Hey, Bri from Einder, I'm going to be in Tennessee, Australia. We're running our speaker school in Phoenix. I'm going to be in Massachusetts, a bunch of places. Now our stuff is not for everybody. I think I've said this a lot. You typically need to be at a certain point in your career or a certain point in your life if you really want to get the most out of what we do, right? We don't come to our workshop and kind of fade to black. We're very interactive. We saw lots of problems for people. We love it. Whether you deal with a difficult boss, you have an issues with your spouse, you're dealing with confidence issues. What we do is personal and professional development that doesn't have a shelf life. We just help folks in Oakland, California that were like, hey, how do I do with somebody that's passive aggressive, but I got to work with every day. How do I get out of my own head? How do I become more assertive without burning bridges? Real stuff. So if you have real stuff and you're a real human and you want to do real work, you can do it with us. Check out those locations at artofcoaching.com slash events.

We have student discounts, first responder discounts, all the discounts, but, right?

We play no part or role in order we apologize. We're not the cheapest.

We're never going to be. We bust our ass. We believe in what we do, and we love for you to be a part of our community.

Talk soon.

Music Welcome to the Art of Coaching podcast.

I'm Rev. Dolomu and at a young age, poor communication nearly caused me my life. Now I help others navigate the great area of social interaction, power dynamics and communication so they can become more adaptable leaders regardless of their profession, age or situation. This podcast is for everybody who is fascinated with solving people problems. So if you're in the no nonsense type who appreciates frank conversations, advise you can put to use immediately and learning how others navigate the messy realities of leadership, you're in the right place. I'm glad that you're joining us. Let's dive in. All right, this one is overdue. I debated on doing an episode on this for a long time because it can kind of be a contentious topic, but it is one of the most common reasons people attend our apprenticeship workshop, to deal with with narcissists or narcissistic personalities, and every other word that you can think of to describe them. Now, the term is nuanced, right? We're going to get into that in this episode, and I also want to remind all of you, and this isn't just a sales pitch, this is the truth. You're never going to learn how to fully deal with different kinds of people or different social scenarios, most effectively without practicing it. That is why our apprenticeship exists. That's the reason for the term, the apprenticeship. It's the only place that you can come refine and rehearse for some of the most meaningful interactions, stressful interactions, purposeful giving, rewarding interactions, you have to practice. Communication is a skill. By any definition of skill, it is a skill. And we still do live in this time, in this era where people think they can just listen to YouTube videos or watch YouTube videos and take free courses and get better at those things. And all education is helpful. But I just want to remind you, and I want to give you a general nudge. If you actually want to get better at light leading, guiding, teaching, coaching, interacting, getting out of your own head, asserting all those things, you have to come do it in real time. We have a great environment of really supportive people. All of our apprenticeships are small. We don't do huge groups that's that's kind of antithetical to the whole idea and

atmosphere. This is not a place where you're going to be exposed and you're going to be ridiculed. This is a place where people are going to share strategies across different industries. More importantly, we've worked with people in 30 plus different professions and they all come together and they share strategies.

And the role playing and the rehearsal

is something that might sound scary to some of you at first.

But I think if you ask the majority

of our previous attendees, they tell you

it is one of the most wonderfully cathartic experiences

they have because nobody's there to judge.

You just get rep after rep and you get little breaks through.

We have a ton of other things that we do.

But please do not be like so many other people who either do nothing at all until stuff gets really bad or you think that you can just kind of listen to this podcast and that podcast and this YouTube video. And yep, I got it. None of us are ever good enough. We can't, we have to resist that kind of entitlement. We have to resist that kind of cognitive laziness. You have to practice. Okay, so go to artofcoaching.com slash events to learn when there's going to be an apprenticeship near you and get your butt out there. Alright, another reason I want to do this episode is because I don't get on social media as much as I used to. A lot of that ended when social media became something where you don't really see the people that you followed or connected with originally, right? Stuff gets pushed to you via an algorithm. But some stuff that has been brought to my attention and I've certainly seen over the years is a lot of this pseudo therapeutic, weird, psycho-babel stuff where it seems like everybody, man or woman, put stuff out of like, here's how you know you're dealing with a narcissist. It's like everybody's a narcissist these days. Everybody's a nurse and some of this is giving really dangerous advice. Now you could sit here and say well you're not a therapist and you're providing tip. I'm not diagnosing anybody. I'm actually going to provide information that is stuff that's well researched. I also have worked with human beings as some of the most high-performing human beings and a variety of constraint-based scenarios for the majority of my adult life. I have worked with athletes who absolutely have fit on clinical diagnoses of the narcissism scale, subclinical as well, and as well as other people who have been in that demographic. So I'm not here to therapist you, I'm here to give you strategies. I'm a communication strategist who is dealt with folks who have gone through this kind of testing have been part of a wide demographic who people who are self-admitted narcissists or all I'm doing is reporting information that is research-based in giving you strategies. I'm not gonna sit here and defend that, but it is problematic when you have people online telling you to, oh, you should leave a relationship if you see these three signals or you should do this, if you see this, nobody should be telling you how to live your life. People should be offering thoughts and tips and advice, but these people should also not be people that are engaging in kind of clickbait, super the day, therapy, speak that is taking over the internet these days, right? So one thing to just talk about and we'll jump around a little bit here, but I want you to know what's coming. We're going to kind of ground the definition. Both clinical versus colloquial what narcissism actually is. I'm going to give you different forms of narcissism, things that exist on subclinical spectrum. I mean, narcissism in general exists on a spectrum in manifests in a lot of different ways. Right? And we'll talk about some broad categories, communication strategies for different types of narcissism, also recognizing that you have elements in it of yourself. Right? We've talked about this in the past. I think it was my podcast with Coach Greg Adamson, right? When you, and it's not worth getting into here, definitely go back and we'll link the episode. But it talks about why certain coaching styles, communication styles, leadership styles aren't, always gonna work with certain individuals, whether they're athletes or staff members. Because if you try to appeal to the broad kind of goals of a demographic, but you have somebody on your staff and you have other people that you're leading that kind of fit into this narcissistic spectrum that are a little bit more self-interested, right? That's not going to be a fit. All I'm telling you is you do have to appeal to people in a wide variety of ways. Some people you can speak to the collective goals. Other people you do have to speak to their self-interest. That's just humans, human, wait, if there's one fundamental truth about human beings, it's that they're self-interested. So I'm not gonna paint narcissism as this broadly negative thing either. It shows that most really successful surgeons are, of course, on that spectrum of narcissism, they have to feel like they can be the ones that can remove that brain tumor. I certainly hope the surgeon that operates with my father who needs is ascending a order replaced and needs a triple bypass and he's type 2 diabetic and he's fairly frail. You know, I hope that they have a certain level of subclinical narcissism where they truly have no doubt that they are the right ones to do this. You want certain athletes to have subclinical levels of narcissism,

and maybe in some cases, even clinical,

otherwise the Olympics would be very boring to watch.

Who wants to watch a bunch of people

that really don't think they're the best in the world

and can't channel a version of themselves

...