As a founder and CEO, Coach Brandon knows what it’s like to be a leader, so much so that through his book, Sabotage, and the power of coaching, he is able to help others pulverize the obstacles that often get in the way of effective leadership. This week, we welcome him to Ideamix radio to share with our listeners what it means to lead, what it takes to succeed, and how one can have an optimal impact on the companies they lead.
Transcript:
Speaker 1: [00:00:14] Three, two, one, lift off! We have a lift off!
Sam Jayanti: [00:00:34] As a leader, founder or innovator, how do you deal with authenticity transparency, while building, protecting and ensuring your legacy in your wake? Brandon Wilson is the CEO and founder of communications firm Wilbron. He’s also the author of Sabotage. He works as a coach to leaders in public and private organizations seeking to lead with courage. Brandon, welcome to ideamix radio.
Brandon Wilson: [00:01:05] Awe, thank you so much for having me on.
Sam Jayanti: [00:01:09] So, Brandon, let’s start with how you would describe the mix of things that you do, which are many, some of which I covered in the introduction, but you do a great mix of things and that has evolved over time. Tell us a little bit about that mix and how you came to it.
Brandon Wilson: [00:01:29] Yeah, I think at the very core of what I do is becoming masterful at the art of communications. I think that’s where it all began for me and it is always and continues to be my North Star. And the reason why is that I possess a really strong belief in the fact that communications, words delivered, expression and emotions delivered, had a unique ability to solve some of the world’s most complicated problems. And in helping organizations use their resources to do that and make our world better, I started to meet executives, highly effective executives and leaders at those organizations who were also committed to moving those efforts and initiatives forward. And they also were married to certain pursuits in their own lives and personally worked to achieve things as a leader–things of impact. And starting through communications introduced me to these leaders and allowed me to offer them strategies, communications strategies, for pursuing, but also achieving those bold pursuits. And in that process, helping leaders to identify their own strengths, how people perceive them, how to unlock the power of collective impact, which in my opinion is the acme of leadership, and in doing so, unlocking all of the levels of their leadership in pursuit of living their absolute best life.
Sam Jayanti: [00:03:30] I love the way that you express that because ultimately the most effective leaders are the ones, in my experience, who live their professional lives very much in sync with their personal life and their values and their longer-term goals because no one’s CEO forever. And I think developing a view of what is consistent among those spheres. But equally, how do you then express that as a leader and how do you sort of incorporate that into your leadership? It sounds like often the challenge that you’re helping many of your clients confront and sort of solve
Brandon Wilson: [00:04:14] is absolutely the challenge. The challenge is us. I think it starts with you and me and our own personal selves. We have lived experiences that tell us what limits we should impose on ourselves. I mean, it starts with us. Those lived experiences also lead to us thinking about success in a particular way. There are people who are, whose leadership journey, have a mountain of complacency because they truly believe that success is something that should be experienced by others. And so they find themselves locking themselves into prisons of having an employee mindset because they feel like their only role is to do what it takes to have their supervisor, manager, vice president, executive vice president, feel the success that they’re worthy of because they feel like they’re not worthy of it. And being able to find where you land or what wrong you are on, or what I call the spectrum of susceptibility to self-sabotage, is incredibly important to getting yourself out of the way of achieving leadership that makes a great impact, but also from achieving a life that is absolutely the best that it can be. An interesting fact here is that about two percent of people in the world realize what I’m talking about, like actually realize it in their in their life. So that means there is about 98 percent of people who never figure out the forces that they need to address to get out of their own way. And as a result, they don’t live their best life. And those two percent of folks are the people who write the books that we read, who show up on ideamix podcasts, who are, you know, who do these incredible things that try to show you what they’ve discovered about themselves. So you’re absolutely right. Our inability to really see ourselves and to see how others see us and to evaluate the power of our lived experiences in the limiting effect affect that it can have on our own leadership journey is tantamount to becoming a leader of consequence.
Sam Jayanti: [00:06:51] Yeah. It’s a great segue into what was going to be my next question for you, this topic of sabotage, which is, as you said, 98 percent of people have the capacity for self-sabotage and don’t even know it. You know, it’s always struck me that your two-percent-98-percent analogy, you know, I don’t know what the exact numbers are, and I don’t, you know, I don’t mean this in any sort of condescending way, but that type of proportionality also applies, I think, to people who have a learning mindset versus the ones that don’t. Like are learning kind of never stops in our lives. And if you adopt that mindset that you’re always looking for the next thing, you’re always looking to learn something out of whatever experience, pleasant or unpleasant, and sort of moving forward with that set of learnings, what is it, do you think, that creates that split, whether it’s, you know, lack of a learning mindset or the ability to self-sabotage, like what is it if you had to point to one or two or three themes that arise in your work with the leaders you work with?
Brandon Wilson: [00:08:12] Yeah, I think it’s very clearly–let me first say that leadership, plain and simple, is influence. And when you realize that, that that’s what leadership is and that’s where it begins, you quickly realize that leading begins the moment you say “I don’t know.” That is critical and vital to answering your question, is assessing your ability to become a transcendent leader who is highly influential, who can unlock the power of collective impact, which is a necessity, which is necessary, for achieving really bold things. Now rewind, all this stuff I say, I say it and look in the mirror and ask, “do I have the courage to say ‘I don’t know'”. Let’s start there.
Sam Jayanti: [00:09:12] Yeah. Such an important question.
Brandon Wilson: [00:09:16] When you finish that sentence, leading begins. And being an incredible reader, very curious, a perennial learner, is vital to navigating your entire leadership journey. You know, the moment you stop learning, you actually find a really comfortable spot whith your leadership journey on the side of the road with the grassy knoll, a hatchery with a lot of canvas and you rest right there and you’re fine just being there. It may be a third of a part of the way and maybe halfway there. And we call that self-satisfaction. We call that complacency. But you are fond of having mastery with that day. The problem is, if you take that analogy and you apply it to your leadership life, is that what you’re really doing, if you have an inability to say ‘I don’t know,’ you’re really finding yourself being locked into a battle to obtain a strong hold on the present. And the present is fleeting. And people who lack the ability to say–and we’ll talk about why they lack that ability in a second–but people who lack the ability to say, I don’t know, or the courage to say ‘I don’t know’ find themselves quickly becoming irrelevant because, you know, just like your phone needs to have constant software updating in order to not be hacked or compromised, our leadership needs constant software updating, which means it needs new information and new learning in order for our own leadership journey not to be hacked or compromised by others who might say what we can’t achieve or who might say they’re only good at resting under that tree at this spot in their leadership journey. And they’re just going to help me go the rest of the way. And so starting with ‘I don’t know,’ is really, really vital to assessing your ability to really become a highly effective leader with an ability to do things and achieve transformation at scale.
Sam Jayanti: [00:11:36] I couldn’t agree more with what you’re saying because I think at many times, you know, you and I both, I’m sure, have encountered this, that people think of leadership as something that is only expected of a CEO or a college president or the president of the PA or whatever. But leadership happens in small, medium and large ways, right, and it happens during every step and stage of our lives, whether that is, you know, you lead your family to do a thing whether it’s as a parent, you’re influencing the leading your child to do the same that you think is right for them all the way up to and everything in between to your college president or your CEO. And now you’re you’re tasked with actually leading a group of people. And it’s fascinating because I think there is a tendency, and I hear this a lot from our podcast listeners, especially the ones who are quite young. So these are people in their 20s who have come out of universities. And they feel that they have no agency almost, in their lives, right, that they’re going to get a job and they’re going to be in this place and they do what they’re told. And some time is going to pass and they, you know, don’t know how but there is some pathway to figuring it out, and it all seems very unclear. And the problem with that is, you’re leading your own trajectory and your own life. And so to your analogy, if you decide that you’re going to sit by the side of the road by this tree at such an early stage of your career, you’re already giving up agency, you’re already sort of taking a back seat rather than leading yourself.
Brandon Wilson: [00:13:37] That’s right. Yeah. And let me unpack that analogy a little bit more. As you’re sitting under that tree at that point in your leadership journey, you are still. You’re not moving. You only have the food that you brought with you and you have the fruit that the tree that you’re under produces. That’s it. The weather is going to change around you. Time is going to continue. Your food will become depleted and you will eventually, because you are still, you are sedentary, you are going to become prey. Think about that. And so when you give up your agency at such a young age, really what you’re doing is saying ‘I will be still,’ what you know, those skills that you have put in your backpack from your academic experiences, from your lived experiences that you’ve garnered along the way from your professional journey to that date, it’s going to become depleted. It’s like that food and the weather is going to change, there’s going to be a need for you to to do other things to survive in your current post at your company, at your job, at your startup, at the company that you’re starting. And because you haven’t–because you’ve ceased replenishing your backpack with skills and knowledge, you’re going to find yourselves incredibly vulnerable to not only self-sabotage, because you’re going to talk yourself out of moving forward because you’re becoming increasingly ill equipped for the rest of the journey, but you’re also going to become susceptible to external forces, limiting forces, which we call “leadership sabotage.” Well, people start to utilize you just for their own personal, very intimate. And so it was really important that you not give up on your agency too quickly or too soon. I mean, I think that’s incredibly important for people to know. And what is unique about promotion and advancement, you talked about being a president of a college or campus, a CEO of a corporation, the secret that I will share with everybody listening or viewing–everybody in your audience, I think it’s important to hear this–that the higher up you go up a career ladder, or even if it’s not commiserate with a title, the more influential you become as a leader and/or the more highly effective you become as a leader, the more vulnerable you become. We are often told that that vulnerability is a weakness. And so we may do so because we lived in houses where parents will literally say, ‘I cannot go after, I cannot change jobs, I cannot build a new start-up because it’s just too risky and I don’t want to do that to my children’. And they say that in front of you while you’re seven years old eating at the table with them. And you literally have been positioned on the wrong–the susceptability, the spectrum of susceptibility, the self-sabotage, to now fear vulnerability because you remember that conversation. And so you tell yourself that if I get a promotion, there are going to be things I don’t know how to do and we go back to the beginning of that conversation. I lacked the courage needed to tell people that I don’t know what I’m doing. That I don’t know how to succeed at this level. And what you do is you rob the opportunity for those around you to help fortify your weaknesses so that you can go forward together. And so the higher you go up, the more vulnerable you’re going to become. And that is actually where you find your strength. And so if anybody ever tells you that you want to run away from that vulnerability, you have to be the smartest person in the room, you have to look like you know everything, what they’re really saying is is ‘be complacent’. Jump into that ring and fight every battle you can to hold on to the ever fleeting presence. And those are myths. And what they should be saying is go to places that stretch you. Go to places where you feel vulnerable because that’s where new knowledge begins. I often tell people the path to new knowledge is laid with the bricks of ignorance. Ignorance is not bad thing. Willful ignorance is a bad thing. But ignorance is something you should knowingly embrace and be confident utilizing as a superpower or as a tool or weapon in order to unlock new information wherever you go.
Sam Jayanti: [00:18:39] Well said. Well Brandon, one of the things we love to do on the show is give our listeners a taste of who you are as a coach. And I want to give our listeners a chance and our viewers a chance to see how you describe yourself and your impact as a coach. So let’s let’s have a quick listen.
Brandon Wilson: [00:19:06] “My name is Brandon Wilson and I’m an executive coach. Most of my clients are hardworking, they are driven and they are brilliant. And so most of my time as an executive coach is not really spent on measurably making my leaders or my clients more effective. It is spent making them more consequential leaders, leaders who dedicate their talent to making a measurable difference in having optimal impact in the organizations that they lead. My clients work with me through an analysis of an Assessment 360 and other assessments that helps them to articulate and to identify their personal missions. And they’re figuring out where their personal mission fits into the whole of their professional mission. In doing this exercise and going through this journey, my clients are able to articulate how what they do professionally connects with their passions and enables them to work with dedication, but also with intentionality and getting after things that make a measurable difference for the companies that they serve and also help them lead richer lives. One other thing that I do with my clients that I think is incredibly important is I help them to identify behaviors that may not be helpful to advancing their priorities and also counsel them in changing or enhancing the behaviors of those that they lead so that they can achieve the acme of leadership. And in my opinion, the acme of leadership is unlocking the power of collective impact. Once leaders reach this level of being able to know and articulate their personal mission, know where it fits into the whole of what they do professionally, and are able to move people’s behavior in a way that they work collectively, they become incredibly valuable to the organizations that they serve, and they also become more consequential leaders by achieving success more often, increasing their effectiveness, but living a richer life because the things that they dedicate their leadership to makes their departments, their divisions, the lives of those that they mentor and the communities that they serve better. I hope this provides you with more insight into the impact of my executive coaching services and sheds a little bit of light on me as a person. And I look forward to connecting with you and helping you unlock the next levels of your leadership.”
Brandon Wilson: [00:21:50] Yeah, I think the first thing for any client to realize is where they fit into the whole of an organization. There’s a map everywhere you go in the mall that says “you are here”. Surprisingly, leaders lack the ability to see themselves in the “you are here” arrow. And being able to do that with assessments, whether be a 360 assessment that provides me an opportunity to hear and to learn from people of value how you are perceived within an organization and then doing an interpersonal or personal personality assessment to show where your weaknesses align with the things that you do every single day. Taking that assessment, and what I’m going to say next might shock a lot of people, I’m not assessing to find out the things you should do like strengths finder. Oh, you are going to be a body builder because you have tons of muscles. What I’m actually listening for is for behavior that you need to stop.
Sam Jayanti: [00:23:02] Right.
Brandon Wilson: [00:23:02] We don’t speak enough about behavior that’s not very helpful to us. And for those people I coach who are highly effective, who are goal obsessed, they’re also superstitious. They believe in doing the same thing the same way over and over again, even when the landscape has changed.
Sam Jayanti: [00:23:27] Right.
Brandon Wilson: [00:23:27] And so what’s really important next is to create a pathway that’s bespoke that states where their priorities are with which skills they need to achieve those things, but also with people they need in order to achieve those bold pursuits. And then through the course of our sessions, it’s also important for us to point out the limiting factors, the barriers, whether they are self-imposed or imposed by the organizational structure that you were operating within and how to navigate around those. I wrote a book because that is a leadership gap. You know, we are often told by coaches and my books that all it takes to be highly successful is for us to wake up early, do what we say we’re going to do
Sam Jayanti: [00:24:20] All these truisms about habit.
Brandon Wilson: [00:24:22] All those truisms about habits and what is missing in the leadership journey is two things. One is, is how to deal with or address or even anticipate the spook behind the door of our office waiting to trip us up when we show up to work early to do what we say we’re going to do and work really hard. And so I wrote a book called Sabotage: Leadership That Overcomes Betrayal, Theft and Deceit because I also realized that anything worth pursuing, which all of my clients have really consequential pursuits, are also things that are worth sabotaging, either self-sabotaging or for others to stop us from doing. And why would they stop us? Because success means advancement, often, they translate. And as you go higher up in the organization, there are fewer slots. And we need to face that reality. So I help my clients to determine and be able to assess their environment and be wise leaders. And when I mean wise, in choosing the path of least resistance so that they are more effective more often and more consequential as a result. And the second thing that I help my clients unlock is the bravery needed to share with others their disappointments. Because failure is going to happen because we’re operating in a place of
Sam Jayanti: [00:25:58] of risk and uncertainty.
Brandon Wilson: [00:25:59] risk and uncertainty. That’s right, it’s going to happen. And to create–the one thing you cannot give yourself as a leader, which is legacy, is important that you not only unpack for others that you are mentoring over those joining your journey or those you are working adjacent to your successes. But you also share with them your disappointments so that they have the ability to continue the work and reflect boldly upon how amazing the consequential of a leader you are so that you achieve legacy but you also have the benefit of seeing generational impact long after you have retired or found your mountain alone, your leadership journey.
Sam Jayanti: [00:26:45] Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. So Brandon, we’re going to go through a mini coach-me exercise. So we’re going to pretend I’m one of your clients and you’re going to coach me for 10 minutes.
Brandon Wilson: [00:26:58] Oh, I love it. I love it. It’s going to be perfect.
Sam Jayanti: [00:27:00] So let me set it up. So I am the founder of a very successful, kind of mid-sized company we’re in the process of scaling. We’re encountering lots of the problems that early stage companies encounter when they’re going from small to medium-sized. And one of the problems that we’re having in our organization, for this situation, is retaining the key managers the level below me, as a founder, who will give us the ability to scale the organizational structure so that we can actually tackle this higher volume business and higher volume customers that we have.
Brandon Wilson: [00:27:52] I am clear. So are we starting?
Sam Jayanti: [00:27:57] Yep.
Brandon Wilson: [00:27:58] Hey! How are you? My name is Brandon Wilson, can you tell me a little bit about where you are along your journey of growth as a business woman.
Sam Jayanti: [00:28:10] Yeah. Thanks, Brandon, for taking the time. I am a first-time founder. This company has felt like it has been my baby. And it’s being just as challenging and pleasurable as having a baby. And I remember the early days of just this sort of the fear and uncertainty, you know, in your gut that this could all go horribly wrong and not work at all as you thought it would, to now a place where the fear and transition, the fear and uncertainty is not ‘is this going to work,’ now we’ve established that it works. But now we’re dealing with all these problems with our growth and the ability to handle the growth that we’re seeing in the volume of business. And so while I thought I would be at a place where the fear and uncertainty is less than the months before, it’s proving not to be the case.
Brandon Wilson: [00:29:27] And so if I may share with you, there’s some trepidation that I’m hearing about the future, about what it means, what it would mean for you, personally, to not be able to scale beyond having mastered the fear and uncertainty of starting a business. I want to learn a little bit more about that and talk about three things. I’ll leave the third to later. But I’d like to unpack two things. One is mission and the other is resilience. And I want to talk about those two subjects in learning a little bit more about your journey to arriving to this session today. And I will start by sharing with you a little bit about me. I am a believer in resilience, in addition to or before I became a highly effective leadership whisperer, I wrestled with a lot of locks and I’ve been homeless twice. I’ve worked at companies and have been subject to layoffs. I have had a lot of successes in my career, but I’ve also had a fair number of misses in my career. And the totality of those experiences have positioned me to truly understand and connect with a lot of leaders who are also facing the fear of going to that next level. And for you, it’s scaling a business to a place where it becomes–where it outgrows your capacity. And so I want to talk about your ability to lose yourself. And so could you tell me why you started this incredible business, and not, you know, and please in this exercise, let’s not talk about making money. Like “I need it to make money” or any of that. What I want to talk about is what were you seeking to build the moment you woke up and said “Eureka! This is what I need to do.”
Sam Jayanti: [00:31:47] It’s a great question. So I set out as we started this business with the realization that coaching had this tremendous potential to have an impact on many, many more people than it was reaching. And we set out simply to build the scalable version of bringing coaching to more and more people. And our mission, in our view, has always been to serve both coaches, as well as individuals who can benefit from coaching, by connecting the two and sort of making the right match, kind of in a way that like you and I have made a match, right, I looked at a number of different coaches, I said, ‘Brian is my guy,’ that’s who I want to work with. And here we are. So that mission is incredibly important and integral to what we do because coaching has this ability to have a deep, deep impact on individuals and their lives and their trajectories. And we continue to believe that is the case and it lies at the heart of everything we do.
Brandon Wilson: [00:33:02] And as a follow up to that, which is and thank you for that clarification, because it sounds like you are committed to building a bridge that connects effective leaders to the coaching that they need to finish their journey. What I love to hear next before we talk about resilience is where as a way of talking about resilience is how would the world change or be different if you were to fail at that mission?
Sam Jayanti: [00:33:38] I think that our failure–and this is a, you know, maybe an overblown sense of the responsibility that I feel–but I feel that the world would be worse off in the sense that having a negative experience with our company or a brand or a savior of our business or our brand has the potential to cast down on the value of coaching for individuals, would just sort of the value that lies at the heart of our mission.
Brandon Wilson: [00:34:18] Understood. And so let’s dive into resilience really quickly and then we could bring this session home. There are two laws that I think are important to share with you where you are in your journey. One is to law–and they’re two leadership laws–one is the law of attraction, meaning that people around us are attracted to us because they see themselves in us and they see the values in us that align with what they hold dear to themselves. And then there is a law of replication. That they stay because they are allowed to do the things that you do, not necessarily the things that you say. They will do what you do. And so you like to run five miles a day. And so they will start to replicate that behavior. You start to see yourself attracting managers who end up doing the types of things that you share. The reason I share these two laws, because one of the barriers to growth sounds like is your inability to attract and retain the managers needed to get after this really audacious mission. And you need other people in order to have that kind of world-changing impact through your company. And so what I like to talk a little bit about is what kind of leaders you are finding yourself attracting, and then talk about the kind of ideal archetype of the leaders that you’d like to attract. So it’s a two part question. What gaps exist in the leaders that you are attracting and what’s the ideal leader that you’d like to attract?
Sam Jayanti: [00:36:15] Also a great question. So I think the problem we’re having is that we’re attracting a wide catchment area of our white type of candidate who wants to come in and work with us, which is great. The problem is that we seem to be bringing in the types of people who, when you get to the core of who they are, are deeply individualistic. And so they’re here because they’re seeking individual success through the mechanism of being at ideamix and working at our company. And we need people who are cognizant of their own success, but I really bought into the mission of the company and that that mission is almost more important than the individual.
Brandon Wilson: [00:37:19] That makes a lot of sense, and so this is a very, very productive first session. And there are two things that I hear, is one is is that what you described, in many ways, might be the things that you are challenged with personally, especially considering the laws of attraction and replication, where there is this wide-ranging idea around the theme of the swath of things we want to achieve. I think you probably bring that to work with you. It’s your authentic self. Like, we want to do so much, the world is so big. You also it sounds like you are attracting people who are seeking personal success and who are drivers and in many ways, ambitious. And I will share with you that ambition, if not checked, can be easily become a character flaw and it could be a barrier for us. What I like to do is to put together a strategy or a plan with you that allows you to more effectively tap into the strengths and abilities of others around you so that you don’t have to change. I think you can be ambition and you can be driven and you can be all of those things that those late leaders that you’re attracted to, but do so in a way that allows them agency and empowers them to take the company to another place, in another level. And in that we’ll do a personality assessment. We’ll do a disc assessment to see who you work well with and how you like to work and what environments you like to thrive in. But I would caution you that this is going to be challenging coaching because another thing I hear is an inability to give your baby flight. You know, you described your company as a baby, and you know, you’re looking for leaders who need to be mission-centered and not self-centered. Mission-centered, not self-centered, and you said almost in a way that is protectionary. Where you want to protect this little one, even when they’re 21 years old. And so and this is not unique just to you. I mean, this is a lot of leaders, especially founders. And in order to give that 21-year-old the flight it needs to move out of the house, it’s going to be important that we allow ourselves to allow that baby to grow up. And I think your company is in a place where it’s now time to scale. And so equally, I like to put together a program, a strategy for you, that allows you to tap into scalable impact at your company, that positions you with all of the foundational things that allows the company to do things that you could not possibly achieve yourself. And if you’re okay with that, then we’ll start laying the groundwork for you to become a more aware, more self-aware, and generous leader, attract that self-awareness and generosity to your company, and then achieve and impact the kind of success that you dream that your baby will achieve when he turned 21 years old. Does that sound good?
Sam Jayanti: [00:40:49] That sounds like a great plan.
Brandon Wilson: [00:40:51] Well, good deal, let’s get to work.
Sam Jayanti: [00:40:55] That was fantastic. That was such an amalgam of so many different founders I’ve come across over the years. But that was really fantastic because I think you honed right in on, you know, the issues and the impediments to people getting out of their own way, really, to recreate the environment in which they middle through their company and their teammates can drive.
Brandon Wilson: [00:41:23] Yeah, well, I’m glad. And it starts with you. Growth starts with you. Growth starts with you, and I’m really hard on leaders, particularly because I think that companies–even traditional and generational and very established companies and corporations–they take on the personalities of their leaders. And if the company is lethargic or if it finds itself in a position where it’s losing stakeholders, and this is hard for people to hear, their share prices are dipping dramatically and often. You can very likely go to the top of that organization and you will find a mercurial leader who is indecisive about the things that it wants to achieve or do that week or that day. You see all of those attributes pronouncing themself in the company that they’re leading. And so it’s always important to start from an individual level because we give birth to the things that possess so much of our mental space and mental real estate and our personality. And so I’m just glad I was able to provide your audience with an exercise is seeing how important it is to connect with a coach who starts with you in mind, and then the leadership, and then the organization that you want an impact.
Sam Jayanti: [00:42:56] Absolutely. Thank you so much, Brandon. Such a pleasure to have you on today.
Brandon Wilson: [00:43:01] Oh, I’m honored to be here.
Sam Jayanti: [00:43:03] Thanks for listening today. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And while you’re there, please do review the show. We love hearing from you. So email us at info@theideamix.com or Instagram DM us. Our episode this week was produced by the incomparable Martin Milewski, with music by the awesome Nashville based singer songwriter Doug Allen. You can learn more about Doug at Doug Allen music dot com.