tremendous idealism like I'd never seen in any other generation. They want to save the whales, save the children, save the world, save the climate. It's a beautiful thing.

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But many of them will not get there. But what gives me hope is there's a small percentage of them that intersect with tremendous idealism, tremendous realism, recognizing I can't build an app to solve my problems. It's going to be a slow burn.

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I need to get the right people. And I think it's that small percentage that typically is a small percentage of people that run the world anyway. What I see is still a small group of people that are going to emerge as the great leaders, but they are going to bring doses of, let's just say, not only innovation, but hope and idealism more than I've ever seen before.

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They care about the social issues, they want to solve the wars, they want to clean the water. 30 years ago, Adam, no one ever talked like that. It's the path to my billions. It wasn't the path to, "yeah, we can do well, but we can do good." And also, there's a balance there of like too much is enough, I think that's important. Move away from at least the traditional definition of capitalism.

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Right. With the younger generation. And I think another piece of it is right, the leaders of tomorrow: You've probably seen this increasingly over the past couple of years, also. The leaders of tomorrow aren't the loudest in the room. It's the ones who listen the deepest that are the true leaders that emerge, that hold a mirror up to the situations and the conversations that they're a part of.

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Well, they deal from a place of pragmatism, recognizing this is not a popularity contest. They're not there to please people. They have difficult decisions to make, and 49% of the people will be upset about them. What are you going to do?

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They don't buckle into that. They recognize that they are accountable for that decision. And in order to get the right decision, it's going to require immediate series of adjustments and getting the right people with the right culture and the right flexibility who are team oriented. I cannot emphasize that enough because I grew up in the Bloomberg organization where it was a collaboration, it was wonderful.

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And BlackRock too, both those organizations, wonderful collaborative culture. And I see often, sadly, many cultures toxic, not cooperative, very emotionally driven. And their ideas are good, but they hurt themselves, they're self-destructive.

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And I encourage anyone that's gonna do what that great thing is that you have set in mind, it's up to you to develop that culture because you're going to lead it from top down and by example. And if you go in there being a jerk, you're just going to create a culture of jerks, and then everybody's going to be upset, and they're all going to quit on each other.

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Right. And while that seems trite and simple, I cannot emphasize enough how many careers I've seen ruined, and how many companies I've seen destroyed that had nothing to do with the brilliance and the idea and everything to do with the infighting, and the derision.

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I win, you lose. That mentality. It's a killer. Let's pack that one away and never say it again. Right. Leaving this podcast, Chuck. Chuck, this has absolutely been incredible. Before we close, where can listeners find you, connect with your work, and learn more?

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You bet. Well, first, Adam, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. You can find me if you remember my name, it's Chuck Garcia. And just add a dot com to it. You're going to find me chuckgarcia.com. Certainly on LinkedIn, there are a couple Chuck Garcias, but you'll see the guy; Columbia professor, Mountaineer, Tedx, soccer.

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That's me. You can always find me on LinkedIn. But most important, I am here to assist in any capacity. So if you go to chuckgarcia.com and you hit the contact tab, hit me. I'll email you back. Perfect. And, Chuck, here's what really, truly hits me from this conversation: Leadership is never about the easy path.

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It's the zigzags, the storms, the moments of doubt where your influence is truly forged. And back to "Is Anything Real", paid ads might buy attention, which is what has happened traditionally. But resilience, communication, and character, those are what makes each of us real in this world.

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Indeed. And I want to wrap up with just thinking about. I think of it in the frame of. A friend of mine wrote a book called the CTR Factor. And CTR stands for credibility, trust, and respect. And what he wrote about is, in his companies through the years, this is what he found was the secret sauce that got people to the top.

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Had nothing to do with where they went to school, their intellect. None of that. And while that may be important to them, it wasn't important to the promotion committee. What was important to the promotion committee? Clear, concise, purposeful communication. Treat people with respect and deliver on every one of your commitments.

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Don't make too many; less commitments, deliver on all of them. If you can do that, that is the path to good leadership, because people are going to follow that lead. That's beautiful. Awesome, Chuck. Well, thank you for tuning in to "Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?", and if this conversation gave you something real to climb with, share it, leave a review, and join us again as the podcast keeps growing.

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But, Chuck, thank you for joining. And until next time, everyone listening: keep climbing, keep questioning, and keep finding what's real. Thank you, Chuck. Thank you, Adam, for having me.